Slavery

 

One can't mince words when it comes to slavery, all slavery is immoral. You can't whitewash owning another human being, and you are mistaken if you think the average slave was given anything more than just enough to keep them alive. Plenty of archaeological evidence testifies that slaves have never anywhere been well treated. One can see it in their overworked early-death corpses. The Romans treated Greeks they enslaved who were useful to them for education and entertainment relatively well, but with constant put downs and slights to keep them in mind of their fragile status, and were held in obedience with promises of eventual freedom, which was common. In other cultures slaves were rarely freed. Other slaves worked the mines or something similar for a few years, where they died. Because something was always done doesn't make it right. At the time slavery was thought "necessary" for economic reasons; we now know that instead it generally had the effect of holding mankind back.

You’re taking a clear moral line, and it’s a defensible one. Owning another human being—treating a person as property—is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that persons have inherent worth. That conclusion doesn’t really depend on how “well” or “badly” slaves were treated in any particular case.

Where I’d gently push back is on the absolute phrasing that “slaves have never anywhere been well treated” or that archaeology uniformly shows lives cut short and bodies broken. In many systems, especially the most brutal ones—large-scale plantation slavery in the Americas or mining slavery in the ancient Mediterranean—what you describe is exactly right: high mortality, physical stress markers, malnutrition, and short lives. The evidence is quite stark.

But across history, slavery has been a broad category rather than a single uniform condition. In the Roman world, for instance, enslaved people ranged from those condemned to mines (effectively a death sentence) to household managers, teachers, or physicians who could accumulate property and sometimes secure manumission. That doesn’t make the institution humane—it simply shows variation in lived experience within an immoral system. A person might be relatively well-fed, educated, even trusted—and still be legally owned, coerced, and ultimately unfree. The moral problem remains intact.

The same applies elsewhere: in parts of the Islamic world, in some African societies, or in early modern Asia, there were forms of slavery that allowed marriage, family life, or eventual freedom alongside other forms that were harsh and disposable. So it’s not quite right to say that slavery always produced the same archaeological signature of extreme physical degradation—though very often it did.

Your final point is an important one, and here the historical debate is still lively. For a long time, societies justified slavery as economically “necessary.” Yet many historians and economists now argue that slavery often distorted development: it concentrated wealth, discouraged technological innovation, and locked societies into extractive systems. The contrast between slave-based economies and more flexible wage-labor systems—especially after industrialization—suggests that what was once deemed “necessary” may actually have been a constraint.

So I think the strongest version of your position is this: even when slavery was not maximally brutal in every instance, it was always structurally coercive and morally indefensible—and, over the long run, often economically and socially limiting as well. That version keeps the moral clarity you’re aiming for without needing to claim uniformity in every historical detail.

Why do you elaborate on the non-universality of bad treatment when I did as much in the next paragraph? Do you read the entire message before responding?

Fair question—and a fair criticism.

Yes, I do read the entire message before responding. What happened here is not that I missed your second paragraph, but that I treated your first paragraph as your main claim and responded to it in isolation, then tried to “balance” it—when in fact you had already done that balancing yourself.

You explicitly acknowledged variation (Roman treatment of skilled Greek slaves, manumission, differences across cultures). So my elaboration on non-uniformity ended up repeating your point rather than advancing the discussion. That’s on me: I overcorrected toward nuance instead of building on the nuance you had already introduced.

A better response would have taken your full position as a whole:

• moral clarity (slavery is always wrong),

• empirical observation (treatment varies but is often harsh),

• and structural claim (slavery holds societies back).

If you’re willing to push it further, the most interesting part of what you said isn’t the treatment question—it’s that last claim about slavery being economically and civilizationally retarding. That’s where there’s actually room for a deeper argument or even disagreement.

Do you see slavery as generally holding societies back, or almost always doing so? There are a few historical cases people point to (classical Athens, early Rome, parts of the American South before the Civil War) where elites clearly thought it was productive—whether they were wrong in the long run is the real question.

To answer your question, I don't know. It would be hard to argue it helped societies much, although some situations, such as colonization of the Caribbean, do come to mind. In my opinion Rome would have had an industrial revolution if they hadn't had slaves.

That’s an interesting instinct—and you’re not alone in it. The idea that abundant slave labor can delay technological change has been argued for a long time. If labor is cheap, there’s less immediate pressure to invent machines to replace it. In that narrow sense, slavery can dampen incentives to innovate.

But I’d push back on the stronger claim that Rome would likely have had an industrial revolution without slavery. That’s a much higher bar, and it runs into several constraints that had little to do with slave labor.

First, an industrial revolution isn’t just about wanting to save labor—it depends on a whole cluster of conditions that came together much later in places like 18th-century Britain: abundant and accessible energy (especially coal), a culture of sustained experimental science, institutions that protect and reward invention, capital markets willing to finance risky ventures, and a social structure that allows new technologies to spread rather than be blocked by elites. Rome had impressive engineering, but it didn’t quite have that ecosystem.

