Dear Maester Steven, I’ve got a question. On re-reading Dance, I came across the chapter where Jorah captures Tyrion and enslaves him. It seems that in fictional slave societies, it’s easy to kidnap someone and tell the world they’re your slave. Did this happen a lot in historical slave societies (illegally enslaving free rivals)? Did slave societies care about this? If you were wrongly enslaved, could you do anything? Or was everyone like “Nope, you’re a slave now, you don’t have rights, lol.”

This absolutely happened in historical slave societies. To take a recent example, the case of Solomon Northrup – a free man who was drugged and kidnapped in Washington D.C, taken to New Orleans and sold as a slave, and spent twelve years enslaved on plantations in the Red River area before he was able to win his freedom. 

What the movie didn’t focus on was the political context of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, enacted three years before the publication of Northrup’s memoir, which allowed people to be arrested on nothing more than an affadavit that they were a runaway slave, denied them the right to a jury trial or to testify in open court, and paid the “judge” (actually a commissioner) who oversaw their case twice as much to declare them a runaway than to declare them a free person. Hardly much concern there about the rights of someone like Solomon Northrup. 

The definition of a slave society is a society where social, political, and cultural institutions are all structured to uphold and defend slavery above all other interests. In such a society, mechanisms for preventing people from being “wrongly enslaved” are deeply destabilizing, because they introduce the idea that slavery could be illegal or illegitimate or immoral, and that mechanisms exist by which slaves could contest their status before an authority greater than their masters. Whereas allowing people to be “wrongly enslaved” creates more slaves to feed the system.