How have slaves ever historically created leverage?
The slave who manages an important man's affairs is himself an important man.
Concubines frequently wield power through their well-placed lovers. At the historical extreme, Wu Zetian was a concubine who worked her way up to being formally crowned emperor.
The Mamluk Turks were slaves. This didn't stop them from taking control of the government and even enacting a requirement that the Sultan be a Mamluk (children of Mamluks, not being slaves, were not eligible).
Chinese eunuchs were also slaves, and also took control of the government on multiple occasions.
No, this is uncommon, for the same reason beasts of burden were generally not worked half to death, beaten, and generally abused. They are valuable.
That was seen as a major problem by slaveholders, though, not a feature. If they'd known how to stop the slaves from dying, they would have.
Sorry, I wasn't looking to shoot you down. I read some very interesting research into this some years ago and I basically participate here to get some chance to talk with people.
Because what you just wrote sounds an awful like a defence of slavery.
What's awful about slavery is not the treatment of the slave. It's the fact that they are slaves in the first place.
>> How have slaves ever historically created leverage?
They do it in all of the ways that other people do.
> Because what you just wrote sounds an awful [lot?] like a defence of slavery.
I will note that in another thread from today, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14651019, you can see people speaking with approval of a company that funds training for its employees with a provision that, should they leave the company within a longish period of getting the training, they owe a large lump sum to repay the training costs. This differs in no way from a traditional contract of slavery, under which, if you want to leave your current employer, you must pay them a large lump sum.
We don't say someone who has taken out a loan is a slave to their lender. And giving that person the option to pay that loan off more efficiently via labour doesn't make it slavery.