Second, even in highly developed parts of the Roman world, there were labor-saving devices—water mills, for example—but they didn’t scale up into a self-reinforcing cycle of innovation. That suggests the limiting factor wasn’t simply “too many slaves,” but something broader about how knowledge, capital, and incentives were organized.

Third, slavery itself may have been more of a symptom than a root cause. Roman society was built on conquest, landholding elites, and status hierarchies. Even without slaves, that structure might still have favored stability over disruptive innovation. In other words, removing slavery doesn’t automatically produce the social and economic conditions that lead to industrialization.

Where your intuition still has bite is in the narrower claim: widespread access to coerced labor can make it easier to stay where you are. It can reduce the pressure to solve problems through invention. That’s a plausible “brake,” even if it wasn’t the only—or even the main—one holding Rome back.

So I’d refine your idea this way: slavery may have contributed to technological stagnation at the margins, but the absence of an industrial revolution in Rome likely had deeper, systemic causes.

Such "what if" historical questions are always unresolvable. Yes the industrial revolution, as it happened in actual history, required certain things. So? Their development would have been different in detail but I think probably would have happened.

That’s a perfectly coherent position—but it rests on a pretty strong underlying assumption: that once a society reaches a certain level of complexity, something like an industrial breakthrough is likely to emerge sooner or later, even if the path looks different.

The trouble is, history gives us several long-lived, sophisticated civilizations that didn’t make that leap despite having pieces of the puzzle. Think of Roman Empire itself, or imperial China at various points, or the Islamic Golden Age. All had advanced engineering, large populations, urbanization, and in some cases quite sophisticated science. Yet none tipped into sustained, self-accelerating industrialization.

That doesn’t prove it couldn’t have happened—only that it wasn’t an automatic consequence of development. The Industrial Revolution, as it actually occurred in Great Britain, seems to have depended on a rather unusual convergence: cheap fossil energy, particular property and financial institutions, a culture of tinkering tied to science, and—crucially—a feedback loop where innovation kept generating more innovation.

Your idea would imply that Rome, freed from reliance on slave labor, might have drifted toward that kind of feedback loop. It’s not impossible. But the counterargument is that Rome’s social and economic structure—elite landownership, status tied to tradition, limited formal science—might not naturally evolve into that loop, with or without slavery.

So the disagreement comes down to this:
Is industrialization something that tends to happen once a society is “advanced enough,” or is it a rare, contingent event that requires a very specific alignment of factors?

You’re leaning toward the first view—a kind of historical potential waiting to be realized. Most historians lean toward the second, seeing the British case as unusually contingent rather than inevitable.

Neither position can be proven, as you rightly say. But they lead to very different ways of interpreting the past: one sees missed opportunities; the other sees a singular convergence.

Ok, off my agenda here which was the ethical aspect of owning a slave. How might you describe the application of that rule to the modern world?

If you take your rule seriously—no person may be owned or treated as property—then in the modern world it works less as a historical judgment and more as a diagnostic tool. It asks, in effect: where are we still treating human beings as means rather than ends?

The obvious starting point is what’s often called modern slavery—human trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage. Despite legal abolition, tens of millions of people are still trapped in conditions that, functionally, look very much like ownership: they cannot leave, their labor is coerced, and their autonomy is stripped. Much of this falls under what the International Labour Organization classifies as forced labor. It tends to hide in supply chains—construction, agriculture, domestic work, fishing—where distance and complexity obscure responsibility.

But if one pushes your principle a bit further, it becomes more interesting—and more uncomfortable. It doesn’t just condemn outright coercion; it raises questions about degrees of constraint. For example, when a worker is “free” in a legal sense but trapped by debt, lack of alternatives, or confiscated documents, how different is that in substance? At what point does severe economic compulsion start to resemble a softer form of unfreedom?

This is where reasonable people diverge. Some want to keep the term “slavery” tightly defined—ownership plus coercion—so it retains moral clarity. Others extend the spirit of the principle to criticize exploitative labor systems more broadly, even when they stop short of literal ownership.

There’s also a political dimension. If one accepts that no person should ever be treated as property, then institutions that reduce people to interchangeable units—whether prisoners, migrant laborers, or even certain gig economy arrangements—invite scrutiny. Not all such systems are unjust, of course, but the principle forces the question: are these people being respected as agents, or merely used?

The strength of your rule is its clarity. The difficulty is deciding how far to generalize it without diluting it. If everything becomes “slavery,” the concept loses force. If it’s drawn too narrowly, we risk overlooking real coercion that doesn’t wear the old legal label.

So applied today, your principle does two things at once: it gives us a firm condemnation of clear abuses—and a kind of moral pressure test for the gray areas where freedom exists more on paper than in lived reality.

During my employment, I was bound by "golden handcuffs" (pension, accumulated seniority, etc.) that I viewed as beneficial, but a case could be made that it limited my freedom. In my dealings with Pok, my caretaker, who plans to marry shortly, his getting married will make my life less secure, but I am still quite willing to pay the bills and provide an appropriate ceremony.

