Daryl Davis (146:39)
Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, like the, you know, the shift to industrial agriculture, when you look at the, like the social changes that resulted from it, it reminds me actually a lot of. Of after Rome conquered Carthage and then the rest of the Mediterranean. You know, you really became like the Roman Empire that we. That we think of, even though it was still a republic. You had this influx of just hordes and hordes and hordes of slaves that were coming from these conquered places back into Italy. And so you had, before that, you had like a Roman republic where the. Each citizen was a soldier. He was like an independent farmer, small farmer, and he was a soldier and a citizen. And those were the Roman people. The Roman people. But all of a sudden you get this huge influx of slaves, and the guys with the larger farms start building out industrial, building out economies of scale. So now you have these massive plantations and they're putting the smaller people out of business, you know, because they don't care if, you know, if you're off to war, if that means you don't get a full crop this year and you can't pay for next year's crop, well, there's no welfare program for that. You got to sell it to the guy or take a loan from a guy that then, you know, it becomes a whole thing. And so all of these independent farmers that were scattered around the countryside got concentrated into a couple, just a few, like, you know, a handful of gigantic latifundia farms. And all of those people who used to live in the countryside, they had to go into Rome, like, looking for work, looking for something to do. And that's how you got like the Roman mob that led to the fall of the republic and Caesar and all that. And if you think about it, in our modern day, we had something similar happen, only it wasn't with an influence flux of slaves. It was the industrial revolution. All of a sudden, like, you know, just having a family farm that you could actually, like, run profitably and sustain yourself on became extraordinarily difficult because prices of things went so far of all. Like, agricultural commodities dropped so far down. I mean, I'm talking like 95%. You know, prices took a hit because all of a sudden you're, you know, you got combines and tractors, and so you're putting out so much more food that it becomes just not viable to be a small farmer, like making his way back then. So all of the. It got, you know, consolidated into gigantic industrial farms. And all the people who used to live in the countryside, which is most people back in the day, they all got herded into the cities to go work in the factories and on the docks and everything. And, you know, it's interesting because, you know, over here, that process was like sort of ad hoc and semi voluntary. You know, I say that with qualification. You know, if you were a farmer who couldn't pay your debt and you were getting evicted. I mean, a sheriff would show up with his gun and be like, get out of here. So, I mean, there's a little bit of implied force there, but the same thing was happening. Like, if you. If you look at what Stalin was doing in the late 20s and the early 30s is over there. They were far behind, like, the level of industrial development in Britain and the United States, States and Germany, and he wanted to change that. And so you had all these small farmers. These are the kulaks, as people call them, you know, that he targeted small farmers who lived out in the countryside and had their communities, but he wanted these to be consolidated into efficient industrial farms. And he wanted all of those people to get in the cities and work in the. In the factories. And so over there, they did by, like, brutal violence in a very accelerated period of time, like something that we did over a longer period of time, that it was more. More or less voluntary. And. But, you know, at the end of the day, like, the. The. The, like, social effects were the same. You know, all of those people from the country had to move into the cities and work in industry. And. And that was. I mean, it was inevitable, you know, I mean, if, like, you know, Russia would be speaking German right now if they didn't industrialize and, you know, get into a place where they could actually fend off that invasion. I mean, you had to do it just to compete. But, you know, it creates. I mean, if you think about, like. I mean, just think about, like, the history of Europe. You know, in feudal Europe, where the aristocracy, virtually all the wealth that anybody had was in land. Like, you were rich because you were an aristocrat who collected rents from the peasants on your land. That's where. That's where wealth came from. So wealth was, like, distributed throughout the countryside. And a lot of times you'd have guys who, you know, a lord who. He would go to court sometimes or whatever, but his power base was out here in the countryside, and they were all spread around. And as that started, as the Industrial revolution like, really kicked into gear, all these guys whose wealth was derived from agriculture and the whole aristocracy, you had, like, by the time you get up to the. The mid to late 1800s, you've got guys who are lords, like aristocrats, who are completely penniless, like, they have no money. They still walk around, like, strut around like aristocrats, but they don't have any money. Meanwhile, you have a guy who owns a bunch of newspapers in London or whatever, who's super rich, and you Know, a guy who owns a factory, who's super rich. And it really changed the balance of power between, you know, the aristocracy and this commercial class that really, like, didn't even exist, like, a couple hundred years before, but now is, like, ascendant and really, like, asserting itself politically. And I mean, that right there is. And what we talked about earlier, as that's happening, you also getting, you know, the. The former. The former peasants and former small farmers are coming into the cities and becoming the new working class. And all three of these groups are getting politicized, you know, and, you know, these are just. These are. It's why the question of. Of, you know, Dan likes to talk