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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1417 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.

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).

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.

Alright, I stand corrected. Still, sounds like it was a lot less frequent for agricultural labor (which probably always was the vast majority of slaves) than in other systems of cattle slavery.

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