User:Seb/Notes

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Note on steppe people

"@Seb the mecema aren't a distinct ethnic group, it's just the Chotarian name for anyone living in the desert. Doubt there are many Secotes there though until the secote invasion. Dulogars zakhrins and the original mentusians are separate groups from the Secotes and speak a different language family. The Dulogar language is iirc Avar"

Notes regarding AGW

Based on discussion of emissions and industrial dev. we will have carbon levels at RL 1980s levels due to a lower world population and the absence of the recent Asian spike of industrial growth. Scientists and the educated elites are well aware of the incoming issues, but there is little visible change yet in the climate system. There is probably some degree of religious-political posturing the Vaestic world about it (unify against impeding catastrophe, convert more, etc.). In Messenia the common person is probably mostly not aware of it, and the problem is ignored in the rest of the world. The political posturing in OJ could create the notion of a "Vaestic Hoax" in some Messenian circles.

Further thought: the lack of deforestation in Serania until the 1600s would have compensated all previous developments in the Old World, however the CO2 increase curve would have been steeper once this started to catch up with RL.

References

Old discussion re slavery in Savam

This would apply the strongest where the Secote had more influence (Savam and Zep), other regions would be doing the same but slower.

[9:37:47 PM] Vince Garton: pre-Secote: slave industry, classical system
Secote invasion: deurbanisation, slave industry breaks up in many places, localised manorialisation
Secote period: process of deurbanisation/manorialisation slows down as Secotes Messenianise and conform more to traditional patterns
second Secote invasion: further development of manorialisation, essentially repeat of first process
early post-Secote: manorial and slave systems coexist, regional segmentation
mid post-Secote: conflicts emerge between central administrations and cities, feudalism spreads, monarchs move to feudalising their estates and side with the landholders
late post-Secote: slave industry effectively dissolves into feudalism in most areas, monarchs become very powerful by integrating the former slave territories into their domains and combining this power with the traditional central administration; birth of the modern state

Note

Rep of Quesailles would be be a specific area where slavery is retained for longer, as there's no monarch at first to feudalise (noble republic wouldn't allow that to maintain power equilibrum within the noble ranks) and although it might be feudalising to some degree during its decline, that would stop once integrated into Dordanie, become a part of "regional identity". Need to determine when it stops there completely, but in the end it will have a hard time to keep it forever when the rest of Savam is not doing it anymore.

Further

[9:16:21 PM] Vince Garton: if the regime coopts the landholders against the cities, and builds its central power in that way, then slavery would be outcornered substantially because the centrally administered areas are not only going to be towns, they're just going to be areas of slave industry in general, so the administration is not identical with the cities and there is a potential for conflict between the two. In that case the administration might want to get the landholders on its side, when that process completes, you would effectively have a fairly conventional late-feudal system with a nascent centralising state. This can't really happen in somewhere like Quesailles where it's a republic, but in a monarchy this would be fairly straightforward

Even further

[10:12:12 PM] Sébastien Demmel: in the area which are still slave based, such as quesailles, and we have noble land owners, the difference with manoralism
[10:12:45 PM] Vince Garton: is that the nobles aren't necessarily landowners lol, or rather, that they aren't necessarily noble because they're landowners. it would be a continuation of the classical system where the aristocrats are more like patricians
[10:13:51 PM] Sébastien Demmel: well there would be this aspect, but regarding the ones that are indeed landowner, the difference here is that their slaves work their land, and the noble do not have legal power devolved to them, right? all the land is effectively their desmene
[10:15:55 PM] Vince Garton: yes
[10:16:05 PM] Sébastien Demmel: okay
[10:16:11 PM] Vince Garton: well they probably aren't slaves though for a start, they would need a level of independence because they'd be tenants rather than slaves
[10:16:58 PM] Sébastien Demmel: ?
[10:17:09 PM] Sébastien Demmel: the people working the land?
[10:17:15 PM] Vince Garton: yes who else lol
[10:17:21 PM] Sébastien Demmel: well where are the slaves then? apart from the domestic ones
[10:17:29 PM] Vince Garton: in the areas that aren't feudalised, working in slave industries
[10:17:39 PM] Sébastien Demmel: well that's what I'm speaking of
[10:18:12 PM] Sébastien Demmel: what do you mean as "slave industry"? My question was in rural non-feudal area, that the slaves would be working the land instead of serf/villain or free tenants
[10:18:44 PM] Vince Garton: slave industry can be anything from farming to mining, but on farms it would operate on a different structure, the slaves would be integral parts of their owner's household, they would be fed and maintained by the owner. In a feudal system the estate held by a particular person is much larger and the serfs are substantially independent in their day-to-day lives. The serfs can own their own things, for instance, and often they can sell or keep a portion of their produce whereas a slave by definition can't keep anything, everything they produce inherently belongs to their owner. But also more generally in these areas with slave industry there is likely to be less focus on farming in the first place, it would also incorporate things like quarrying, mining, large-scale woodcutting
[10:23:21 PM] Sébastien Demmel: who takes over these activities in a feudal system?
[10:26:05 PM] Vince Garton: the guild system
[10:26:17 PM] Sébastien Demmel: so the burghers
[10:26:20 PM] Vince Garton: yes, instead of large groups of slave gangs there are organised independent workers employed by merchants who have wages and so on
[10:27:40 PM] Sébastien Demmel: but who is the owner of the forests or mines? Feudal lords? or the guilds directly
[10:28:11 PM] Vince Garton: at some level probably the feudal lords, but in practice that probably manifests in the form of taxation. The feudal manorial system as such only really applies to agriculture (in terms of extracting resources). From reading about it now it seems that a lot of these industries basically collapsed in the early feudal period, for example there were no operational silver mines in Europe for a long time after the fall of Rome
[10:31:20 PM] Sébastien Demmel: but the messenia collapse is supposed to be less widespread, I gather?
[10:32:21 PM] Vince Garton: yes, and it would be maintained under the slave system
[10:32:40 PM] Sébastien Demmel: Ok, so the slave areas might be for a time richer than the others since they maintain more organised industry, right? at the beginning at least
[10:33:29 PM] Vince Garton: Since medieval times miners had been organised by the Duchy of Cornwall into four Stannaries, which policed the industry in a manner not dissimilar to an urban guild, ensuring standards of the refined tin, limiting membership and adjudicating on disputes between tinners. … Tin was also subject to ‘pre-emption’, the right of the Crown to purchase all that was produced, although this right was usually farmed out to London merchants and pewterers, who consequently had a monopoly over the trade. that's relevant as an example, and yes re the slave areas that's very likely

