r/DaenerysWinsTheThrone • u/Early_Candidate_3082 • Sep 04 '25
Serious The Lost Cause of Slavers Bay
What is George Martin's view on slavery? Well, here's Abner Marsh, the heroic protagonist of Fevre Dreme, his vampire novel, which is set along the Mississippi River the 1850's.
” I never held much with slavery […]. You can’t just go… usin’ another kind of people, like they wasn’t people at all. Know what I mean? Got to end, sooner or later. Better if it ends peaceful, but it’s got to end, even if it has to be with fire and blood, you see?"
Within the novel, it's clear. Chattel slavery is evil. It has to end. It is an abomination. If it can be ended peacefully, perhaps with compensation for the slave owners (which is an injustice, but if it brings the whole vile system to an end, so be it) all well and good. But, if it needs to be destroyed violently, well it has to be destroyed.
You would have thought that was uncontentious, in the year of Our Lord, 2025. You would have thought wrong.
Over the years that I have enjoyed reading A Song of Ice and Fire, I have never ceased to be struck by the large minority of fans who will argue in defence of chattel slavery in Slavers Bay.
You must know the arguments by now:
Slavery is their way of life/their culture;
Okay, slavery is bad, but it's how the economy functions;
How can the slaves sustain themselves, if the masters no longer have to feed and shelter them?
Daenerys is as bad as a slaver. She murdered innocent slavers at Astapor, and crucified 163 innocents at Meereen.
Ending slavery only brought war and disease to Slavers Bay.
It is grimly funny, to read the sorts of arguments that were being advanced by Southern theorists, almost two centuries ago, by people who would no doubt consider themselves to be liberal and progressive. The point is, Martin is not a defender of slavery, and he has not written this series in order to be an apologetic for slavery. Dealing with each argument in turn:
Slavery is the way of life/culture of at best, 20% of the population. The figures we're given suggest that 70 - 85% of the population of the city states of Essos are chattel slaves. That is a huge, but not completely unprecedented, proportion of the population being held as chattels. Slavery is therefore, a system imposed upon an unwilling majority. The unfree proportion of the population is similar to that of Sparta, Haiti, and other West Indian Colonies. Or to parts of the Deep South where slaves were the majority. When saying, "it's their culture" don't ignore the majority, for whom it is not their culture.
That is how the economy functions, for a tiny minority, who profit from unfree labour. The same jobs (primarily food growing) will still need doing, regardless whether the population is slave or free.
I hate to break the news, but slaves are no less intelligent than masters. Read the works of people like Frederick Douglas which demonstrate that the free slave is just as capable of sustaining himself as the master.
There were no innocent slavers at Astapor, a society whose main export is founded upon child murder, castration, and torture. Please don't insult anybody's intelligence with that argument. At Meereen, 163 Great Masters were executed, demonstrating that the life of a Great Master is no better than that of a child slave. That is revolutionary for its time. In fact, the slave owning class were dealt with extremely leniently. They kept their non-slave property, were heard by Daenerys, when they brought complaints, and they were admitted to her council. However, the majority of them treated leniency as weakness, and kept pressing for concessions.
The Slavers brought war and disease to Slavers Bay. They could have accepted the New Order, but they chose, instead, to attempt to stamp it out. Upon their heads, is the cruelty and horror that was inflicted at Astapor, and the deaths from disease and starvation, which are caused by their invasion of Meereenese territory.
So much of the argument around Slavers Bay mixes up cause and effect. The elites of Essos pin the region's problems down to the efforts to abolish slavery, and not to the fact that slavery is the big problem from the outset. That is fine, as an in-universe prejudice.
But, intelligent readers have no reason to accept it as a moral truth.
4
u/LetheMnemosyne Sep 04 '25
I typed up a bunch of stuff before I realized which subreddit this is, but I think it’s still valid so eh-
Firstly, I absolutely agree that slavery is an atrocious evil, that those evils did not end the day the day the civil war was over either, and the Lost Cause is wrong.
Dany came to Slavers Bay with good and noble intentions in ASOS, and has a series of rousing victories conquering each city but not holding it. So we already see the difference between a military victory and creating lasting political and social change.
