Worldbuilding 102: Slavery
Once again we meet again! I, your favourite alien Limax, Vivian, and you, beloved reader! Today's topic is a sensitive one so obligatory disclaimer first:
Disclaimer: This post is under no circumstances endorsing or condoning slavery as an act as that is a gross violation of an individual's personal and bodily autonomy and rights. I condemn all such on a moral level toward any living person regardless of how positive anything within the post may sound. Those instances will only be for the topic at hand and the moral atrocity that slavery is will never change no matter how palatable one attempts to make it. Any humour within the blog post is for entertainment purposes and is not an attempt to trivialise or minimalism slavery and its impact.
There. Are we good? Slavery is morally bad, mmmkay?
Terminology
There are discussions about what terminology to be used and I acknowledge there are differing views. I will be referring to people who are enslaved as slaves. Both because the person-first kind of speech is extremely cumbersome and repetitive and I wish to emphasise that it is a condition imposed on a person and meant to reduce the people. In addition to that, referring to them as people can give a sense of agency and autonomy which slaves did not have and thus the terminology can, in my views, be humanising the act itself in a way it does not deserve. But mostly because it is annoying to write.
What is slavery?
Slavery has existed for thousands of years amongst humans, and I doubt any civilization in the galaxy has not utilised it in one form or another. But what is slavery? What is the definition of it? We all hear people go “This is like slavery!”, especially teens when they have to do chores.
One way to define it that is meaningful and sufficiently broad is that slavery “is a societal system in which labour is extracted, potentially forcefully, out of a person or people without them having been able to negotiate for compensation and be given anything for the labour.”
That is a whole lot of words, but what does it mean? Well, slavery is rarely a single person thing. It is something the entire society engages in, or at least a significant portion of it. Its purpose is to extract some kind of labour out of the person. Some of you might exclaim:
Sex isn’t labour!
It is a form of labour in this context; you might disagree for a myriad of reasons, and you are entitled to it, but it is a thing performed by a human, and in economic terms, that means it is a form of labour.
The last part is the important one: the ones doing the labour had no say in negotiating terms of the labour, compensation and what more. They are not compensated. And this is the most fundamental part of what slavery is. This is also why poor labour conditions, teenage chores and more are not forms of slavery. There are negotiation powers and laws generally protecting one's ability to negotiate. It might be unfair, it might be bad, but because this power of negotiation and compensation exists, it is not slavery. With this, it is also important to understand that you have negotiation power if you are, at any time, legally allowed, and also allowed by the job supplier, to walk away and not have the job. The system of society and economy and more can, however, be so heavily rigged against you, you poor worker (Anne is shouting revolution in the background), that you are strongly incentivised to NOT walk away and take any job given and take any abuse given and so on. That is not slavery because you still have that option of leaving. It is, however, extremely exploitative and creates environments where people are easily exploited and has been used many times in history.
Human Nature
We need to discuss the nature of humans and how you imagine us aliens. We are not any better honestly. Anyway, compassion and empathy are something we all have; they are precious and they are amazing. However, one thing that is also part of human nature is greed and the economic incentives you and all create. And an unfortunate effect of this is that for groups and individuals, the economic gain in terms of standards of living often tend to outweigh moral concerns if the gain is sufficiently large. You know the old saying, everything has a price. That includes morality. And economics and greed are known to win the overwhelming majority of times when it is that, or being moral. People tend to go the more moral route when the costs for it have so little impact on their own standard living that it is negligible.
I am not saying everyone is immoral people or such, all I am saying is to think about it for yourself. If being moral means you lose something you value, where will you start to draw the line where morality is no longer worth it for you? Most will struggle when it comes to the lives of their loved ones, choosing an immoral action in order to save them from harm, but I bet a lot of you, myself included, will draw the line a whole lot sooner than where lives start mattering if the immoral act is not too heinous. It is a sliding scale on immorality and the things we value where the line is drawn. These lines also start going up if we do not have to see the immorality we enable…after all, who among you buys fast fashion clothes?
It’s easy to be a saint in paradise.
-Benjamin Sisko (Star Trek: Deep Space 9)
Economics of Slavery
Now that we got the fragility of morality out of the way and are all probably feeling extremely uncomfortable about ourselves and our possible selves in the worst of cases, let’s move onto the economics of slavery!
As much as I have said here that people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling, exceedingly few of us do things to be cruel for cruelty's sake. There is generally something else that drives someone to start doing immoral acts, and like most things, it is about economics. So how does slavery work in an economy–what are the pros and cons (economically speaking)?
