Domesticated human slaves

[Tanc49]

Right, so this subject isn't for the faint of heart.

I was reading "Against the Grain" by James Scott where he talks about the need for coerced manpower in early grain states, with things like helots, slave raids... We can also see chattel slavery and serfdom in that light.
. He also talks about how humans domesticated themselves to live in a sedentary society.

My question is this: would it be possible for premodern society to go full in and domesticate a group of human slaves, by selecting early reproduction, culling the clever ones and the agressive ones...
It could even be incidental, at the start anyway, but end up with a biologically distinct group of people. Is that possible?

 

[AltoRegnant]

I think that the closest you're gonna get is a disturbed, make the nazis look tame level of evil CSA wank. Maybe, maybe if the nazis win and decide to just breed some of the smarts away and more muscle in instead of killing them (which raises fascinatingly awful questions of ethics)

Because while I think you could in the modern world with the right time, I think any body that tried- nation, private company, or private citizen, would immediately get the highest punishment possible

 

[Richard V]

I think that is possible, if the slavers were evil enough.

But the incentive isn’t that high. Why do this when slave revolts were quite rare? You can’t enslave wolves, or boars, or aurochs. Domestication was the only option. Humans are intelligent enough to understand the terms of slavery: The slavers aren’t going to eat you, they just want to exploit you.
Revolt and they might kill you. So maybe bondage is the better option.

 

[Jan Olbracht]

Human reproduction is too slow for it to work. You'll need to wait hunderts of years for any effect (if there would be any). Otherwise race of super slaves would be breed long ago.

 

[Tanc49]

I think that the closest you're gonna get is a disturbed, make the nazis look tame level of evil CSA wank. Maybe, maybe if the nazis win and decide to just breed some of the smarts away and more muscle in instead of killing them (which raises fascinatingly awful questions of ethics)

I actually also got the idea from an old thread about a CSA wank where people toyed with the idea of the CSA lobotomising its slaves once the possibility is discovered.

Because while I think you could in the modern world with the right time, I think any body that tried- nation, private company, or private citizen, would immediately get the highest punishment possible

In the modern world, definitely (although lobotomy in some very shady industry…) but premodern world didn't have the same notion of ethics.

But the incentive isn’t that high. Why do this when slave revolts were quite rare? You can’t enslave wolves, or boars, or aurochs. Domestication was the only option.

Slave revolts might just appear rare due to the record being written by the enslavers. In the book "1493", the author shows the existence of large settlements of maroons in Brazil and we see similar things in Haiti. In "Against the Grain", there seems to be a lot of flight and revolts, it's just you don't really hear about them.
Damn, even in the Bible, the flight to the Sinai is pretty much just that, a big slave revolt.

Regarding animal enslavements, some horses do need to be broken, and éléphants also need to be broken to work. I'd argue it's closer to enslavement than full on domestication

Humans are intelligent enough to understand the terms of slavery: The slavers aren’t going to eat you, they just want to exploit you.
Revolt and they might kill you. So maybe bondage is the better option.

I'd guess it dépends on the type of bondage and the alternative possibilities. If you can just run away in the wilderness and make a life there, why would you stay and be beaten?

 

[Fabius Maximus]

My question is this: would it be possible for premodern society to go full in and domesticate a group of human slaves, by selecting early reproduction, culling the clever ones and the agressive ones...

The Spartans seem to have tried something like this, by deliberately targeting the fittest and ablest Helots during the crypteia, though apparently not to a high enough degree to have a noticeable impact on the Helot gene pool.

 

[Orcot]

Considering what people do to their slaves I would imagen their will be considerable amount of rape (?inbreeding?) between masters and slaves. Therefore it couldn't work

 

[Derek Pullem]

Cro-Magnon / Early Modern Human and Neanderthals?

What if there was a stronger taboo against crossbreeding (or genetically less successful) but stronger requirement for labour?

 

[Orcot]

These are allready different enough that they can be considered seperate species, that said it gives the same problems again inbreeding/crossbreeding, again it gives you a creature that is never going to win against a ox in cost benefits. It takes many years to raise a child slave, it needs to be fed and clothed or it will die. Any diseases it has could more easly spread from the slave force to the master force, the only real advantage that it has is it's realitve force compared to homo sapiens and it's intiligence. If their is a strong taboo against crossbreeding then you will change human nature, and those people are not exatly homo sapiens, if they practise castration on their slaves then again you can not selectivly breed them

 

[Tanc49]

The Spartans seem to have tried something like this, by deliberately targeting the fittest and ablest Helots during the crypteia, though apparently not to a high enough degree to have a noticeable impact on the Helot gene pool.

It's amazing how every time we go "that's too awful to happen IOTL!" somebody comes forward and provides an example.
It could be systematised though, it seems like the fertile women were particularly targeted in Mesopotamian slave raids so might not be entirely far fetched.

