Similarly slave labour is not free in the economic sense.
You still pay housing, food and time at a minimum.
You still pay housing, food and time at a minimum.
Not saying that slavery is by any means even slightly positive. Just that economic system allows for extreme exploitation of people without alternatives.
People still romanticize the antique so much they miss that the medieval period saw quite a few advancements.
Why did the Romans not have an industrial Revolution?
For that you need a society that actually has incentives to efficiently use the labor available. Like in capitalism where you pay the workers based on hours. And the prerequisite for that was feudalism, the development of cities, start of manufacturing and so on. One economic system leads to another. Not easy to just leapfrog from a slave-holding society into the industrial age.