Domesticated human slaves

[Burton K Wheeler]

I thought about this as part of a dystopian setting once. The way it would have to work is by having a slave population very phenotypically distinct from the ruling class, whether indigenous or imported, who are kept strictly segregated by something very much like slave codes in the U.S. South. Probably something more like the Spanish rancheria system, where the slaves are a sort of church/state property who live in their own villages and have their labor leased out, would work better than private ownership.
However...

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.

And this was the stumbling block I kept running into. It's basically impossible to keep two human populations living together genetically distinct. There are a few genes, like those that make pygmies, that are visually distinct binary switches between "us" and "those people", but they have the small problem that slaves will occasionally give birth to real people or vice versa, depending on whether they're recessives. Neither is an acceptable situation.

There is, in fact, a genetic engineering trick that can solve this problem, but it wouldn't be possible until early 21st century technology becomes available.

As to how behaviorally distinct you really can make people through breeding, it's hard to say, but I lean towards it being an insurmountable challenge.

I think if you're going to do this, having the slaves live in walled villages, only allowed out under supervision of trained professionals, and breeding them for phenotypical distinctiveness from the free population is the only way you'll maintain a distinct population. It goes without saying there would have to be strict taboos about sexual contact, which will probably still be broken. If slaves live with free people, even as domestic servants, they'll inevitably be submerged into the population.

 

[DG Valdron]

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

Hmmm. I remember a few years ago, there was a thread I contributed to, which posited selective breeding programs to produce super-soldiers, things like that. I offered some thoughts in the discussion. Out of that came a timeline where Alexander the Great, or some such, began a centuries long Eugenics program, to create 'superhumans.' For the life of me, I don't think I'd be able to find either one.

I did discuss this, tangentially, in an essay about Edgar Rice Burroughs lost city of Opar.

 

[Orcot]

Also if their slave labor becomes cheaper then prostitution. This is very difficult on earth Pre 1900 but couldn't you make a warhammer story on a Agricultural world that simulates the setting of your choosing?From there you could beginyour story with a believable setting warhammer does not necesairly need to involve demons

 

[DG Valdron]

It's just incredibly difficult to maintain distinctive populations close to each other.

Take the United States - despite massive racism, Jim Crow, segregation, and slavery fairly consistently across a period of two hundred years, almost all American black people have white ancestors, and on average, American blacks are about 24% European. White Americans have as much as 10% African DNA.

This is a country where, for long periods, an African American male having sex with a European woman was literally a death sentence, and often a horrific death sentence followed by torture. Interracial couples were in physical danger. Social proscriptions were massive, and enforced not just legally, but with ostracism, threats, violence and murder.

 

[FairlyUninformedGraduate]

It's just incredibly difficult to maintain distinctive populations close to each other.

Take the United States - despite massive racism, Jim Crow, segregation, and slavery fairly consistently across a period of two hundred years, almost all American black people have white ancestors, and on average, American blacks are about 24% European. White Americans have as much as 10% African DNA.

This is a country where, for long periods, an African American male having sex with a European woman was literally a death sentence, and often a horrific death sentence followed by torture. Interracial couples were in physical danger. Social proscriptions were massive, and enforced not just legally, but with ostracism, threats, violence and murder.

This is exactly why I think the only viable way something this awful can occur is post 1900, in a nightmare Axis Victory scenario - the ideological desire to do it, the knowledge of how to do it, and the pre-existing social taboo of the subhuman to prevent too much genetic mixing. If they've captured, burned and enslaved eastern Europe they also have isolated 'breeding centers' they can use. Horrifyingly, its not that unbelievable that they'd do it.

This negates the proximity issue - they'd probably keep them as isolated slave camps for heavy industry, mining or just agriculture where the only non slaves are sociopathic fanatics with natty uniforms with deaths heads on.

But thats post 1900. And also evil.

 

[DG Valdron]

This is exactly why I think the only viable way something this awful can occur is post 1900, in a nightmare Axis Victory scenario - the ideological desire to do it, the knowledge of how to do it, and the pre-existing social taboo of the subhuman to prevent too much genetic mixing. If they've captured, burned and enslaved eastern Europe they also have isolated 'breeding centres' they can use. Horrifyingly, its not that unbelievable that they'd do it. But thats post 1900. And also evil.

