Tag: slaver’s bay

Some people consider Dany a white imperialist, wrongly imposing her will on the Ghiscari, and you’ve written defenses of Dany critiquing that view. I’m very much behind you here, but I do find one thing a little troubling: you often emphasize how the Ghiscari slaves are not ethnically Ghiscari (to support the point that there is no such thing as ‘Ghiscari culture’). My question is: would the Ghiscari slave-owning be somehow less objectionable if the masters only/mainly enslaved ethnic Ghiscari?

The reason why I emphasize that is largely to rebut the premise that Dany is interfering with Ghiscari culture in an imperialist fashion – after all imperialism is not inconsistent with banning certain practices that might be considered immoral (hence Napier’s statement on sati, for example) – by pointing out that there is the culture of the slave (and in the case of slavery as practiced in Slaver’s Bay, there’s actually many cultures of slaves) and the culture of the slavemaster, so the situation is rather more complicated than a crude Orientalist analysis might suggest. (There’s also the fact that Dany actually shares a good bit of ethnic and cultural background with the Ghiscari…)

But to answer your question…as someone who’s argued the proper historical parallel for Dany’s narrative is the American Civil War and Reconstruction, there was a case where the slavemaster had largely (but not entirely) imposed their culture on their slaves. But in sharp contrast to “Lost Cause” narratives then and now about loyal slaves fighting for the Confederacy, despite their shared culture, African-Americans in the South didn’t share the belief that they should be slaves (and in the case of Nat Turner, we can see that shared culture being used to justify and motivate slave rebellions), and attempted to free themselves the moment that it was practical. 

So if the Ghiscari slaves didn’t want to be slaves – and in Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen, there were likely more than a few slaves of Ghiscari ethnicity, and they demonstrated their feelings on slavery quite clearly (if sometimes equivocally, as seen in ADWD) – then I don’t see Dany’s actions as imperialist in nature.

Do you think any ghiscari masters ever try to treat their slaves well ? Or does social pressure make impossible it ?

Believe it or not, this was a topic covered very well by 12 Years A Slave. Yes, of course there were some masters who treated their slaves well – but the problem is that A. there are some rather strict limits to how “well” the slaves can be treated (freeing them is out of the question, as is treating them like a free person), and B. treating your slaves too “well” makes other masters view the non-conformist as a threat to the smooth functioning of the system. 

As with other systems of human oppression, slavery didn’t require participants to be actively malicious to function; it worked just as well if they were financially dependent, morally ambivalent, and socially surveiled. 

Question

If Volantis was destroyed would that reroute traffic to slaver’s bay?

Probably not. Keep in mind, the economies of Essos are fairly specialized. In this case, the cities of Slaver’s Bay act as processors of the human raw materials that the Dothraki extract, and sell them to the Free Cities:

“For centuries Meereen and her sister cities Yunkai and Astapor had been the linchpins of the slave trade, the place where Dothraki khals and the corsairs of the Basilisk Isles sold their captives and the rest of the world came to buy.” (ADWD, Dany III)

 Of the Free Cities, Volantis was their largest customer. Thus, Dany’s anti-slavery crusade has had two effects. First it’s terrified the slaveowners of Volantis into electing a tiger majority and going to war against free Meereen:

“The best calumnies are spiced with truth,” suggested Qavo, “but the girl’s true sin cannot be denied. This arrogant child has taken it upon herself to smash the slave trade, but that traffic was never confined to Slaver’s Bay. It was part of the sea of trade that spanned the world, and the dragon queen has clouded the water. Behind the Black Wall, lords of ancient blood sleep poorly, listening as their kitchen slaves sharpen their long knives. Slaves grow our food, clean our streets, teach our young. They guard our walls, row our galleys, fight our battles. And now when they look east, they see this young queen shining from afar, this breaker of chains. The Old Blood cannot suffer that. Poor men hate her too. Even the vilest beggar stands higher than a slave. This dragon queen would rob him of that consolation.” (ADWD, Tyrion VI)

The other effect that it’s had is to raise the price of slaves by massively cutting the supply. Hence why in ADWD, you see slavers being so greedy and reckless as to kidnap wildlings and try to sail through Braavosi waters, because the pure profit is worth the risk of being hanged. 

