[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by johndallman

It sounds like a whole planet of Holy Roman Empire. That might be a useful model, actually: an Emperor who is elected from among the kings and gods, who lacks power other than that of his own state, but has influence.

Good. I'm trying to get it not to turn out as a whole planet of India.

Originally Posted by whswhs

I think it could probably be made to work. In effect it's a lot like a caste system, with very overt caste markers, as seen through the eyes of Jack Vance.

Yeah. I don't want it to look too much like caste, because this is Navabharata, which was once the official national prestige colony of the the Republic of India, and I don't want to suggest national atavism. The reason it keeps turning out like this is that during the Age of Piracy it is accessible and vulnerable, which draws in a large number of high-tech invaders setting themselves up as kings.

On the other hand, it's not obvious to me that the entire planet will be homogenous in political culture.

This is of particular concern to me because it is a large planet with short days and high surface temperature, which makes the equatorial zone uninhabitably hot and windy. With late Renaissance industrial technology there's no connection between the north polar habitable zone and the south polar habitable zone. And I know that really I ought to write up two quite different colonies.

What prevents the young nobles of some one kingdom becoming fascinated not merely with offworld technology, but with offworld ideas about public choice and sound administrative design, and implementing, oh, an Adam Smithian reform program in their kingdom? This needs a clear answer to avoid "It was raining on Mongo that night," I think.

Same thing that kept India in a state of developmental stagnation for forty years, and is still doing the same for Africa. War, political and economic fragmentation, bad roads, internal tariffs and import restrictions, plutocracy, rent-seeking, power-hunger, slow and unreliable courts, sovereign immunity, under-developed markets for labour and capital resistance to change….

To Smithise a kingdom on Navabharata you would first have to be elected king by the other gods, which means either persuading your elders to support a liberalising program or dissimulating your liberalising agenda. Then you have to create a competitive market for labour, which means (a) giving up your power to assign your subjects to the work you see fit and (b) creating competing employers. Then you have to create a competitive market for savings, which means (a) giving up enough of your divine income that the workers have a saveable excess and (b) creating a number of competing entrepreneurs to bid for capital. You probably have to abolish a lot of people's customary rights. Then when you do it it doesn't work very well because your pocket-handkerchief kingdom doesn't have sufficiently extensive markets to supply an industrial revolution and consume its output. Conservative neighbours declare you heretic and invade to stop you from upsetting the social order that they are kings and gods under. If anything goes badly, if there are uncomfortable transition phases, you are executed and fed to the mob while your family elect a new king.

And al this so that you can give up being a fabulously wealthy monarch receiving divine honours in favour of making other people prosperous.

The system is obviously going to develop in some way. Probably one of the larger kingdoms, one with a bit of economic scale will go first, probably near the Imperial enclave and with access to a spaceport. Perhaps the Empire will build a sea-port and international rail network centred on the main spaceport. Shipping magnates will accumulate capital not in royal hands, and the royal family might get big enough and of wide-enough responsibilities that it develops multiple competing nobles each with enough capital to found separate enterprises and compete for labour. That kingdom will industrialise, become powerful, and establish a commercial empire. That will either provoke a series of wars or gradually drag the planet (well, one polar region) through an industrial revolution.

That could easily take centuries, though.

Anyway, I'm not especially troubled about the plausibility of comminuted Balkanisation or economic stagnation. I reckon that they are sufficiently often found in example. The thing that I was afraid might set off people's fertiliser detectors was the God-gambitting aristocracy subject to the restrictions of sacred kingship. And that has passed without comment. Good.

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

The Empire is pretty schizo especially in this time period.

Oh, Navabharata as described above is certainly compatible with the feeble Empire of 532 PDT. But I'm doing the write-ups for 606.

I'm willing to except that they can't actually form a clear policy and implement it yet. Especially since this is only one planet of a whole class of messed up low-tech colonies near the core.

True. Of 35 colonies in Central Sector I'm getting eighteen that you might kindly call "pre" industrial, and they have populations from twice to thirty times that of the whole Imperial Service. And that's not even considering the demands of six hundred-odd colonies in the outer sectors.