Considering what people do to their slaves I would imagen their will be considerable amount of rape (?inbreeding?) between masters and slaves. Therefore it couldn't work

That does depend where the slaves are though. If you have slaves in the household, then you'd probably have that, but if they're away from the domus that'd be less frequent. I don't imagine there'd be a lot of rape in salt mines


EDIT:
According to wikipedia:

At night, the chosen kryptai (κρύπται, members of the Krypteia) were sent out into the countryside armed with knives with the instructions to kill any helot they encountered and to take any food they needed. They were specifically told to kill the strongest and best of the helots. This practice was instigated to prevent the threat of a rebellion by the helots and to keep their population in check.
Only Spartans who had served in the Krypteia as young men could expect to achieve the highest ranks in Spartan society and army. It was felt that only those Spartans who showed the willingness and ability to kill for the state at a young age were worthy to join the leadership in later years.

Jesus Christ, psychopatic, armed sparthan teens stalking you in the night. Makes the Purge look like a Pixar movie.

 

[Jan Olbracht]

Jesus Christ, psychopatic, armed sparthan teens stalking you in the night. Makes the Purge look like a Pixar movie.

😱
You mean these freedom loving Spartans, fighting against tyranny of Persian barbarians???

 

[A Piece of History]

This is literally what the Nazis tried to do in Generalplan Ost. Starve most of the 'untermensch' (50 million people according to some sources) to death and turn the survivors into uneducated plebs or helots. The only German they were to be taught was simple enough German that they could respond to orders. They had already started to carry this out in 1939 by liquidating the Polish intelligentsia, from politicians to priests.

😱
You mean these freedom loving Spartans, fighting against tyranny of Persian barbarians???

I feel sorry for anyone who thinks 300 is a accurate description of what the Spartans were.

 

[Lalli]

You would need earlier occurance of such breeding idea. And ancient societies were rarely so nasty anyway. Slaves were usually criminals and war prisoners. Furthermore such breeding would last centuries if not even millenia and still it not sure that breeding slaves lesser smart, stronger but still non-aggressive would work out. And slave owners usually had sex with their female slaves which would be pretty counterproductive.

So getting this work slave society would need very long time and strict legistature against sex between master and slaves. And probably you should change morale of society that they would even think something so mad.

 

[Gloss]

I think the levels of human mortality simply makes this very hard, imagine having to maintain some sort of population growth within this enslaved population to offset the effect of the type of selective reproduction you see with some addomesticated animals. Plus I'm not sure if people would really make the connection between psychological behaviour and blood like they do with evident external features.

Also I'm not sure anyone would see the need within early human societies and when states start forming it might be hard to enforce and even still unnecessarily complicated and intrinsically unnecessary when you have to deal with external hostile populations. I just don't see how it would happen.

 

[theg*ddam*hoi2fan]

😱
You mean these freedom loving Spartans, fighting against tyranny of Persian barbarians???

I feel sorry for anyone who thinks 300 is a accurate description of what the Spartans were.

Actually, while I hated the rest of that film, one part in 300: Rise of an Empire was good. In 300, because it was told from a Spartan POV, they’re all heroic...but in Rise, it’s from Themistocles’ POV, and the Spartans come across as far more psychopathic...

 

[FairlyUninformedGraduate]

This would require some actual knowledge of selective breeding and its mechanisms, which would need to be systematically applied over centuries and thus a consistent design and will to do this over centuries (as noted, humans breed much slower than domesticated animals - you can get five generations of dogs in a few years not multiple decades); also, it implies you have a single pool of servile people to do the experiment with wholesale rather than replenishing it with new purchases/captives. So the most likely would be a much longer lived very late slave plantation era when the trade is mostly choked off or as mentioned above, or something like the Helots (though dubious as to how conscious people were of selective breeding at the time). A truly hideous, hideous scenario but if someone had had the idea, had controlled a single 'class' of slaves, and that persons descendants or successors carried it on, just about feasible?

Edit: Or yes, as above, the Nazis. They had the knowledge of selective breeding, a fanatical faith in eugenics, and if they'd somehow won, a servile population we know they were happy to perform sickening experiments on. *shudders*

 

[Fabius Maximus]

Jesus Christ, psychopatic, armed sparthan teens stalking you in the night. Makes the Purge look like a Pixar movie.

Personally I find that reading about ancient Sparta always puts me in mind of The Hunger Games ...

 

[Tanc49]

Personally I find that reading about ancient Sparta always puts me in mind of The Hunger Games ...

I remember a bunch of articles when the last one came out how such a dystopia of mass oppression, and how such display of humiliation on such a large scale was unrealistic and unbelievable... All I could think of was "You Sweet Summer Child, go read ANY History book…"

 

[DG Valdron]

Humans live too long. You'd probably need about twenty generations. Assuming 15 to 20 years, that's 300 to 400 years, minimum.

The problem, however, is that you'd have wild humans continually breeding back into the slaves. Because the first thing that a 'master' race does to its slaves is rape and impregnate them.

 

[Tanc49]

Humans live too long. You'd probably need about twenty generations. Assuming 15 to 20 years, that's 300 to 400 years, minimum.

The problem, however, is that you'd have wild humans continually breeding back into the slaves. Because the first thing that a 'master' race does to its slaves is rape and impregnate them.

For some reason I have the feeling you had to look into this quite intently a few years ago….