Going on strike in ancient Rome

Strikes and unions may seem like modern inventions, but they've existed for much longer than many of us realise. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, historian Sarah E. Bond talks to John Borkham about how people in ancient Rome challenged authority and withheld their labour, from disgruntled mint workers to rebellious charioteers. We're going to talk about your new book, which is called Strike, Labour, Unions and Resistance in the Roman Empire. And it came out earlier this year.

Now, Sarah, firstly, let's focus on some of those words in the title. So we've got strike, we've got unions, we've got resistance. Some people might say that those feel a little anachronistic when we're talking about ancient Rome, but that's a strategic decision, isn't it? It was, and certainly it was something that we debated and thought a lot about beforehand. We just didn't do it idly.

But as I say in the first page of the book, we recognize that in 1768 is really when the word strike begins to develop out of the UK and that there is a huge striking down of the top sails on ships within the port of Sunderland and that when the sailors there get what they ask for after they strike down the topsails and keep the ships from leaving, that this action spreads throughout England at the time and that sailors on the Thames also begin to do it. But it represents an action that, as this book argues, goes all the way back to the second millennium BCE. And so even if these words were not familiar to those within the ancient world and were not used, that they are still methodologies within labor disputes that have been happening for thousands of years.

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