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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   2460 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 6, 2025

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Do you think the Muslim world’s proximity to Africa and use of Slavic slaves gave them a big advantage in warring against Europeans? They had a constant supply of slaves in their economy. I wonder how they would have done in war if they had no slaves supplying them constant boosts in productivity.

Janissary/mameluke-style military slaves performed well in battle, so possibly yes. The Ottomans were by far the strongest force in the Muslim world, probably in part because they made good use of actual Europeans fighting for them.

Without steppe nomads or Europeans, Muslim combat power seemed to be quite low.

Muslim armies seem to have done well when led by a nomadic or recently nomadic military class i.e. Bedouin tribesmen or Turkic horsemen, and to have lost their edge after settling down in much the same way the Mongols, Manchus, and Khitans did after conquering China. I don't think slaves had much to do with it.

Slaves are not a productivity boost(they usually perform worse than free labor), not really, and labor generally isn’t the limiting factor on premodern economics anyways.

It’s possible that the use of military slaves gave Muslim armies a greater degree of flexibility in comparison to European armies where, pre-line infantry, soldiers performed tasks in battle dictated by their civilian social standing rather than the needs of the army. But I don’t think ready supply of Eastern European slave girls did much for the Ottoman Empire.

Slaves are not a productivity boost(they usually perform worse than free labor)

Not sure how this passes the intuition test. If I force you to labor in a mine and beat you if you don’t, the mines will be productive, and I don’t have to pay you much. Or, if I have to pay a cook $30 an hour to come to my house, it is more productive if I pay you in $4 beans and beat you if I don’t comply. All of the extra “resources” saved could be taxed to raise armies.

Hence the famously efficient Soviet model?

Coercion smooths out the economic signals that tell you how valuable your industry really is. It’s possible to get a good deal, but you will lose out to competitors who aren’t trying to command their economy.

  1. Slaves have poor motivation to improve their condition. They have little aspiration to improve their position, and practically speaking you can't beat a cook into making you a great dinner. You can beat them into cooking you A dinner by beating them if they don't cook; but if you're going to beat them unless the dinner is perfect they're probably getting beaten regardless. At which point there's no motivation to make a better dinner. Where a free chef who comes to my house is motivated to enhance his status, make a great dinner, get more business, etc.

  2. Free labor typically provides for itself in the long run on a lower wage than it costs the slaver to feed and maintain his slaves. Chattel Slavery only works with continual infusions of fresh slaves from foreign parts, otherwise it doesn't tend to perpetuate itself well.

Of course slavery takes many historical forms, and we can debate details.

Societies with slavery have such low labor costs that it doesn’t really matter, and, furthermore, slavery removes a lot of the incentives behind productivity improvements. The alternative to a $4/hr slave cook is usually a $5/hr master chef.

You can speculate all you want(and the motte has a fetish for low labor costs), but in general more economically optimized societies aren’t eager to adopt slavery. The gulf states and apartheid South Africa were not models of economic efficiency, and that’s probably the closest thing to slavery in the industrialized world.

Slavery gives the center of an empire a quick economic boost from conquered territories though. Which otherwise would be very hard to extract without letting them develop economies and tax infrastructure that the empire might lose control of to local elites.

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