Starting from Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia — Using Slavery to Understand How Power Works

July, 2026 Freiburg

The recently aired anime Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia (Japanese: 天幕のジャードゥーガル) has provoked a good deal of online discussion about its plot: why does the heroine, herself a slave, remain so fixated on taking revenge on the Mongols for her murdered mistress? Is this not implausible, both logically and in terms of human nature? In my view, however, judged by the way slavery actually operated in history, the behaviour of the heroine Sitara is perfectly reasonable — and it offers us a window onto how political power and slavery work in human societies.

For readers who have not seen the anime or the manga, let me first summarise the story briefly; in what follows I will not discuss the anime's plot in any further detail:

Personal Dependency as the Logical Core of Slavery: Better a Dog in Times of Peace Than a Man in Times of Chaos

When we speak of slavery, what usually comes to mind first is slavery in the American South and in ancient Greece and Rome. In practice, however, historical slaveries were far more varied. The historian Watson (1980) placed slavery along a spectrum between "closed" and "open" systems. The former — slavery in the American South and in the colonies of the Americas — (almost) never allowed slaves to be freed or to buy themselves out; the latter  gradually absorbed slaves into the master's family or into society, so that in this generation or the next they could shed slave status. In the Persian-Islamic world where the heroine starts out, slavery was of the "open" kind: Islam encouraged manumission, and Islamic jurisprudence held that "freedom is the original state of mankind"(al-'asl huwa 'l-hurriya) (Ware, 2011). As in Rome and in other civilisations, the slave was regarded as a "permanent junior," a kind of "child." A small aside: on the road to Mongolia after their capture, Anīs teaches Sitara one of the advantages of being a slave, namely that one does not have to be responsible for oneself. "A slave's faults are borne by the master, and one need feel no guilt even over a master's death. A slave is precisely the person who cannot bear responsibility for herself." (This is the gist of it.)

Slavery, then, is less a question of ownership over "persons" than one of asymmetrical dependency of one person on another, together with death in the social sense (Patterson, 2018; Winnebeck et al., 2023). Plantation slavery in the American South is merely one extreme manifestation of slavery in history. Modern historians understand slavery as a spectrum of personal dependency: from complete dependency to complete independence. When a person survives entirely by depending on another, that person is a slave; when a person survives independently, that person is free. As Cicero put it: ...liberty "does not consist in having a just master (dominus), but in having none".

In antiquity, entering into dependency was often a safer mode of survival than individual freedom. The underlying logic of Western European feudalism was exactly this: peasants sought the protection of local armed force — the knightly lord. Peasants paid  labour services and military service in exchange for protection of their persons, and at the same time for rights of use over land and capital. Correspondingly, the lord too bore a set of obligations. Recent historical research has also found that the living standards of Prussian serfs may often have been higher than those of nearby free smallholders, and that serfs likewise held a set of legal rights the lord could not strip from them (Eddie, 2013). In the past, the opposite of slavery was not modern individual freedom but kinship (Snyder, 2010). A slave who rashly fled bondage or left the group was likely to end up enslaved all over again. Acemoglu tells a story in his book The Narrow Corridor (2019). In the nineteenth century a Congolese man, Goi, was seized as a slave; at the port a missionary ransomed him, but Goi said: "I am free — so they tell me, at any rate — but I do not believe it, because I do not understand what freedom means, and I think I am now the white man's slave. I do not want freedom, because I would only be seized and sold again." 

Summing up Chinese history, great writer Lu Xun (鲁迅) said that it contained only two kinds of age: "first, ages in which people wished to be slaves and could not manage it; second, ages in which people had, for the time being, settled securely into being slaves." (一，想做奴隶而不得的时代；二，暂时做稳了奴隶的时代。) An old Chinese saying makes the same point: better to be a dog in times of peace than a man in times of chaos (宁为太平犬，不做乱世人). Compared with suffering violence directly in an age of chaos — an age in which one cannot even manage to be a slave — depending on another as a slave in peacetime is the more attractive option. Under the Qing Empire, being entitled to refer to oneself in front of the emperor as Aha (奴才, Manchu: Aha, "slave") was a way of displaying status, not a debasement of one's standing or  personhood. According to the findings of research on world slavery and on Chinese history, for ordinary people an age of settled slavery was not necessarily worse than an age in which one wished to be a slave and could not. In Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia: which is better, being killed by the Mongols, or surviving as a slave of the Great Khan?

Sitara's strong sense of belonging to her original master's household is therefore intelligible. She began as a slave who had been trafficked or seized, and was entrusted by a slave merchant to Fatima's household for her education. The household of her mistress Fatima taught her knowledge and protected her from Mongol blades, and Fatima, on her own deathbed, called her "daughter" — thereby, in legal terms, already freeing her and recognising her as a member of the family. But a further question remains: why was Sitara, a slave, able to receive an education at all?

The Slave as the Most Loyal Partner

In terms of historical background, large-scale agricultural slavery was exceedingly rare in the Islamic world; slaves were still used mainly for domestic labour and urban services (Gordon, 2021; Ware, 2011). That Sitara receives an education in the anime follows not only from religious and moral requirements, but also from slaveholding practices that were widespread in history.