The free labour aspect is abundantly clear, but if that was all to it, why isn’t it used anymore in most industries and such in the Western world? One important aspect when it comes to all types of slavery is that the job generally has to be very menial and simple to check. If it requires complex knowledge to see if the slave is doing the job, it starts to consume far too much time making sure the slaves are doing the work rather than actually using them. At this point, you might as well pay those checking to do the jobs and hire a few more instead of wasting all the food and energy on slaves. This is why jobs that require a great deal of knowledge from the slaves were generally not ones to have slaves. After all, that took education that could take many years which was also costly and, yeah you get the point.
Okay, so slaves do simple jobs that require little to no prior knowledge and can be learned while working. So why is it still not generally done in the Western world? Again, skipping the morality, one key factor is this: in the old days and such, most types of menial labour and such required land. As I explained in Fictional Economies, for large parts of history, land was an economy, so you needed large swaths of land for a meaningful economy. And one thing that has correlated strongly with slavery is when the amount of people on a land is very small. That is, the amount of land needed to be worked is large, but the population living there is not large enough to use it.
At these times, it becomes more beneficial to use slaves to work the land. Doing farming work, amongst many others, is easy to supervise when there are so few people. Getting them to move and work to where you want them to work is… going to get very expensive. You need to pay for a move, get family and much else to come along and all… wouldn’t it just be better if you could TAKE the people and have them work without paying? Sure you still gotta feed and clothe them and house them even! You’re not a total savage! But it is still way cheaper than paying them!
Jokes aside, this is generally where and when slavery pops up, where there is a lot of land to be worked easily to make something, and there are not a lot of people that can willingly work it. Once the population grows sufficiently large, the free market labour price tends to sink below the cost of keeping slaves in check and housing and feeding them, and that is when slavery stops. Russia and the USA were amongst the last Western/European countries to abandon it because they had relatively small populations and lots of land quite far into history. This is also why northern states were more against it compared to southern states. In northern states, slavery couldn’t be used economically because what they needed was either machines or skills, not lots of human labour. While in the south, it was human labour to deal with crops before those had been successfully automated.
Speaking of automation, one observation historically is that slavery often has a negative effect on technological advancement. This is because slavery does not incentivise doing labour more effectively. After all, if all you have to do to get more production going is to enslave more people, why get machines? Again, we see this in the southern states before the Civil War. But this was historically the same. It usually is up to a certain point like this. Technology, which will happen regardless, will eventually make most kinds of slavery entirely pointless as machines can do the slave jobs better than humans can.
There is however one glaring exception which is the most prominent and well known kind of slavery that lingers to this day. Sex slavery. It fulfils the criteria of requiring little to no actual knowledge or training, it is easy to verify if it has been done. It is, however, independent of population density because the general demand for sex is high regardless, and there is no way that any machine can do this the way a human can do it. These are some of the many reasons why it persists. I speak about it in a factual sense as this is meant to be informative, but as stated above, it is repugnant beyond words to me that anyone could get a person and then let them be assaulted so regularly. It is, however, the kind of slavery most likely to never truly stop existing.
Slavery laws
I know, I know what you are thinking. Let me guess
These laws about slaves are only to help the owners and what their rights are!
Which, while true to some degree, is not the whole story. Actually, in a lot of history, the laws around slavery have encompassed not only the rights of the owner, but also the rights of the slave!
You heard me right, in a lot of history and cultures around the world, slaves had rights! In ancient Athens, if you struck a slave, you were breaking the law! Sure, it was partially because slaves and people generally dressed the same, but hey, they still had the right to not be beaten! Another interesting fact is that it was not only tolerated but legal for slaves to talk back against their owner over something.
In some cultures and types of slavery (which I will go through in next section), the slave could earn money on the side if it didn’t interfere with their duties, and using this money, they could even buy their own freedom! I bet a lot of you had no clue that there were these many nuances to slavery. This is why I made the disclaimer. I am not saying any of these things to make it look like “Oh look, good slavery”, no, it is never good.
But what I am saying is for worldbuilders you can make it different and more palatable to modern eyes by having rights and rules surrounding slaves and slavery. Not all kinds are inherited, not all can easily be sold, not all pass the slave status onto the next generation, not all are for life. And keep in mind also that there can be many different kinds of slaves within a society that are different in the societal hierarchy, and this does not have to depend on the status of their owner.
