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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2699757" data-attributes="member: 7240">I strongly suggest you drop your late 19th century ideas about "progress" and advancement and think more precisely about which ways this civilization is advanced. When you have a decent quantity of magic or cheap labour, most types of technological engineering our civilization has developed don't actually make any sense. People built water mills and invented heavy ploughs in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages because of civilization's collapse, not in spite of it -- the slave labour supply of the Roman world had dried up.You mean the enslaving civilization was Iron-age? What kind of tech did the humans have before? Also, what aspects of human culture and society have remained distinct from that of the civilization that enslaved them and why? How separate were the humans from this group and what maintained this separation? Did the humans have any form of limited self-government?What has become of the civilization that enslaved them? What remains of it? How do the humans interact with it? Do any of the humans style themselves the successors to it? If the humans have organized into city states within a hundred years or so, it seems probable that (a) their enslavers were probably similarly organized and (b) the humans have either inherited their former masters' infrastructure or had been maintained more as tributary states than personal chattel slaves. When you imagine the city states and leagues, do you see them more along an Aztec model or a Greek one?Only very specific types of slavery can do this. More commonly, slavery is obsessed with tracking your bloodline so it can know who is born into slavery and who is not. But if politics in these eastern states is based on ideology, where have the ideologies come from? Are they subversions of the political ideas of the humans' former masters, survivals of an ancient oral tradition, handed down directly from the gods after liberation? Also remember that heredity is not the only basis on which to run a political system that is not explicitly ideological; it seems more likely that a group so new to self-government would be more likely to have political power follow armies (and those who can best rally and command men) or, if the slave population was unused to economic self-sufficiency, the ability to control and protect agricultural land or flocks.Yes. But before we can even get to that point, you really need to answer some basic questions about how the humans lived when they were enslaved, what the culture that enslaved them was like and why and how it fell apart. There are no general rules for this kind of thing; cultures change and arise due to the specific individual characteristics of the situation in question.</blockquote>

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