Essos´ unviable slaving society (SPOILERS)

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.

Doran Martell´s useless plan (SPOILERS)

I´m not a native english speaker, so forgive me if I mess it, O.K?.

Dance with dragons:

I have to say, i´m quite dissapointed with all the people implied with the Targayren-Martell marriage compromise… they all act SO dumb!.

Doran Martell:  O.K. Doran, old guy, seriously; What in the seven hells made you think that living as a beggar for almost a decade would help Viserys to grow into a man fit to conquer and rule Westeros? Didn´t you think that he would rather become…I don´t know,…for example, …a sad, bitter, resentful, uneducated, untrained, weak BEGGAR!!! You didn´t need to reveal him your “master plan” (which basically implies hoping that the Lanninsters, Baratheons, Tullys, Starks and Arryns somewhat sometime destroy themselves/each other and then stepping in and claiming the spoils), all you had to do was to anonymously send him a bag of gold now and them, in the name of the “secret supporters” (just make up some group of common-born merchants and artisans who are all Targaryen supporters but can´t help him other way; Viserys already thought the commoners were on his side, anyways) or to send him a loyal exiled knight to teach and guide him (like Varys and Illyrio did to Aegon), or ASK THE FREAKING SEALORD OF BRAAVOS, WHO ALREADY KNOWS YOUR WHOLE PLAN AND MAY BE THE RICHEST AND MOST POWERFUL GUY OF THE WORLD BESIDES THE KING OF WESTEROS, TO LEND HIM SOME HELP!!!).

So, Viserys and Daenerys had to fend by themselves, sell all their heirlooms to feed and clothe themselves, and once they had sold all they had, they started to travel, asking for the assistance of the rulers of the free cities, and when those where tired of their begging, they had to rely on the charity of mere merchants, until those where also tired, and you, Doran, allowed the siblings to become the despised, pitied, laughing stock of both shores of the Narrow Sea (which will really help a lot when they try to conquer and rule Westeros), and finally Viserys was so desperate that trusted the plan of some untrustworthy (even young naïve Daenerys knew of Illyrio´s bad reputation) rich merchant to marry his sister to some savage barbarian warchief who may or may not lend him a few thousand troops (I think Drogo would have considered his part of the deal done by crowning Viserys “king” of some town or city-state like Mantarys, or maybe a weak nation like Lhazaar), and Viserys ended committing suicide by douchebaggery, and Daenerys was pregnant with Drogos´s baby (and would probably have been never allowed to go to Westeros had not suffered an assassination attempt) and king Robert was sending assassins after her and Khal Drogo was pissed and was going to burn the Seven Kingdom to ashes, Dorne included…So, when were you planning to ask Daenerys to fulfil your little marriage compromise? And how exactly were you planning to convince Drogo to divorce his wife and let Quentyn marry the mother of his son?.

Maybe I´m being unfair, maybe Illyrio´s plan caught you unaware, but if you think about it, their lineage was the only thing of value they had left, the only thing they could offer, so of course they would arrange a marriage alliance with somebody else soon of later!; in fact, had Viserys been a sensible guy instead of a nutso, he would have realized he had zero chances to reclaim the throne of his father and would have resigned himself to a marriage into a rich merchant family as trophy husband, and the same for his sister.

Everything seems to point that Doran had already renounced to fulfil the marriage alliance before the hatching of the baby dragons; the only thing I can´t understand is why he didn´t let Arianne marry Edmure Tully, Renly Baratheon or Willas Tyrell, since he apparently wasn´t going to make her marry Viserys anyways (what was he gonna do? Wait till she was forty and Viserys a grandfather before letting them marry?); it may mean that Doran can´t make a decision to save his life, that he doesn´t care the future of his daughter, or that he wants to keep her for himself (hey, this is a GRRM book, and we all know he has a thing for incest).