[10:35:30 PM] Vince Garton: interesting according to this the miners weren't organised, they were independent, each miner owned their own means of production which only changed in the 17th century with the transition to wage labour. that's obviously a big contrast to slave industry
[10:36:20 PM] Sébastien Demmel: Yes
[10:37:25 PM] Vince Garton: and actually slave industry is much more like the modern form, so that could provide an interesting basis for modern capitalism if it lingers around in places like Quesailles, though obviously with a change towards wage labour following the disappearance of slavery as such

[10:40:07 PM] Vince Garton: no but that's the thing, it's not pre-corporate, it is corporate. The Roman slave industry was organised on an effectively corporate basis. you had a person like Cassius Longinus who owned and employed massive amounts of slaves in mines in faraway places like Iberia and under Roman law that whole enterprise comprised a corporation
[10:42:00 PM] Sébastien Demmel: I see
[10:42:30 PM] Vince Garton: I mean the actual term corporation comes from that usage in Roman law in the first place lol
[10:42:49 PM] Sébastien Demmel: would the fact that such thing would survive around Quesailles might help the region becoming an dominant economic centre, even after the end of slavery?
[10:42:53 PM] Vince Garton: yes, no doubt

On colonisation of the Seranias

[7:35:00 AM] Chris Hitchcock: so there is an issue [7:35:18 AM] Chris Hitchcock: which is that colonising the seranias would have been very different, in pretty much all terms, from colonising the americas [7:36:01 AM] Chris Hitchcock: the early thrust of american colonisation largely targeted areas which had established infrastructure [7:36:36 AM] Chris Hitchcock: and it was possible to capture large sections of an existing workforce and often put them to work on existing projects [7:37:21 AM] Chris Hitchcock: later on the tiny and largely unsuccessful colonies in north america like virginia got a boost from a) being able to import slaves and b) the realisation that it was possible to cultivate tropical goods that it wasn't possible to grow in europe [7:37:45 AM] Chris Hitchcock: now there is plenty of impetus for several sections of joriscian society to emigrate... [7:38:34 AM] Chris Hitchcock: population pressure and especially in the 17th century the crushing of the beetje [7:38:51 AM] Chris Hitchcock: the expansion of the power of the state and the high nobility [7:38:53 AM] Chris Hitchcock: etc [7:39:16 AM] Chris Hitchcock: and also joriscia has a large existing population of slave labourers who continue to exist and can be exported [7:39:21 AM] Chris Hitchcock: but what happens on the messenian side? [7:39:43 AM] Chris Hitchcock: possibly the lack of an obvious workforce accounts for the relatively slow speed of messenian colonial development [7:39:49 AM] Chris Hitchcock: compared to joriscia, which uses rabtat [7:40:30 AM] Chris Hitchcock: later on states possibly forcibly transfer parts of their population to the seranias to compete with and defend against a growing joriscian strategic threat [8:06:37 AM] Chris Hitchcock: also what is established about the vesnite colonies is that metropolitan authority is pretty weak there from the beginning of the 18th century on, at least in the vast areas that agamar (which is unusual and very much ahead of the game) doesn't control [8:07:10 AM] Chris Hitchcock: there are also large independent trade leagues which begin to emerge in the 18th century [8:07:47 AM] Chris Hitchcock: what I think might make sense is if joriscia is well ahead in the colonies game and joriscian colonisation, which is largely privately driven, encompasses the majority of the seranias at one point [8:08:38 AM] Chris Hitchcock: but the weakness of the joriscian colonial order and the unwillingness/inability of joriscian powers to project power there makes the colonies easy targets for messenia when it starts to play catch-up on a serious basis later [8:09:12 AM] Chris Hitchcock: terophan and azophin only begin to reestablish direct rule over the colonies in the 19th century

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