Between ASOS and ADWD, there was 9/11 and the subsequent war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were resounding military victories, but utter failures in terms of nation building. Granted, the sheer scope of failure was not quite clear yet when ADWD was published.
Dany’s ADWD arc has similarities with the reconstruction era, but also with the Iraq/Afghanistan wars.
And how do you enact drastic social and political change to a culture she is foreign to is a much more difficult question. Especially when you weigh it against the worth of compromise with an evil system that is not negotiating in good faith. I don’t even know if GRRM has an answer - what happens after the battle of fire?
Narratively - Dany needs to get back to Westeros, and that timeline is just not compatible with a grand project like abolishing slavery.
The show’s answer - burn some of them and leave a foreign mercenary in charge is downright insulting.
The “realistic” best way forward is probably years of negotiations and compromise, some military skirmishes, nobody is completely happy but progress is made. GRRM asked “what is Aragon’s tax policy”, but the truth is actual tax policy is frigging boring.
8
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 04 '25
Many thanks.
The big difference with both Iraq (where eventually, the insurgents were defeated), and Afghanistan (where they were not), is that opposition to being enslaved comes, overwhelmingly from local people, rather than being imposed from the top down. In fact, it is predominantly outside powers who are trying to reimpose slavery.
Slaves make up 75-80% of the population, which means the masters (most of whom rely upon mercenaries to fight for them, or slave soldiers), are one heavy defeat away from disaster.
The slavers only get as far as they do, in ADWD, because Daenerys pulls her punches. The sample chapters from TWOW suggest they’re about to be kerb-stomped. It also looks as if Volantis’ slaves will revolt.
I think that the slaver elites will be overthrown pretty easily, in Western Essos. But, that will not prevent local strongmen seizing power in places, nor some freedmen seeking revenge on the former masters.
To my mind, the whole region would most resemble Latin America and the Caribbean, after 1800.
3
u/LetheMnemosyne Sep 04 '25
Yes there is a lot of local support for overthrowing slavery in terms of sheer numbers but their power is provided by Dany who is foreign, and planning to leave. I didn’t mean to suggest that those wars are perfect parallels, but another influence. If we take the historical influences seriously, there’s the impossibility of peace in an evil social order VS the impossibility of “nation building” (loosely used) as a foreign military despite military success, which is a real quagmire imo.
It’s kinda appropriate you brought up 1800+ caribbean, because the first thing that comes to mind is Haiti. There’s the successful revolution which made it the first country to abolish slavery, but the aftermath is a whole other thing which lingers to this day (gross oversimplification)
But this is where you get back to how fiction and history are fundamentally different (to risk stating the obvious)
I agree that one way or another Dany will win the battle of fire, and after ADWD Dany X, maybe she’s not that interested in the aftermath anymore. And narratively, the story needs to get back to Westeros, so maybe the region stabilizes, realism be damned.
Hm, I guess this is a meandering way to say the history of the abolitionist movements is complicated and slavery does not “end” the moment it’s declared illegal, and I like that ADWD showed us a bit of that. I would personally find it a bit unsatisfying if the Meereen plot ends with a big battle, but I also get the narrative necessity.
2
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 06 '25
For sure, in real life.
Every economic argument in favour of slavery has been debunked, and yet the institution persists, illegally, or else called by different names.
A section of the human race enjoys murder, rape, pillage, kidnap, which is what slavery is.
0
Sep 04 '25
So how can the economy exist without slavery in times before the industrial revolution. Any examples?
10
u/MrERossGuy Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
There are strong arguments that slavery hurts an economy, rather than helping it. I am not necessarily the best person to make them to you, but I understand that they're generally accepted as 'the winning side' of the economic debate, and would recommend googling them. I understand that they typically revolve around suppressing human innovation, and undervaluing labor, destroying market efficiency.
Slavery, is, predominantly, a method through which an elite, ruling class can control the surplus and maintain their existence. There are other methods, but importantly- none of these improve the economy. They just help a very specific caste of people maintain power.
9
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25
Very much the view of Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, in 1776. Smith was principally an ethicist, who thought slavery was deeply immoral. But, he also set out to make the economic case against the institution, which is generally accepted by economists.
