Why didn't the Romans invent capitalism and modern industrial society?

Many, many reasons... As I see it, the primary reason was the combination of a slave-based economy with a very decentralized and inefficient trade system. That is, with the exception of a few very large cities (e.g. Rome) and their accordingly very large populations, all of a village/town/region's needs were met with local resources. Also, all of these resources were produced with slave labor, i.e. very cheaply. A farmer in Syracusae and a farmer in Britannia would each be producing food for roughly the same cost, as after the initial purchase of the slaves, there was no external upkeep beyond the land tax. So, if you're a farmer in Syracuse, and you want to try to sell your surplus grain outside of your locality, you have to ship it. And that suddenly adds a massive cost to your product, immediately giving your product a huge disadvantage against the locally produced product. Shipping and transportation at this time was slow, expensive, risky, and dangerous. Shipping by boat meant ...  more

Capitalism requires a lot of things, many of them require all the others. You need to gave a legal system, the rule of law, property rights, human rights, capital, and social capital. And a way of keeping track of capital. And enough of a middle class that the upper class can't surpress them. Capitalism does not have much of a chance if you don't have these things. Same with technology. You could send the blueprints for a 747 back to roman times and they could not even begin to build one. Metallurgy requires science, which requires smart people, instruments, which requires precision tools, which can only be made from other almost as precise tools. Building anythng complex requires many skills, which requires cooperation and education and social contracts. All these things are interrelated. That's why progress is so slow. Sometimes you can't build X until person Y has thought T that takes time T2 which relies on having food F at hand which requires Road R so Farmer F2 can get the ...  more