Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

[Cetashwayo]

Not necessarily! Plenty of naval powers - Athens is the one that jumps to my own mind - staffed their oared warships with non-enslaved people, if usually ones of low socioeconomic status.

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Not necessarily. They were not necessarily a majority but it is increasingly accepted that slaves were likely used as rowers on Athenian triremes. Graham (1992) is the major citation and involves both the logical fact that Athens' manpower was too low to rely on citizens and metics alone, and textual readings of Thucydides which seem to indicate slave rowers. This is especially so in desperate times. It is by no means a rule that ancient navies were solely staffed with the free. For some cities (though not Athens) slave rowers may have sometimes been a majority.

 

[xamaplak]

Well, this just makes me want to use that great deed we've got sitting around to get a wolfship for ourselves and go awandering around, getting into all sorts of trouble.

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I'd say cross it with the Vlag Great Deed and get an ironclad or two for a small flotilla, but the Vlag dwarves aren't exactly set up for that. They could make a killer port for us, though, and it'd give us a chance to interact with a face of Ranald that we haven't really touched.

Mostly unrelated, but I bet if we unclog the primordial holy place, we'll get a new aspect for the Coin

 

[Nimbus]

Not necessarily. They were not necessarily a majority but it is increasingly accepted that slaves were likely used as rowers on Athenian triremes. Graham (1992) is the major citation and involves both the logical fact that Athens' manpower was too low to rely on citizens and metics alone, and textual readings of Thucydides which seem to indicate slave rowers. This is especially so in desperate times. It is by no means a rule that ancient navies were solely staffed with the free. For some cities (though not Athens) slave rowers may have sometimes been a majority.

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Certainly slaves were inducted into the Athenian navy in moments of crisis, though I was under the impression that they were typically freed before their service for reasons bound up in both Athens' particular democratic culture and the tie between citizenship and defence of the polis in general (though, of course, freed slaves weren't citizens)... That said, I don't remember where I got that impression from (and now I think about it it sounds eerily resonant with outdated 'hoplite revolution' views of the polis) - not something I've ever researched in depth, so perhaps something to look into at some point! Thank you for the recommendation - should I do so, I'll start there.

(And yes, absolutely, Greek poleis' differences shouldn't be flattened and certainly shouldn't be flattened with other polities and cultures. The ancient Mediterranean's diversity makes it such a fascinating place!)

Edit: Ah, okay - looks like I may be thinking about the Battle of Arginusae, for which slaves were inducted as rowers and were, unusually, given citizenship for their service! Possibly a particular event rather than a general trend, then (which does make sense - infrequent crises don't usually make for consistent patterns).

 

[Boney]

The thing about rowing is it absolutely is a skilled profession and if you have untrained, unmotivated slaves doing it, you're going to be worse off for it. That doesn't matter terribly much for merchants and can be a very easy trade-off to make for pirates who want to keep profit margins up and will be going after soft targets, but for military purposes you absolutely want people that know what they're doing and will be giving it their all. You want them to be able to put on a burst of speed to ram, to quickly respond to change in orders to maneuver, to quickly ship oars while boarding or being boarded to prevent the oars from being broken off, and to be willing to get off their benches and go crack the heads of whoever just boarded you or got boarded by you. You definitely don't want them to be physically weak, vectors for disease, and suffering constant attrition and needing replacing. You can make it work if slaves are all you got or if you're ontologically evil and therefore obliged to do things in dumb ways that maximize suffering, but if you can get professionals you almost always should.

(Consider trying rowing sometime if it's an option for you! Canoe and kayak hire tends to be pretty affordable, and it's a lot of fun once you get the hang of it and can be a lot of fun not having the hang of it with friends. I've got a fair amount of fond memories of it even though the Daystar has sworn to destroy me.)

...Do Druchii ever use galleys? Cause it sounds like galleys with slaves would be things they'd like to use whenever their ships aren't getting pulled by magic or gribblies.

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Ravenships have a deck that can be converted between an oar deck and cargo storage. For internal patrols and military clashes with Ulthuan they want the extra speed and maneuverability, but for piracy they want the extra storage space and lower costs of just relying on sails. And it seems very like they'd use galleys for internal trade and logistics in the Sea of Chill.

