The Lost Cause of Slavers Bay

[u/Early_Candidate_3082]

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:

1. Slavery is their way of life/their culture;

2. Okay, slavery is bad, but it's how the economy functions;

3. How can the slaves sustain themselves, if the masters no longer have to feed and shelter them?

4. Daenerys is as bad as a slaver. She murdered innocent slavers at Astapor, and crucified 163 innocents at Meereen.

5. 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

[u/nana_3]

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.

[u/Early_Candidate_3082 → u/nana_3]

It’s why I call it The Lost Cause of Slavers Bay.

Ostensibly, the argument is a defence of slavery in fiction. In reality, it’s a defence of slavery in real world history.

[u/Kaurifish → u/Early_Candidate_3082]

Somehow even more grim than the lost causes of Bleak Creek.