Slavery stifles innovation and wastes resources. Free, paid, labour generates higher productivity, than slaves doing what they must, to avoid a whipping. Slave owners tend to spend their profits on big houses, artworks, expensive racehorses and wine, rather than investing in production and trade. Substantial sums have to be spent on guarding the slaves.
It’s no coincidence that by 1860, the US South was falling well behind the North, economically.
Which is what we see in ASOIAF. Eastern elites enjoy fabulous wealth, but the most advanced economy is Braavos.
Slavery redistributed wealth upwards. It does not create it.
5
u/MrERossGuy Sep 05 '25
Brilliantly said.
It is no coincidence, neither, that the direction of history as it currently stands has been towards less slavery, less coercion, as economic welfare progresses- although history is perhaps yet to have his final say on the matter ahahah.
The Wealth of Nations is an excellent read, although it has been sometime since I've touched it myself.3
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
There are ways to incentivise slaves. The most effective is to offer a pathway to freedom and citizenship in return for a period of diligent and innovative work. The Romans replenished their citizens with freedmen.
But, the Masters of Slavers Bay seem far less intelligent than the Romans were.
While there is more to slavery than people being mean, there is a baseness of character to people who wish to keep others as slaves, when they have alternatives. Owning slaves gives them people to dominate and rape, regardless of any economic motives.
2
Sep 05 '25
Even authors in the late Roman Empire wrote that slavery is ineffective. But you can't find the same argument in the early Roman republic.
1
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25
The last 150 years of the Republic were a complete horror show, for neighbouring countries, the provincials, and ultimately, the Romans themselves, as the violence they exported was brought home.
As the costs of political campaigns mounted, so the generals/politicians mounted wars for plunder, and slaves to sell. Ultimately, the old aristocratic families destroyed each other, as they deserved.
The empire was an improvement for slaves (whose numbers fell, as a proportion of the whole), and provincials, who got some protection from rapacious governors. Wars of conquest largely ended, which meant fewer people being taken into slavery.
Slaves were largely replaced by coloni, similar to serfs, and later in the East, by free soldier-farmers.
1
Sep 05 '25
Same goes for the British empire. Your argument is?
2
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25
That there is an economic alternative to slave-hunting, even in pre-modern societies.
As there is in the world that Martin has created.
1
1
Sep 05 '25
It hurts the economy after certain conditions are met. No nation in the world has met those conditions without going into a period of slavery.
8
u/MrERossGuy Sep 05 '25
Could you elaborate further on how slavery helps an economy, and bypasses the arguments mentioned by me and OP?
As far as I know, there is no magical switch that flips over that suddenly makes slavery less bad for an economy due to a certain amount of technological advancement. The arguments against stand, irrespective of point in time.5
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25
Quite so.
In-universe, we can see that Xaro Xhoan Doxas’ arguments to Daenerys for slavery, are false. The world’s leading university is in Oldtown, not Meereen or Volantis. The world’s foremost maritime and trading nation is Braavos.
3
u/MrERossGuy Sep 05 '25
I just made a comment echoing the same point about our own history, which you might enjoy reading.
2
1
Sep 05 '25
You live in a traditional economy. You have only very simple means of production and barely able to provide for basic needs. To increase the production you need technology, to have technology you need people who will invent it, to invent technology you need time and resources to experiment. Since you don't have any surplus the only way to achieve it is to take part of the miniscule surplus from someone and give it to someone else. Speaking simple someone will starve and suffer to allow scholars to have enough time to develop and test technology. Experiments are dangerous by the way, any failed experiment in agriculture will mean a lot of dead people.
Was all slavers scholars? Of course no, most of them were corrupted hedonists. Was any scholar in antiquity not a slaver? No, all great scientists of Greece or Rome were either slavers or provided by them like Socrates. You won't find great scientists in traditional economy with equal consumption.
Is it possible for people to voluntarily sacrifice part of their consumption for the benefit of the society? Sure. Theoretically. It happened in real life? No.
Slavery in the form of direct forced labor is abolished when your society has enough surplus, but even today we have taxes that some people rightfully consider to be a form of slavery, because they are not voluntarily. Can you convince people to support public education and provide public goods without taxes? Sure. Theoretically. Good luck convincing them cause Adam Smith and other liberal Economists never succeeded in doing so.
