Do Scandanavians make good slaves?

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Do Scandanavians make good slaves?

Post by OgreBattle »

Was pondering an alternate timeline where super cold environments get colonized with brutal chattel slavery. What region of the world would produce the best chattel slave stock?
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Post by virgil »

The region economically least able to resist the practice (aka, fight back) at the time the infrastructure is being created.
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Re: Do Scandanavians make good slaves?

Post by Stahlseele »

OgreBattle wrote:Was pondering an alternate timeline where super cold environments get colonized with brutal chattel slavery. What region of the world would produce the best chattel slave stock?
Innuit.
They are unlikely to resist AND are born with a blubber layer under the skin that helps protect them against the cold.
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Post by hyzmarca »

It depends what kind of slave economy you have going, and where you're from.

If we're assuming that sub-sahara Africans are enslaving Europeans and having them work on plantations in the Caribbean, then you want people from temperate climates of Southern Europe, rather than ones who are likely to have trouble adapting to the heat.
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Re: Do Scandanavians make good slaves?

Post by Whipstitch »

Stahlseele wrote: They are unlikely to resist AND are born with a blubber layer under the skin that helps protect them against the cold.
HUMANS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. /morbo
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Post by Chamomile »

Image
Pictured: Inuits, apparently.
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Post by Username17 »

Scandinavians of course were in brutal chattel slavery until relatively recently. It's where we get the term "thrall."

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Post by DrPraetor »

Stahlseele is correct that Inuit have cold tolerance adaptations.
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/e ... l.pdf+html

Africa had both a dense population, and indigenous groups willing to supply European merchants with slaves. Inuit are mobile, very sparse, and self-sufficient; and, they don't have a history of inter-tribal cattle raiding that could be adapted to slave capturing instead. So no, Inuit slaving would not be likely.

If there were some economic incentive to take slaves to mine Endurium from the Mountains of Madness in Antarctica, you'd still just take whatever humans were cheapest. So, still Africans, most likely. Europe or Southeast Asia might be an alternative source, depending on where the trade routes went from your super-cold colonies; but, it would be somewhere heavily populated where one group of locals was willing and able to capture and sell another group of locals.

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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

The West India Company genuinely did wipe out indigenous populations and replace them with slaves from Africa, so the precedent exists. And sure, black people in arctic climates are going to have some vitamin D problems, but that's a small thing in the grand scheme.
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Post by Whipstitch »

DrPraetor wrote:Inuit have cold tolerance adaptations.
They still don't have blubber though. Brown fats aren't blubber and neither is a high waist-to-hip ratio. Blubber is a very firm layer of fat and connective tissues that keep marine animals warm and hydrodynamic. I get that we usually talk colloquially here but if we're seriously going to have an awkward conversation that verges dangerously close to giving ethnic groups weird monster manual entries then we can at least try to be accurate about it.
And sure, black people in arctic climates are going to have some vitamin D problems, but that's a small thing in the grand scheme.
Practically anyone in polar climates can have vitamin D problems since in such areas you're stuck depending on dietary sources even if you're paler than Conan O'Brien. It's just a fundamentally bad plan to be relying on sun exposure in areas where polar night is a thing and freezing to death is super easy which is probably why it doesn't seem to matter very much that Inuits are actually pretty brown. The degree to which it'd be a problem would depend a lot on how stubborn newcomers are about trying to import everything rather than eating the oil rich local wildlife.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Hmmm...would people from a climate totally unlike where they were being sent be best? In that if the wilderness outside the slave camps is something totally unknown to them, it'd be inhospitable and frightening, and discourage attempts to escape.

At least initially.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Thaluikhain wrote:Hmmm...would people from a climate totally unlike where they were being sent be best? In that if the wilderness outside the slave camps is something totally unknown to them, it'd be inhospitable and frightening, and discourage attempts to escape.

At least initially.
It depends.

It probably doesn't matter which people you take into an arctic environment. You're going to have to dress them warmly, but you can do that regardless of their origin. On the other hand, things like disease resistance could be important.

Real-life slavery often focused on moving one tropical population to another tropical location. There is a whole group of diseases that we call 'tropical diseases'. A tropical population that had exposure to a particular tropical disease might have a better survival rate when moved to an area that also has that disease, while a population with no disease resistance might be wiped out. There is no equivalent in 'arctic diseases'.

