How much of it was conquest and slavery? Certainly not all of it, but I feel like a lot of it was conquest and slavery and we should control for that sort of thing when singing praise.
But to me it feels orthogonal to the benefits of increased state capacity, trade, and standardized coinage that helped provide the Roman Empire it's economic benefits. Yes much was built by slaves, but other empires also had slaves. So what was the comparative advantage of Rome?
Rome was in fact special.
But you can't get more slaves if you don't have more lands, but more lands means administration difficulty increases, which means you need more soldiers and bureaucrats, who are not directly producing food.
Empires like the Romans made some basic inroads into these problems (although in Rome, murder was still a personal matter, banditry was still the norm, etc). Building an aqueduct or a road is a massive quality-of-life achievement for everybody.
I suspect the differentiation they are drawing is that in "modern" society there are very few accepted reasons for killing someone, and all cases should be examined by an arms-length person.
This is very much not true across societies, or historically.
In the Ancient world, I don't expect murder of slaves or subsistence farmers would have any involvement outside of their families/owners/patrons.
It's fortunate that no action is required from the murder victim, I guess.
I think in general, for antique societies, they don't have detectives - if a crime is committed, the first problem is, there's no state agency interested in investigating the matter.
The claim that murder was a 'private matter' is from Emma Southon, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Pre-modern history is rife with blood feuds that are basically the 'private' way of preventing murder. The state typically wouldn't have the resources to get involved, even if they did have the interest.
If you imagine the chain of somebody_is_murdered to somebody_is_punished there are questions like: 'who reports the crime, and to whom?' and 'how do you establish the crime actually happened, in the way it was reported?' that are just really hard to answer unless you have a big state organization dedicated to managing stuff like that.
Did it have any advantage? Rome has a special place for Europeans because it's "our" ancient empire, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was superior all of its peers. Also, maybe those peer empires didn't build aqueducts, but they built different but equivalent projects instead.
The Romans were very good at conquering people and levying brutal taxes, but that doesn't add value and we shouldn't pretend that it does. They were also good at civil engineering, keeping the peace, and other economic activities which do add value and we should give them credit for it. I'd love to see a historical economic discussion that tries to tease apart these factors and weigh them against each other.
One of the reasons why Roman empire was so stable was that Roman taxes were actually lower and simpler than whatever taxes the local kings imposed previously. This makes sense if you think about it: Romans only really cared about Italy, and they didn't have to extract much resources from all the provinces to enrich Italy significantly. Previous rulers typically had only their small kingdom to tax, so they taxed it heavily.
> Romans only really cared about Italy
Yeah, so they famously instituted for-profit tax collection: "we'll auction off the right to collect what you can!" Are you telling me that the competing individuals who were willing to bid the highest amount for this privilege were less effective at it than the kings who had preceded them?
Historians often talk about Rome's "tenacity" -- the fraction of their male population they were willing to throw into the meat grinder of a failing war machine, the number of people they were willing to nail to trees when they risked their lives to complain about taxes, the lengths they were willing to go to in order to put down a tax rebellion (see: the giant earthen ramp up the walls of Masada) and so on. Rome is often credited with being more tenacious than their adversaries.
It's not impossible that taxes were generally lower, but I tend to suspect there are some serious qualifiers, like "in Italy," or "during peacetime," or "for those who the Romans were trying to make a positive example of."
Rome tried many different kinds of tax policies in it's territories. The relatively light touch they finally ended up was essentially a reaction of first trying a policy so maximally extractive that it could be described as genocidal.
How do you think the nice things you seem to enjoy about Rome spread around?
The biggest country in the World, Russia did that expansion in 1500, and Germany wanted to replicate the Americans in WWII.
Is the prosperity of the US independent from having a virgin country with bast resources and no population?
Certainly it is not, (North)Americans could have a big number of children to replace the exterminated native population and exploit its bast resources and automate everything because there were few workers to do the job. In other places of the world automation was more expensive(China, India) than just using workers, so it did not happen.
Population skyrocketing meant a healthy young population and economy to prosper. People got rich killing buffaloes or cutting down millennial forrest or gold(that had been extracted and depleted on other parts of the world for milenia) and not to talk about Industry being financed by(very expensive at the time) sugar and cotton cultivated by slaves in the South.
There have been large movements in the USA directed exactly at this multiple times over the last 3 decades. How would this be remarkable at all if the grandparent felt that way?