The Masters and the free born citizens of Yunkai, Meereen, Astapor, and New Ghis are members of the artificial Ghiscari culture, which requires a vast population of slaves for internal use and foreign export. These slaves are not considered part of Ghiscar’s culture, but, rather, its raw materials and products, in effect regulating them to a completely separate country which one might call anti-Ghiscar. Anti-Ghiscar is defined both by its enslavement to Ghiscar and by the existential inferiority the Masters attribute to and impose on it in order to justify, reinforce, and maintain said enslavement. This anti-Ghiscar is necessary for the support of Ghiscari culture but at the same time is always threatening to break free and negate what it supports. Hence Ghiscar is constantly locked in never ending and extremely violent conflict with anti-Ghiscar in order to keep it under control.
Now, when one moves from the ideological reality imposed by the slaver class to the lived reality of the slaves things are a bit messier. Many slaves partake in aspects of Ghiscari culture…
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that some of those slaves/freedmen in the back dream not of a world without Masters but of sitting in the Master’s seats.
In the liberation of Astapor most of the aristocracy and its enforcers were massacred, though the families survived in their prepubescent children. What follows is the world literally being turned upside down. Cleon the Butcher takes power with a cleaver, distributes the pyramids to various armed gangs, and turns the upper class boys Dany spared into new Unsullied (ending once and for all the great bloodlines of Astapor). Steven Atwell gets one thing wrong when he writes “the slaves of Astapor violently reject this culture the moment they have a chance” (A Laboratory of Politics Part VI). Only some of the slaves do. King Cleon and his ambassador Lord Ghael illustrate how there are many freedmen who creatively emulate rather than reject the culture of their former masters.
Madeinmyr makes a good point here – I think I somewhat overextended my argument in my efforts to argue against a simplistic conception of an “authentic” Ghiscari culture that Dany has no right to interfere with.
However, I think there’s a real question as to whether “some” or “many” seek to emulate rather than reject Ghiscari culture. Cleon and Ghael aren’t elected leaders – Cleon rose to power through a violent coup d’etat and Ghael is his lackey. Certainly the Astapori refugees who flee his coup and arrive in Meereen to take shelter with Dany don’t share his vision of a new slave class and a new master class. Nor did the tens of thousands who followed her from Astapor to Yunkai.
Likewise in Meereen, while it’s true that some freedmen attend the fighting pits, they number perhaps a few hundred in a city of several hundred thousands. Contrast those few hundred with the 4,000 Brazen Beasts who follow the Shavepate in opposition to the Great Masters and their culture, or the 6,000 who join the Free Brothers, the Mother’s Men, and the Stalwart Shields, whose very names speak to a devotion to freedom and Dany as a symbol of revolution. Likewise, it’s true that some slaves sell themselves back into slavery, but they are the well-educated minority; the tens of thousands of slaves who labored in the countryside rejoice when they have the opportunity to farm their own land without chains on their legs.
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