Given that a Tyroshi slaver off Bear Island would be quite far afield, do you think that, rather than Jorah selling those poachers into slavery being a one-off born of desperation, he in fact made a habit of selling slaves?

Good question!

So in AGOT, they only speak in general terms of Jorah “selling some poachers to a Tyroshi slaver” or “a few lice-ridden poachers,” although the people who talk about this are either slavers-in-all-but-name (Illyrio) or Jorah himself, who has every reason to minimize his crimes.

However, Jorah shows a surprisingly deep knowledge of the slave economy, much deeper than you’d expect to see from a Westerosi lord with only one encounter with this foreign economic system:

“I’ve told the khal he ought to make for Meereen,” Ser Jorah said. “They’ll pay a better price than he’d get from a slaving caravan. Illyrio writes that they had a plague last year, so the brothels are paying double for healthy young girls, and triple for boys under ten. If enough children survive the journey, the gold will buy us all the ships we need, and hire men to sail them.”

My thinking is that either Jorah sold slaves (more than once) in Westeros and/or he did it in Essos (or was otherwise employed in the industry as a guard or an overseer or something). I think the former case is more likely, because it seems somewhat unlikely that he got caught on his first outing.

So I had a thought on the Disputed Lands and slave labor. It seems weird to me that there are so many slaves proportionally in the Free Cities, so there has to be some kind of demand for them somewhere like a need for manual labor to farm large amounts, like the reason African slaves were brought to the Americas. This might be the real reason why the disputed lands are so fertile/how the Free Cities support such large populations. I just wanted to know if you thought that a plausible head cannon

You raise a good point. Slavery of the intense proportions seen in the Free Cities was only seen historically in single-export plantation economies. And yet, the Free Cities’ economies are overhwelmingly focused on commerce, finance, and the production of high value-added manufactured goods.

So vast latifundia in the Disputed Lands would provide at least a partial explanation for why you see such unusually high levels of slavery in the Free Cities. Not a complete explanation, but better than what we have now.

Greetings Maester Steven, In A Laboratory of Politics, Part V, you trace a parallel between the Volantene society and Byzantium, naming them both slave societies. Volantis is undoubtedly one, but what makes you call Byzantium a slave society rather than a society with slaves? Isn’t that parallel a bit exaggerated, given that slavery is far more widespread in Volantis than everywhere else in medieval Europe? As for the Byzantines, could you point me at some historiography regarding the matter?

Byzantine slavery was a direct outgrowth of Roman slavery, and Rome was undoubtedly a slave society, with anwhere between 4.6-19.3% of the population enslaved (see Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, 2011). Specifically on Byzantium, a huge, huge part of Byzantium’s Black Sea trade was in slaves, and Byzantium not merely acquired slaves by the tens and not hundreds of thousands at a time for use in a variety of industries at home, but also sold slaves widely across the Mediterranean, there were slave markets in many Byzantine towns and cities (the one in Constantinople was known as the “Valley of Lamentations”). So I think it counts.

For more on this, check out Youval Rotman’s Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (2009), and Hadjinicolaou-Marava’s’s Rercherches Sur La Vie Des Esclaves Dans Le Monde Byzantin (1950), which are both important monographs in their own right but should also provide some useful bibliography.

I’m trying to wrap my head around how many slaves are in Volantis, the Three Daughters, and Slaver’s Bay. Given the volatility of that kind of societal makeup and how long Volantis has been around, I just can’t believe those societies have been that dysfunctional for thousands of years. My theory is that the conquest of Sarnor/Century of Blood created a massive glut in the global slave trade that really warped the political economy of southern Essos. Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

Well, we know that the societies of Slaver’s Bay were reconstructed after the Doom:

“What now remains of the once-proud empire of Old Ghis is a paltry thing—a few cities clinging like sores to Slaver’s Bay and another that pretends to be Old Ghis come again. For after the Doom came to Valyria, the cities of Slaver’s Bay were able to throw off the last of the Valyrian shackles, ruling themselves in truth rather than playing at it. And what remained of the Ghiscari swiftly reestablished their trade in slaves—though where once they won them by conquest, now they purchased and bred them.”

And certainly the rise of the Dothraki, and the way their khalasars’ raiding and migratory patterns “industrialized” the acquisition of captives which the cities of Slaver’s Bay would then “process” into skilled slaves for the Free Cities’ markets, would have probably contributed to an increase in supply of slaves.

However, we also know that the Valyrian Empire was a slave society stretching back thousands of years, so it’s not like Volantis et al. just started buying slaves for the first time. So the political-economy mystery here is what would have caused such a sharp increase in demand to meet the increase in supply.

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.

Anon Asks:

Why is slavery illegal in Westeros? We know that the northerners hate it. But why should it so hated as to demand execution?

Good question!

One quick correction: both northerners and southerners hate slavery; it’s one of those few true universal taboos in Westerosi culture, like kinslaying or guest-right or oath-breaking.

I do think there are different cultural reasons for the shared belief, however. In the case of the South, I think it’s a combination of the Seven’s “all souls are children of the Seven” kind of ideology and the memory of the Valyrian Empire and the need to flee Andalos to avoid being enslaved. In the case of the North, I think it’s a kind of deep ancestral memory of the White Walkers and their drive to turn all that lives into their zombie slave army.