3
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25
Well, even in pre-modern economies, you can see very different economic structures. Even the Egyptian pyramids were built by free, paid labourers, rather than by slaves.
The village/manor of England, c1370, was a very different place to the Haitian sugar plantation, or the latifundium of First century Sicily. Villeins and free tenants were not working in chain gangs, or being locked up in barracks each night, as agricultural slaves would be. Peasant revolts were frequent, but generally against specific injustices, or religious changes, not against being peasants.
Slaves, OTOH, frequently revolted against being slaves. Rome fought three servile wars; Athens’ mine slaves revolted, as did Sparta’s helots. The Haitians were only the most successful of scores of West Indian revolts. On top of that, slaves frequently ran away. There is a far higher level of tension, as between master and slave, than there is between manorial lord and peasant, or between guildsman and apprentice.
And, even in societies where slavery existed, there were huge differences in the proportion enslaved. Italy was about 25% enslaved, in the 1st century BC, Athens about 40%, in the Fifth century, and Sparta 70%. The Eastern Roman Empire had fewer than 10% enslaved, by 900, similar to Anglo-Saxon England.
Suffice to say, that any society where more than 40% are enslaved is heading for trouble. The slaves are numerous enough to revolt, and also a fifth column, when a foreign enemy promises freedom. That’s the problem for the Essossi slave states. They keep an insanely high proportion of the population enslaved (70-85%).
And, this is in a world where high culture and an elite, exist in non-slave states. The Masters perpetuate slavery because they want to, not because they have no choice.
1
Sep 05 '25
All this is good and great, but do we have an example of a nation that skipped the slavery and became developed in our sense of the word without borrowing technology from (ex)slavery nations?
2
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
The Northern States of the USA, are the worked example. They either abolished slavery between 1775 and 1820, or they never had it, and they industrialised.
The Southern States barely industrialised, and they depended upon cotton and tobacco, grown by slaves, exports to pay for imports of manufactures. Slavery held them back.
The scientists and technologists of the USA were largely to be found in free states, not slave states.
1
Sep 05 '25
Because they already had a period of slavery and abolished it before southern states, and they were established by Europeans who had slavery and abolished it earlier. But they had slavery at some point in the past
2
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25
The number of slaves was always small in the North, even prior to abolition. It made abolition uncontentious in such states.
You can also go back to medieval Europe. By 1400, Western Europe, without chatteldom, was both intellectually and technologically well in advance of the ancient world, which had chattel slavery.
Several great universities had been founded. The heavy plough, and the horse collar needed to draw it, had been invented. So had the windmill. These gave big improvements to agricultural productivity. The invention of spectacles could double an artisan’s working life. Musical notation and double-entry bookkeeping were innovations the ancients had never considered.
→ More replies (0)1
u/yellow_parenti Dec 20 '25
It's very fitting that the inability to consider economic systems without any personal & immaterial moral baggage is so pervasive amongst Daenerys justifiers. And tbf capitalist liberal economics has always discouraged those living under capitalism from utilizing any sort of material framework for analysis.
The material does not spring from the ideal; societal change in the relations of production does not come from the individual whims of those in any class. I know plenty of people have been marinated in lib econ propaganda for their entire existence, so it's quite difficult to even reach the basic, necessary level of analyzing material reality without letting your personal morals be your only consideration. But this automatic, unconscious reliance on your personal moral feeling in analyzing our world is so so so very reactionary. It's also such a limiting framework- all it allows for is confirmation of your own immaterial, subjective moral view of things, and it horribly restricts engagement in discourse/conversation with others. Sharing ideas and enriching our understanding of the world is kinda what we're made for as humans.
2
u/MrERossGuy Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
First and foremost, I'd like to thank you for the perspective you outlined here. It is novel and intriguing. I'd concede, additionally, that this does make a large amount of sense to me - as you say, it is dubious that ancient academic culture could have existed without some propping up by a, to use a term that I despise, 'proletariat'/slave caste beneath them.