 

[The Lone badger]

I assume Druchii have decks full of slaves pulling on oars even when the ship is actually pulled by sea monsters or propelled by magic. For the aesthetic.
(plus because they're not actually needed to move the ship you can whip them and underfeed them as much as you want without risking getting stranded)

 

[Boney]

While we're on the subject, the same logic applies to almost everything. There is very little worth doing that a skilled and motivated worker can't do significantly better than a sickly and rebellious slave, and societies as a whole are very obviously better off for having a bunch of employed professionals around than they are for having large slave underclasses. There are only a handful of historical edge cases where even a completely amoral weighing of the facts suggests slavery as the most efficient course, and even those stop existing with the right technological advances and sufficient capital investment. The actual main reasons to use slavery are to concentrate money and power in the hands of a minority. This is only ever good for that minority, is almost always detrimental to the state or people as a whole, and a lot of the time works out badly for the minority in the long run as well.

Slavery is not just evil, it is also stupid.

 

[The Phoenixian]

Among many, many other things, It turns out that when you spend money, someone else makes money. And if someone is not paid money, they cannot spend money.

(There might be better points, but that's the one that's been on my mind for a while, for various reasons.)

 

[Pyrelight]

Certainly the people who would be being paid that money if slaves weren't doing the work instead wouldn't be happy.

Though I'm not sure on the historical basis of that - IIRC it was one of the claimed rots chewing at the roots of Rome as it expanded, that armies of imported slaves working without pay Took The Jobs of Roman commoners and allowed the wealthy classes an economic edge which they used to destroy the Hard-Working Yeoman Farmer-Soldier class who were responsible for those victories in the first place and add their lands to the big, slave-powered estates.

But I'm not sure how much of that actually happened, how much was people blaming helpless slaves for the problem instead of wealthy patricians who might hit back, and how much is modern myth-making.

In any case it's quite doable to cut the corner on this: if your employees are paid, but you own all the stores and venues they buy things from, you win both coming and going.

 

[reignonyrparade]

On the matter of "Only ever good for that minority, almost always detrimental to the state or people as a whole" by my understanding, historically China had fairly frequent (in a relative sense, so like, every century or so) 'We Want There To Be Fewer Slaves As A Matter Of Economic Policy' drives because it turns out it's a lot easier to extract taxes out of peasants than land-and-slave-owning aristocrats. Not to the point of full on abolition but like "Okay only these classes get to have slaves, they're limited to these fairly small numbers, gotta actually be criminals instead of letting people sell family/themselves to pay debts, etc." They really only took in limited amounts because slavery was in fact good for the land-and-slave-owning aristocrats (hence it needing to happen multiple times) but it does demonstrate this sort of analysis isn't just outside-looking-in analysis done with the benefit of distance from the practice but something that could absolutely be identified from within those societies.

 

[Boney]

Certainly the people who would be being paid that money if slaves weren't doing the work instead wouldn't be happy.

Though I'm not sure on the historical basis of that - IIRC it was one of the claimed rots chewing at the roots of Rome as it expanded, that armies of imported slaves working without pay Took The Jobs of Roman commoners and allowed the wealthy classes an economic edge which they used to destroy the Hard-Working Yeoman Farmer-Soldier class who were responsible for those victories in the first place and add their lands to the big, slave-powered estates.

But I'm not sure how much of that actually happened, how much was people blaming helpless slaves for the problem instead of wealthy patricians who might hit back, and how much is modern myth-making.

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While it's easy to look askance on this flavour of rhetoric in a modern context, the explicit way it was supposed to work is that legions were supposed to be retiring to the land they were given when they retired, and that way the lands that Rome expanded into were supposed to be quickly and fairly densely filled with retired legionaries working the land, speaking Latin, growing enough crops to be self-sufficient in a crisis, paying taxes, having little baby future legionaries, and being available to form the core of a militia if it came under attack or if the locals decided they didn't like being part of Rome any more. When it actually works this way, this removes all the usual weaknesses of freshly-conquered provinces and makes for a very durable sort of nation that has a lot of leeway to ride out all sorts of crises.

But what it doesn't do is rapidly enrich the people that are already rich, and we all know how much of a problem that is.

So you buy the land off the legionaries - or, better yet, just reform the entire process to seize the land for yourself and have retiring legionaries given the market value* of a plot of land instead - and form all of those small blocks of land into massive cash crop plantations worked by slaves. You maximize the economic output of that land, having it creating larger amounts of more valuable crops than if it was all still individual farmsteads, and the state doesn't even benefit from this because there were various aristocratic privileges and plutocratic tricks you could use to dodge your tax burden. But while those slaves are working the land, they're often not speaking Latin, they're not growing staple crops that could feed the province in a crisis, they're not paying taxes, they're not having little baby future legionaries, and they're certainly not forming the core of any militias. In fact, they have a lot of reason to throw their lot in with those who don't want to be part of Rome any more.

