[ExI] Belief in Market Efficiency

[Stefano Vaj]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 6:13 PM, painlord2k at libero.it
<painlord2k at libero.it>wrote:

> The Romans had slaves before conquering the Empire.
> And slavery in Greek was as much diffuse as in Rome.


Mmhhh. Slavery was learned by Indoeuropean peoples from the populations they
conquered and developed gradually through "oriental" influences. Still in
the Homeric period or when Rome was founded slavery was socially and
economically irrelevant. Labour, war, culture, domestic chores, you name it,
were essentially the business of free men and women.

On the contrary, slavery has always been one of the foundation of the
societies where monotheism developed, and practically all modern slave
traders and employers are and were monotheists - Christians more often than
not. In fact, it is arguable that "slavery" has ever been abolished until
the end of Christian egemony, feodalism simply replacing the status of "serf
of a master" with that of "serf of a glebe", so that slaves could cease to
be independently traded and - reflecting the changed and worsened social
conditions - be chained instead to the field they were attached to.


>  In other continents, such as
>> North America or Sub-saharian Africa, organised large-scale slavery
>> arrived together with monotheism.
>>
>
> "organised large-scale slavery" need large empires, commercial connections.


Actually, I suspect that the diffusion of slavery ends up *killing*
empires... :-)


> And, mainly, the monotheism that arrived and dominated was Islam.


Any statistics at hand? :-)


> In America the things are a bit different, because the power of the Church
> were only nominal.


Besides the fact that this is not true, the cultural or even political power
of christianism being even larger than what it was in Europe, the real
question is why the Church would and should have ever done otherwise anyway,
and why a Christian should have something, in purely religious terms,
against an economic system which is described, blessed and regulated in
detail in his or her Holy Scriptures.

In fact, what ended slavery in Western Europe was not in the least the
Christian churches, let alone the Catholic church, but in the stricter sense
the coming of feodalism, and in the broader  sense the fall thereof, two
phenomena where the Catholics played not role at all, or which even actively
resisted.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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