Torres tells van Rijn:
"'Met him on Arkan III - on the fringe of the Kossaluth, autonomous planet, you recall. We'd put in with a consignment of tea.'" (p. 142)
Tea? Will it ever be economically viable to haul tea across interstellar distances? I know that that is the premise of this series but it takes some believing - or rather some willing suspending of disbelief. We know that, later in this future history, Terrestrial tea will spread through the Merseian Roidhunate but the Merseians will grow their own, not import from Terra.
SSL also exports cinnamon and London dry gin to Sector Antares where Jo-Boy Technical Services sends engineers and scientists. If supply is suspended, then the Antarean colonies might lose their taste for SSL products and might even start to train their own engineers and scientists. Well, they should certainly be doing the latter, in any case. Surely Jo-Boy realize that that particular business can only be temporary?
It sounds so cozy delivering tea as if they were merely crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific.
6 comments:
Depends on transport costs, which in the Technic history are very low indeed.
It paid to ship tea from China in sailing ships, even when a round trip took a year.
Things like coffee, tea, spices, wine etc. are extremely sensitive to what vintners call ‘terroir’, the interaction of local soil, microclimate, trace elements, and the way particular plants respond to those. They’re luxury trades, and of course origin has a snob appeal all its own
Kaor, Paul!
And besides what Stirling said, I would argue that, given FTL, it made sense to trade in luxury goods. And in other kinds of rare and expensive items. And it wouldn't take a whole Terran year for Solar Spice & Liquors ships to transport such goods a couple of hundred parsecs.
Ad astra! Sean
A year round-trip is about the limit for direct trade -- trade through a chain of middlemen is more permissive.
And it's also about the limit for the size of a political unit, btw; most are much smaller.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And the advantage of direct trade, of course, is how that eliminates many of the middle men you have to use when the time it takes to import/export goods takes more than a year.
And the Terran Empire did not try to expand that much! It was satisfied with claiming a sphere of space that would take people traveling from one side of the Empire directly to the opposite frontier in about four weeks.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the Terran Empire also had problems of scale, too. There's just too much of it to be administered easilhy (or closely), even given FTL and very advanced information systems. Too much data from too many people/places.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I remember people as different from each other as Lord Hauksberg and Dominic Flandry fretting about that problem. And the first or second chapter of THE PLAGUE OF MASTERS shows us Flandry wishing "the thumb witted guardians of a fat and fun seeking Terra" would spend more time sifting thru reports and archives and investigating each of a million mysteries.
Ad astra! Sean
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