No Royal Road: As Old Worlds End and New Ones Begin: Part 2 | Regrettable Century / Varn Vlog
Notes
- evidence of [[capitalism]] starts in the Italian city states in the 1100s
- [[Banaji]] believes that capital can even be found as early as Rome
- after the collapse of Rome taxes were still collected in the same way
- in Rome, the weakened metal base of the currency meant that it was unreliable outside of the empire
- Roman society was big on manumission, and one tension the late empire faced was the fact that it wasn’t getting new slaves because it had stopped expanding
- Roman slavery was not chattel slavery
- Roman slaves ended up become tenants
- Serfdom involves an agreement to a lord, that the subject must hand over some kind of extraction to the lord, and the lord in exchange offers protection
- Peasants don’t have bonds, serfs do
- Sheriffs initially were for tax collection purposes
- Most of the time punishments were physical, imprisonment was pretty rare
- European punishments were relatively rare in general
- Absolutism and divine right of kings were ideas of modernity, not the feudal era
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