quote:
Originally posted by Leonidas:
<STRONG>
The comments here seem to completely miss the point of slavery. It isn't about sadism. Slavers don't take joy in forcing slaves to do menial tasks. That's all just modern historical revisionism. Real slavery was about economics. Slave owners didn't beat their slaves for fun any more than you would beat your car for fun.</STRONG>
I would take exception to this on several points. The thrust of the paragraph is dictated by an overly economic view of humanity. Human beings are not efficient little agents that act solely according to their economic self-interest. Cruelty was and is a salient feature of slavery for the simple reason that human beings in an unequal power dynamic tend to (not will or always) act in a cruel manner to those below them. There is a vast amount of historical data to reinforce this basic observation of our character in regards to slavery that does not require any more "historic revisionism" than picking up a primary text document and reading it.
The first point feeds a second. In the examples given of historical slavery that followed, the problem for these cultures of political instability via slave revolt, for instance, was an issue, but certainly not the sole or even primary issue of inherent concern. In the case of the Sparatans and American South in particular, the big area of concern was that dependence on slavery helped to shape a political, social, and military culture increasingly defined by slavery. If a vast swath of your production is based on slavery then the rest of your culture must follow suit. The more slaves, the more the need to control slaves, the more justifications and reinforcements to preserve the status quo, the more that other areas of culture, military and economics suffer as a result. Hard core dependency on slavery leads to an almost predictable calcification of the society with disasterous results when an outside threat emerges, be it military or economic.
For Dwarf Fort, particularly with the long term arc aiming towards Baronies and Kingdoms, slavery is a real option. Providing an internal stability threat from this force in the form of insurrections dictated by a sliding percentage chance linked to, say, number of slaves within a contiguous locale amplified if they all tend to be of the same race, would lock down military resources otherwise available for other things such as expeditions and should also have a destructive economic (smashing the goods) and social (increased social polarization) element. I'm for it.
