I´m not a native english speaker, so forgive me if I mess it.
I´m still bored, so I´ve decided to share my plight and bore the hell out of the world with my tantrums.
I´m gonna speak about Essos´ slaving societies now. It seems that the economy in the eastern continent is strongly based on slavery, and is reminiscent of the most slave-dependant cultures of our own world, mixing elements from the Roman Empire and the american plantations; also, the number and economic importance of slaves and the harshness of their treatment seem to increase the closer to Slaver´s Bay and Valyria they are: In Braavos, up there in the north, slavery is forbidden; in Pentos slavery is illegal, but still practised by those who have the power to flaunt the laws; in Tyrosh and Myr it´s legal, but they doesn´t seem to be overwhelmingly dependant on it (their sailors, for example, are freemen, not slaves); the lysene have made pleasure slaves one of their more famous exports; the volantene have five slaves per free person, tattoo their faces so they can never pass as free people, the number of freedmen seem very low, their sailors are all slaves and their army and priesthood are made up of slaves; the ghiscarians have no trade save slave trade, and systematically brutalize their human chattel (feeding kids to bears, strangling toddlers as part of the Unsullied training, eviscerating children as a scare tactic, and so on...).
We don´t know much of the slaves in Tyrosh, Lys and Myr, but if you stop and look volantene and ghiscarian societies, you will see there is something that doesn´t add there...
As I said earlier, slavery in Essos seem very similar to the one that existed in the Roman Empire, colonial America, antebellum USA and certain periods and locations of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic Califate(s); the common link is the existence of a source of a great number of cheap foreign slaves: The romans took prisioners of war; the europeans of the colonial and post-colonial periods bought their slaves from warlike coastal african states that attacked their neighbours and took away their people; the muslims did the same, but they also bought european slaves (balcanians, greeks, slavics and caucasians, mostly), and raided the mediterranean coasts, taking spanish, italian, greek and balcanic captives (slave trade and slaving raids went both ways between Europe and Africa).
The existance of a source of cheap and abundant foreign slaves allowed to use them as a disposable resource, massively using them in plantations and mines (the romans, the USA southern states, the caribbean spanish colonies, the brazilian portuguese colonies...etc., all of them developed plantation economies strongly dependent on slave labor; the arabs and turks also used large number of black african slaves in plantations just like the ones in America; look the Zanj_rebellion), but, most importantly, using slaves of a different race, culture, religion and language allowed to dehumanize them, treating them as chattel (all those societies had already forbidden the enslaving of their own -with some exceptions, like rejected babies in roman society -before they even started to import foreigners en masse, and when by chance they came to possess slaves of their own race and religion, they received a much better treatment than those who weren´t).
The main difference is in the numbers: the city of Rome had a proportion of 2 to 4 free people per slave (depending of the historian you ask), and were always fearful of the possibility of a slave revolt; at some point the Senate tried to pass a law that would force the slaves to carry a special dress to make them easily recognizable as unfree people, but they stoped it in the last minute, since they realized it would allow the mostly illiterate slaves to know (even without being able to count) how numerous they really were and encourage them to start a new servile war; compare to Volantis, that has five slaves per free person, and mark them with a tattoo so they can forever be recognized as slaves.
Another difference between Rome and Volantis is that Rome was a very warlike society, that relied in huge armies of free citizens to protect themselves while the volantene depend on mercenary and slave armies. A roman citizen would fight to death to defend his property and his social position but, would a mercenary or a slave soldier do the same? or would they change sides if they thought the slave rebellion is the winning horse?.
There have been societies with a very high proportion of slaves, but there is always a catch, a certain factor that makes those societies viable: the spartans had a majority of slaves, but all their citizens had to become permanently mobilized full-time soldiers to control them (which, in the end, was a bad deal; the macedonians, the roman, the persians...etc., all of them created incredibly rich and powerful empires; the spartans, despite their strength and discipline, remained always a poor backwater, since all their energy was focused on controlling their subjects, preventing their development and expansion); many american plantations had as much as ten slaves per free person, but the antebellum southern states as a whole never had a proportion of slaves greater than aproximately one per two free people, and one per nine free people in all the States, so, even if they could esily kill their own master, they could not win a war against the whites as a whole.
Another factor that made real-world slave-owning societies stable is that, in most long-lived slaving societies, they ended realizing that stability was best served by giving better treatment to their slaves, and developed laws that granted them some level of protection (against being killed or permanently maimed, against being separated from their children...etc.); the romans did it, the muslims did it and the spaniards did it.
