When Slavery Works

With the full expectation of pissing off just about everyone - Let’s talk about slavery.  Worse yet, let’s talk about the morality of slavery.

Forget what you might think about the trans-Atlantic slave trade of the Age of Discovery.  You have to think farther back, because slavery is not as easy as a racial issue in most fantasy worlds.  Anyone can become a slave regardless of race or ethnicity.

In Fletnern, slaves typically come from war.  But they can also come from other origins.  The most obvious right now is the earthquakes on Hughijen.  Massive earthquakes in the desert region near Lympeid have been causing the wells in the villages to collapse.  This in turn forced refugees to go to other places where the resources were already spread too thin.  Those with the money to escape chose to escape.  The problem is that they chose the wrong folks to help them escape.

Centaurs sail the open seas in huge ships, trading whatever they can or even venturing into piracy.  They were some of the first on the scene in Lympeid, and they made all sorts of offers to the refugees.  New homes, new careers, in a safe and water lush new homeland.  But they didn’t mention the chains that went along with all of that.  The centaur warlords were in need of workers for their sweat shops, and they were happy to use the Dethebs.

Now one of the accepted principles of sea travel through the Anglic Straits (where the centaurs had to sail) is that if you are transporting slaves, the Myork Navy will sail up and sink you.  They might be able to save the slaves (or not), but they are not going to let the slavers through.  So why did the Navy let all those centaur ships through when they knew they were hauling Detheb slaves?

Now we’re into the morality of it all.  The current powers in Myork had a decision to make.  What to do about all the Detheb refugees?  If they brought that many Dethebs into their lands, there would be major cultural issues.  While they could absorb the refugees and even produce enough food to feed them, they couldn’t do it without giving up some of who they are.  The resulting culture would be an amalgamation of the two.  They were not willing to do that.

The other option was to sink the centaur ships and stop people from carrying Detheb slaves.  But that would doom the Dethebs to death, and in fact doom more than the number of slaves.  It had all happened before.  Problems in the desert lead to people overwhelming the resources and all the people die, not just the refugees.  So if it’s a numbers game, then Detheb slaves survive, the people of Lympeid survive, that’s a win-win, right?

That’s where the morality of slavery often comes to:  death or slavery, which is worse.  If the centaurs did not move large populations of people to where the resources could handle them, then a larger number of people would die.  What happens to the slaves, even if they all died, would be a greater “good” than an even larger number of people dying.  Granted this messed up “logic” also justifies slaughtering people during a famine, but we’re really not going there right now.

Let us please be clear:  Slavery is never morally right.  We are not arguing that slavery would be morally right, ever!  But in the minds of people pushed into really bad places, it might seem better than the alternative, especially if you expect the alternative to be death.

Let’s switch examples:  The elves of the Slyvanian Forest believe that death is better than slavery.  They are one of the few legal systems in Fletnern that allow for abortion.  The nearby Rhorics are absolutely against abortion.  They are so against it that if a poor couple winds up pregnant, they will often sell the baby to the plantation slavers.  Their morality tells them that selling (and really, it’s far more like giving) their child to the slavers means the child will have a chance to grow up on a large farm doing hard work, but living.  They see that as the far better outcome.  They couldn’t feed their baby, but the plantation will.

Let’s go back to the Dethebs escaping Lympeid.  While the greater good could be served by the Anglics of Myork allowing the refugees into their lands to work as low paid agricultural workers who could earn their keep, they are not willing to do that.  Their sense of patriotism (that is how they see it) tells them that doing so would weaken who they are as a people and this would endanger the world.  It doesn’t help that the Dethebs are stereo-typed as being lazy and willing to cheat anyone in order to make their lives easier - and there is a nugget of truth in that broad cultural stereo-type.

It would also be the greater good if the centaurs would pay the Dethebs a living wage and allow them to leave if they so choose.  But then why would they be willing to ship them across the sea?  Where’s the profit in that?  Without question, the centaurs who are running Detheb slaves are not moral people.  They are immoral people, and they like profiting by the easiest means.  So they know they are the bad guys, but they are OK with it.

So let’s sum up:  The Dethebs want to live.  Many of them, given the choice of slavery or death would choose slavery.  There should be other choices open to them, but right now there are not.  The Angles have chosen to allow the Dethebs to be sold into slavery in order to avoid a massive death toll in Lympeid.  There are other options open to them, but they believe those options to be more dangerous.  The centaurs are the bad guys, and they don’t care that slavery is immoral.

But what about the rest of the world?  Let’s just focus on the governments of Drentae for a minute.  While they don’t think about it, they have been relying on cheap fabrics made in the centaur sweat shops for a generation now.  Publicly they are against slavery, but they aren’t willing to do anything it.  Trying to “rescue” the new slaves would put a strain on their resources and dramatically increase the cost of certain fabrics.  Just to leave you with one point here - If you think these other governments are evil for allowing slavery and in a way profiting from it by getting cheaper goods, you might want to think about what’s happening in the world today.  There is a direct parallel!

This post was written as part of the soon to be released The Centaur Warlord of Lockney and Other Tales of the Beast Men aka All About Centaurs, the latest in our Small Bites editions.  Each Small Bites book looks deeply at one subject, a character archetype, a race/monster, a style of questing, or some other role-playing/world building subject.  This one details all sorts of centaur cultures, including the centaur warlords who have been running slaves.

To get the full forty page Game Masters’ edition right now, subscribe to our Patreon project.  Otherwise, in a few weeks, we will release the shorter, but free World Walker edition