Academia: Slavery
This is a simplified look at slavery in general, and why it works. As with strategies in battle, I have more information and history at hand than Theralis does, so this isn't a primer on how Theralis slavery will work - it's just a preview of how I view slavery in a historical context, and what approach I'm taking in culture building in Theralis. It's pure fluff, in other words
.
With that said, it's fairly frank, and probably politically incorrect. Many people would prefer that slavery
didn't work, that it was impractical or only inspired by evil, and I don't much cotton to that blindered approach to reality. Slavery is what it is, and while we find it abhorrent as a culture enlightened by some 2,000+ years of human rights theory and "enlightened self interest" theory, Theralis (and most earlier civilizations) don't.
Domesticating Human Beings
At its heart, slavery is the process by which another person is convinced that their best interests lie in serving
your best interests for very little return. Since, on the face of it, there's no reason whatsoever for that to be true, you will usually have to create a highly specialized situation wherein
not serving your best interests is somehow
worse.
The specifics vary somewhat by culture, of course. For example, a person raised to believe that freedom is the only path to heaven will have to somehow be persuaded that you can ensure they will go to hell anyway. And fanatics of any stripe are unlikely to be convertible - fortunately for the would-be slave maker, true fanatics are rare.
Once you have established this highly specialized situation, you must then maintain it. Only the dimmest of minds will fail to attempt to alter the situation until it becomes feasible to consider interests other than yours. Thus, maintaining slaves is a constant struggle, and often a costly one - the question is whether the gain (in labor) exceeds the cost (in your labor, and feeding and care of the slaves). In most primitive societies, it most often is.
Breaking Communication
Slaves who are allowed to communicate with each other have many options open to them, which would otherwise be closed. As in the modern age when the Internet allows organized revolutions and massive populations to coordinate over wide areas, slaves who are allowed to communicate freely will be able to stage revolts and actions simultaneously - and if you have enough slaves to break even on cost, you have too many slaves to stop all at once.
Thus, preventing communication over more than a small area is of tantamount importance. Well established methods include promoting illiteracy (except among specialized slaves who are further separated from the others), preventing mixing of slave groups, restricting travel (even outside the home!) and (in some extreme cases) removing tongues or otherwise enforcing silence.
By way of example, plantation slaves in the south were allowed to sing, but not to talk after dark; were usually not allowed to leave their plantation; were almost never sold in groups to the same person; were kept illiterate; and were sometimes isolated in small shacks when they misbehaved. They got around this in various ways, from encoding messages in gospels to sneaking out at night, and these methods were clamped down whenever they were discovered in a constant struggle.
Obedience Treatment
Almost as important is motivation. As mentioned before, it is very important that not serving your interests be worse than serving them. Generally, there are three approaches here: capital treatment, breaking treatments, and game treatments.
Capital Treatment is simple - slaves who disobey are killed or horribly mutilated, sometimes both. Babylon and Egypt both seem to have followed this route, as did many eastern cultures. When you first enslave a people, you end up killing a
lot of them, but by then the remainder are very, very complacent. In general, a culture has to view another group as subhuman, possibly even disgustingly so, in order to consider this approach. And while effective, it is not
efficient - slaves function better under the other approaches, and you don't have the harvest cost. There is also the side issue of how the slaves will treat you if they ever
do become free.
Breaking Treatment is convuluted, and useful only in small numbers at a time, but ultimately results in the most functional and permanent slaves. Essentially, the slave-to-be is targetted with a combination of mild torture ("mild" is judged on a case-by-case basis), propoganda and statements to the effect of "I don't want to do this to you, but if you can't be obedient, I have no choice". Some people call it brain washing, but the result is a broken and conditioned individual who has problems even
thinking about revolt. This is often combined with one of the others, as a way of handling slaves needed for sensitive duties.
Game Treatment is somewhat more difficult than Capital Treatment, but primarily involves appealing to self interest. Punishments for misbehavior are initially mild (beatings, isolation chambers, reduced food), increasing with the severity and commonality of the infractions. The emphasis is always put forth that the punishments are fair, and that slaves are treated for how they behave, rather than who they are. Then rewards begin, for those who are particularly obedient,
or who help others be obedient. That latter part is important, because it helps the slaves enter the game as near-equals to their masters, and gives them a stake in the social structure that they would not otherwise have. And, irrational as it is, that stake
means something to the slave, particularly if there's room for advancement (even very little advancement).
Tipping Points
The above two primarily serve to keep revolts small and disorganized, and to reduce the number of slaves involved in the first moments of a revolt. Not all slaves will respond well to a treatment, but enough will that the hesitant ones prevent a unified uprising. Communication, similarly, prevents the uprising from occurring in all places at the same time.
It is
assumed that there will be revolts - the goal is to make sure that all revolts that occur can be stopped, and used as an example to lengthen the time before the next one.
In the first few moments of a revolt, assuming you have done the other things well, you will have a small group who are leading the revolt. They believe, for whatever reason, that they can succeed. Perhaps they feel that if they just show the way, the other slaves will surge behind them - and they would be right, if they were allowed to show the way.
Instead, they are killed, messily, while those who were still afraid, or not certain it would work, or just confused, watch on. It's a tipping point, and it usually ends the revolt fairly quickly.
Escapees
As with fanatics who can not be converted, there will be those you can not catch. While lacking the firm principles and moral strength of the fanatics, they are both more clever and more agile than you or your soldiers. They get away.
To a certain extent, as with shoplifting in retail, you just have to accept your losses and do what you can to minimize them. You can also make sure that those who try to escape and DO get caught are treated in the most horrible fashion your culture allows... so that fewer try, and therefore fewer still succeed.
Ultimately, however, the only cost with those who escape is actually that they might
come back, because then they might help others, or help establish communication. Usually, they just run, and it's okay to put minimal resources on it, and then let them go; when they come back, a great deal of resources must be put forward to stop them, or you may end up with a successful revolt...
Conclusion
Slavery is a condition from which it is often nearly impossible to break free of. Even in most literature, it takes acts of God, an enemy at the gates, or some other outside force - the number of successful slave revolts can be counted on one hand, and most of them involved a failure of the masters to follow the above rules.
Of course, nearly impossible is not entirely impossible.
. Forgive me for getting on my Noble Savages kick 
. And the website is more informative than mine 
