Strike: labor, unions, and resistance in the Roman Empire

Strike: labor, unions, and resistance in the Roman Empire, by Sarah E. Bond (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025)

It doesn’t require long reflection to realize that labor organizing must be as old as labor itself. From child-rearing to tool-making, hunting to husbandry, ours would have been a short-lived species if we hadn’t sought to ease our toil, and safeguard its fruits, by the sharing of means and methods.

While the earliest forms of social organization are the domain of archaeology and anthropology, the advent of writing brings to the fore new and compelling evidence for labor organizing. Textual evidence, though, has its limitations. How and by whom the writing was produced, and the ratio of what has survived to what has certainly been lost, are factors that temper and indeed hamper its usefulness. Regardless of the period of study, the historian has to approach written evidence creatively, and with a great deal of caution.

Sarah Bond’s Strike: labor, unions, and resistance in the Roman Empire attempts to sift through evidence of labor organizing that underlay the more familiar, triumphalist story of ancient Rome and its expanding power. It’s a book of modest size, considering the ambition of its aim and scope, to center the lives of laborers, artisans and tradespeople over more than a millennium of organizing and resistance.

However, the scattered and uneven nature of the evidence is a perpetual cause of difficulty, as the author proceeds, in a somewhat predictably linear fashion, from the legendary beginnings of Rome through the royal, republican and imperial eras. It’s a narrative dominated by the names of powerful men and seemingly unceasing conflict, even as it tries to privilege “regular folks” over the elite (6). Only incidentally, and sometimes accidentally, does the written record offer a glimpse of the worlds that most people inhabited.

The book’s first chapter concentrates on the struggle for political power between Rome’s patrician and plebeian orders during the early republic. Our knowledge of this centuries-long conflict comes mainly from writers of a much later date, and it’s difficult to single out economic interests from among other competing pressures. While these “quasi-mythical tales” may have given to the city’s laboring classes “at least some hint of plausible, collective social actions,” (42) it seems to this reviewer that they could have been treated in a more summary fashion.

The chapters that follow highlight the existence and conjectured agency of numerous collectives (often called collegia in Latin), each one particular to a certain religious cult, trade or occupation. While thousands of these associations are known from inscriptions and texts on papyrus, little is known about them. They are, over such a long period and so vast a region, like small dots that alternately flicker and vanish on a mostly blank screen. To connect them into a unified and credible portrayal of ancient labor organizing would seem to demand equal and almost infinite resources of study, synthesis and imagination. The impulse to do so is clear from this book’s opening pages, but it doesn’t come close to achieving a coherent picture.

To belong to one of those ancient collectives typically meant having a source of support and social connection. Yet it’s hard to determine how they emerged, how they functioned, or how much control they had over working conditions and wages. The author addresses these questions in a manner that is necessarily episodic, yet so dependent on the more granular research of “association scholars” of Roman Italy and Egypt that there is limited scope for the reader to engage with the evidence directly.

The narrative thread winds through and sometimes gets lost in a recounting of Rome’s dramatic, at times cataclysmic history: its foreign conquests; wars to suppress rebellion among the conquered and enslaved; the rivalries that brought down the republic; and occasional street warfare and riots in theaters and hippodromes. These tumultuous years bring on the advancing regulation of society under the empire. During the republic, labor collectives were sometimes targets, sometimes instruments of political ambition and control, but their operation as engines of economic stability or reform doesn’t emerge clearly until, in later centuries, they become mostly compulsory associations and organs of the bureaucratic state. With regard to slavery, the author argues that “enslaved laborers not only engaged in labor conflicts and small, everyday acts of rebellion, but at various points also took part in and drove strikes, well into the period of the late Roman Empire.”

The author supposes that popular unrest, which at times seems endemic to Roman society, must have drawn strength from “organized associations that could assemble quickly and effectively in order to work toward a shared goal.” (180) It may be an appealing, even inspiring idea, but the lifespan of unrest tends to be brief, especially when it is so often brutally put down. The day-to-day labor of most workers, and the workaday activities of most labor associations, must have remained relatively free of strife or scrutiny.

The book includes a substantial bibliography that will assist anyone eager to investigate specific issues in ancient labor history, especially the author’s “provocative choice” (her words) to emphasize the similarities between modern labor unions and Roman associations. 

At least in part, Strike is aimed at modern labor historians, who the author hopes will “engage with Roman antiquity in more meaningful ways.” (11) Such engagement would benefit from a leaner and more focused treatment, and would in turn impart new insights and investigative rigor to Roman labor studies.

Reviewed by Gregory Guderian, who is on the staff of the New Jersey Room at Newark Public Library.