They'd need to maintain their breeding program for centuries. At this point, almost no human societies have been able to demonstrate that stability and consistency for a program of this nature.

And it would be incredibly difficult to figure out how to sort behaviour. Things like height, skin colour, hair colour, are relatively easy to select for. Temperament? In humans?

 

[Tanc49]

Hmmm. I remember a few years ago, there was a thread I contributed to, which posited selective breeding programs to produce super-soldiers, things like that. I offered some thoughts in the discussion. Out of that came a timeline where Alexander the Great, or some such, began a centuries long Eugenics program, to create 'superhumans.' For the life of me, I don't think I'd be able to find either one.

I did discuss this, tangentially, in an essay about Edgar Rice Burroughs lost city of Opar.

And you never thought about it in Green Antarctica?

And it would be incredibly difficult to figure out how to sort behaviour. Things like height, skin colour, hair colour, are relatively easy to select for. Temperament? In humans?

If things like that can be slected in dogs, why couldn't it in human? A lot of the temperament is neurochemical, so you could point out a biological cause.
Troubles like anxiety and ADHD do have a strong chemical component for example

 

[FairlyUninformedGraduate]

And you never thought about it in Green Antarctica?


If things like that can be slected in dogs, why couldn't it in human? A lot of the temperament is neurochemical, so you could point out a biological cause.
Troubles like anxiety and ADHD do have a strong chemical component for example

I do tend to agree that the timescale is too long; I think a post-1900 setting like the one I mentioned is one where it would be tried, but not necessarily successfully so. More likley theyd use drugs, conditioning and lobotomies to get there quicker, which is either just as vile or marginally worse.

 

[Jan Olbracht]

If things like that can be slected in dogs, why couldn't it in human?

Time scale. Within one human generations you could have dozens of dog generations.
I think only very long living intelligent race of non-humans would be able to achieve similar results with humans.

 

[mork23]

You will need an earlier system of writing and reading to accomplish this. I was thinking of a society that is ruled over by wise man that control everything. You can have them at first live in compounds and then have them trade in knowledge and use that to gain control. Getting the basic knowledge they can use it to get specific people, probably women and use them to control who gets to bread or not. Once they create an empire they can probably start to castrate and sterilize the people they don't want. Have the social structure last for a really long time and you can get something done.

Also for this I can see them increase the maturation rate so you can a new generation faster. Weather this leads to a slave race is unknown.

 

[Father Maryland]

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.

To some extent I've seen a lot of people interested in the history of slavery overstate the relative successes of various maroon groups/ mini states. The ones that actually tried to fight any guerilla war and liberate others tended to fail relatively fast. The ones that lasted either were heavily supported by nation states for geo political reasons (The Spanish supporting and arming fugitive slaves from the English/American NA colonies in Spanish Florida while being heavily engaged in the slave trade or using slavery extensively elsewhere) or reached accommodations either official or unofficial with the local powers. For instance the Maroons in Jamaica who lasted a pretty long time pretty early on reached a deal with the local English colonial government where the Colonists would leave the maroons alone and in return the maroons would stop their guerrilla raids and indeed return any and all new fugitive slaves they encountered (for a decent price I believe).

There were a lot more slave revolts in the carriage (and to a lesser extent South america) then in North America. That was partially due to the following factors.

1) The death rate for slaves and indentured servants (and indeed for free whites as well) was much higher in the Caribbean sugar colonies then in NA. This meant there was less incentive for playing along to get along and that much of the population was actually born in Africa and actually remembered being free.
2) On the small and densely populated Sugar Islands there wasn't much opportunity to escape. No opportunity to escape led to more incentive to rebel.
3) On said small sugar islands the vast majority of the populace tended to be black with Free Whites being distincitly in the minority. Gives better odds for rebellion.

 

[DG Valdron]

And you never thought about it in Green Antarctica?

Not really, no. I had the Tsalal diverging somewhat from mainstream humanity by natural selection - shorter life spans, melanin replaced by a different molecule that conferred more resistance to frostbite, other divergences. But overall less genetic diversity given that the founder population was so small. The late era culture that evolved on the Cold Islands, maybe - not so much as breeding slaves, but as this weird eusocial society.