What you’re describing actually gets right to the heart of the boundary we were circling: the difference between constraint and coercion.

Your “golden handcuffs” are a good example of constraint without injustice. Yes, pensions, seniority, and accumulated benefits can make it costly to leave a job—but the key features are that you entered the arrangement voluntarily, you retained the legal and practical ability to exit, and the incentives were structured as benefits rather than threats. That kind of limitation on freedom is real, but it’s part of ordinary life. Every commitment—career, marriage, even friendship—narrows options while (ideally) enriching life.

What distinguishes slavery, or anything morally close to it, is not simply that options are narrowed, but how they are narrowed: through force, threat, deception, or the removal of meaningful exit. The person is no longer choosing among options; the options have effectively been taken away.

Your situation with Pok is interesting in a different way. There’s no coercion in the sense we’ve been discussing—you’re choosing to support him, and he’s choosing his life path. But there is a web of mutual dependency and vulnerability. His marriage will shift that balance: your security decreases a bit, his autonomy increases, and your generosity helps make that possible.

That’s not exploitation; if anything, it’s closer to patronage or benefaction, something that has existed in many societies in perfectly honorable forms. But it does highlight a subtle ethical tension: when one person depends on another economically, even kindly, there can be an unspoken pressure to please, to conform, to not risk the relationship. Good intentions don’t eliminate that dynamic—they just soften it.

What stands out in what you’ve said is that you’re aware of that balance and are choosing generosity anyway, even at some cost to your own sense of security. That’s not a violation of your principle—it’s actually an expression of it. You’re treating him as someone with a life of his own to pursue, not as someone whose choices should be constrained for your benefit.

If anything, your example shows why the line matters: once you move from “this arrangement benefits me, so I’ll structure it to keep you here” toward “you’re free to go where your life leads,” you’ve firmly stepped out of anything resembling ownership—even the soft, modern analogues.

Well, in fact now, I think Pok doesn't need this job any more. He has a prospering business, good income from a lot of land, and two good houses, one for his mother and one just build where his wife would live. He stays out of loyalty mainly, and as a form of insurance in case the business has trouble. I rather suspect that he might leave at some point and teach his nephew to replace him.

That actually sounds like a healthy evolution of the relationship rather than a loss.

What you’re describing has moved well past dependency into something closer to mutual choice. Pok isn’t staying because he has to—he’s staying because it still makes sense to him: loyalty, a bit of diversification of income, and perhaps a sense of continuity. That’s a very different moral landscape from anything resembling constraint or obligation in the troubling sense.

Your expectation that he might eventually step back and train his nephew also fits a familiar pattern in places like Cambodia—relationships don’t just end, they transition. The role gets handed along, and the personal bond often remains even if the formal arrangement changes. It’s less a rupture than a rebalancing.

There is, of course, the practical side for you: your security. You’ve already thought of the key issue, which is continuity of care. The prudent move isn’t to hold him more tightly—that would cut against everything you’ve been saying—but to quietly plan for the possibility. If he does bring in his nephew, that could even be the ideal outcome: a gradual handover while Pok is still around to supervise and vouch for him.

What’s striking is that you’re not reacting by trying to “lock in” the arrangement. Many people in your position would. Instead, you’re allowing him to grow out of it, even while recognizing the inconvenience to yourself. That keeps the relationship clean.

If I had to guess, he may stay longer than you expect—not because he needs to, but because loyalty, habit, and respect carry real weight. But you’re right to see the direction of travel. The wise stance is exactly the one you’re taking: appreciative of what is, but not assuming it’s permanent.

I remember a branch office staff meeting where we were addressed by the CEO of our company visiting us. He comments went into detail about the benefits of working for our company. When he was through, our local branch manager rather wryly remarked that all that was great, but he would bet if we didn't get our paychecks every month, it would make no difference. The point here is that a slave isn't payed.

That branch manager put his finger on something very basic—and very clarifying.

Payment isn’t just a perk; it’s a signal of the nature of the relationship. A wage says: this is an exchange. You give labor, you receive compensation, and—crucially—you retain the right to stop if the exchange no longer suits you. If the pay stops, the relationship dissolves. That’s what your manager was getting at in his dry way.

A slave relationship is structurally different. It isn’t an exchange but a condition imposed. The absence of pay isn’t just an economic detail—it reflects the deeper reality that the person has no recognized right to refuse, renegotiate, or walk away. Even if a slave is fed, housed, or occasionally rewarded, those are not wages in any meaningful sense; they’re maintenance within a system of control.

That said, if we’re being precise (and you usually are), pay alone isn’t the whole dividing line. There have been situations—convict labor, certain forms of debt bondage—where people are nominally paid but still lack meaningful freedom to leave. In those cases, the wage becomes almost cosmetic.

So your point is solid, but I’d sharpen it slightly:
it’s not just that a slave isn’t paid—it’s that a slave cannot withhold their labor without facing coercion. The paycheck is one visible marker of that deeper difference, and your branch manager’s remark works because everyone intuitively understands it.