Estatism

Estatism is the economic arrangement that characterises modern Vaestdom, based on the division of land and labour between closed enterprises known as estates which act as autonomous vassals of the imperial Banner. Though estates are similar in many respects to private businesses, Vaestism makes no distinction between public and private spheres of life, and as such they are bound inextricably to the central hierarchy of the Banner, constituted by imperial fiat and mandated to operate ultimately in the interests of the Banner as a whole. As extensions of the Banner, estates are also considerably more far-reaching in their authority than private enterprises, exercising political and social authority over their employees and the inhabitants of the territories they own.

Since estates are agents of imperial authority, they are superseded only by the Schools and the central imperial will itself; for this reason, it is often very difficult for individuals to move between estates. Estates are highly secretive in their practices, though the ubiquitous presence of Scholars ensures their central regulation. They are distinguished in striving for complete vertical integration of production processes: competition between estates has been primarily enabled through the provision of central shops and warehouses which sell products from a range of estates, and through the regulated distribution of external products within particular estates' territories.

Through the legal device of servience, estates that are subject in principle to one Banner may exist on the territory of another—or anywhere in the world—without thereby imputing their territory to the home Banner.

History

The origins of the estatist system can be traced to the transformation of Kunentsyism over the course of the Neritsovid period. In the Kunentsyist system, a simple arrangement prevailed in which members of the Secote class known as the High Nobility exercised authority over domains granted them by the sovereign. From the mid-16th century this system met with an escalating challenge from the increasingly assertive class of urban merchants. This antagonism came to a head with the War of the Pact of Osan in 1611, in which a league of trading cities initiated a direct confrontation with the Emperor of the Vesnites; the war ended with a crushing imperial victory, however, and the Eternal Treaty of Nardash of 1617 effectively eradicated the power of the incipient merchant class, imposing undivided imperial control in the cities and heavily regulating the flow of trade in the empire. Though this may have seemed a powerful justification of Kunentsyism and the traditional authority of the High Nobility, in fact the managed death of the independent mercantile class fundamentally undermined the system by forcing the rural estates to assume novel responsibilities in managing trade and resource production. The remainder of the 17th century, indeed, saw the emergence of 'noble-profiteers' who effected the transformation of many Kunentsydoms—or, in some cases, areas of Kunentsydoms—from classic feudatory territories to intensively developed estates with diverse productive capacities beyond traditional agriculture. This, in modern historiography, was the inauguration of the Old Estate.

The Old Estate, robustly combining the entrenched power of the established aristocracy with incipient capitalist modes of production, soon attained a supremacy which was to last effectively until the Radiance. It is difficult to determine the extent to which this was the result of self-conscious assertion on the part of a hegemonic class of noble-profiteers: in reality, many in the High Nobility paid little attention to the process of transformation, and often it proceeded under the guidance of reformist Scholars or even enterprising rabtat rather than effective central direction within the broader structure of the Adjoinment or family corporation. In any case, however, the fall of the Neritsovid Empire and the halting disintegration of Vaestdom in the 18th century contributed significantly to the development of the Old Estate by further weakening the effective domestic power of the divided imperial authorities vis-à-vis the High Nobility. It was made constantly clear through this period that the rulers of Vaestdom ruled with the essential consent of the High Nobles. Far from the essential class transformation that typified Messenian economic development in the period, the Old Estate saw the assumption of new responsibilities by an already entrenched aristocracy, rooting capitalist production in the hierarchical control of land and human labour.

The rapid diversification and complication of industry brought about by the technological changes of the early Radiance saw the decline and transformation of the Old Estate. As the necessity for a managerial bureaucracy expanded and the aristocratic estates came to depend on ambitious town-based clerks and, in the Rasheem territories, the Serim, the centre of power began to pivot back toward the cities. Combined with the intensifying intellectual assault on the established aristocracy that characterised the Radiance thought, this new class of managers soon began to assert independence. Over the course of the High Radiance, the decaying superstructures of the large, dispersed, and diverse holdings of the Old Estate nurtured and gave birth to a system of much smaller, intensive landholdings, generally managed as professionalised Comptrollerships. In many countries, the High Nobility retreated from economic life not only to turn their attention to intensifying internal struggles for power, but also to defend their established privileges against political and social attack. Paradoxically, however, as the High Nobles of the Old Estate attained increasing formal centralisation of power, their hold on social and economic life disintegrated precipitously.

The new system that emerged from the accelerating collapse of the Old Estate was the modern New Estate. In this transformation, the managerial divisions of the noble estates first asserted and then successively acquired independence. From the 1870s until well into the 20th century, a series of demediatisation measures were unfolded across the various Vaestic Banners. Demediatisation involved the detachment and subordination of the managerial subdivisions directly to the imperial centre, transforming them into estates in their own right and effectively eliminating the traditional feudatories. Though carrying over the formal structure of the aristocratic holdings, the new demediatised estates were freed from the binds of traditional privileges and duties, and fluidly managed and redistributed land and labour. This process was often marked by violent upheaval and resistance, not just on the part of the High Nobility but also by the peasants and agriculturalists who were marginalised and stripped of their established security by the encroaching transformation. These disputes were effectively rendered irrelevant by the massive centralisation of state power entailed by the advent of the Long War; with this fiscal and political consolidation, the New Estate attained a final victory over the older aristocracy.