about, you know, the. The debate between the great man theory of history and the trends and forces theory, you know, is it like just broad social forces and so forth that just you could get rid of Hitler? It would have been a guy named Otto, you know, who would have started Second World. He's all just, we're all pawns in the, you know, the grand scheme of history. Or does it take, like. Is it based on personality, like somebody who really moves the chains himself? And it's always a little bit both, but that's something that'll never be really fully resolved because, you know, there are times like that where I, like, take, like, the emergence of slavery in the New World. It's a perfect example, right? If you're a European country, and this is like, when we started colonizing the New World, the Spanish and Portuguese started colonizing it at first. This is, like, right on the tail of them finishing up the Reconquista. So they had spent the last 700 years in a state of constant war because this is crazy to think about, but Muslims actually controlled Spain and Portugal for a longer period of time than Spanish and Portuguese people have controlled it since then, right? So, like, it was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. And they're at a constant state of war to push the Muslims back into North Africa. So you have a very, like, spartan, warlike people, because it's how you had to be. Their whole society was geared toward, like, this conflict. It was centuries long. And so you take those people and they're the first ones who show up in the New World, right? So right there you've got, like, a certain bias in, like, the relations between these Europeans and the people in the New World. Well, they come over there, and this is pretty soon just like, you know, 1492. And then just a few decades later, the Protestant Reformation happened. Happens. So there's religious Conflict and religious wars and things, you know, wars between different kingdoms now have a little bit higher stakes because you're not just talking about, you know, they're going to take this piece of territory from us or something. It's like, no, they're going to change our religion, you know, really high stakes. And this is still at a time when, you know, Europe politically, like, geopolitically, was an anarchic place. I mean, people were at war all the time, and nobody even thought that war was immoral. You know, it was actually, like part of the natural order of things. If you were a stronger neighbor and your weaker neighbor has something, you should have it, you know, and there's nothing really, like, considered wrong about it, like, in a moral sense, especially since back then, wars were generally fought between, you know, the aristocracy themselves, you know, the knights and people. It wasn't like they were rounding up peasants and sending them off as cannon fodder. And so given, like, the high stakes, once the Spanish and Portuguese came over to the New World and just started extracting so much wealth, you know, from there, almost immediately you get Charles V, who takes over a huge chunk of Europe, you know, becomes the Holy Roman Emperor, the first Holy Roman Emperor, and, you know, is just becoming overwhelmingly powerful. And if you're any other country in Europe at that time, you're looking at it like, we gotta get in on this New World thing or else we're going to get swallowed up. And so you start getting in on the New World thing, and what you find out really quickly is, oh, we don't have enough people actually to go over there and, like, do all the mining and all the agriculture and everything else. We're gonna have to find somebody else, another population to do that. Well, you couldn't take any Europeans as slaves or anything, because whoever the, you know, you needed your own people here, and the kingdom next door was not going to let you do that, to take their people. And so they started resorting to West African slavery, which was sort of served up to the Spanish and Portuguese, because the Muslims in Spain and Portugal had been engaged in that for centuries. And so they had been sort of, you know, like, the Spanish and Portuguese already knew the trade networks. They all. They were very familiar with African slavery, you know, which had existed in Spain really since, like, the time of the Roman Empire before, like, you know, they had a constant history with slavery going all the way back. And so they get over there and they start using slaves to set up their colonies and extract the wealth from those colonies and the Interesting thing to me about it is that if you were a ruler, who said, yeah, well, I don't think slavery is right, so I'm not going to do that. Okay, then you will get swallowed up by somebody who has less scruples and is willing to do it. They're going to get richer and more powerful and they're going to take what you've got. And then, guess what, there's slavery anyway. It's just that you're not, you know, around anymore. That's it. And the same like with the West African kingdoms and the rulers and warlords down there who were selling the slaves to the Europeans. You could be a guy who's like, you know, I really don't think we should be selling our fellow Africans to these Europeans to be, you know, taken as slaves. That just seems wrong to me. Well, okay, that's fine. Your neighbor, who is getting gold and guns from the port, Portuguese or whatever, is going to conquer you and take you all as slaves and send you over. And so it almost becomes like a game theory problem where, you know, there's no overarching authority to tell all the people, hey, we're not doing this. And so you, each individual actor does it just really as a matter of like expedient survival at the time. And when you look at when slavery did, when the slave trade was put to a halt, it only happened after the British Empire became like the real dominant power on the seas. And they were the ones, you know, they were the ones with the anti slaver ships who were going around putting a stop to the trade. And that never could have happened until there was like this big overarching authority who could actually make everybody else make this change that they didn't want to make.
