Slavery

[John Suburbs]

What's to prove? It's free labour. 

That's the point. It is not free, just like owning a dog is not free. Even if you find a stray, you still gotta feed it, take it to the vet when it gets sick, buy nail clippers... And then most of the time it just lays around the house licking its balls. It would be cheaper just to rent a dog whenever you wanted to go for a walk or chase a rabbit out of the garden.

[Ser Lepus]

In Modern and Contermporary Europe slavery didn't stick because it was more profitable to employ free workers, so there were relatively few slaves who were mostly household servants.

However, the spanish Dukes of Medina Sidonia made a fortune buying slaves and allowing them to buy their freedom. It was inmensely profitable: The dukes didn't have to spend a cent feeding or clothing them, they would live by themselves and save as much as they could and give them the money.

Other people did the same, but a very smaller scale. There are even cases like that of Juan Valiente, who joined the Conquistares in order to earn enough money and buy his freedom. He saved the money, but the bureaucrat who was supposed to give it to his former owner stole it instead. His former owner insisted on being paid, but Juan Valiente died in battle shortly afterwards.

It was basically like a mortage on their own bodies. So people who compare loan debtors who take mortages to modern slaves aren't misguided.

 

 

[shadows and dust]

Disagree.  Slaves do not work as hard as they can, they work just hard enough to avoid a beating.  Capitalism was and has proven more effective because the harder you work the greater your reward, that's 1 of the reasons the North was so much richer than the South.

 

This has only been true because capitalism has been pairbonded with innovation. In a society where man is breaking his back to get something done, there's more reason for man to create things to make that job easier. When slave does the work, man does not have the incentive to improve the process. In Planetos there has been a decided lack of invention - a thousands of years history stranded in the middle ages - that makes comparing slavery with Earth slavery difficult.

 

Unrelated, but with regards to your US North/US South example...

In the antebellum South,  the reason for economic disparity b/w North and South has very little to do with the North's advancing technology, it was more globalization of markets and the high shipping costs of the time. The North never was able to drop the cost of argricultute below the cost in the South. (and not that they weren't trying, there are some huge farming states in the North) It was just the North had a more diverse economy and want that also produced many manufactured goods. Had a world market not developed for traditionally-US cash crops, the South would have had a much more robust economy.

Where the antebellum South fell, was that no matter how low they could get their cost per pound on cotton, tobacco, etc, they still needed to back it onto ships and sail it across the Atlantic to sell. That's expensive. When Asian and Indian countried began producing similar crops they were able to drive down the world price for those goods. Even if they weren't using slavery, their unskilled labor was so cheap they could stay competitive and then it was just who could ship cheaper. Either way competition is always bad for business, and the US South went from having an almost complete Monopoly on the European sale of certain crops to splitting nearly half the business. It's not like they all of a sudden stopped being able to compete with Pennsylvania farmers using tractors, they were cheaper. They couldn't dominate Asian workers getting paid near-slave wages and shipping cheaply over land.

[Jaak]

But by then, slavery has become an institution and you can't very well just free a bunch of people who are already pissed at you for destroying their civilization and enslaving you.

Um. Most slaveowning cultures did free a lot of slaves. And when the supply or demand for slaves diminished, soon the stockpile of slaves followed.

[John Suburbs]

Um. Most slaveowning cultures did free a lot of slaves. And when the supply or demand for slaves diminished, soon the stockpile of slaves followed.

Not all at once. Not en masse. They didn't just turn all their slaves loose, especially the newly conquered ones.