Smugglers probably wern't that desperate with an attitude like that. Mostly just lazy opportunists who realized they could steal and get more than actually working. Justifying it to themselves as "muh life's not fair so I need to steal from others!"
Why am I doing the authour's work by adding...
Slavery in the LN and Manga worlds are more fetish than function. People who took slaves for something leisurely like sex/domestic labour would be very well off as the leisure class were a huge minority through most of history prior to the industrial revolution, even craftsmen would have...
Actually I think there would be a good market for increasing the value of slaves. If a master would take care and teach new skills to their slaves they would make significant profit from reselling. Abusing slaves is a net loss over all.
No idea how old this story's "country" is when we have conversations like the one in this chapter.
One game i like to reference for political changes and reformation is Victoria II where, the player intervening in their selected nation can use a few tricks to get the country to take the path...
Well, to be fair for their period, it would be pretty hard for people to get out and meet people when there was little leisure time to go meet and date others. That is especially so when travel outside of one's local area would be uncommon.
Fire ships were a thing; however, those were big floating bonfires producing enough heat they COULD set fire to a ship. If the flame burned high enough it could even reach the sails if the ship had any.
From what I can tell from the chapter, the pirates were aiming to delay one fleet while...