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I'm writing a fantasy-ish novel from the perspective of a newly-enslaved someone. My google-fu is weak apparently. Stuff I've found is not... quite what I was looking for. More specifically, I finally found porn that actually managed to be depraved enough to sicken me.
Obviously that was not my goal. My goal is to try and give some authenticity to the whole experience of what the newly-enslaved characters go trough.

I am looking for two (or perhaps three) things:

- Accounts from slaves or slave-owners/master or even traders on the treatment of slaves. How they were "broken", how they prevented rebellion among the slaves, how they managed to logistics of feeding/housing/etc.

- In-period documents and "manuals" written to slave-owners about how to treat slaves and what is expected of them.

- Finally, if it does not require any serious work, some pointing me towards trustworthy analysis on slavery by proper historians.

Period is mostly ancient (or any culture's period when slave labor was the most significant), mostly Rome and Greece, but I am curious about slavery in Turkey and Persia, as well as India and China (if they had them in the form as we recognize slavery, not sure whether the last two or even three cultures had a detailed slave-culture).

I am not requesting any essays or serious searches, just a few keywords or names to help me with my google-fu.

It depends primarily on how slavery is done in the culture you're writing.

In a lot of antiquity, slavery was a state that one could overcome; an enslaved person would probably have either been a criminal, or someone taken by a military raid. Sure, being a slave sucked donkey dong, but there were often (very) basic protections for slaves (such as the owner being fined if they beat the slave over-much or killed them, for instance,) and it was understood that, even as a slave, a person could expect some (meagre) compensation for their work and could own things of their own and/or purchase their freedom.

Generally, in such cases, a slave would be someone who looked like anyone else.

In such cases, keeping slaves from rebelling was a matter of giving them something to look forward to (freedom,) and ensuring that their lot, if bad, was not excruciatingly miserable.


Then you have Antebellum South type slavery, where a slave had absolutely no hope of freedom save the beneficience of his master, where he and his wife and his offspring were the absolute chatel of the master, to do with as the master pleased more or less without reprecussions, forever unto perpetuity.

In such cases, order is maintained through making disorder an absolutely hopeless proposition. Of course, even in the antiquity scenario, a slave who killed his master would be put to death, but they could always try to flee; if he could make it to a place that did not know of him and was not bearing any marks of servitude he could not remove (such as brands,) he could simply pretend to be any other traveler, perhaps claiming that he had been robbed upon the road to explain his meager possessions; or, if skilled in living in the wilderness, he could flee to the wilds.

In the case of absolute bondage without hope of self-determination, the way slaves were kept in line was by making sure that there was nowhere else for them to go. That's why they never tried to enslave the native American population; they knew the land, and could simply leave at any time they were not physically restrained. By contrast, the slaves used in the South of the United States were uniformly African in origin; they couldn't hope to blend in with white "civilized" society because they were of a radically different racial origin and visually distinguished as a slave. They couldn't flee into the wilderness, because even if they had been captured in Africa, all of their personal survival skills would have applied to Africa, and attempting to survive in unknown wilderness would have been dicey at best.

Basically, it sucked donkey dong to be a black slave, but the alternatives were death for fighting or running into "civilized" society, or death in the wilderness. Large-scale revolts did, in fact, happen, but they were uniformly crushed by military units. The owner's holdings became the only "safe" place for the slave, and thus most chose to stay.

Not all, of course. There were those who fought and died, and some who ran away to the wilderness. Some of them may even have survived on their own, and any that chanced upon native Americans who would take them in would have been able to survive and maybe even marry into the tribe. But in general, that boils down the two ways of making slaves tow the line: the old carrot and/or stick.

1: give them something to look forward to by making it possible to legitimately earn their freedom from bondage.
2: make sure that any option other than living in bondage until the day they die ensures a much swifter and horrible end.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:That's why they never tried to enslave the native American population; they knew the land, and could simply leave at any time they were not physically restrained.

Teeny nitpick: this actually was attempted early on and off and on (the fact some Native tribes had slaves as well fed into this) but, since the results were pretty much as you described, it never really caught on. Also, Native slaves had a distressing tendency to drop dead of European diseases.

Native American slavery varied, of course, because there were so many and varied groups, but most commonly it was military-capture type acquisition, usually used for labor with the occasional ritual sacrifice (until you got down to Central America, where capturing people for ritual sacrifice was a major reason for warfare). But the labor required of Native slaves was pretty much the same as done by everyone else in the group (Cherokee picked up plantation slavery from the Europeans, but they used Africans for that). Native slaves weren't usually bought/sold/bartered and in some cases wound up members of the tribe after awhile. Slavery usually wasn't hereditary (except in the Pacific Northwest). Anyhow, being slave to a Native in a tribe was probably a better deal than being an African slave on a white man's plantation - Natives that might have tolerated being enslaved to another Native tribe probably found the form of slavery practiced by the Europeans way over the top, leading to them escaping as soon as possible and melting back into the landscape, because they could.

