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Notes -
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.
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.
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