In a community near the sea, in a tropical climate, where most people live in cabana-like huts on poles above the water, what kind of work would slaves (male or female) possibly perform?
plantation work, fishing, gutting fish, building, diving for pearls, rowing galleys, anything you can think of that is hard and dangerous
Those who own the slaves, are they colonizers or are they also indigenous to the aforementioned tropical location? A local economy by and for the local population will be vastly different to a long-distance economy yoking the tropical setting as merely a prime location for a particular commodity. Differing economies will have differing needs. The mass monoculture agricultural interests of the colonizer with its subsequent mass need for a particular kind of labor will likely be absent in a local cultural economy. Also, are the slaves in question from the same gene-pool as the owners? Are they ethnically and culturally the same people, or are the slaves of foreign extraction. That may (active word being may) come into play as regards the level of compassion with respect to assigned labor.
You'd want to flesh out the economy and politics more. Are they agricultural or more hunter-gatherer/ fishing oriented? Do they live in city-states like the pre-Spanish Filipinos? Depending on the way things are, slaves could be employed in a wide range of activities, from deadly (mining) to merely backbreaking (sugar cane plantations) to relatively cushy (domestic servants, tutors, concubines).
The owners will be local people and it's a mostly fishing oriented culture, with maybe some hunting. Almost no agriculture; any crops etc they get through trade with a different community on the island. The slaves are from a different genepool, although their appearance doesn't necessarily make that obvious, and their people have been slaves for about 3 generations already, so 99% of the slaves there will have been born into slavery. Thanks for the input
Okay. Then juggernaut economies consuming foreign lands isn't the motor behind the slavery as it was in the New World. And three generations isn't very long. It's not the kind of thing that will be regarded as "it's always been this way" by the population. Did they lose a war so badly that this is their fate? Just trying to get into the mindset of the owners. There are any number of unpleasant, menial, or heavy-labor tasks one could rattle off, but how the slaves are viewed by the owners would likely color how they are treated and what they are made to do. The owners could be thinking in terms of a kind of permanent indentured servitude, but the slaves are still people in their eyes, or they could be seen as not-people, where much less concern will be shown.
I recently read VS Naipaul's A Bend in the River which depicted an Indian Muslim family of traders living on Africa's eastern coast. The family also owns a number of slaves who are, at the time of the story, of mixed African-Indian heritage. The slaves and the family members basically do the same work next to each other, the only real difference being the understated, but unmistakable, power disparity. It is a perverse kind of family relationship. Once the unnamed country they live in becomes independent and slavery is outlawed, the slaves still remain in the family employ. The reason I bring this up is just to say that slave labor is not necessarily pure drudgery with the masters reclining on couches. There are different degrees of slavery- all bad, undoubtedly.
My first thought would be piracy, which I believe was the primary way people were captured and sold into slavery in maritime southeast Asia.
The problem is, the way you describe the society, they have no reason to need slaves. An essentially hunter-gatherer society doesn't have large amounts of labour intensive work that needs to be done by slaves. Sure, they could build houses or boats, but there's only so many of those they need. You could send them out fishing, but chances are, they'll just sail off. Slaves represent additional mouths to feed. The return on having slaves has to be more than the food and resources they consume, otherwise the community is making a net loss. They'd be better off cracking them over the head and using them to feed the fishes.
This is the same stumbling block I'm having with the premise, hence the questions I asked above. At face value, I'm having a hard time finding a sufficiently powerful engine for the tropical hut-dwellers to drive the idea of "let's go snatch some folk who we then have to guard and who certainly won't be happy about the whole thing".
Even then, that only works if the community has a surplus of resources, which hunter-gatherer communities tend not to have. I don't know how large a slave population the OP envisages, but under the conditions described, it would be, at most, only a few individuals.
Take a look at Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest--the Chinook, Tlingit, and so on. They were not agricultural, and yet they kept slaves captured in raids. The plentiful natural resources of the region (berries, game, large and delicious fish) allowed them to lead pretty chill lives, and slavery was very widespread. This thread piqued my curiosity and I'm reading a chapter out of a book on it right now called "Indian Slavery in the Pacific Northwest;" I'd be happy to email it to you if you want to give it a look through. According to it, slaves were used to pick berries and fish, among other things. The slave trade was also quite well developed; evidently the tribes around the mouth of the Columbia River were very involved in it--the Chinooks would take their dried fish each year to the Cascade mountains to trade for slaves from the interior, and then trade those slaves to other tribes on the coast.
But that's the key - they had resources to spare. If you're only able to catch enough fish to keep your tribe alive, there's nothing spare for the slaves. It all depends on that factor in the scenario the OP describes,
Yeah. I'd expect many places in the tropics to be similar though. Plenty of big fish in the sea, plenty of bananas, plenty of papaya and whatever else.
I see your point. Let's change it then: what if the whole population was very poor at some point in time and people started to steal from each other so a kind of police force had to be formed that became a ruling caste later. Now the majority of people have literally nothing while there are a few wealthy "policemen" who "guard" the others.