Something curious arising from your essay on thralldom. Do you think there was slavery on Dragonstone and at Driftmark? If so, when was it abandoned?

There was definitely slavery on Dragonstone, and likely at Driftmark as well:

“The Targaryens were of pure Valyrian blood, dragonlords of ancient lineage. Twelve years before the Doom of Valyria (114 BC), Aenar Targaryen sold his holdings in the Freehold and the Lands of the Long Summer and moved with all his wives, wealth, slaves, dragons, siblings, kin, and children to Dragonstone, a bleak island citadel beneath a smoking mountain in the narrow sea.”

In terms of when it was abolished…it seems to have happened fairly early on, because the description of the practice of first night on Dragonstone in P&Q wouldn’t make sense.

How would you contest Xaro’s claims about the necessity/benefit of slavery?

Here’s Xaro’s argument:

“We curse the rain when it falls upon our heads, yet without it we should starve. The world needs rain … and slaves. You make a face, but it is true. Consider Qarth. In art, music, magic, trade, all that makes us more than beasts, Qarth sits above the rest of mankind as you sit at the summit of this pyramid … but below, in place of bricks, the magnificence that is the Queen of Cities rests upon the backs of slaves. Ask yourself, if all men must grub in the dirt for food, how shall any man lift his eyes to contemplate the stars? If each of us must break his back to build a hovel, who shall raise the temples to glorify the gods? For some men to be great, others must be enslaved.”

This was an argument that was used historically to justify slavery as a “positive good,” in the leadup to the American Civil War. People like George Fitzhugh would argue that, without slavery, you wouldn’t have Plato or Aristotle or all the other wonders of Ancient Greece or Rome, or indeed civilization itself.

Anti-slavery writers responded to this particular line of attack by arguing that free labor was inherently more productive than slave labor, following Adam Smith:

“The wear and tear of a slave, it has been said, is at the expense of his master; but that of a free servant is at his own expense. The wear and tear of the latter, however, is, in reality, as much at the expense of his master as that of the former. The wages paid to journeymen and servants of every kind must be such as may enable them, one with another, to continue the race of journeymen and servants, according as the increasing, diminishing, or stationary demand of the society may happen to require. But though the wear and tear of a free servant be equally at the expense of his master, it generally costs him much less than that of a slave…It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.”

“The liberal reward of labour, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence increases the bodily strength of the labourer, and the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and of ending his days perhaps in ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the utmost.” (Work of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 8)

Free laborers work hard because their labor can directly improve their material standard of living and, ultimately, the opportunity for upward mobility. Because a slave is fixed in position and cannot hope to be anything but a slave, they work only hard enough to avoid a whipping. Thus, anti-slavery writers argued, free societies are more productive than slave societies, and would produce a greater surplus to invest in the refinement of civilization than slave societies could.

A second line of argument follows more Rawlsian lines. Since, in a slave society, freedom and slavery are ultimately an accident of birth, many people with the talents to make great advancements in the arts and sciences, trade and industry, politics and warfare, all the occupations and professions denied to the slave, would be born into slavery and thus be unable to share their gifts with the world. Whereas in a free society, all are free to pursue their dreams and ambitions, and civilization benefits from the additional contributions of those who would have otherwise been slaves.

Steven Xue Asks: Was Tywin really a slaver?

You have criticized Tywin on numerous occasions of “breaking one of the oldest Westerosi taboos” which is slavery. Now I hate to nitpick on this issue because I am no expert in this matter but isn’t what he did in Harrenhal a form of state bondage in a time of war rather than actual slavery? Weren’t the captives at Harrenhal technically POWs? And usually in any war, don’t captured prisoners (whether they are enemy soldiers or civilians) get conscripted into doing forced labor without pay and had few if any rights at all during their time of involuntary servitude?

I don’t really see a distinction between “state bondage in a time of war” and “actual slavery,” I guess. At the end of the day, it’s still involuntary labor extracted through force and threat of force.

POW status is usually reserved for enemy soldiers, not civilians, and the taking of large numbers of civilian prisoners is highly unusual. And there really is no precedent for this in previous Westerosi wars – we’ve seen attacks on civilian populations before, but we haven’t seen peasants kidnapped and forced into servitude before.

The only thing that comes close is “Lord Lymond Hightower, the Sea Lion, who revived the practice of thralldom in Oldtown just long enough to set the ironmen captured during the battle to hard labor strengthening the city’s walls.” But even then, that’s enemy soldiers and temporary.

Re: Yunkai’s Peace Offer

Man, I’m annoyed when I miss a quote that could have been in an essay. From ADWD, Ch. 24:

“The Yunkishmen. The envoy they sent to woo Volantis…wishes us to be the fourth and offers twice what Myr was paying us, plus a slave for every man in the company, ten for every officer, and a hundred choice maidens all for me.”
“That would require thousands of slaves. Where the do the Yunkishmen expect to find so many?”
“In Meereen.”

Yeah, something tells me Yunkai’s peace offer wasn’t genuine when they were paying their sellswords with the proceeds of sacking Meereen.