That said, SD's actually got the basic social dynamic described pretty well: it's a lot harder to degrade someone as far as 19th century plantation slavers did if they have some place to run to. Historically, even a glimmer of hope was enough to get substantial numbers of plantation slaves to try and escape- witness the Underground Railroad- and it took a massive interlocking network of social structures to block out that hope.

That's important to bear in mind: maintaining a slave economy warps the entire fabric of society. The larger the proportion of the population that are enslaved, and the worse the conditions of slavery, the greater the extent of that warping. In the Antebellum South it reached to such extremes that by the 1840s and '50s, virtually every aspect of political life and discourse revolved around maintaining blacks in the condition of slavery. It was not a 'natural' or a quiet state of affairs; it required constant, active maintenance by people who were very much conscious that they were enforcing and preserving the institution of slavery.

If you know where to look, you can see this warping in other societies where slavery was marginally less harsh- or appears to be. It's worth remembering that we have few sources on ancient times, and many of those sources were written by freemen for freemen, paying little or no mind to the troubles of slaves (or women, or anyone else who wasn't a freeman).

So in a society based on slavery, you will not see people who are 'normal' aside from owning slaves, or even people who don't own slaves but routinely deal with them. Their behavior towards the slave will be constantly affected.

As for sources, many of the classic sources on plantation slavery in the US would be viable, both contemporary (Uncle Tom's Cabin) and modern (Roots). Slavery in other eras... trickier to investigate.

To the OP: you should try and get a copy of C.L.R James' The Black Jacobins for several reasons:

- It is an incredibly important work not only in the context of the Haitian Revolution but also in the context of anticolonialism;
- Reading James is to take a trip back to when historical events were recounted with passion and emotion, not dull, lifeless language;
- James' Marxist perspective on Haitian society before the revolution - the interlocking groups of slaves, free blacks, mulattoes, petit bourgouis and plantation owners, their interactions with each other, and the sheer brutality of the slave system - is superb; intricate and well written.

That at least fulfills point three of your request. But it's a brutal illustration of slave society and, as Simon points out, the way slavery completely warps the societies in which it is present.

Something to keep in mind is that slaves generally get seperated into different classes, partially for efficiency and partially for control. You have the houseslaves, the people who are treated decently and look down on the other groups. You have the manual laborers who are supervised by overseers when they are used in large numbers. Than you have the guys who are in chains, sent down into the mines and the like- people treated like absolute crap with little to no freedom who may never see the sun again.

It helps prevent rebellion by having divisions amoung slaves and making sure there are people worse off.

China had slavery. Heck, Korea has slavery until 1894. 30%-40% of the population were slaves.

(Blog for number. If someone could fine a decent source for the percentage, it would be appreciated)
http://www.asian-studies.org/absts/2006 ... /k-116.htm

Interesting article
http://kennedy.byu.edu/papers/Peterson.pdf
Economics of slavery
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/14735/1/ ... _14735.pdf

You might be interested in reading these memoirs of a slave.

In the same vein as Thanas: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/ ... biography/

I deeply thank you all for your links, comments and insights. I will definitely consult them and try to read them as time permits.

However, I would like to ask whether anyone knows sources about slavery in non-American sources. Particularly, I recall there being a story written in Roman times about two boys who were caught as such.

Zixinus wrote:However, I would like to ask whether anyone knows sources about slavery in non-American sources. Particularly, I recall there being a story written in Roman times about two boys who were caught as such.

How about the barbary corsairs? You could search for galley slave first hand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_corsairs

link 1
link 2

what about the slave labor ov Axis pows & civilians at the hands of the Allies post ww2. The trummerfrauen were particularly harshly treated. Women into their seventies being forced to clear millions of tons of rubble w/ their bare hands out in the elements & starved under the JCS 1067s Food Policy (which only permitted 1000 calories a day to every German at MOST, that is they usually had even less to eat than that & had to prostitute themselves so they & their children wouldn't die of starvation) My great uncle served in German postwar & confirmed these things actually happened. There was no motive other than sheer sadism for treating those women in that fashion, since such rubble could've been cleared in far less time using our bulldozers & trucks along w/ jackhammers. plus hundreds of thousands of civilians were handed by the US Army (under Eisenhauer) to the soviets for use in the Gulag. plus the reparations demands amounted to slavery as well. People working in factories & being made to DISMANTLE their own factories well into 1949. The period of Stande null was a worst nightmare than even the darkest moments of WW2.

I know it doesn't really 'count' as 'slavery' in the 'traditional' sense. But there are still some survivors who can be asked about their first-hand experiennce.

That's it.