If things like that can be slected in dogs, why couldn't it in human? A lot of the temperament is neurochemical, so you could point out a biological cause.
Troubles like anxiety and ADHD do have a strong chemical component for example

Very true, but I'd argue that humans exhibit a lot more behavioural complexity, and sophisticated language interaction complicates things, as do circumstance. We can select for broad personality traits in dog, but it's often hit or miss - particularly given how subtle some personality traits are. We don't even have a meaningful definition for IQ, much less an 'IQ gene.'

So for instance, we could try and selectively breed humans for docility or timidity. But what does that mean? Fight/flight are the same set of neurologic responses, so if we tried to breed selectively for fearfulness, we might get humans who were more irrationally aggressive. Suppose we bred humans for lack of fight/flight, would that make them more docile or simply calmer and more methodical in their attack.

There isn't a one to one correspondence, one gene for one personality trait. So it's rather tricky. Even animal breeders breeding for domesticity note that the breeding process produces peculiar results, as in the case of domesticating foxes.

 

[Tanc49]

To some extent I've seen a lot of people interested in the history of slavery overstate the relative successes of various maroon groups/ mini states.

Whether they were successful is one thing, and we'd need to define success, but merely existing is another.
There were revolts, and it was disruptive. Now did it result in the slaves kicking out their masters or just getting massacred as free men? That's something else

Suppose we bred humans for lack of fight/flight, would that make them more docile or simply calmer and more methodical in their attack.

Interesting!

 

[mork23]

While a slave race might be difficult I can see a new ethnic group be created. Compared to the mind, one only needs to look at the body and get rid of those you don't like. For this to work it would have to be less about strength and more on getting specific features so no Spartan like attempts.

 

[snerfuplz]

I don't think there was enough population for it to be done. As others have noted most slaves in the ancient world were prisoners of war or civilians taken during a sack/raid. It was only with the rise of the Roman Republic that the slave trade reached industrial levels. The population of the Greek island of Delios were infamously relocated by the Athenians so the island could become the center of the Roman slave trade. This massive population of slaves were fueled by the Roman conquests of Macedonia and Corinth where the population was sold into slavery and the Seleucid Civil Wars were various claimants would sell captives as a way to pay their armies. In normal times slavers had to rely on kidnapping and piracy which involve far smaller numbers

Then you get into the problem of masters frequently raping their slaves which would defeat the purpose of creating a genetically isolated sub-population

 

[mork23]

I wasn't thinking slaves I was thinking a civilization that invented eugenics and domestication much earlier. This isn't about just using slaves but the entire population to get results.

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

This is exactly why I think the only viable way something this awful can occur is post 1900, in a nightmare Axis Victory scenario - the ideological desire to do it, the knowledge of how to do it, and the pre-existing social taboo of the subhuman to prevent too much genetic mixing. If they've captured, burned and enslaved eastern Europe they also have isolated 'breeding centers' they can use. Horrifyingly, its not that unbelievable that they'd do it.

This negates the proximity issue - they'd probably keep them as isolated slave camps for heavy industry, mining or just agriculture where the only non slaves are sociopathic fanatics with natty uniforms with deaths heads on.

But thats post 1900. And also evil.

That meets my requirement for controlled isolation of the slave population, but doesn't meet the requirement for phenotypic distance between the master and slave populations. How will anybody guess whether the child of a slave had a Russian slave father or a Nazi soldier one just by looking?

 

[Burton K Wheeler]

I wasn't thinking slaves I was thinking a civilization that invented eugenics and domestication much earlier. This isn't about just using slaves but the entire population to get results.

The question is how possible is it to breed humans for personality and behavior. There's not really enough evidence to suggest it's actually possible. I'd be very leery of using that even as a fictional device.

 

[mork23]

That is why I was going for their appearance which is easier to manage. Honestly I don't think you can do much on purpose but accidental change in behavior might be possible.

 

[Jan Olbracht]

That is why I was going for their appearance which is easier to manage. Honestly I don't think you can do much on purpose but accidental change in behavior might be possible.

Appearance is relatively easy to select compared to behaviour, but what is the point? What are benefits? If someone wants blonde blue eyed slaves it is far more viable optio to just buy/capture these than to wait generations to breed them.