If a society is sufficiently advanced that they have a good understanding of disease theory and good insect control methods, it probably wouldn't matter. Of course, if a society is sufficiently advanced, one would hope they have no need for slavery.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

Best slaves for what region? At least part of why the northern sections of the American colonies rejected slaves was that imported Africans tended to get sick and die rapidly there. They were favored in the more tropical southern areas because of their relative resistance to malaria.

Europeans have never thrived in Africa, which accounts quite nicely for all the colonies they established there not doing well.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Occluded Sun wrote: Europeans have never thrived in Africa, which accounts quite nicely for all the colonies they established there not doing well.
This is vague enough that there is a small chance you are not completely wrong in every way that it would be possible to be wrong. But it is extremely small.

While there were certainly problems with tropical diseases, that's way down the list of reasons why Africa is no longer colonized. In fact, it would be fair to say that the only reason colonies in the Americas did well was because of a disease apocalypse as old world diseases ravaged new world populations. Africans (and Asians, where colonies were also established) had been exposed to Old World diseases and therefore did not have the same type of population crash as the New World did.

Venezuela and Nigeria are both situated about equally north of the equator and if anything, Venezuela is 'more tropical'. Are you trying to make a case that Europeans failed to 'thrive' in Venezuela?

I have to ask because many of the things you've said in the past have been outright racist, and any claim that Europeans cannot survive in Africa seems likely to be intended to reinforce some notion of 'African otherness' which is bullshit.

Rather than write a long treatise explaining how your single sentence is utter crap, I'll recommend people read 'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond.
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Post by maglag »

It wasn't diseases that eventually ended the european colonization of Africa, it was a combination of:
-Africans getting their shit together to present big political movements demanding for independence and/or organized guerilla/military forces ready to back up their words with deadly action.
-Most european nations being severly weakened after WW II so they couldn't really afford to go around sending troops to supress the africans anymore.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

maglag wrote:It wasn't diseases that eventually ended the european colonization of Africa, it was a combination of:
-Africans getting their shit together to present big political movements demanding for independence and/or organized guerilla/military forces ready to back up their words with deadly action.
-Most european nations being severly weakened after WW II so they couldn't really afford to go around sending troops to supress the africans anymore.
But even before that it wasn't the same type of colony that, say, the United States and Canada had wherein there was a real effort to populate the country with European settlers. Keep in mind that much of that colonization goes hand-in-hand with genocide of native peoples (and was only really possible because populations of Native Americans were much lower as a result of exposure.

African colonialism was primarily based on resource extraction (as was Indian colonialism). While there were Europeans who moved to these countries, often it was seen as a 'temporary' assignment. There are some notable exceptions (Algeria, and South Africa primarily). Places like Kenya are known for white settlement, but there were only 400 settlers in 1903 and only 60,000 when Independence was granted.

As far as why there were fewer colonial settlers for African nations, it wasn't primarily a consideration of disease (though that was certainly a consideration). Well into the 19th century, only the coast of Africa was well-explored and mapped by Europeans. Moving to the interior would mean severing connection with the home country. It wasn't until the advent of rails and telegraphs that continued communication and support could be assured. There was also a dearth of navigable rivers, which was an important component of European settlement in the Americas.

And even if all of that had been addressed, there was still the problem that European crops weren't well suited to the environment. If a large population of settlers arrived and then displaced the native people, they still would have starved to death. And displacing the native peoples at that point was far from assured. Guns in the 17th and 18th centuries weren't so advanced that they provided a huge advantage against large numbers of warriors. Even in 1879 the first attempt to subjugate the Zulus was a disaster for the British. At the Battle of Isandlwana the Zulus lost 1,000 men and killed more than 1,300 British who were armed with breech loading rifles.

There's a lot going on with how colonization worked/didn't work but it wasn't really about disease and it wasn't really about 'Africans getting their shit together'. That statement pretty much ignores all of the 'breaking shit' that Europeans did while trying to dominate a large, diverse continent and force the population into difficult resource extraction.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

Africans were never extirpated as the North American or Australian natives were. The ultimate reason for that is that Europeans could never settle areas densely and push the natives out - and the reason for that is that they couldn't deal with the endemic diseases. The only parts of Africa with notable populations of European-derived people are the ones that are so far south that they cease being tropical. Temperate people don't adapt to the tropics any more than tropical ones adapt to temperate regions.