Types of slavery
There are generally no commonly agreed upon classifications of slavery, but there are some very broad categories such as chattel slavery. For the purpose of worldbuilding and my blog, I will deviate somewhat from these and define a few terms on my own in the way I see that it benefits communication and worldbuilding. Keep in mind that many of these definitions and terms I give can overlap and be applicable at the sametime. As my friend Lady Verbosa (Anne) pointed out, she has this mental image of what chattel slavery is that coincides with US one, and it is often very close, but in this blog I am tearing a lot of the properties of all kinds of slavery apart into separate categories.
Chattel slavery
For the longest time I pronounced this like “Cattle slavery”, not the best pronunciation but given history it doesn’t make much of a difference. Anyway, Chattel is a word for property, and while slaves are always owned in some sense and treated more like property than people, that is the entire freaking POINT of slavery! Thus I define chattel slavery to have the property that it is that slaves are INHERITED to the next one in line of inheritage of the owner. In some forms of slavery in history, there have been such types that when the owner dies, the slaves are freed. But not in chattel slavery–off to the next generation they go, and there is no relief. I tried finding a better word for this, so if you have suggestions please provide below.
Generational slavery
This one is where you imagine that the status of slaves is inherited from the slave parent to the child of said slave. This can be through complex systems whether they are a slave if the parents are slaves vs free. It can also be entirely arbitrary at the discretion of the owner. The point is that there is a significant risk for the slave to have any child because their child will be made to work as a slave when sufficiently old. For obvious reasons when it comes to children and the likes, this can get extremely brutal in order to get them to work.
Innate slavery
I am choosing this term not, again, to in any way lessen any person or any group’s agency or the likes, but rather I pick this because this is how the people practising slavery, the ENSLAVERS, view it. There are some characteristics, it can be nationality, ethnicity, whatever weird arse social construct you got including “race”, which can be based on literally anything. Anything imaginable that is a property of a person can be viewed as something that marks them, in the society and for the enslavers, as a person being innately a slave. This can include one's own population where certain people with certain qualities become slaves along with many others. Again, I want to emphasise I picked this from the view of the enslaver because I wished to be as broad as possible as I do not personally subscribe to race or many other but also wished to give it broad enough coverage that scifi and fantasy things could be included.
Debt slavery
This slavery is, as the name suggests, a means by which one pays off debts. In the old days, you couldn’t go bankrupt and have your debts dissolved. If you were heavily indebted, you could easily be taken to become a slave for a fixed amount of time. If not, legal “shenanigans” were of course involved which could easily happen. In the worst cases, your entire family could be dragged with you into slavery, at best of times it was just you, and they were left alone.
Autoslavery/Voluntary Slavery
This one is extremely strange but has been documented in history. Auto-, in case some do not know, means “self”, hence the alternative term. This is where a person voluntarily sells themselves into slavery. This can be for many different reasons, to give your family resources or settle debts (going back to the previous one but now it is more willing), for example. The duration for this can be any amount agreed upon and, depending on laws and more, how well it is upheld by the enslaver, who may disagree toward the end.
Spoils of war slavery
The war is over, you’ve won, everything is yours for the taking because the opposite force has been decimated. What do you grab? Well, the gold, the silver, oh fancy silk! ...look at all the people up for the taking! You can grab them as well and sell them back home for even more riches! And then you also help your own economy with free labour! Yes, this is how a huge amount of slaves have been taken through history, including the ones going to what would become and is the USA. When wars were lost, people of the loser, including their civilians, were taken as slaves and sent back home to increase the coffers content if they weren’t used by the state or the likes for projects.
Punitive slavery
You done goofed up. You murdered, stole from the wrong person, or worse…slept with the lord's daughter! 😱 Up for trial you go, and your punishment comes down! Slavery, your sentence is declared! And off you go and are a slave until you have done your punishment, which may or may not be your entire life. In some historical jurisdictions, this has been a separate kind of punishment from general imprisonment, in some (for example modern USA), any imprisonment behind bars means you can be rendered a slave to work.
Poverty slavery
In some parts, it was quite literally illegal to be on the street and poor. So they had poor houses where poor people were made to go. They got housing, got clothed, got fed …and got a gruesome job that they were not allowed to not do. They were made to do it to stay there and getting out in any way was extremely difficult. So it was a form of slavery.