Thus, if Dany attacks and captures Volantis, the economic effect will be to massively curtail the demand for slaves, by removing one of the biggest markets for slaves in all of Essos – because Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh aren’t big enough to pick up the excess. Which may be enough to break the slave system throughout Essos…

In order for Dany to succeed, would she need to completely eradicate the master classes of Slaver’s Bay, or is there a more peaceful option?

Generally speaking, there’s really only two ways to prevent a revolution like Dany’s from going backwards – eliminate the population of the master class or eliminate what makes them a master class. 

The former involves a lot of revolutionary violence and/or exile. Deeply morally problematic, certainly, but a big part of Machiavelli’s chapter on cruelty in the Prince is an argument that it’s better to do it all at once, rather than leave things undone and deal with years and years of insurrectionary violence and reprisal-killing that will either bring down the new regime or require an incredibly heavy hand to put down, leading to more overall violence. 

The latter is much, much harder to pull off, because it means keeping alive a class that has an existential impulse to pull down the new order, and it requires a thorough power analysis – in other words, what made the master class the master class, and what would the newly-overthrown class need to get back on top, and how can we confiscate and redistribute the former while preventing them from getting their hands on the latter? And the reason why this is hard to pull off is that if you miss one element that gives the former masters a foundation to build power from, they’ll come roaring back with a vengeance. 

Let’s take Slaver’s Bay for an example. 

Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen were slave societies, and particularly intense ones at that. Numbers were not what was keeping the Good/Wise/Great Masters in power – they are in fact outnumbered about 6:1. This is an advantage for a new regime, because the supermajority of ex-slaves itself can help keep the ex-masters in check. But since that ratio obtained back during the old regime, numbers alone aren’t sufficient.

So what did the master classes have that kept them in power? 

  • Firstly, a monopoly on violence, which they used with abandon to put the slave population in a state of terror – Astapor especially is a comprehensive example of how you use conspicuous exemplary punishment to instill fear in a population. Likewise, you look at how the Sons of the Harpy operated in Meereen and how the Yunkish put down the new regime in Astapor, and it’s pretty clear that the Masters really prefer this method of control to any other. 
  • Secondly, a monopoly on the means of production. Now, in the old regime this meant control on the slave training system that was the basis for much of the economy in Slaver’s Bay. However, as we see in Dany I of ADWD, it also crucially meant control over farmland, pasturage, mines, workshops and machinery, and shipping – the building blocks of a post-slavery economy. 
  • Thirdly, a monopoly on capital. This refers primarily to liquid capital, which is especially important when you consider how the Yunkish use their cash to hire mercenaries and bribe the Volantines into intervening.

So the question before us is how should Dany have dealt with these factors when embarking on her crusade? 

Violence:

Here, Dany made some good moves initially. Liberating the Unsullied of Astapor reduced the Good Masters to a few dozen inexperienced cavalrymen. Destroying the Yunkish army of slave infantry and mercenaries left the Wise Masters unable to resist any of Dany’s demands. Similarly, her decision in Meereen to mobilize the ex-slaves into the Brazen Beasts, the Mother’s Men, the Stalwart Shields, and the Free Brothers is a good one, in that it allows the freedmen to potentially defend themselves rather than relying entirely on Dany’s own forces and especially her dragons.

However, Dany made some significant mistakes along the way, as I discussed in my Laboratory of Politics essay and on my tumblr. In Astapor, she pulled out all of the Unsullied, meaning that the new government had no military to defend itself with from usurpers. In Yunkai, she left the Wise Masters in place while removing tens of thousands of ex-slaves from the city, allowing the new regime to re-arm itself without interference at home. In Meereen, while the city is sacked, the pyramids of the Great Masters are untouched and the former military elite are able to hide underneath Dany’s amnesty to form the hard core of the Sons of the Harpy. Similarly, the ex-masters were seemingly not disarmed following the Siege, allowing them to strike at both civilians and isolated soldiers. 