Shocking as this may be to a person so historically erudite as deaddmwalking, European crops didn't do all that well in North America either at first. Which is part of why the colonists accepted crops like maize even while they rejected every other aspect of native life - because they grew well. I will further note that maize was brought to Africa and is now a staple crop there, due partly to its immense productiveness and partly because of its adaptability. Tropical strains of the plant were brought to the continent by colonizers.

People from tropical regions don't do well in more temperate zones, and vice versa, so Scandinavian slaves would only thrive in relatively congenial regions. Italy is probably about as equatorial as they could get and have any hope of competing.
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Post by maglag »

deaddmwalking wrote: There's a lot going on with how colonization worked/didn't work but it wasn't really about disease and it wasn't really about 'Africans getting their shit together'. That statement pretty much ignores all of the 'breaking shit' that Europeans did while trying to dominate a large, diverse continent and force the population into difficult resource extraction.
Europeans were breaking Africa's shit for centuries. Thanks to WW II Europeans suddenly had to slow/stop down their rate of breaking shit in Africa (and also in India since it was mentioned), allowing africans to get their shit together and gain independence from Europe.

The factors are directly related.
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Post by Blicero »

I feel kind of dirty for saying this, but Charles Mann's 1493 agrees with most of what Occluded Sun is saying.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Occluded Sun wrote:Africans were never extirpated as the North American or Australian natives were. The ultimate reason for that is that Europeans could never settle areas densely and push the natives out - and the reason for that is that they couldn't deal with the endemic diseases. The only parts of Africa with notable populations of European-derived people are the ones that are so far south that they cease being tropical. Temperate people don't adapt to the tropics any more than tropical ones adapt to temperate regions.
Your assertion that people from tropical climates cannot 'adapt' to temperate climates is demonstrably false. The reason that Europeans could not settle areas densely has less to do with disease and more to do with existing populations. The Americas were different because diseases there wiped out native peoples. Europeans densely settled even tropical areas.
Occluded Sun wrote: Shocking as this may be to a person so historically erudite as deaddmwalking, European crops didn't do all that well in North America either at first. Which is part of why the colonists accepted crops like maize even while they rejected every other aspect of native life - because they grew well. I will further note that maize was brought to Africa and is now a staple crop there, due partly to its immense productiveness and partly because of its adaptability. Tropical strains of the plant were brought to the continent by colonizers.
Corn was originally domesticated in Southern Mexico. That actually means it was originally a tropical crop. It took a long time to acclimatize it to temperate zones, but not only did temperate varieties have a tropical heritage, there were still tropical plants growing at that time. Generally speaking, you can move plants east-west and they'll continue to do well because they have the same relative periods of day/night. Obviously there are other specific considerations such as rainfall and soil conditions, but the general case is true. It is much more difficult to move a plant north/south. They will have different periods of day/night. Of course, if you move a plant from the Northern hemisphere to the same latitude in the Southern hemisphere, you'll maintain the same conditions. South Africa is at 30 degrees South; North Africa is at 30 degrees North. South Africa has a Mediterranean climate, so crops that do well in the Mediterranean also do well in South Africa.

Tropical Diseases did have an impact on European colonization of Africa, but that is certainly far from the largest factor. For the sake of comparison, look at colonization of the colonial Americas. It was the eradication of native populations by introduced diseases that allowed European conquest. Africans had been exposed to European diseases for thousands of years and were not more susceptible to them the way Native Americans were. As a result, in order to occupy the continent as settler/colonists, Europeans would have needed to displace native populations through force. Despite claims of 'military superiority', until well into the 20th century that is largely exaggerated. Exterminating a large native population through the use of muskets was not feasible.

Even if it had been, Africa would not have been as desirable a location to settle for a number of reasons, only one of which was disease. There are other far more important reasons that trumped it. It isn't like European cities were free of disease, either. Typhus, Cholera, and Influenza (among others) all killed large numbers of Europeans in the 19th century. Implying that Africa was a greater risk for disease is a failure to consider all factors. There were definitely different diseases, but there is less certainty that Europeans were more likely to die of disease in Africa than in Europe. Even if we accept that it is generally true, the actual rate of death by disease was not so large as to be a major impediment to large scale colonization.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

I'm just gonna conserve precious pixels and put deaddmwalking on Ignore. If you want any resolution to the issues he fails to understand, it's probably best if you research the topics yourselves - it's quite interesting and complex.