Hedonic slavery
I didn’t choose sex here for a reason; I want it slightly broader than just sex. Sex slavery of course goes here, but in hedonic slavery, the purpose of the slave is to bring joy and pleasure to their owner. The job is not necessarily physically exhausting but can for obvious reasons take an extremely high emotional toll. Some fortunate ones can be in this category and their job is entirely to act as servants and look pretty, showing off their owner’s wealth and status. The most unfortunate are of course repeatedly assaulted on a regular basis for the carnal pleasure of whomever their enslaver chooses.
Abolitionism through history
Abolitionism is nothing new. It has existed since time immemorial all the way to when slavery was rendered mostly moot and was made illegal. Some of you might wonder, how could there be abolitionism when I said people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling before? Very simple! People and societies are complicated! No matter how good an act is economically and benefits a society, there are always people who will question if the end justifies the means.
Most people of course will not randomly decide that they think that something is immoral if they have grown up around it as being natural. If you want an example, take a look at how many Americans view atrocities related to firearms. There is a lot of desensitisation happening there, while in Europe, the reactions to such events are pure unadulterated horror at how something like that could ever happen.
I am not saying it to bash or the like, but it is a perfect example I am certain many of you will be all too familiar with. To get out of such mindsets, in slavery here, there is generally a requirement of education where you see many different views and experiences. Back in the day, the highly educated travelled a lot because there were few places to get educated at. Travelling to many places not only gives them many different views and experiences to put their own position and culture relative to, they might stumble upon a culture where their own kindred are being enslaved, thus leading to the next point. Another path of course is personal experience. It can be befriending a slave, having your own family become slaves, or your best friend, it can be many things that shocks the person to reconsider and then think about abolition. Unfortunately, until the economic powers are sufficiently undercut, there are rarely enough abolitionists to be at the critical mass where a large-scale change can happen.
And for those of you who think you would have been different back then… how is that fast fashion clothes feeling? Are you pretty and fabulous enough to warrant the immoralities?
Justifications of slavery
Justifying slavery is a touchy subject and I will, sigh, reiterate, does not mean it is in any way making it valid or the likes. Do I need to get the gif back? Never good. This is about how people justify it to themselves when you have slaves. How do you justify seeing another fellow human being as being nothing but property? You could never imagine it for your friends, your family, and the likes, so how is it justified?
The easiest one is simple. Taken from innate slavery as discussed above. When you have declared a trait innately makes you a slave, you have already declared them unworthy of humanity, or more generally, personhood. You deny them that because you view them as inherently subordinate to you through whatever delusional belief you have in some arbitrary ranking, and thus, the people that are slaves are viewed as nothing more than animals to be used to extract labour from. It is dehumanising and the most dangerous form. This is why reducing people into numbers, not people with names, is so dangerous. When we forget they are fellow people with feeling, our empathy evaporates like water on hot asphalt.
Or if you don’t want to look down on people as innately wrong but only culturally due to technological disparity, you could claim you are bringing them civilization and teaching them, making them better! Exactly how this works in their heads is beyond me but it has been used so here it is.
Another is through crime or debt. They owe society or people money, so they should surely pay back. It feels natural, it feels fair, pay what you are due to society or those that you owe to! And this has been the consensus for many centuries and why even the poor came to be thrown into this lot. Work and slave away to earn a meagre existence just for being poor. And once again, in the pursuit of a feeling of justice and fairness, people surrender empathy and care, just to feel that it is “Just”.
Another big justification is the spoils of war slaves, as they are generally justified as the losers of the war. Often historically they have been shown more lenience in terms of slavery conditions. It could range from having rights to it being temporary to “repay” the cost and effort of the war itself to the victors. This is not an attempt generally to justify it in a moral sense, but a justification in economics to redo massive costs due to the war. It is, however, at the great expense of so much.
I give examples of a few justifications here, how it can be done in the minds of the enslavers, but I also tell you this. Deep down, they are all facades. Fake masks held up to make the enslavers feel better about themselves, and the more you look into a whole lot of their excuses, the ever expanding complexities of excuses and reasons, what shines through to me is that the wrongness of it was rarely lost. They knew, but for a myriad of reasons, didn’t care. They just wanted to sleep peacefully at night in a delusional belief to comfort them.
How do you justify fast fashion clothes? They are that pretty, huh?
Sources of slaves
Slaves can come from many sources depending on the type. A non-exhaustive list is:
War losers
Indebted people
Foreign populations
Poor people
Unwanted natives
Not a fun list, and a very short section.
