"'Local self-government is so strong, most places, that I see actual feudalism evolvin' within the Imperial structure.'"
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT Chapter Nine, p. 83.
Dominic Flandry reflects that the slowness of interstellar communication:
"...made a slow growth of feudalism, within the Imperial structure itself, inevitable. Of course, that would give civilization something to fall back on when the Long Night finally came."
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010).
These are the two themes of the Flandry series:
the Empire will fall;
there will be systems in place enabling at least some planetary systems to cope with the "Long Night."
-copied from here.
Lastly for this post but earlier in history, Poul and Karen Anderson's Gratillonius and his colleagues began to build feudalism after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from Northern Europe. See Proto-Feudalism.
2 comments:
Feudalism has a number of definitions, whether you look at it from the bottom up, where things like manors and seigneurialism are most important, or from the top down, where the decentralized nature of authority and its delegation via chains of vassalage are the significant markers.
I think Hauksberg was looking at it in the second context.
Kaor, Paul!
And, broadly defined as meaning local self gov't, I'm inclined to approve of "feudalism." And such a system doesn't have to exactly follow the structure given in the chart you chose for illustrating this blog piece. Some examples of the kind of feudalism Hauksberg and Flandry saw evolving within the Empire would probably be Nyanza, Aeneas, Dennitza, etc.
Sean
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