# 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


## Refs

-   https://www.buzzsprout.com/1777565/9627149-no-royal-road-as-old-worlds-end-and-new-ones-begin-part-2-with-chris-and-jason-of-the-regrettable-century