Is being a slaver a trade profession requiring training or can any old mercenary do the job?

A lot of people think slavers "train" or "catch" slaves. This is actually generally rare. Of course there are some particularly intrepid slavers who will go out and take slaves for themselves. But oxen can fetch a similar price and are far easier to lead by rope.

Most of who are called "slavers" are simply brigands who take hostages to sell back to families or villages rather than true slavery. True slavery requires two things: debt and war.

We already talked about war. Now let's talk about debt.

A surprisingly large number of slaves will not be hostages or prisoners, but will simply be deep in debt. Debt can come in many flavors: religious debt, financial debt, or criminal debt. These slaves will be allowed to work above what is required of them and save a small portion of the profits. Eventually, once they have paid off their debt, they will be able to live freely.

What most people don't tell you (but what is widely understood) that the life of a recently freed slave isn't exactly one of many prospects. In fact, if their masters are fair and honest, these slaves will often stay in the service of them as their way of life is often more suitable than going from villa to ghetto.

These slaves often form a larger skilled labor force to choose from than those slaves taken by war.

The best slaves are those who are acquired (through whatever means) from the educated population. Slaves who serve as teachers, language instructors, book-keepers, and writers are- by far- the most treasured. Only the most respected slavers are equipped with the means to deal and trade in these slaves as they are often owed a certain accommodation that would make some free-men envious.

Slaver guilds function as any other guild might. The point of a guild is to keep profits stable. No member of the guild can undercut the standard prices.

Slaver guilds are made up of many personnel. Of course you have the guards. These are hard men who must be large enough to subdue an unruly slave, but tempered enough to not harm the property (at least, permanently). A slave with bruises, cuts, or broken bones is a slave that's going to fetch a lower price.

Then you have the cooks who feed the slaves, the book keeper who takes meticulous notes, the freedman who serves as translator (oh? you didn't think slavers needed a translator? Believe me, it's far easier to calm slaves by speaking their own tongue). They often have a physician on hire to help curtail disease and treat injuries. Often a wet nurse is on hand to deliver slave infants that might be born during the process of transport or while in holding.

Lastly and most importantly, you have the merchants. The merchants with their silvered tongues to haggle and raise the price as well as to keep their ear to the ground of a farmer or mine who is currently in demand.

Drugs, magic, ransom, manipulation, verbal/physical abuse and forced stockholm syndrome.

Or the slaves are paid like those people at Barnes & Noble.

>youtube.com/watch?v=aBE3c9X0BoA

>higher pursuits such as art and philosophy

Oh, don't forget music, politics, religion, and... of course, training for war.

Slaves are the backbone of a workforce that feeds a professional army.

>higher pursuits
>music, politics, religion

Yes. Higher pursuits.

Because unless you have slaves to farm for you that's what you do. You farm. About 90 percent of you do, at least. And if you don't farm, you probably do something menial every single day. You make barrels. Every day. That's all you do.

You introduce cheap labor (no labor is free, even slaves have overhead) and suddenly you can do other stuff. Stuff that seems like a waste of time. Stuff that only rich people get to do. "Higher pursuits" if you will.

fucking love that game

Eh, employees are cheaper as you dump on a lot of their expenses on their own heads.

>employees are cheaper.

Literally all of human history disagrees with you.

Except for modern times.

Most of human history had a primarily barter-based economy. Employees are cheaper in a market economy.

Not exactly. Cheap labor forces are little more than slaves in modern time. Barely covering their overhead.

>Posting adam smith-level economics

You realize this concept of barter-to-market economies isn't supported by history right? It's almost always been gift economies and both credit and money developed much earlier than he thought.

There's nothing cheaper about an employee in a market-based economy, either.

Still not slaves as you don't have to worry about them like you would your actual property.

Yes, you need to "mind" the slaves. But often this is only insofar as your initial up-front investment and the amount of money it takes to feed them for a year.

A society that tolerates both slaves and free men are not also going to tolerate the wages of free men resembling those of the slave. It's well understood that the cost of an employee far exceeds that of a slave.

Or why would so many societies bother keeping them?

Mostly because you can get most of them through conquest. Once that dries up it's way easier to just employ people, especially when you can outsource it. Slaves are a long term investment unlike wage employees.

Most slaves are probably people who have themselves accepted slavery to pay off a debt.

And, if conquest dries up, continue to the horizon.

Long term investment but stable source of income.

That benefits them more than it does you. There's also only so far you can expand before an empire becomes unmanageable.

Certainly depending on the context it benefits both parties.

Now, ask yourself. If slavery was not somehow viable (lucrative), why would this system exist for so much of human history?

On your last point, of *course*. But still, we're talking about roleplaying games here.

I didn't say it wasn't viable, just that employees work just as well if not better.