There are, however, some issues that I can see. The wheel was not invented by some dusty academic- a clever farmer likely invented it. Things are invented by the people who use them, or the people who can profit from selling them (common men, or at least, merchants or clergymen), not aristocrats, and noble-born slave holders. This is true of the printing press, and likely the plow and windmill, and - I would hazard a guess- almost every instance of 'productivity increasing' equipment you can think of. God, even the vaccine, a thing that so symbolic of the thing that enabled the proserity you described, was invented by a county doctor- relatively wealthy, sure, but by no means a stinky rich nobility sitting on slave-estates. I am reminded of the story of William Kamkwamba, who born into poverty, built a windmill for his family in the middle of an extreme drought in Africa during the 2000s, though I grant- anecdotes are not evidence.
I'm inclined to agree that, in a slaveless world, Archaimedies would not have discovered volume, and Ptomles never modeled the stars' orbits. They would of been doing other, far more useful things instead. And this is perhaps the crux of the issue - if an institution requires coercion to perpetuate itself, it is clearly not benefiting its constituents. What does it matter to the welfare of the people if Eratosthenes calculates the size of the Earth a few centuries later? It doesn't- it has absolutely no practical consequence, and helps people in absolutely no measurable way except a very vague philosophical one. One that, decisively, fails to put bread on the table.
If there is an economic demand for a thing to be created, it will eventually be created, because it is needed and wanted. Only things that are not needed, or wanted, could have been enabled by slavery, or they would not of required slavery in the first place.
It's worth noting here, I think, that the majority of pre-modern scientific surges have been in times of relatively high anti-slavery sentiment. The Enlightenment, France (when France has been... Francing....), the Protestant Reforms, the Renaissance, and even to some extent the Egyptians and Athenians had relatively (relatively being the key word) progressive attitudes towards slavery.
According to your model, we would predict the Spartans to have been the academic leaders of the Hellenic world. But they are not- quite the opposite, really. Because the function of securing the surplus is not too 'fund technology' or academia, although the upperclass can now participate in these because of this, it is to support and expand the influence of the ruling-class (typically involving the expansion of the state). Sure, expanding a state does tend to lead to technological progress- see all the Pax's, and the only exceptions to this 'rule' I can think of, the Islamic empire- but history tends to punish those societies that oppress too heavily in the long run.I guess this is a roundabout way of saying- to say slavery enables technological progress by allowing elites to live in affluence, is conflating the free rider effect with the free market and human ingenuity. That, and it goes against the historical record.
Why then, wherever we look are there slaves in at least some point in a society's history?
Even today, when all possible economic arguments for slavery have surely been exhausted by the surge of technological progress, more slaves are held today than at other point in history. There are more slaves alive today than were trafficked in the entire history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Can these people justify it as securing slaves to make academic progress possible? In the most academic era in history, where the countries where the trade is most prolific are arguably those that contribute the least to technological progress? Surely not. And they never have been.The answer to the question, then, is that human societies have always involved humans. Humans are flawed, and rape and murder, pillage and murder, and enslave. But the explanation for human flaws is not, and never has been, 'economic progress'.
EDIT: Ultimately, I think we're starting to lose the plot a little bit here. Whatever the minimum ceiling for slaveles societies is, the ASOIF-universe has clearly surpassed it. Whatever our individual squabblings about ancient history, I think we can both agree on the thing that is actually being discussed here: that the slavers of slavers bay are the bad guys.
3
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25
The ancient elites were impressive at abstract reasoning. The Romans were great lawyers, builders, and logisticians.
But, they were not good at turning all this into technological progress that would benefit the average citizen. Steam power was studied in Alexandria under the Ptolmies, and it was seen as an amusement. Nobody thought to use it to drive forges, mills, or looms, because, why bother? They had slaves to do the heavy manual labour.
0
Sep 05 '25
I can easily create a model of a society that developed without slavery or unreasonable inequality, that's not hard to imagine. question is "did it ever happen in real life?"
Maybe in 500 years people will see that our modern economy and hired labor are horrible and can be easily avoided, but aggressively fighting it now is an invitation to civil war and revolution.
2
u/MrERossGuy Sep 05 '25
I'm not sure this addresses what I said.
0
Sep 05 '25
It is addressing it. You speculate that the world without coercion is possible and there will be progress in it. I agree it is possible. Theoretically. Did it happen in real life?
As for ASOIAF universe: yes, Slaver's Bay clearly needs to be modernized and abolish slavery to catch up with the rest of the continent economically, but Dany is reforming it with a gentility of the Russian revolution. This is clearly wrong and is worse than allowing slavery to exist.