Slavery as a cog
As with all, slavery does not exist in a vacuum. There requires some cultural justifications for it and a societal need for it. In ancient times, these needs were plentiful due to general low populations, but as society and medicine advanced, the need slowly started to decrease. So if you are going to include slavery, think about which types you wish to involve and if it makes economic sense.
Hedonic slavery is the most likely one to exist in all eras, while the rest are contingent on more economic pressures. Make sure the slavery in your setting makes economic sense before you add it. You might want to do stories showing it is bad (which it is), but if it doesn’t fit the society, like they are very modern societies, then it will look strange and shoehorned in.
And keep in mind also to make your protag’s position, whether pro or anti slavery, and other people’s, sensible. I have said this before and I will say it again, morally enlightened protags that befit our modern morality in a setting where it is the exception, not the norm, is poor worldbuilding unless properly justified. If it is important to you to have a morally enlightened protag like this, look at the list of reasons for abolition and make sure that justification is clear!
Narrative aspect
Of course, this leaves the narrative of it in stories. Worlds can have slavery and that is fine from a worldbuilding perspective, but in narratives, you as a writer will be imbuing your own views somewhat in the story. How do you show slavery, even the kinder kinds, as wrong without constantly slapping the consumer in the face with what should be blatantly obvious?
You can of course have the protag have better morality and question it and all that jazz, but that is literally the most boring one, and as I have said time and time again, unless you properly justify why their morality is so different, it is also the worst one to do. The best way to generally show it in a negative light by using negative descriptors. The narrator (if it is not first person or directly from protag, that is) uses negative descriptors to illuminate all the bad parts of it through the descriptions. The narrative itself. If you go more closely in point of view, a style I am not fond of myself, but hey, I know it is popular, the narrator can use at most neutral terms (unless the arc is about going from pro to anti) rather than positive terms.
Another one is of course having the pro-people being antagonists. You can also work on humanising the slaves, which you should always do anyway. Focus on how they are just people in terrible conditions against their will (or rare instances voluntarily). I would say this is the most important aspect: always humanise the slaves in the story if interactions happen with them. I will let my friend Anne make the final input on this section as she is great.
(Anne): Vivian did a great job covering the narrative aspects, but there are all sorts of ways you can play with slavery in your stories while still showing it as the abomination that it is. For example, as Vivian says, if your world has slavery embedded in it, your protags are likely to see it as a part of life unless you do some justification. Now, it’s not hard to fit that justification in, but it can be interesting adding that justification in the story itself and not just the backstory. While it’s tempting to emphasise that slavery is evil, and we should never sympathise with characters who support it, because that’s what we as authors believe, it’s far more interesting to show an arc in which characters come to realise this, as Vivian briefly mentioned above.
If you really want to show your audience the damage that slavery does, then starting with an oblivious or even supportive character who embodies the justifications for slavery, for example believing people or cultures to be less than or acknowledging that it might be bad but it would crash the economy without slavery, and then showing their realisation that people shouldn’t be enslaved, can be an extremely important tool. Show their education. Show them travelling to places without slaves and realising society and the economy works perfectly well there. (Vivian: This can be difficult in an economic sense due to how economical it is, but hey, magic and stuff can easily solve this) Showing this realisation is more powerful than just showing that slavery is bad, because it deconstructs the justifications and reveals just how self-serving they are. Plus, you get a wonderful character arc and can really delve into the society, so bonus development there!
Overall, I absolutely agree with Vivian on humanising slaves at every turn and using negative language (or else people will draw the conclusion that you support slavery), but having characters with that belief and showing their change is a wonderful way to really drive home how completely evil it is.
Summa summarum
Just because some will get their panties in a twist with a cactus inside sprinkled with sand on it, Slavery is bad!
Slavery has existed for economical reasons and been justified through a myriad of reasons; we all know they are complete and utter bullshit but they have. They are a worldbuilding tool and a narrative tool, and while it is important to not romanticise this abomination of existence, it is equally important to know that you do not need to beat people over the head that it is bad.
Most sensible people know it is bad so you can do nuances that open up for interesting stories and tales that black and white narratives cannot allow. So be creative, use different forms of slavery, different relations between slaves, different types within a society, and most importantly, give the subject the respect it deserves while entertaining and being nuanced and varied.
And when in doubt about yourself and where you stand, fast fashion is where you gotta look in the mirror. Are you doing everything in your power to end this atrocity, or are you just going along with it because you benefit? Really think about that, because you might not like the answer.
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Copyright ©️ 2023 Vivan Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as basic definitions, purposes, and types of slavery are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific language or exact phrasing is individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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