Monarchy does not prevent enslavement. In fact, serfdom is a relatively common feature of monarchy. That’s what those two things have to do with each other.
The UK, under a monarch, abolished slavery and set the Royal Navy to blockade slave ships.
Meanwhile, the USofA pre civil war under a President with no offical monarch (other than the Little King for a term arrangement) had extensive slave plantations.
Good that you agree slavery was abolished by a country with a monarch ... you skipped over the second point; the country most associated with industrial scale slavery in the world had no monarch.
It's a loose correlation you're making here, very much a "let's build this skyscraper with wet noodles instead of steel" approach.
Slavery was “abolished” in the UK while that same nation continued to traffic and profit from enslavement for quite a long time it’s “abolition”. Is your point that monarchy is good, or that slavery is associated with all forms of government?
"guest workers" as a term completely excludes serfs. Serfs are attached to the land, guest workers on the other hand come from a completely different place. North Korea is not a monarchy, and what's happening there is forced labour, or slavery.
The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy". People are so completely unable to provide evidence for that claim of it being common these days (500 years in the past being quite irrelevant here given numerous monarchies exist these days) that the closest you can get is by pointing to one single case, on the other side of the world from the monarchies we're talking about, that isn't serfdom and isn't a monarchy. Hardly a "relatively common feature".
Serfs were forced to work for little to no wages, and often can't leave the country because their employers confiscate their passports. That's about as close to modern serfdom as you can get.
> The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy".
It is. Some kind of serfdom was common throughout Europe until around 19-th century. Russia abolished it in 1861, in Austria in 1848, hardly "500 years". As usual, Wikipedia has a nice overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
Perhaps absolute would be a better wording. After all there are also very few absolute democracies, absolute free markets, etc, etc.
Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned it just isn't prevented in practice either. At which point I wonder about other localized abusive working and living conditions in many supposedly more developed and civilized countries.
> with hereditary power transfer
Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy? It seems to me that the defining characteristic is a single authority figure. Hereditary power transfer is just a natural consequence of basic self interest under those circumstances.
> Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned
Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
> Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy?
Yes. It's _the_ main characteristic of monarchy. Without it, you have run-of-the-mill autocracy (e.g. Putin in Russia or Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Hereditary power transfer means that the monarchy is an institution, with its own support structures (feudals, court, etc.).
The saying: "The king is dead, long live the king!" is not hypocrisy. It's a sign that the monarchy is an institution and can survive an individual monarch's death.
For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know. There's going to be a power struggle with unpredictable results. There is no line of succession for the true power.
It's almost as though the global political landscape has varied significantly over these thousands of years and various societal features (including monarchy, serfdom, slavery, etc) aren't inherently linked to one another.
My original point was that a monarchy permits both the best and worst possible outcomes because a single individual has maximal power to enact a unified vision. The observation could obviously apply in degrees to any dictatorship though, regardless of the official classification.
Yeah, that’s the ol’ philosopher-king argument. I get it, but I don’t really buy into it. I.e. if the next monarch is a despot, their rule is a part of the previous monarch’s actions… so even a truly good king will inevitably harm the people under them.
In other words, nothing.