To return to the original post: it's worth asking what qualities make for a "good" slave in the first place. A lot of the northern Native Americans died when colonists tried to use them as slaves - of disease, sometimes, but even the survivors then seemed to die of despair. The losses of the Mexican Amerindians to disease were tremendous, but the survivors did relatively well afterwards - quite probably because a lot of them were already laborers in urban and farm environments, with cultural and possibly genetic adaptations.

Most hunter-gatherers spend relatively little time 'working'. In a lot of ways modern environments are completely different from the ancestral world. Peoples with a long tradition of agriculture are noticeably more tolerant of staying in one place and laboring for long periods of time, as well as having greater time preference (being willing to delay gratification to obtain reward later). It's not so much that any one psychological factor is different as that a bunch of factors are slightly different in a consistent way.

So drawing slaves from a population of people who were effectively already slaves, or low-status laborers, would save a whole lot of difficulties from the point of view of the masters.

You'd want people that can be cowed and controlled, but not stupid and requiring constant oversight; they'd need to be psychologically capable of tolerating boredom and extended periods of labor. You'd want them to resist local disease and be well-adapted for the local diet. (One of the big reasons Native Americans tend to have health problems in the modern world is that their metabolisms seem to be adapted for their ancestral diets - the high-carbohydrate modern diet tends to produce diabetes.)

How long have the people in question been civilized in the same manner as the society they're going to be enslaved in? European societies had a several-centuries-long cull in which people who couldn't cope with restrictions on violence and living in close urban environments were jailed and/or executed, so their 'wildest' strains were eliminated.

In short: to what degree are the potential slaves pre-domesticated?
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Post by virgil »

Occluded Sun wrote:I'm just gonna conserve precious pixels and put deaddmwalking on Ignore.
This is probably good advice for anyone dealing with Occluded Sun, because his last two posts are steeped in racism. I bet he thinks anime characters have big eyes because they culturally believe whites to be more attractive.
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Post by Occluded Sun »

virgil wrote:racism
That word - I do not think it means what you think it means.
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Post by Kaelik »

virgil wrote:
Occluded Sun wrote:I'm just gonna conserve precious pixels and put deaddmwalking on Ignore.
This is probably good advice for anyone dealing with Occluded Sun, because his last two posts are steeped in racism. I bet he thinks anime characters have big eyes because they culturally believe whites to be more attractive.
Really, the guy who thinks literal Chattel Slavery of Blacks was True Freedom is racist, who could have guessed.
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Post by Pseudo Stupidity »

Occluded Sun wrote:I'm just gonna conserve precious pixels and put deaddmwalking on Ignore. If you want any resolution to the issues he fails to understand, it's probably best if you research the topics yourselves - it's quite interesting and complex.

To return to the original post: it's worth asking what qualities make for a "good" slave in the first place. A lot of the northern Native Americans died when colonists tried to use them as slaves - of disease, sometimes, but even the survivors then seemed to die of despair. The losses of the Mexican Amerindians to disease were tremendous, but the survivors did relatively well afterwards - quite probably because a lot of them were already laborers in urban and farm environments, with cultural and possibly genetic adaptations.

Most hunter-gatherers spend relatively little time 'working'. In a lot of ways modern environments are completely different from the ancestral world. Peoples with a long tradition of agriculture are noticeably more tolerant of staying in one place and laboring for long periods of time, as well as having greater time preference (being willing to delay gratification to obtain reward later). It's not so much that any one psychological factor is different as that a bunch of factors are slightly different in a consistent way.

So drawing slaves from a population of people who were effectively already slaves, or low-status laborers, would save a whole lot of difficulties from the point of view of the masters.

You'd want people that can be cowed and controlled, but not stupid and requiring constant oversight; they'd need to be psychologically capable of tolerating boredom and extended periods of labor. You'd want them to resist local disease and be well-adapted for the local diet. (One of the big reasons Native Americans tend to have health problems in the modern world is that their metabolisms seem to be adapted for their ancestral diets - the high-carbohydrate modern diet tends to produce diabetes.)

How long have the people in question been civilized in the same manner as the society they're going to be enslaved in? European societies had a several-centuries-long cull in which people who couldn't cope with restrictions on violence and living in close urban environments were jailed and/or executed, so their 'wildest' strains were eliminated.
OS, how do you not know what you posted was racist? Is it even possible to be able to write but somehow still be illiterate? You wrote a 6-paragraph post where the only point you flail around trying to make is that white people are better than everyone else at everything, including being slaves (and of course you will never provide citations for your completely dumbass theory that Europeans culled the worst "strains" of their people).
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