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Old 10-12-2021, 08:11 PM   #693
jason taylor
 
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Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
Default Re: 'Imperial Culture' (non-canonista)

Subsidized Peoples:

With multi-thousand world societies sometimes conducting policies involving whole planets for centuries (like a terraforming project) it naturally comes to be that workers laboring for such will be in essence "ethnicized". The Terrans first saw this phenomenon when they met the Vilani and called such groups "castes" and sometimes they did resemble the groups in East Asia the term was meant to evoke. But as they expanded they developed similar groups in their own system.

In the Third Imperium the most obvious example of such is the network of contractors and suppliers that keep the Imperial Defense Forces going. But the civil service has examples too as do many groups associated with megacorporations. Several ImperialLines luxury passenger ships have a hereditary crew that marries by preference endogamously or at least with crews of other liners.

Members of such groups have a feudalistic relation to their employers and it is considered a point of honor to maintain a reciprocal relation. Which of course does not mean there are not treacherous employees or miserly or tyrannical employers. It means simply that such behavior is disapproved.
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