Chee Lan tells us that Polesotechnic League company factors and field agents "'...set up a little dunghill of an empire...'" (p. 372) on Tametha. I took this to mean that the company representatives oppressively exploited Tamethan labor, which would explain why the natives rebelled, although we are not shown any details of this exploitation.
On Valya, we are told of injustices perpetrated by Stellar Metals although, in this case, the injustices do not involve exploitation of local labor:
Stellar Metals chased out the gold miners who had been there before them;
Stellar mining machines break up the herds which are the Valyans' main food source;
Stellar neither picks at veins nor sifts streams but extracts quartz from mountainsides, leaving heaps of poisonous slag;
Stellar also diverts rivers through hydraulic separators, destroying aquatic life.
Thus, "Lodestar" and, after it, Mirkheim, show us serious problems within the League and also an ingenious solution devised by David Falkayn.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
what I see here is short sighted greed by entities like Stellar Metals. Nicholas van Rijn would not have behaved like that!
Ad astra! Sean
What they seem to have done is to control the conditions of trade to the extent that they could rig prices systematically... "extra-economic coercion" is the technical term.
They're controlling the -exchange- of products, but not directly controlling production. (This is much less troublesome -- it was the chosen MO of the East India Company, for example.)
By way of contrast, in the Americas the Spanish and British Empires totally reorganized -production-, in the process reorganizing, displacing or just wiping out the indigenous economic systems and/or populations.
This is potentially much more lasting and effective, but it's a high-investment type of imperialism, and also higher-risk.
The forms merge into each other. For example, when the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain in the post-Roman period, they weren't interested in (and anyway didn't have the organization for) preserving the Roman forms of economic production and exchange. The invaders were petty chiefs and their warbands and kin, from groups that knew little about the Roman world -- they smashed the previous arrangements up, eliminated the native upper classes, and subjugated/enslaved/drove out/killed the bulk of the population piecemeal.
This contrasts with the much more centralized (and Romanized) Goths, who wanted to preserve the Roman system and use it for their own ends.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very interesting comments, esp. what you said about the Goths. In "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," Poul Anderson shows us how they were picking up some Roman ideas. And I recall reading in Bury's HISTORY OF THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE FROM THE DEATH OF THEODOSIUS I TO THE DEATH OF JUSTINIAN I how some Gothic chiefs and kings explicitly said they wanted to preserve the Roman way of life and government.
Happy New Year! Sean
By the time the Roman Empire fell, a lot of Gothic kings and chieftains had direct experience with the higher levels of Roman military and civil administration.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, it was the petty chiefs and their war bands who invaded Britannia who did not have SOME degree of Romanizing.
Happy New Year! Sean
Post a Comment