Utopian slavery

Utopian slavery is a labor status that the Utopians apply to some convicted offenders, accept in certain cases from neighboring peoples, and impose on part of a defeated enemy garrison. It is not simply a single punishment with one route into it: the enslaved include native criminals, people condemned to die abroad and redeemed by Utopian merchants, voluntary foreign servants, and captured soldiers. The system links punishment to useful labor, but its distinctions in treatment and its threat of severe force expose a coercive edge within Utopian social order.

Origins and categories

The Utopians do not ordinarily enslave prisoners of war, nor the children of enslaved people, nor people from other nations merely because they are foreigners. Their principal penal category consists of people condemned to slavery for crimes. A second group enters through trade: Utopian merchants sometimes redeem people who have been sentenced to death in the countries where the merchants travel, acquiring them at low prices or, in some places, without payment. The account thus distinguishes a Utopian sentence from a status imposed elsewhere, even as both result in a person being held in permanent service.

A different route is described for poor people from neighboring countries who offer themselves for service. They receive treatment in other respects comparable to that of Utopian citizens, but are assigned more labor; the account presents this added burden as manageable for people accustomed to hard work. Their service is not compulsory: if they wish to return home, the Utopians do not detain them and send them away with money. This category contrasts sharply with criminal slavery, which is described as perpetual and enforced by chains.

The Utopians also make captives from a defeated enemy part of their slave population in a specific military circumstance. When they take a town by storm, those who resist its surrender are put to death, while the remaining garrison is enslaved. The inhabitants beyond that garrison are not harmed. The distinction limits who is enslaved in the account, but shows that slavery is not confined to domestic sentencing: it can also follow the violent capture of a town.

Labor, discipline, and unequal treatment

Enslaved people are kept at perpetual labor and are described as continually chained. The account draws a sharp distinction between Utopian-born offenders and foreign slaves. Native offenders are treated more harshly because their crimes are taken as proof that they resisted the benefits of an excellent education; in the Utopians’ judgment, that failure makes them especially deserving of severe treatment. Foreign slaves, by contrast, include people who were already condemned to die elsewhere, as well as those who entered service by choice. The distinction reflects the Utopians’ view of culpability, but also means that the same status does not entail the same degree of hardship.

Slavery also appears in ordinary civic labor. In the markets and provision system, citizens do not kill livestock themselves; the work is assigned to slaves. The stated reason is that butchering animals would impair pity and good nature, qualities the Utopians regard as important. This arrangement places enslaved labor within the practical workings of communal life, not only at the margins of the penal system.

Punishment, resistance, and release

The Utopian Senate determines penalties for crimes not otherwise covered by law, adjusting punishment to the circumstances. For the gravest offences, slavery is generally preferred to execution. The rationale is public as well as punitive: forced labor benefits the commonwealth, while the visible, continuing misery of the enslaved is intended to warn others more lastingly than an execution would. A person who rebels against the imposed labor and refuses submission may ultimately be put to death, on the stated ground that neither confinement nor chains can keep such a person in order.

The account nevertheless leaves open the possibility of release. Those who endure their punishment patiently and appear more troubled by their crimes than by their suffering may hope for restoration to freedom by the Prince’s prerogative or through the people’s intercession; their sentence may at least be substantially reduced. This prospect does not make the initial status voluntary, but it makes remorse and conduct relevant to whether enslavement continues at its original severity.

Adultery provides a more specific example of criminal enslavement. Both parties, if married, are divorced; the adulterer and adulteress are sentenced to slavery. An injured spouse may marry someone else or, if affection remains, continue living with the condemned person, but in that case must share the labor assigned to the enslaved. Repentance, together with the injured person’s continued kindness, has sometimes persuaded the Prince to remit the sentence. A person who relapses after pardon is put to death. The law also punishes an attempt to seduce a married woman as severely as the completed offence, treating deliberate intention as culpable even when the intended act fails.

Comparison and significance

In his argument against England’s death penalty for theft, Raphael Hythloday uses the Polylerits as a contrast, not as another name for Utopians. Their thieves make restitution and serve in public works, and Raphael favors their approach over executing people for theft. That comparison helps distinguish the argument against disproportionate capital punishment from the Utopian system itself: the Utopians’ usual response to grave crime is not the Polylerite arrangement but enslavement, with continuous labor and chains.

The institution therefore complicates any simple picture of Utopia as a society organized around shared goods and care. The account emphasizes public benefit, graduated penalties, and the possibility that a condemned person may earn leniency; it also makes labor compulsory, gives native offenders harsher treatment than foreign slaves, and allows death for rebellion or repeated adultery after pardon. In war, it extends enslavement to captured members of a defeated garrison. Utopian slavery is presented as an alternative to killing many offenders, but its claimed public utility rests on sustained control over the enslaved and on a distinction between lives the society chooses to spare and lives it subjects to coercion.