Look at your own image, OP. At the very least a slaver needs to know how to check his slaves for health issues, to make sure he's not getting ripped off and/or literally working his slaves to death. Despite popular Hollywood depiction, a reasonable slaver doesn't want to work his slaves to death because slaves cost fucking money. You want to get as much mileage out of them as possible.

>Neil Tyson
How appropriate
youtu.be/nX3MUpmD7g8?t=2m41s

Except if there's not a reason to make an upfront investment for slaves (as opposed to employees), take care of said slaves, and still profit, then it's not *viable*.

If you live in a society where it makes more sense to hire an employee than it does to own a slave, then slavery is not *viable*.

And yet, for much of human history, slavery was viable. Think about what you are saying here, user.

Even if you're just catching them and selling them as raw material to a specialist, I imagine it takes a certain amount of skill to get them subdued without damaging the merchandise.
The Aztecs had special weapons just for that purpose, after all.

We're aware now that it isn't as viable, not always so.

>We're aware now
Are you under the impression that smart people only existed for the last couple generations? "Which of these things costs me more money" is a comparison that people have been able to make for as long as money has existed.

Saying something doesn't make it so, user.

There are more reasons than financial that make slavery non-viable in a modern setting.

It's not about cleverness, someone has to actually do the study to see if it's true.

Not even that. The abolition of slavery was only a thing starting in the late 18th century (1792 in France, I think?) because industry was a thing. In an agricultural society, you simply want to produce as much as possible because there's always a demand for food due to biological reasons. In Europe slavery was abolished in most countries because it's not a very Christian thing to do, but conveniently colonies only counted as European territory whenever it was handy to consider them so (in the case of the colonial powers that meant slavery was allowed in the colonies, but slaves who somehow made their way to the homeland would be freed). Industry changes things, and relies on creating demand rather than demand always existing and being relatively constant. Industry doesn't need slaves who can't buy products, it needs wage slaves who are paid to create products, and then use said pay to buy back those same products this is by the way why Western politicians today tell us that mass migration of illiterate third worlders helps the economy: such an abrupt influx inflates demand in the short term and keeps relatively high demand in the long term. More is being bought so the economy is "stimulated", even though these third worlders can only buy shit because they mooch off tax money. It's not that industrial societies are more moral, but to them slaves simply have no real benefit. This is why in the US Civil War there was such a sharp divide: the south was agricultural (to a large extent relying on "King Cotton") and the north was industrial. The north wanted to enforce the abolition of slavery on the south to create more demand for industrial goods while the South wanted to keep its profits high by keeping the production costs of agricultural goods low.

It's not about cleverness because it doesn't require cleverness.
>do the study
I'm not sure if you're picking the wrong word since English isn't your first language, but it doesn't take a study. It takes a ledger, or equivalent. All you've got to do is look at the numbers you've written down, which any competent business person will do, and we've got record of businesspeople recording their shit for as long as we've got records of anything being recorded at all.

You need comparative ledgers of people doing the two methods though. If everyone is using slaves there isn't any data to contest the viability of them.

Well, that or just comparative ledgers of your own slaves and your own employees. Which is what people had. There are very few times in history when only one of the two was used.

They do need to be doing the exact same work though.

>You need comparative ledgers of people doing the two methods though.
Not him, but do you think there was never such a thing as a freeman farmer? Look up the crisis that started Caesar's rise in the first place, or the "Bread and Games" policy that failed to solve that crisis. In the Italian peninsula of the time, many poor people were living in squalor because the rich patricians bought all the land and filled it with slaves. Nobody was hiring the poor to work the land. Not because nobody ever tried this, but because all patricians *knew* getting slaves to work the land for free is less expensive than paying plebs to do it. The populists (Caesar's faction) in the senate tried to solve this by forcing some redivision of land, guaranteeing at least some land to the plebs. The optimates (the conservative, established order) on the other hand simply tried to keep the plebs satisfied by keeping them entertained and only barely not starving (bread and games in the most literal sense).

Like that other guy said: our ancestors weren't fucking stupid. They knew what worked and what didn't, and slavery more often than not caused *social* problems rather than economic ones. Kind of like third world migration for lowly educated jobs today, or robotization in the future. This is nothing new, we've all been here before.

It depends on the economy and population. It's cheaper to employ a 3rd world worker now than it was to use black slave.

If you're trying to publish in Nature, they do. If you're not concerned with the formality of your analysis, you can still draw pretty good conclusions just from people doing very similar sorts of work. After all, the main thing you're looking at is the price of wages vs. the cost of keeping the slave taken care of, and whether the difference there is enough to offset the initial purchase price of the slave given the amount of work you need that person to do. Which means that for something you need constantly, a slave is a good idea, and for something you need infrequently, a contractor or employee is preferable. Of course, this can be complicated if you have the facilities or contacts to efficiently sell the slave again, and it's further complicated if you have a skilled slave that you might lease out to people needing that skill. But all those complicated details are things that, at one time or other and in one society or other, have happened. The world's been around for a good while now, people doing their jobs professionally have already gotten far deeper into the economies of labor than will occur in the idle ponderings of fa/tg/uys.

