Sure, but since most of my ancestors were peasants, and since we have too few examples of modern successful nomadic societies, I believe my PoV is reasonable.

The tragedy is that their society will be raiding; will be taking people and selling as slaves; and, obviously, will get smashed with impunity as soon as an opportunity presents.

From the pastoralist's point of view their hunting grounds are being raided by agriculturalists. And it is states -- which are without exception agricultural socieities -- that are responsible for the vast majority of human slavery in history.

> since most of my ancestors were peasants I believe my PoV is reasonable.

Uh, that is... quite a leap there. Not sure that one follows from the other.

> the vast majority

As a percentage of the population, or in absolute numbers?

That's hardly the sticking point - the very notion of "state" is relatively modern with respect to practices such as slavery.

In 'recent' history, Viking/Norse-Gael Dublin was one of the major slave trading centres of Europe from the 9th to the 12th Century.

Do we classify the Vikings, here settled in the one city and raising crops for three hundred years, as nomads? Is their state the state of Ireland, the place that they are taking many slaves from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Ireland#Viking_peri...

> From the pastoralist's point of view their hunting grounds are being raided by agriculturalists.

True up to a point, but the agriculturalists are able to support far more human flourishing on the same land - hence why they won the fight. And AIUI for much of the time when both existed and were in conflict, the pastoralists were essentially parasitic on the agriculturalists (in that they were taking more by raiding than they would ever have gained through hunting).

> And it is states -- which are without exception agricultural socieities -- that are responsible for the vast majority of human slavery in history.

Formal, documented slavery perhaps - but that's because those are the only societies with formal, documented anything. How much choice do people in those societies have of what kind of work to do, much less not to work? How much choice do women have of who to marry, much less not to marry (and how much choice of how they're treated within that marriage)? Of course you can choose not to follow the customs of your tribe, but at that point how much protection is there for your property or even your life?

Are you seriously conflating getting all of your relatives killed in a raid and you being captured to be shipped overseas to be treated like an animal for the rest of your life - with getting married within the commnunity where you were born and raised??

Forced marriage is generally recognised as slavery, and very common even today, and in many of these communities everyone was de facto forced to marry.

And every man, too.

If you conflate these two options, though, it does not make sense to discuss anything with you.

Population density != human flourishing.

>> hence why they won the fight.

More likely, they won because there were always far more of them, and Eurasian trade shifted from the "silk road" to the oceans.

>> those are the only societies with formal, documented anything

You can't be serious.

"Xiongnu", the early Chinese ethnonym for their nomadic northern neighbors, literally contains a word meaning "slave".

And I thought that people always try to settle and agriculture anywhere they could. Only where they couldn't that people have to resort to pastoralism. There's a reason why China didn't expand agriculture into Mongolia steppe.

It's a bit more nuanced than that and they have, at great expense. Human subsistence strategies tend to be well optimized for the conditions they exist in. Greater Mongolia, both the modern country and what's now the province of Inner Mongolia in China, does have areas of arable land. One of the major issues is these areas tend to shift over time. Some years, one valley gets sufficient rainfall, some years, another. Pastoral communities can easily adapt to this and other marginal conditions much more effectively.

But you can also approach these issues with say, a couple centuries of large-scale agricultural development projects like China has done in Inner Mongolia. If you build massive irrigation networks and invest heavily in other technologies, you can develop the area for sedentary agriculture at the expense of the grasslands.

Farming is a _lot_ more work than hunting and gathering (if food is plenty) and people mostly resorted to it out of desperation, and farmers had to be _forced_ through slavery to do the work throughout most of history.