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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1229 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 19, 2026

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Have people looked into how necessary slavery was in historical civilizations? While industrialization seems to have ended the necessity of chattel slavery, though not necessarily all coerced and semi-coerced labor, in a country it seems the past required more coercion. An example is that sugar farming is so horrific once Haiti/St Domingue ended slavery, it basically stopped since no one was willing to do it without being forced to. I'm curious how much more economically diversified empires like the Romans and Chinese required slavery.

I remember once seeing a comparison of the "energy" used by a modern household vs. Classical household, and that it was pretty similar, the difference obviously being electricity vs. human slaves. No idea as to the accuracy/rigor of it, tho.

Have people looked into how necessary slavery was in historical civilizations?

I like walking people through the thought experiment/scenario "Okay, you're a moderately-sized village of stationary agriculturalists in the Neolithic, and young men from hunter-gatherer tribes keep wandering by to hunt your livestock and gather your crops, because they find your idea that a person can 'own' such things, and that plants and animals aren't just there for whoever can take them, laughable and absurd, and mock you for the labor you put into cultivating those things instead of relying on the bounty of nature like a real man." Then ask what, after you defeat any of these raiders in a battle to defend your stuff, do you do with your defeated foe? Point out the strategic reasons (as pointed out by the likes of Sun Tzu) why you can't just kill or cripple them all. But why you also cannot just let them go to keep trying again. And then pointing out that a Neolithic farming village lacks the surplus to feed and house an idle prisoner. Then ask who supervises the prisoner you've put to work? Why would the prisoner submit to this person? Wouldn't it make sense to have it be the same guy who defeated and captured him in the first place, then? But why would this person take such a job? What does he get out of it? Can you trade that role to someone else?… and so on, through careful Socratic dialogue.

I love the looks on their faces when they finally realize what solution they've "invented."

Edit: Plus, you might also find the writings of George Fitzhugh interesting. A socialist who was answering the "socialism is state-run slavery" argument with a "chad yes" long before libertarian-types were around to make it. Who condemned the racist character of Southern chattel slavery… on the grounds that white people should be enslaved too.

on the grounds that white people should be enslaved too.

They were. It was called "indentured servitude". Yes, I know it wasn't hereditary, but for the person in it there wasn't too much difference in that.

BTW, returning to your Neolithic example, the question now if this prisoner finds a nice girl who wants to marry him and produces children, why shouldn't those be free? The whole argument does not work there if you want to make it hereditary.

Then ask what, after you defeat any of these raiders in a battle to defend your stuff, do you do with your defeated foe?

Investigate the root causes of their raiding.

More seriously, your hypothetical does give an interesting conclusion; if you wish to maintain a 'Jeffersonian' society and are unwilling to resort to slavery, you kind of just have to kill the invaders. That being said, the 13th amendment does exclude coerced labor as a consequence of legal punishment from the abolition and coercing prisoners to do labor is more or less common in even rich nations, so I'm not sure using the defeated raiders for coerced labor is de-facto condemned even now.

The problem becomes comparing different forms of slavery/sefdom/free labor which are incommensurate.

Chattel slavery actually has a pretty clear bright line- the individual can be transferred from one owner to another like any other piece of property, it isn't bound to real property.

Nowadays bound to real property is pretty rare in the west- it comes up in mineral/water rights sometimes and game animals, but it isn't something average people have to care about. But various forms of unfree labour which were not transferable, they were bound to real property, were not slavery, and historically bounded property was very common in other contexts as well.

I don't think "transferred from owner to owner and not bound to real property" is actually a good map to "slavery" as a concept across multiple cultures, at least not in terms of "what are we talking about when we are talking about slavery." Other factors that seem relevant:

-- Are the children of slaves free or are they also enslaved?

-- Can the owner beat or otherwise corporally punish the slaves? How severely?

-- Does the owner have a legal right of sexual access to the slaves?

-- Do the slaves have the right to property or marriages that the owner must respect?

Classical Greece had a tradition of agricultural slavery, but functionally the slaves were simply peasant farmers who didn't have the right to move or leave their farms. There were no overseers, no whips, no chains. They had money, friends, marriages, families.

The legal regimes and the customary treatment given to slaves varies wildly. I constantly bring up the anecdote in Frederick Douglass' memoir of a young Freddy making white friends who taught him to read, something they were legally obligated to do at school, in exchange for bread, of which Freddy had an endless supply from his master's kitchen.

I don't think discussions of slavery are terribly valuable absent a discussion of the particulars.

Large parts of medieval Europe basically didn’t have actual chattel slavery for long periods of time- they had unfree labour, but serfs weren’t slaves.

For Russian serfs, I don't see any difference (except the racist aspect of course).

For significant portions of Russian history, serfs were also understood as of a different blood and breed to the point of being practically speaking a different race.

Yes, and of course the aristocracy everywhere considered itself "different breed", but with black slavery it's always more prominent. It's one thing when somebody is of the low birth and you can find it out by digging into the archives, and quite another when you literally see it in their skin color. If you take a Russian serf, feed him well, clean him up, dress him up and put him next to a typical Russian pomeshik, you'd see little difference. Not so with a black slave.

Russian serfs didn't have to be afraid their wives or children would be sold off to a far away plantation at any time, for one.

They did. Selling serfs "without land" had been allowed in 1675, and while Peter I tried to limit family-splitting sales, it had been largely ignored. A Russian proverb says "the severity of Russian laws is mitigated by the optionality of following them" - this is one of the constants of Russian history, whatever is happening there otherwise. Other tsars tried to ban the practice too (yet another evidence that previous bans were ineffectual) but it was still widespread. Especially when dvornya (house serfs) were concerned, since there wasn't a concern about working the land there.

Here's an episode from the biography of famous Russian writer Turgenev: http://i-s-turgenev.ru/books/item/f00/s00/z0000007/st003.shtml who, being a young man, interfered with such a deal, planned by his mother. Since he was a noble and proclaimed he will shoot the police officer if he'd try to enforce the deal (Russia was much more wild back then) the deal was cancelled. The police officer opened an official investigation, but since he was a lowly village policeman, predictably investigation against a local noble went nowhere and had no consequences whatsoever.

Mining was also a pretty rough profession for a long time.

The word "necessary" might be doing a lot of the lifting either way. It definitely makes some industries more profitable for the owners, but how "necessary" is it for that industry to be more profitable?

For something like salt mines maybe it matters a lot since salt was used to preserve food, and food preservation was very important for armies and power projection.

But for something else like tobacco production in the Americas .. the industry wasn't necessary at all. It was a luxury good that caused long term medical problems. Sugar is probably similar as well.

Yeah, I was thinking about levels of necessity too. Coal mining was possible without slavery and people were distressed when this nightmare job was taken away. Orwell quote, just because the writing is good:

“…each man is shifting coal at a speed approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don’t have to work kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National. I am not a manual laborer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

--Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

Quote from By This Axe (a sourcebook for ACKS (the Adventurer Conqueror King System), whose author prides himself on thorough historical research):

Throughout Europe during classical and late antiquity, and well into the modern age in many places worldwide, most mines were worked by slaves. However, there is some archaeological evidence that some mines were worked by paid laborers. For instance: There are over a thousand ancient graves at the Hallstatt salt mines, and all of the bodies are interred with valuable grave goods that suggest care and respect for the dead. These might be the graves of miners, and if so that would suggest paid labor.

My cursory Internet searching did not find anything super-helpful, but here are some articles about slavery in Scotland.

Interesting links. It seems coercive labor, even if it's not "slavery" per se, crops up almost everywhere you have civilization.

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