Quentyn Martell:  I sort of sympathise with this loveshy nerdy boy, but, come on, man, if you live in a world so dangerous and unforgiving like that one, and you aren´t a badass like  Jamie or Ser Barristan or a cunning mischievous lying bastard like Littlefinger or Tyrion, and you haven´t an unnatural charisma like that of Daenerys (and when I say “charisma”, I mean “hypnotic boobies”), then at least try to have some sensibility; try to be prudent, reasonable, realistic, cold-headed, try to know your limits and be dependable within your level of competency, doing your best without overreaching; not everybody can be a Khal Drogo or a Victarion and get out of most messes by raw ballassery, but you can be a Kevan Lannister, a Davos Seaworth, a Rodrik Harlaw or a Wyman Manderly (heck, Quentyn, even Samwell Tarly is more efficient than you!); being serious, careful and sensible can carry you a long way when everybody else around you think with their sword or/and their genitals.

I know that sixteen years old boys tend to do very stupid things, but it bothers me that the guy who is presented as serious and dependable, who is trusted a mission of vital importance by his father –who doesn’t trust almost anybody else –happens to be the only one that acts like a retarded hormoned jackass-video-fan teenager (and got himself roasted alive), while all the other kids behave as if they where at least five to ten years older than their real age.

I also don´t like his behaviour with respect to the marriage; he is really square-headed, and doesn’t seem able to see or understand anything besides the will of his father. Quentyn, please, think about it for a second: it wasn´t even her marriage contract to start with, and also, that woman married another man two years ago, lived with him for months, got pregnant, gave birth, lost her child, became a widow, received several marriage proposals (one of them from one of the richest men in the world), took a lover –that you know about –and married a second time, and in between marriages, had time to hatch three dragons, cross a deadly desert the dothraki themselves fear, travel through half the world, raise an army, start a war, lay waste to three city-states and conquer a kingdom; that’s not being just late, that’s being L-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-T-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E (again, how exactly were you planning to convince Drogo to divorce his wife and let you marry the mother of his son? And, what would have you done if you had gone to Qarth and found Dany carrying in her belly the baby of Xaro or another of the Thirteen?); your little piece of parchment means nothing. And that’s without taking into account that your dad let her and her brother to their own devices, living as beggars for years, and only remembered the compromise when she got dragons.

You should also realize that she has no reason to trust you: You have no proof that you are who you pretend, you could be just another assassin seeking the promised lordship, and even if Daenerys believes you are who you say, Doran is far from trustworthy: he didn’t help Aerys during the Usurper’s War, and did nothing to help her for years before she got her pets. She knows (and everybody knows too) that you and your father want her dragons, not her.

Even if Daenerys believes and trusts you, you’re asking her to leave behind her army, her devout followers, her little kingdom and her hunsband in the middle of a war, knowing that all of them will be destroyed without her; yeah, I know, Slaver´s Bay is kind of crappy, and the Seven Kingdoms are bigger and shinier, but this girl has been a homeless beggar, dreaming of a lost kingdom all her life, and now she has something real and tangible in her hands, and you expect her to discard that for the same old bunch of hopes and dreams her brother died for, and even if she doesn’t care her current throne, she may care the lives of her people, who depend on her (and no, she can’t carry to Westeros all the freedmen of Meeren in her thirteen ships even if she where able to break the blockade).

Even if Daenerys believes and trusts you, and don´t care neither her little kingdom, nor the lives of her supporters, anybody with an ounce of brains would realize that she can´t use her dragons to fight; otherwise you, your Windblown buddies and your Yunkai´i old pals would be roasted meat long ago, so, what happens when she arrives to Sunspear and tells Doran that she hasn´t any secret super-weapon to win the war for him? What, then? Will you fight for her anyways, Dorne alone against all the other six kingdoms? Will you surrender her to the Lannisters? Or will you kick her back to the Free Cities, a beggar again, having lost yet another kingdom?.

If Quentyn or his companions had some common sense, they would had stopped insisting on the marriage contract, had reaffirmed their loyalty, even without a wedding, and offered her to prepare together the reclamation of her throne, asking her only to tell them what were her plans with respect of Westeros, and them Daenerys may have shared some of her plans and thoughts, or at least, they could have gone back to Dorne and told Doran that Daenerys wasn´t going to leave Meeren (Daenerys didn´t spend any time with them, but maybe she would had done, if they had spoken with Ser Barristan and asked him to pass their message; at the very least she would have had to say clearly if she was going to leave for Westeros in any foreseeable future, before letting them go).

