Slavery

Upon their arrival on Emeriss, Humanity brought with them a grim tradition of captivity and forced labor of fellow sapient creatures. While some of these early Men balked at the idea of human slaves they had a more difficult time combating the idea of non-human slaves. Many of the first city-states were built on elven backs and the arrival of dwarves, gnomes, and halflings from their besieged homeworld only expanded the practice.
When the Empire of Duras opened the Great Gate to Catalainia and discovered the sheer variety of peoples who lived there, the practice of slavery exploded and for a time the number of slaves within the empire nearly rivaled that of the free population.
The first cracks in this institution appeared with the mysterious God-King Darrius XIV, who declared Ruelle a sovereign nation and all the people who dwelt there as free citizens.
After the rebellion of the Siegenthal and the rise of the Vennican Dominion, the Durasian military was spread too thin and in an effort to to avoid a potential uprising Emperor Halden Ala the First decreed that all slaves were now indentured servants, owed a wage and able to purchase their own freedom. To this day, slavery is illegal in Duras but the empire still maintains a robust economy of indenturement where servants can be bought and sold exactly as they always have but with the tantalizing promise of freedom always just out of reach.
While technically legal, the Siegenthalers have little use for slaves and the city-states and racial centers of the Borderlands have their own laws regarding slavery and its proliferation, but the Vennican Dominion fully endorses the practice among all non-humans, allowing the merciless and the cruel to make their fortunes even in this more enlightened age.