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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1368 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 19, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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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.

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.

You think that, and I think that, and it might even be true. Aristocrats of the time, true believers, did not think that was true. Aristocrats truly believed that they looked, thought, acted, simply were different at a biological breed level than their lessers. No matter how much you dressed a peasant up, the true nobles would see right through him. He could not imitate the nobility that comes from generations of breeding.

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