Told correctly, every single scrap of blame for this should be levelled at the patricians, and the dynamic at play is one that should resonate with a different set of modern concerns.

* lol

 

[horngeek]

While we're on the subject, the same logic applies to almost everything. There is very little worth doing that a skilled and motivated worker can't do significantly better than a sickly and rebellious slave, and societies as a whole are very obviously better off for having a bunch of employed professionals around than they are for having large slave underclasses. There are only a handful of historical edge cases where even a completely amoral weighing of the facts suggests slavery as the most efficient course, and even those stop existing with the right technological advances and sufficient capital investment. The actual main reasons to use slavery are to concentrate money and power in the hands of a minority. This is only ever good for that minority, is almost always detrimental to the state or people as a whole, and a lot of the time works out badly for the minority in the long run as well.

Slavery is not just evil, it is also stupid.

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Now I'm morbidly curious what those edge cases are/have been, I'll admit- total agreement on the rest of the post.

 

[Altom]

Clan Skyre musicians are now a firm part of my headcanon.

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Well, on tabletop Skaven do field musicians, just like most other factions, so, while I don't think regular Clanrats are getting anything fancy, Skyre Stormvermin and other elite units may well have something luducrious the resident Engineer cooked up while on another Warpstone binge.

Does the Empire use that many galleys these days? I thought they were moving towards galleons that can make the transit to Lustria and Cathay.

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War Galleys are, well, galleys, Wolfships look to me like a Galleass and other types of Imperial ships tend to be Wolfship + Rule of Cool powered supergun.

 

[Boney]

Now I'm morbidly curious what those edge cases are/have been, I'll admit- total agreement on the rest of the post.

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Strenuous jobs that quickly and unavoidably kill the people doing them. A lot of early mining, when it hadn't been figured out what causes air to burn or people to asphyxiate, falls into this category. But even then there are alternatives that could be argued for - more labour-intensive but safer forms of salt mining, surface deposits of most metals that don't require a hell pit to access (but they don't exist on myyyy laaaaand and don't enrich meeeee), and just not mining jewels and precious metals because they don't actually do anything.

 

[Ivan the Not-so-Terrible]

Now I'm morbidly curious what those edge cases are/have been, I'll admit- total agreement on the rest of the post.

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High-fatality highly profitable jobs and particularly ones in state-owned industries/monopolies (e.g. precious metal mines) - Athens wasn't going to send citizens to go die in the mines at Laurion, and you had similar things going on at Potosi.

 

[Godwinson]

Strenuous jobs that quickly and unavoidably kill the people doing them. A lot of early mining, when it hadn't been figured out what causes air to burn or people to asphyxiate, falls into this category. But even then there are alternatives that could be argued for - more labour-intensive but safer forms of salt mining, surface deposits of most metals that don't require a hell pit to access (but they don't exist on myyyy laaaaand and don't enrich meeeee), and just not mining jewels and precious metals because they don't actually do anything.

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What's worse is that even for the mines where stuff was vital, a lot of them just didn't bother at all in the slightest with safety because it was slaves, and therefore it's entirely a matter of costs and just forcing them to do shit that kills them. A lot of mine safety precautions weren't ever really a matter of technological capability, but sheer disregard for the idea of trying.

 

[Altom]

surface deposits of most metals that don't require a hell pit to access

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If I recall my Unmitigated Pedantry correctly, most mines were usually pretty shallow, because hell pits are expensive, no matter how many corners you cut. Hell pits as a result were only common in gold, silver etc mining, where it was worth all the extra investment to dif them.

 

[NexusEye]

The treatment of slaves also depends on how expensive they are, if they're expensive you want to keep them alive for as long as possible so you get your money's worth from your investment, if they're cheap it might be more profitable to work them to death quickly and buy replacements for cheap as was the case for many plantations in the Americas buying cheap replacement slaves from the Triangular Trade in the the 15th to 19th centuries. There's also the fact that different societies and cultures treated slaves differently, from Egyptian and Roman slaves who had limited rights depending on the time period to American chattel slavery in the 18th-19th centuries where they were effectively treated as livestock who could follow instructions. It's a bit like murdering someone by slitting their throat in their sleep versus feeding them feet first into a woodchipper, in both cases the most salient point is that they were murdered but due to the context surrounding the crime one is notably more horrific than the other, likewise while there is no such thing as "good" slavery depending on how the slaves are treated slavery can range from simply horrible to oh-dear-god-what-the-fucking-fuck levels of horrifyingly horrible.

 

[Boney]

If I recall my Unmitigated Pedantry correctly, most mines were usually pretty shallow, because hell pits are expensive, no matter how many corners you cut. Hell pits as a result were only common in gold, silver etc mining, where it was worth all the extra investment to dif them.