The economic historians Dari-Mattiacci and De Oliveira (2021) argue that, relative to free labour, slave labour has two distinguishing features: 1. slaves can be punished, whereas free labourers cannot (though consider the fines levied inside Chinese firms — is it that free labourers really cannot be punished, or that these labourers are not in fact free persons?); 2. slaves cannot leave their employer at will (consider modern non-compete agreements and post-resignation litigation). The first makes it possible to deploy slaves in large numbers on simple labour, just as slavery is conventionally imagined, since the cost of punishment is always lower than that of reward. The second, however, means that training slaves and entrusting them with important responsibilities is in fact the more economically rational course, because the slaveholder can fully appropriate the returns to that skill training, while the slave's loyalty is guaranteed institutionally. Nobel laureates in economics Fogel and Engerman (1995) likewise found that slavery in the American South also used Black slaves in urban labour rather than only simple agricultural work. Subsequent research in economic history has confirmed this point (Hilt, 2020).

Complex labour performed by slaves was hardly confined to work involving elaborate crafts. In classical Athens there existed so-called "public slaves," owned by the polis, who were thought harder to bribe and easier to punish. Hayek held that a democratic society requires an elite corps of "impartial arbiters" independent of every class — and the irony is that the ancient Athenians achieved this purpose using slaves. Consider, specifically, the Scythian archers of Athens: the city hired this body of slave police to keep order in the assembly, and they had the power to arrest citizens or to eject from the chamber any citizen who disrupted proceedings. Or consider Athens' public slaves: they served as government archivists, mint workers, assayers of silver coin, and state executioners. The religious reason for choosing a slave as executioner was that the slave was an outsider, so that his act of killing would not draw the wrath of the gods onto the body of citizens (Rihll, 2011).

History furnishes countless further examples showing that a slave who won his master's favour could acquire enormous wealth and power, sometimes even shaping the fate of an empire. The familia Caesaris of ancient Rome included slaves, and some people of such origin could hold immense de facto political power and wealth. And that is to say nothing of the famous Mamluks and the Janissaries of the Ottoman sultans. Korea's Yi Ŭimin (이의민 / 李義旼) and China's Yi Yin (伊尹) and Baili Xi (百里奚) were all of slave origin. This echoes the earlier point: the enslaved could in fact alter their individual circumstances within the system of dependency, and many historical slaveries were dynamic in practice.

The emperors of imperial China were all fond of promoting "worthy ministers" (贤臣) and "solitary ministers" (孤臣) who had no great-clan background. The myth of upward mobility attached to the imperial examination system (keju 科举) likewise stressed that one might be "a farm lad in the morning and ascend the emperor's hall by evening" (朝为田舍郎，暮登天子堂), that noble sons come out of humble gates (寒门出贵子). In his final years Mao Zedong too promoted Wang Hongwen (王洪文), a man without connections. Beyond the narrative of so-called "appointment by talent alone" (任人唯才), for an emperor, employing someone whose every scrap of power derives from the emperor himself does more than anything else to ensure loyalty. The Ming emperors' use of palace slaves — eunuchs (宦官) — is the perfect illustration of this slaveholding logic. For the slave as an individual, depending on the master in order to secure a better life is plainly a more rational strategy than rising up to overthrow slavery. And for the emperor, employing someone already "socially dead" (Patterson, 2018) is more reliable than employing an outsider with a base of his own.

This logic of power is not confined to complex societies that have developed state apparatuses and administrative systems. Even in stateless societies, former slaves could be absorbed into kinship groups and take an active part in operating slavery. Snyder (2007) cites one historical record: in the late eighteenth century, identity among the Creek of northeastern North America rested on whether a person was a member of a kin group and clan, and they frequently absorbed people of African descent into the tribe. In 1788 three Black slaves fled a plantation and took refuge with the Creek. They were fortunate enough to be accepted as warriors, and seven weeks later they led a Creek attack on the plantation they had come from. Yet — contrary to what a modern person might imagine — they did not "liberate" their "Black brethren"; they killed three of the plantation's Black slaves and carried off and enslaved six others. They were now professional captors of Creek society. Racism is all but absent here; what determined an individual's fate was his position along the spectrum of personal dependency (Engerman, 2020).

Here, then, we can understand why Sitara received an education and was generally accepted by the society of her time — and why, in later plot developments (which I have not watched; I only know them roughly), she can exert political influence in Mongolia. Fictional though the story is, this accords with slaveholding practice in history. As the historian Engerman (2020) also points out, historically the relationship between slavery and racism is neither sufficient nor necessary. Sitara's Persian identity does not necessarily mean she would face discrimination in the Mongol Empire. The logic of power in classical empires did not have to operate along ethnic lines.

Conclusion

This essay is not about whether the anime's plot is historically accurate. It uses slavery as an entry point to introduce the many forms slavery has taken in history, and to use that "extreme value" to understand the logic by which political power operated in human societies across the overwhelming majority of historical periods:

1. The degree to which individuals are enslaved or free depends on their distance from the centre of power or from a kin group. The opposite of enslavement is not freedom; it is the shelter of kin-based organisation.

2. The slave, as a marginalised person who is "socially dead," has a fate that depends entirely on the master. And this is precisely what allows the master to entrust the slave with weighty responsibilities with peace of mind.

I do not, of course, wish to drape slavery in a rose-tinted veil of warm sentiment. My hope is rather that readers come to appreciate the diversity of human societies and the wider range of their possibilities. What we find is that the logic behind slavery and personal dependency exists across civilisations and across time and space. From the standpoint of the social sciences, then, this is a "universal regularity" about human society and behaviour. Having entered modern civil society, we have come to believe that the opposite of enslavement is freedom — yet we keep encountering the echoes of history. These echoes may not be the residue of an old society lingering after the birth of a new one; they may be the underlying code of human interaction.