The Allied Planets spaceship, New Dawn, has found an isolated human colony planet where there is:
"...a large slave class." (p. 674)
However:
"...none of the space travelers was unduly shocked. They had seen worse elsewhere." (ibid.)
Furthermore, history might inform them that there had been slaves in two previous interstellar civilizations, the Merseian Roidhunate and the Terran Empire. The Domain of Ythri had phased out slavery with the help of technology from Terran Technic civilization.
The text continues:
"Historical data banks described places in olden times called Athens, India, America." (ibid.)
Thus, in this story by an American sf writer, America is remembered not as a land of the free but as a place where there had been slaves.
A local leader tries to convince a Krakener that his people are civilized. They eat only slaves.
Until historically quite recently, slavery was ubiquitous, to a greater or lesser degree.
ReplyDeleteIt varied in importance, but was present everywhere -- hunter-gatherers had slaves (usually abducted women), neolithic villagers had slaves, Bronze Age city-states had slaves, empires had slaves, republics had slaves. Slaves everywhere -- for example, at the time of Domesday Book, something like 15% of the population of England were chattel slaves.
The first large area -not- to have -any- slaves was Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Southern Europe still had some, but it steadily declined in importance. Japan abolished slavery in 1590, but the majority of Russians were, effectively(*), slaves until about 1860.
In the 19th century Britain abolished the slave trade, then slavery in its colonies (it had been illegal in Britain itself for a long time) and then went around the world forcing others to do likewise, usually by grabbing them by the throat and stuffing a gunboat up their collective noses.
Note that the locals on that planet -have- to eat human flesh, or they'll become extinct.
ReplyDeleteWould abducted women be slaves of hunter-gatherers or just new members of the tribe?
ReplyDeleteWell, they'd be raped and set to doing chores that nobody else wanted to do. Their children would be members of the tribe... but then, that was true of many other cultures too. Eg., if a Roman slave was emancipated, which happened fairly often, their children would be first-class citizens. By the second century AD, most members of the Roman senate had freedmen among their ancestors.
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