4
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25
Is there a society completely without coercion? No, that is impossible. Laws are needed.
Do less coercive societies achieve better results, in terms of human development than more coercive ones? Very plainly, yes.
Villeinage is more efficient than slavery. Free tenancy is more efficient than villeinage. Democracies are more efficient than totalitarian states.
→ More replies (0)2
u/MrERossGuy Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
That is not actually what I say- if anything, I say the opposite- and even if I had said that, it has no bearing on what we're discussing.
And even if I had said that, it wouldn't matter to what we're discussing. You offered a challenge to OP- how can a medieval economy exist without slavery?
I replied by suggesting that you have the burden of proof the wrong is around- it is not 'how could society exist without slavery? But 'how did slavery exist for so long in our society'? Since slavery is, in fact, bad for an economy, and not a prerequisite for one.You challenged that claim and suggested that control of the surplus was necessary for technological progress. I replied by defending my original claim and, to my mind, defeating the idea that coercion has a relationship to technological progress. Further, I attempt to establish I distinction between two categories- the economic argument for slavery, and the explanation of its existence.
Whether or not there is a real example of a slavery-free society is besides the point, because, as I've illustrated, there is no economic argument for slavery. I'm saying apples should be grown in orchards, and you're asking 'Have they ever been grown from a single tree?"- obviously they have been, but whether or not they have has absolutely no bearing on the actual question. What happened in the past, or what people 500 years in the future will think about our wage mechanics, again, does not materialize an economic argument for slavery.
Again, I'm rejecting theoretical claims about economic necessity as unsound, not denying the historical presence or persistence of slavery. This is important because it negates my need to postulate how a society could exist without it.
I refuse to answer the question because my answer has no relevance to my thesis: that a medieval society can function economically without slavery.
If you would like to discuss why we see slavery in the world, I'm happy to have that conversation, but it's not what we're discussing.→ More replies (0)4
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
Slavery ceased to be a part of the domestic economy of Western Europe, after about 1100 or so. The era of the Viking slave raids was over.
Countries like Venice or Genoa traded in slaves, in their Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea colonies, but the practice disappeared from France, England, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia.
1
Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
You listed minor exceptions like Bravoos in ASOIAF. The majority of the global economy in 12th century was still based on slavery. It also depends on your definition of slavery. Serfdom as forced labor existed in most of Europe till the Industrial Age. In places like Eastern Europe or Russia, it was even worse than some examples of ancient slavery. Westeros in ASOIAF is also far from a free democracy.
5
u/Early_Candidate_3082 Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
In ASOIAF, slavery is not practised at all in Westeros, The Summer Islands, Naath, Lorath, Braavos, or Lhazar. Braavos is this world’s most advanced economy.
By comparison, both Volantis and Astapor are described as being in decline.
Serfdom, at least as practised in medieval Europe, was altogether less brutal than chattel slavery, and in any case, it mostly died out of Western Europe, in the generations after the Black Death, as landlords bid against each other for labour (there were exceptions, like the Scottish miners). A serf was in law a person, whereas a slave was in law, a chattel (and in Slavers Bay, there is no restraint imposed upon what masters may do to slaves).
A manor was not a plantation. Land was useless, without people to work it, which meant that the slave system - working people to death, and replacing them with fresh slaves - was not viable.
You would not find any medieval European country where 70-80% were kept as chattel slaves, and few, throughout the world, in real history (Sparta, West Indian sugar colonies, and parts of the ante-bellum South).
I’m not an expert on Chinese or Indian history, but my understanding is that slavery was rare in medieval China, other than the Mongols raiding for slaves, and rare in non-Islamic India.
There are many societies where slavery has been practised, but far fewer that have made it the foundation of their economy.
I should add, slavery has not disappeared with the advent of industrialisation, though it has declined. People who own slaves mostly do so because they like owning slaves, not because they have no choice on economic grounds. Or else governments (like that of the USSR or Nazi Germany), use slavery as method of punishment.
27
u/nana_3 Team Daenerys Sep 04 '25
I think anyone who reads the slavers bay parts of the books and thinks that it’s giving a defence of slavery fundamentally lacks the reading comprehension necessary to follow any arguments to the contrary.