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I'd recalled the lead mines as being infamously deep and horrific, but it turns out they doubled as silver mines from galena containing both. Now I'm wondering if greed for specie indirectly poisoned the Romans by creating a glut of cheap lead to be used as water pipes and wine sweetener. There's a horrible poetry to that.

 

[pucflek]

Strenuous jobs that quickly and unavoidably kill the people doing them. A lot of early mining, when it hadn't been figured out what causes air to burn or people to asphyxiate, falls into this category. But even then there are alternatives that could be argued for - more labour-intensive but safer forms of salt mining, surface deposits of most metals that don't require a hell pit to access (but they don't exist on myyyy laaaaand and don't enrich meeeee), and just not mining jewels and precious metals because they don't actually do anything.

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Uranium mines, yay!

 

[NexusEye]

I'd recalled the lead mines as being infamously deep and horrific, but it turns out they doubled as silver mines from galena containing both. Now I'm wondering if greed for specie indirectly poisoned the Romans by creating a glut of cheap lead to be used as water pipes and wine sweetener. There's a horrible poetry to that.

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Lead water pipes aren't actually that dangerous after they've formed a protective layer of minerals from the minerals in the water, which happens relatively quickly so lead pipes are usually only dangerous when they're recently installed. The Flint water crisis was caused by them switching to a cheaper but more acidic source of water which dissolved the protective mineral layer and started leaching lead from the pipes into the water itself. Before that they'd been using lead pipes for decades without problems due to that protective mineral layer. So for the most part the Romans probably didn't suffer from significant levels of lead poisoning from their use of lead pipes. As for using lead to sweeten their wine, while their is documentation of them using lead acetate as a wine sweetener there is also documentation of people warning against using lead as a sweetener due to it being a potential poison, how widely these warnings were heeded I don't know and they probably only figured it out after considerable experience using lead acetate as a sweetener and observing the negative effects of it but there were at least some people who had figured out it was a bad idea. As for further details, I don't know, that's all I found from a cursory google search, I'd need to dig deeper for more details.

 

[Altom]

And now I wonder if Imperial mines are actually safer and more advanced then equivalents from RL due to another case of Dwarf Osmosis .

 

[Boney]

Lead water pipes aren't actually that dangerous after they've formed a protective layer of minerals from the minerals in the water, which happens relatively quickly so lead pipes are usually only dangerous when they're recently installed. The Flint water crisis was caused by them switching to a cheaper but more acidic source of water which dissolved the protective mineral layer and started leaching lead from the pipes into the water itself. Before that they'd been using lead pipes for decades without problems due to that protective mineral layer. So for the most part the Romans probably didn't suffer from significant levels of lead poisoning from their use of lead pipes. As for using lead to sweeten their wine, while their is documentation of them using lead acetate as a wine sweetener there is also documentation of people warning against using lead as a sweetener due to it being a potential poison, how widely these warnings were heeded I don't know and they probably only figured it out after considerable experience using lead acetate as a sweetener and observing the negative effects of it but there were at least some people who had figured out it was a bad idea. As for further details, I don't know, that's all I found from a cursory google search, I'd need to dig deeper for more details.

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It varied a lot. Rome itself mostly dodged the dangers because the Aniene had a lot of dissolved chalk in it, but not everywhere would have such obliging water sources. De Architectura, De Re Rustica, and De Medecina all recommended rainwater transported through terracotta pipes over riverwater through lead, which raises my eyebrows. Vitruvius outright said that it was the lead exposure that made it unhealthy, though it was far from universal in the literature, with Celsus having lead-based poultices in his.

But yes, this dynamic is one that surrounds every putative cause of Rome's downfall - there are plausible arguments and counterarguments for every one of them, all very well established and reasonable-sounding.

And now I wonder if Imperial mines are actually safer and more advanced then equivalents from RL due to another case of Dwarf Osmosis .

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The ones that exist are safer, not just because of Dwarven teachings but because the costs of tapping the deeper and more dangerous deposits can't compete with Dwarves doing the same in the richer and better-established mines of the World's Edge Mountains.

 

[Pyrelight]

It varied a lot. Rome itself mostly dodged the dangers because the Aniene had a lot of dissolved chalk in it, but not everywhere would have such obliging water sources. De Architectura, De Re Rustica, and De Medecina all recommended rainwater transported through terracotta pipes over riverwater through lead, which raises my eyebrows. Vitruvius outright said that it was the lead exposure that made it unhealthy, though it was far from universal in the literature, with Celsus having lead-based poultices in his.

