I'm not going to contest your first section - I think you make good points, even if I personally disagree that it makes it utterly impossible for a research paper to have been Imperial-funded.
Here, however, I am going to disagree, because 1) some Southern plantation owners
did make at least token efforts to keep their slaves somewhat less unhappy, and 2) your analogy is flawed. The South was a huge
minority - it was, IIRC, the only remaining slaveholding population in the European sphere - while the Empire is the undisputed
majority. The South faced discrimination and scorn and would have been attacked had the systematic research you propose been done; the Empire can afford not only to
do the research, but to actually conduct it effectively and efficiently
and still keep it under wraps. Moreover, propaganda is not the sole possible result of Imperial research on the matter: lifespan and criminality are useful data points for the Empire to consider for a slave race, as those factors in particular are ones they want to increase and reduce specifically (or, possibly, reduce in both cases; depends on the particular use the slave is being put toward). Learning how the environment impacts an organism and therefore how the Empire can manipulate those organisms by altering the environment is a worthwhile endeavor. (Education chances, admittedly, they probably
would care much less about.)
Han and Chewie were bought for the price of a used landspeeder. In that same bar was a man boasting that he had a
death sentence in 12 systems. Admittedly, my example was poor - what I'd meant to intimate was that off-world transport is
not ridiculously rare. Star Wars is not 40K, and hyperdrive ships are not closely-guarded lostech worth more than some planets. You don't need smugglers or other less-than-reputable types; I'd used Han because the very first encounter with him is Ben and Luke buying passage to another planet, with the likeliest reason for them going to a smuggler instead of a more reputable place being that they're trying to avoid the Empire. Hyperdrive ships are easy and cheap to acquire and gain access to, they're fast, and they're reliable. The idea that a university can't conduct research on other planets - even without taking into account interstellar communications (which, admittedly, would likely
not be a good venue for communication due to being entirely Empire-controlled) - is in my opinion laughable.
As for being a statistical certainty? Yes, I believe so. Perhaps said research may not have been of the utmost quality with sources from every major planet spanning the two and a half decades of Imperial rule, but there were,
what,
one hundred quadrillion sentient beings in the Old Republic? Frankly, I would expect societal research to be
more common than weapons and industrial research, because unless you have some kind of genius breakthrough, you're not getting past the established giants in those fields, while populations and societies
always need to be watched.
