Thanks for the additional info! Continuing this thread because I find this (& the concept of "race" in fantasy) interesting to think about:
Derogatory comments about dark skin are not the same thing as the concept of "race" that trans-Atlantic chattel slavery and colonialism created irl over the course of the late 17th-19th centuries—the idea that there are different biological "types" of person with different traits, legal statuses, etc. There's nothing in the history of Thedas that would produce this type of "race," because chattel slavery was never based on phenotype along the lines of skin color. I think this is probably a case of the writers importing irl values because they lack imagination. At a stretch & to be generous, I suppose you could say it's analogous to certain aesthetic shorthands and stereotypes about dark coloring that existed in Europe prior to the invention of this specific conception of "race" (these ideas were then harnessed into the service of "racism" proper as it developed).
I didn't say that Thedas doesn't have systems of imperialist extraction. I said that it doesn't have systems of imperialist extraction that run along the same lines as "racial" ideas based on geography / phenotypical things like skin colour, where darker people are associated with 'colonised' status. People irl talk about the "global North" versus the "global South," "imperial core" versus "imperial periphery," or "East" versus "West," to express the point that histories of colonialism have created conceptions of global geography where different racial "types" of person, or different "types" of civilisation, exist in different places. There's an irl historical conception that hotter and "dirtier" climates produce darker skin and racially degenerate stock over evolutionary time, & that's where we get racially "inferior" people from. This doesn't line up with anything in Thedas:
Orlais conquered (and then lost) the Dales and Ferelden; the Tevinter Imperium conquered (and then lost) (parts of?) the Free Marches; the Tevinter Imperium and Par Vollen fight over Seheron. There's no concentration of colonial power in one small area in this map analogous to Europe; no continent that is fought over by various imperial powers from that region analogous to the scramble for Africa; nothing analogous to the fighting between the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French and Dutch over Indonesia as a way of controlling the Asian spice trade. This specific colonial history is what created the association between "exotic" lands and "spices," and there is no reason for it to exist in Thedas.
3. I don't think that a place merely exporting a certain type of good is enough to create this kind of exotified, romanticised association between that good and that place—as I said in the OP, historically what happened is that the "Orient" was "reduced to stereotypes of [itself] to drive a market for 'exotic' goods." This is Said's argument in Orientalism.
I suppose you could assume that part of what the Qunari and the Imperium are fighting over Seheron about is control of trade routes for spices and other goods? I think that this would be pretty unimaginative and boring, though, and a major loss of the ability to think through alternate histories that fantasy ought to give us. Like you said, it's probably just the developers & the fandom having an association between "distant place with hot climate" and "spices" based on their own colonialist ideas, and not really interrogating that.
4. It's interesting that Sten, who is from Par Vollen, is the one who canonically associates Seheron with export goods such as tea and incense. There could be something interesting there if it were intentional! But there's still no reason to give this attitude to somebody from Ferelden, I don't think...
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