What Dany should have done was to leave a decent-sized garrison in Astapor and Yunkai to support the new government in both Astapor and Yunkai, which she should never have left in the hands of the Wise Masters. These Unsullied could have also provided training to the men of military age who would have joined the Mother’s Men, Stalwart Shields, and Free Brothers, providing those cities with a more substantial defensive force. Moreover, with the garrisons giving more security to the regime, it’s more likely that the tens of thousands of refugees who followed Dany, complicating supply issues, spreading disease, and eliminating the land route to Volantis would have stayed home.

Means of Production:

This is much more of a mixed bag. While the destruction of the ruling class of Astapor gave the ex-slaves control of the entire city’s resources, Dany’s decision to have the Yunkish only a limited reparation of “a weapon, and as much food, clothing, coin, and goods as he or she can carry” guaranteed that the ex-slaves who followed her would be starving refugees in short order. In Meereen, while a few ex-slaves with skills were able to set themselves up as weavers or prostitutes, her decision to allow the Great Masters to live and retain all their property meant that “they had freed their slaves, yes … only to hire them back as servants at wages so meagre that most could scarce afford to eat.“ 

At the same time, with no way of supporting themselves independently, tens of thousands of ex-slaves were thrown onto a buyer’s labor market, driving down wages and creating such a degree of economic insecurity that ex-slaves with human capital turn to selling themselves back into slavery, which symbolically threatens Dany’s revolution even if the majority of ex-slaves remain free. 

What Dany needed to do in both Yunkai and Meereen is to expropriate the workshops, farms, and urban real estate of the former masters and distribute it to the former slaves, so that the freedmen have a baseline of economic security and have an alternative to throwing themselves on the labor market for whatever wages are going as a means of survival, and so that the former masters can’t use their economic power to coerce the ex-slaves and non-slave-holding free people into subservience or use those assets against Dany personally (in the case of Meereen’s navy). In addition, giving the former slaves workshops and farms gives them a very personal and active stake in the survival of the new order – as we see with Rylona Rhee, slaves who have economic independence get active politically, forming the leadership of a new political class. 

Capital:

As I’ve suggested above, control over access to liquid capital is very important, both because the ex-masters are going to use their cash to hire mercenaries, bribe Volantines, and entice non-slaveholders into joining the Sons of the Harpy, and because Dany badly needs that liquid capital to create a new economic order that doesn’t rely on the training and selling of slaves.

Yes, it’s true that Slaver’s Bay doesn’t have a huge amount of currently exploitable resources to build an economy on – copper being less valuable in a post-iron era, the Great Master’s damaging scorched-earth strategy, etc. But one of the things you can buy with money are saplings to plant in place of the vanished cedars and the burnt olive groves, tools and labor and materials to improve irrigation systems so that the hinterlands can make the cities more self-sufficient for food, equipment and labor to expand salt and copper mining and prospect for other minerals, ships to compete in non-slave based commerce, and so on.

More importantly, getting that cash out of the masters’ hands – as Dany belatedly does when she imposes the blood tax – means that they don’t have the resources to hire mercenaries, bribe anyone, or recruit Sons of the Harpy. 

Conclusion

In addition to all of this, we can’t neglect the importance of the symbolic. A big part of the reason why the Masters were able to hold such sway over their cities was that they could afford display of power and importance – hence the tokar, the crazy hair, and so on and so forth. While the Masters lost most of their human wealth with Dany’s revolution, they still had the money and the property with which to undergird their public image.

But take all of that away from them, reduce them to the level of just another ordinary citizen who has to work for a living, and you eliminate the mystique. Non only does the ex-slave not have to knuckle under to them to live, but the ex-non-slaveowner has no reason to show them political or social or cultural deference. Rather than being the one-and-former rulers revenging themselves on the occupier, they’re a bunch of impotent dead-enders. 

In that circumstance, Shavepate’s cultural revolution seems like the better bet – whether that’s a position in the Brazen Beasts, a job working in Dany’s palace, a seat on the ruling council, etc.