But yes, this dynamic is one that surrounds every putative cause of Rome's downfall - there are plausible arguments and counterarguments for every one of them, all very well established and reasonable-sounding.



The ones that exist are safer, not just because of Dwarven teachings but because the costs of tapping the deeper and more dangerous deposits can't compete with Dwarves doing the same in the richer and better-established mines of the World's Edge Mountains.

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To be fair, there are other reasons than pipes why rainwater could be safer than river water.

While it's easy to look askance on this flavour of rhetoric in a modern context, the explicit way it was supposed to work is that legions were supposed to be retiring to the land they were given when they retired, and that way the lands that Rome expanded into were supposed to be quickly and fairly densely filled with retired legionaries working the land, speaking Latin, growing enough crops to be self-sufficient in a crisis, paying taxes, having little baby future legionaries, and being available to form the core of a militia if it came under attack or if the locals decided they didn't like being part of Rome any more. When it actually works this way, this removes all the usual weaknesses of freshly-conquered provinces and makes for a very durable sort of nation that has a lot of leeway to ride out all sorts of crises.

But what it doesn't do is rapidly enrich the people that are already rich, and we all know how much of a problem that is.

So you buy the land off the legionaries - or, better yet, just reform the entire process to seize the land for yourself and have retiring legionaries given the market value* of a plot of land instead - and form all of those small blocks of land into massive cash crop plantations worked by slaves. You maximize the economic output of that land, having it creating larger amounts of more valuable crops than if it was all still individual farmsteads, and the state doesn't even benefit from this because there were various aristocratic privileges and plutocratic tricks you could use to dodge your tax burden. But while those slaves are working the land, they're often not speaking Latin, they're not growing staple crops that could feed the province in a crisis, they're not paying taxes, they're not having little baby future legionaries, and they're certainly not forming the core of any militias. In fact, they have a lot of reason to throw their lot in with those who don't want to be part of Rome any more.

Told correctly, every single scrap of blame for this should be levelled at the patricians, and the dynamic at play is one that should resonate with a different set of modern concerns.

* lol

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IIRC the original I heard this from was something with a "yeoman smallholder farmer" type of fixation - I think it would have predated most of the modern talking points, being from the 90s.

I suppose while it might have been worse for the Roman state, from an anticolonial perspective anything that damaged Rome's military readiness and grip on the provinces would be a good thing. And from a humanitarian perspective, certainly the alternative wasn't going to be "all the people the legions kidnapped during the war get to go home".

 

[Boney]

IIRC the original I heard this from was something with a "yeoman smallholder farmer" type of fixation - I think it would have predated most of the modern talking points, being from the 90s.

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By 'modern' I meant 'this side of Constantine'. But that said, very few 'modern talking points' are actually modern, they just get a makeover every few years. You can draw a direct line from manifest destiny to blood and soil to whatever the underlying framework of the fixation you describe to the tradwife movement and through everything in between. And like every other political position, people have used the fall of Rome to frame arguments for and against the whole time.

I suppose while it might have been worse for the Roman state, from an anticolonial perspective anything that damaged Rome's military readiness and grip on the provinces would be a good thing. And from a humanitarian perspective, certainly the alternative wasn't going to be "all the people the legions kidnapped during the war get to go home".

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While I won't go so far as to unilaterally say that one shouldn't do an accelerationist reading of Roman history, I don't think this is the place to do it. It's a really volatile topic and as meandering as this conversation has been, it is ultimately in the context of the civilizations of the Warhammer world. The toppling of the Empire is not going to lead to the sort of vacuum that positive institutions are going to be able to flourish in.

 

[Dark as Silver]

Strenuous jobs that quickly and unavoidably kill the people doing them. A lot of early mining, when it hadn't been figured out what causes air to burn or people to asphyxiate, falls into this category. But even then there are alternatives that could be argued for - more labour-intensive but safer forms of salt mining, surface deposits of most metals that don't require a hell pit to access (but they don't exist on myyyy laaaaand and don't enrich meeeee), and just not mining jewels and precious metals because they don't actually do anything.

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I think flour milling was another, while the famous hazard would be flour particle explosions breathing in the dust had its own health effects.
However, having said that https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...ng_sent_to_work_in_a_roman_mill_was_up_there/ does point out its unknown how common this was to use human slaves (Or if they just weren't shackled) instead of or as well as animals.

And of course this can link back to your earlier point that as soon as technology advanced to the point of water wheels the slavery was definitely no longer necessary and by the medieval period miller was actually a very good job. And if you could improve conditions somewhat by beating people less.