WI: no slavery?
- Thread starter ArKhan
- Start date
Well, it seems that it was unavoidable to come out with that when de-personalization of social life kicked in during the early phases of urban revolution.
Research tends now to see urban revolution as much as cognitive leap than a technological or political one: the abstraction of social function, best embodied in proto-writing for archival and authentication purposes.
I'm not sure I follow?
Basically, the concept that that person is not Uncle Bill who is writing something, but a scribe (who may or may not be related to anyone and may or may not be called Bill). It means you can relate to people solely through their function. And that would enable you to reduce another person to a function, depriving them of all nonessential add-ons such as name, family, identity and liberty.
I'm not sure I follow this argument. There are many forms of dependency and the concept of slavery is neither foreordained not even terribly intuitive. But given the realities of preindustrial society, I think some form of bonded labour is inevitable.
That was my point, said better than I did.
It's the argument set forth recently by an Assyriologist whose book I am reading (Buccellati, but the book is in Italian). He basically portrays slavery as the extreme form of this form of dissociation between personality and social function.
Weirdly enough, most of the history books call the invention of slavery as a step forward in humanity, since before that, war captives were simply killed... useless mouths to feed, etc. I've never been sure as to just how true that is, since we don't know when/where slavery was invented, and it doubtless predates any written records and probably existed in prehistoric times. It depends on just what replaces slavery... vast slaughter every time a city is captured? Guarded integration? Mass exile? Somehow, people have to deal with the problem of what to do with captured populations...
That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Reminds me of how the Draka where disgusted by the holocaust because the Nazis "could've used them as slaves".
The past is a foreign country, and not always a very sentimental one. I wouldn't call historians absurd just because their theories sound cruel to us.
It's absurd, because as other posters have pointed out, slavery didn't "improve" anything. Genocide and forced exile still happened after the conquest of enemy cities. All Slavery did was add another kind of Genocide.
That's straight out of Roman legal theory. The idea was that servus - slave derived from servare - to spare, meaning the slave was an enemy placed entirely in the power of the conqueror through victory and spared death to continue indefinitely in that state.
It is as fictional (and as seminal) as Locke's idea of original acquisition.
while no one doubts that slavery is an awful thing, in the utterly cold logic of history, you can say that enslaving a captured population is better than slaughtering them all, because the people are alive, at least. But as I pointed out above, there's not really any one point in history where you can say, 'okay, slavery was invented right there, and before that, captives were always killed.' No one knows where slavery was invented, and it doubtless existed before anyone developed writing. So we don't know exactly how things went that far back in time...
I think the important question is why was slavery started.
my understanding is slaves trends to happen when there is a shortage of labour will to work in the area, then slaves are used.
In the modern world illegal immigrants tend to be used in these jobs that no one wants to do and can deported if they cause any problems.
my understanding is slaves trends to happen when there is a shortage of labour will to work in the area, then slaves are used.
In the modern world illegal immigrants tend to be used in these jobs that no one wants to do and can deported if they cause any problems.
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