Is "Memory" Part of the Technic History?

In "Memory" by Poul Anderson, a regime called the Hegemony restores interstellar civilisation after the fall of a human interstellar Empire. In "The Sharing of Flesh" by Poul Anderson, the Allied Planets restore interstellar civilisation after the fall of the Terran Empire which Manuel Argos founded in "The Star Plunderer" and Dominic Flandry defended in several stories and novels. Are these the same Empire? The stories do not cross-refer because they are set either in different fictitious futures or in different spatial regions. If the Hegemony and the Alliance occupy opposite ends of the former imperial territory and expand in different directions, then they must lack common references and terminologies. For example, Hegemonists call the post-Imperial interregnum "the Dark Ages" whereas Flandry's direct successors call it "the Long Night." Also, the repressive Hegemony was too unstable to have survived long. When, at the end of "Memory," a "deviant unit," i. e., a free man, starts to build an alternative to the Hegemony, this could become the Commonalty which we know will succeed the Allied Planets.

"Memory" attributes to the fallen Empire a mental technology that did not exist in Flandry's period but that could have developed later especially when the declining Empire became more repressive. A Hegemonic unit says that altered stellar positions have invalidated Imperial charts. This kind of background inconsistency is often smoothed over when disparate stories are shoehorned into a single timeline. But, if we take this detail seriously, then it implies a much later date for the Hegemony. In that case, the Hegemony and its rivals could instead be one of the branches of humanity that, we are told, co-exist with the Commonalty in two or three spiral arms. Such far flung civilizations can be expected to endure for a correspondingly longer period and the short lived Hegemony could be an incident during such a period.

There is another possibility. By their actions, Hans Molitor, the usurper, and Dominic Flandry, Intelligence Officer and Imperial Adviser, prolong the Imperial period, thus giving some colonized planets more time to prepare for the war, piracy, economic collapse and isolation of the Long Night. This in turn later leads to the beneficial regimes of the Allied Planets and the Commonalty. The Hegemony might be what would have happened otherwise.

Thus, "Memory" is set in the Allied Planets period, the Commonalty period, a divergent timeline or, as Anderson himself believed, an unrelated timeline. I had thought of only the first and fourth possibilities when I started to write. If "Memory" were to be incorporated into The History of Technic Civilization, then a concluding collection for the series could contain just four stories, each set in a different milieu: Long Night, Allied Planets, Hegemony and Commonalty. The Night Face is one Allied Planets novel. The first two stories of the History cover the first two periods of interplanetary and interstellar exploration, the latter called "the Grand Survey." Between the two end points are the two major periods: the Polesotechnic League (main characters Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkayn although there are others) and the Terran Empire (main character Dominic Flandry although there are others). Between these two periods is the pivotal story about Manuel of his Dynasty the First. With or without "Memory," the Technic History remains a substantial series.