That's a globalization thing though; it's to do with differences in cost of living across space, and the fact that we have such efficient transport that those gradients can be exploited. This is a situation which actually isn't common across history before us.

>It's cheaper to employ a 3rd world worker now than it was to use black slave.
>[citation needed]
Like I said in an earlier post, many third worlders also rely on welfare and mostly exist to inflate demand for goods and services within a country. They're not cheap, and in fact a drain on public resources. Unlike a slave who gets the job done for free, which is a huge boon in an agricultural society that doesn't need to inflate demand for its goods as there's practically always more demand. In pre-industrial times, there was almost never an instance where a society could say "that's too much grain, bro". Any surplus could always be sold because there'd always be a region or a country that could use more.

You don't employ them in your own country, you outsource.

Well, that's cheaper that hiring the natives indeed (hence why outsourcing is the hot new thing for menial jobs, and no American jeans are actually made in America). It's only cheaper than slavery in an industrial society though. In an agricultural society there's no such thing as "outsourcing" (unless you mean such things as Rome conquering Egypt to guarantee steady supply of grain, or Roman veterans being given land in Gaul and such), the only "outsourcing" is buying foreign products.

Slaves aren't a requirement for civilization though, you can get similar results through things like serfdom. Being able to easily replace workers when they become unable to work is a pretty big boon.

Or you could sell to cannibals.

Yep. There's advantages to both, which is both have been historically used.

Roll animal handling?

>thinly veiled elf slav wat do thread.
Yeah, no.

Economy is at its capitalistic core a game of making things. More hands make more things. Therefore, even the poorest of the third world people can help an economy, if they are willing to work.

And guess what, most everyone is willing to work! Is not about hunger, is not about money, people inherently just don't being useless slobs. I challenge you to find me a population group that by its own volition cost more to maintain that what they produce.

There's always talk about the inmigrant tthat wants to go to a nation to smooch of the social benefits. But first of all, nobody willing to abandon home and country is a person liking the easy life. The inmigrant is he or she willing to do many things to earn a life. Secondly, people don't go to the nicest countries to get social security. People go to the nicest countries because they are NICE, the social security thing is just a coincidence (or maybe part of the reason why the country is nice in the first place)

Yeah it probably requires training or at least the passing of knowledge from journeyman slaver to apprentice slaver. Shit like what's desirable in the market, best way to keep them from rising up, how to market them, signs of revolt, how to inspire/instill fear in them.

Why am I picturing slaver trade school? Or someone majoring in Slavery. Cool.

>Once that dries up it's way easier to just employ people

Nig, that's what you create a permanent underclass of ex-slave dependants for.

>I challenge you to find me a population group that by its own volition cost more to maintain that what they produce
Romanians.
>the social security thing is just a coincidence
This is ridiculous. I feel baited.

>let's replace one unsustainable form of labor for another

All advantages they have are extremely short term. You would need an entirely inhuman civilization to have long term slavery be viable.

>Romanians

Source

>Romanians
Source for that? I though you were going to say gypsies for a moment.
>This is ridiculous. I feel baited.

I don't (intentionally) bait. It is my honest belief that when people migrate to rich, wealthy countries with social security, they are attracted by the "rich, wealthy" part mainly.

Otherwise nobody would migrate to the USA.

This. Though I wonder if the ridiculously wealthy could be considered a population group that costs more than it produces

Isn't capital also the means of production? I always assumed the rich countries out-produced the poor ones, per-capita if not as a whole.

Maybe places like luxembourg are a money sink, though.

How the fuck can the wealthy cost more? Nobody is costiong anything except when he is in some way depenedent on the state or the people.

Depends on what you define as "production"

Well what if they massively overcharge products for what they are worth?

Or what if they are gathering way more wealth than they are putting back into the system?

>Well what if they massively overcharge products for what they are worth?
First you have the problem of defining how much something is actually worth, second until you specify your made-up scenario further there is no damage done, if someone is willing to pay a lot for something it's his deliberate choice and the money just keeps flowing. At best the rich guy is just an effective business man, which is not a bad thing. If the buyer ruins himself it's because of his own problems and stupid choices.
What you might mean is patents, which would I agree on is a bad practice for the consumers.
>Or what if they are gathering way more wealth than they are putting back into the system?
They are still not doing any damage since the money is just in a passive state, not destroyed, not lost.

>the advantage of paying less money over time is short term
Are you sure there's not something wrong with your brain?

>yet another "slavery whut do" thread