Quote:
Originally Posted by castlebravo92
A problem governments would have is too many mouths to feed. They probably wouldn't be in the market for buying slaves (although, in effect, I would expect most MilGov cantonments to be run like military slave camps where they just compel labor when they need it on the resident population). That leaves who for the buyers? Legitimate question, I'm curious what other folks envision.
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Some polities would have both a need for labor and resources to trade for it. For example, a settlement that can produce gunpowder could trade some for slave laborers. IIRC, Sandomierz, in Poland, had operating sulfur mines up until around 2000. In a
Pirates of the Vistula PbP I ran years ago, the government of the city bought slaves from local marauder groups in exchange for gunpowder. It wasn't huge numbers- a dozen or so every few weeks, but enough to do the dangerous manual labor needed to extract sulfur from the ground. Attrition due to the dangerous, abusive working conditions would necessitate a fairly regular influx of replacements*. There were around 200 slaves in the city when the PCs arrived.
As you pointed out, acquiring slaves means adding more mouths to feed, but put some of them to work in agriculture and the surplus produced could feed both those ag workers and others employed at other tasks. IIRC, many of the Free City of Krakow's
robotniki are employed in food production.
*In former 18th century African slave Olauda Equiano's autobiography, he claimed that British Barbados imported
20,000 slaves a year to replace those who'd died of overwork, abuse, illness, etc. I'm not suggesting this sort of scale for the T2kU, but rather pointing out how deadly slave work could be, and how such a market would require routine replenishment.
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