Also, those societies usually gave their slaves the hope of a better future, of achieving a better condition: the romans freed a large number of slaves every generation, most of which where guaranteed a job, living quarters and even legal support by their master, and the children of those freedmen where full citizens; in most muslim countries freed slaves enjoyed equal rights to their former masters as long as they converted to Islam, being able to achieve even high positions in the bureacracy or government; slaves in Latin America were forever marked by their skin colour even if they were freed, but there was a free black and mulatto community they could join, and become respected members of it, and even in Europe, freed slaves could join free society to some degree (it´s a little known fact that the portuguese have a 13 % of black african ascentry on average, and the spaniards, about a 8 %, due to their freed slaves intermarrying with the local population until being fully assimilated).
In Volantis slave tattoos mark them forever as such; given the enormous percentage of slave population, it seem unlikely that many of them are ever freed (the freedmen would be included into the less than 16,67 % of free population), and even the few freedmen are esily recognizable because of the facial scars. What happens when you have a large percent of slave population plus no means to keep them subyugated by brute force, treat them like shit and give them no way to better their lives? Haití happens: the slaves revolt, kill their masters and take control of the country. Interestingly, Haití slave rebellion didn´t spread to its neighbour, Santo Domingo (today´s República Dominicana) where the spanish government had taken measures to prevent it, and the large free black and mulatto population prefered to keep what they had rather than take the risk of joining the revolt.
The slave sailors are also hard to understand. In our own world there were ships almost entirely manned by slaves in the Caribbean, but those slaves lived in a world controlled by global powers, like England, France, Spain and Portugal, that would consider as pirates any slave crew that dared to take control of a ship, hunt them and hang them all, and despite that, many slave or forcibly recruited (impressed) sailors defected to become pirates. In the world of ASOIAF, pirates control the ocean and half the coasts and islads of the planet are outside the reach of the power of any state; becoming a pirate is as difficult as throwing the captain to the sea and going to the Stepstones, or, if you are not interested in piracy and would rather become an honest free sailor, to Westeros, where slavery is illegal.
The major slaving powers also rely on slave armies. Slave armies did exist in our world, but those slaves were such only in name: the janissaries were highly paid, highly respected elite forces that wielded great political power, and often were kingmakers during many of the frequent civil wars of the Ottoman Empire, and the mamluks become the de facto rulers of Egypt. The existance of a janissary-like corps in Volantis, the tiger warriors, seem uncompatible with their political system (something between oligarchy and democracy); a group of slaves can´t feel any loyalty to the "democratic" rules that leave them outside, and without a strong military leader they could respect as head of the state keeping them in check, it´s difficult to understand why they don´t take control of Volantis; and we also have to take into account the politacally active Red Priests...
But what really, REALLY makes the system unviable is the insecurity for the free people: It seems that anybody can catch a free person, put him/her in chains, an sell him/her as a slave; nobody ask Mormont to prove that Tyrion is truly his slave; the Widow of the Waterfront is afraid to set free a slave (even when that slave is really a free man unlawfully kidnapped and put in chains) but apparently can easily subdue a free man and sell him as a slave without any fear (or at least she says so to Mormont); Quentyn and company, possing as rich merchants, are afraid of boarding a slaver ship out of fear of being sold as slaves; the Yunkai´i board, capture and sell the volantene carrack Perfumed Senechal and its crew despite being allied with Volantis against Dany (the captain may be dead, but the carrack itself still belonged to his legitimate heirs in Volantis, and the freedmen officers and free passengers still were on board of a volantene ship and under the protection of the volantene flag).
How could somebody like Penny remain free for more than five minutes alone in the streets of Volantis? How there can be any trade at all, when every merchant vessel that dares to travel abroad is not only at risk of being attacked by pirates during the trip, but also of being enslaved at the very port of destiny by the very people you want to trade with? Think of this: you are a westerosi merchant, you buy wine at the Reach, sail east, dodge the many pirates of the Stepstones, arrive at the arbor of Volantis, step out of your ship, and then you are clubbed into submision by a group of local thugs who put you and all your crew into chains, steal your ship and cargo and sell you as slaves...And why would anybody go to sell or buy slaves at Slaver´s Bay, when the ghiscarians themselves openly and without shame or fear capture and enslave their own business partners and military allies?
In our own world, the very first international treatises ever signed in our history dealed with the security of travellers and merchants and the mutual respect of property (including, of course, the property of slaves and ships), and even before any official treatise was ever signed, the taboo of the host rights were developed to protect said travellers and merchants, and the most important right ever considered was the right of the free people to not be unlawfully enslaved.
Of course, we may be lacking information; maybe Mormont was taking a great risk when kidnapping Tyrion, and the Widow could have easily had him arrested (but she didn´t do that because Tyrion would have been shipped to King´s Landing, and she liked him); maybe the slavers who captured the Perfumed Seneshal were taking advantage of the chaos of war, and usually wouldn´t have dared doing so...who knows? but, with the knowledge we already own, the eastern society is utterly unviable.
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