I think poor Quentyn had his share of daddy and self-confidence issues; if Arianne suffered from lack of paternal attention, then he probably suffered from an excess.

Yronwood and Drinkwater, Quentyn companions:  I think Quentyn´s party lost their wizard and their cleric during their travel, and got stuck with a barbarian, a fighter and a cavalier (each of which had 8 in every mental attribute); and they had no rogue.

Ser Barristan: “You had best guard that tongue, ser.” Ser Barristan did not like this Gerris Drinkwater, nor would he allow him to vilify Daenerys. “Prince Quentyn’s death was his own doing, and yours.”

Gerris Drinkwater : “Ours? How are we at fault, ser? Quentyn was our friend, yes. A bit of a fool, you might say, but all dreamers are fools. But first and last he was our prince. We owed him our obedience.”

Uh…no, sorry Gerris, your liege wasn´t Quentyn, it is Doran (you know, that old crippled man who is gonna have your livers pulled out through your nostrils if he ever learns all the truth about his son´s death), and you owe obedience to the latter, and I´m fairly sure than his first priority in this matter is to get his boy back alive and safe, above getting some dragons to avenge his sister who died sixteen years ago; also, I´m quite sure he expected you adult men to give his son sound advice, and not letting him to kill himself in the silliest possible way.

If those are the best Dorne can offer, I weep for Dorne, Land Of Stupid.

Daenerys: I think most people are too hard on her; from our perspective, she is wasting time and slowing the plot, we want her to go to Westeros already, but she doesn´t now she is a character in a book, and she doesn´t know what “plot armour” is, she is trying to do the right thing, from her position and perspective.

Look at it this way: Daenerys knows that the houses Stark, Arryn, Tully, Lannister and Baratheon and her respective kingdoms/regions/provinces are against her, the Tyrell started fighting for the Targaryen during Robert´s Rebellion, but switched sides later, the Martell and Greyjoy didn´t take arms one way or another; later, she didn´t received any help from anybody from the Seven Kingdoms during her years as a beggar, and Ser Jorah told her that the commoners don´t care who is their suzerain, so she (before Quentyn´s arrival) doesn´t know if anybody will help her when she arrives there.

Her Unsullied are strong, but few, and can´t be replaced, her freedmen are untrained, her dothraki are less than a hundred of unblooded young boys, her sellswords are few and untrustworthy, she has no fleet, and her dragons are too small, weak and untrained to be of any use in the battlefield, plus she fears that the freedmen of Slaver’s  Bay will be re-enslaved once she goes, and can´t fully trust Illyrio, so she decides to stay some time, organize things in Meeren –so her supporters are able to fend for themselves when she lets them alone –strengthen her army, build her fleet and let her dragons grow, so she is stronger when she finally arrives to the Seven Kingdoms; it’s a bother for us readers, but it´s a reasonable strategy from her point of view.

Later she gets really invested emotionally with Meeren, and going back to Westeros becomes secondary; it´s only reasonable, from her point of view, to care more for the kingdom she has already conquered than for the one she can´t remember and is barely a pretty dream for her.

What disappoints me is not that she cares for Meeren and refuses to abandon her supporters to destruction, it´s that she doesn´t even try to explain to Quentyn and his companions that she can´t land with her dragons in Dorne and win the war for them (she probably can´t even transport them across the ocean, they would burn the ship and she couldn´t stop them); I´m quite sure that if she had told Quentyn “I can´t transport neither my troops nor my dragons to Dorne; do you still want to take me to Dorne and start a war?” that would have given him material for thought, and may have made him a bit more reasonable. Maybe she wanted to keep it a secret that she had no real control over her beasts, but it isn´t difficult to guess, since she hasn´t used them at all, and everybody will realize it eventually; plus she never seems to doubt Quentyn sincerity, even in her inner thoughts.