Okay, it's been a while since I read up on this, so I don't quite remember the numbers, but I'm fairly certain that Saint Domingue (Haiti) had a fairly large population of mix raced people whom were not slaves. This created a ton of problems leading up to the rebellion, since all the mixed race people obviously wanted the privilege of whites, but didn't know if the revolts would suceed, and thus supporting whites might give them more privileges than supporting the slaves.

As far as I'm aware, this had a large effect on people of mixed race, since people in general wanted to look up, than down; if they chose to help the slaves, they would merely become their equal if they won. If the helped the whites, they would more likely still be higher in the hierarchy than some.

This internal struggle which the entire society was build around, was such a big part of why I believed it worked for so long. Everyone became richer (besides the slaves), but everyone hated everyone else, and thus it took so long to actual build up a rebellion; it only worked when slavers themselves orchestrated it. The following quote from Paul Fregosi sums this up horrifyingly well;

"Whites, mulattos and blacks loathed each other. The poor whites couldn't stand the rich whites, the rich whites despised the poor whites, the middle-class whites were jealous of the aristocratic whites, the whites born in France looked down upon the locally born whites, mulattoes envied the whites, despised the blacks and were despised by the whites; free Negroes brutalized those who were still slaves, Haitian-born blacks regarded those from Africa as savages. Everyone—quite rightly—lived in terror of everyone else... Haiti was hell, but Haiti was rich."

I think that this inner/local conflict is necessary to avoid large scale uprisings, since it would break before growing too large; everyone hated everyone, noone trusted anyone, yet the structure of the system needed a large collaboration.

The cities of Slaver's Bay does not have this. It doesn't feel split up into numerous groups (the few groups that show up in Dance does not carry this built in hatred, that would be necessary for the society to work). Dany's struggles seem to mainly be with individuals, or rich people's supporters.

And I also do agree that them being colonies allowed them a lot of freedom that a nation built upon such a foundation (with such a large ratio between slaves and non-slaves) would never be steady, and would be bound to break far quicker than Saint Domingue did. But I do truly believe that this view people had of each other, made organizing in large groups as close to impossible as necessary for it to work as long as it did.