The Polesotechnic League civil war is a catalogue of colonized planets:
the Free Hermetian Navy destroys the Abdallah Enterprises centrum on Hopewell;
Hermetians hijack supermetals carried from Mirkheim by Interstar Transport for the Stellar Metals Corporation, thus causing staggering losses to Timebinders Insurance;
Hermetians destroy equipment and data stores of XT Systems in Maharajah on Ramanujan;
bribed union leaders call a strike of technicians working for Sanchez Engineering on the metal-rich St. Jacques, sister planet of Esperance;
independent League companies, Sinbad Prospecting and the Society of Venturers, attack and loot the Galactic Developments entrepot on a Germanian moon;
on Hermes, the patriot army storms Starfall.
"Government by terror does not work on people used to liberty, if they have hope of deliverance." (p. 273)
Hope makes a difference. A population endlessly ground down does not necessarily Rise in its Wrath.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Here we get a foretaste of the chaos of the Time of Troubles, starting about a century after MIRKHEIM.
Happy New Year! Sean
Paul: very true. Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out very astutely that it's frustrated hope that breeds revolutions, not despair; and that the most dangerous time for a bad government is when it sincerely tries to reform itself.
Notable examples; the last days of the Bourbons, when they called the Estates-General, and Gorbachev's rule in the USSR.
The US War of Independence is an example of the first. At the end of the Seven Years War, the American colonists had never been more self-confidently, militantly British. It was the disappointment of their confident expectation of continued autonomy and continental expansion that turned them into rebels.
Specifically, British attempts to make them pay for their own defense, and to protect the Indians from colonial expansion, the latter admittedly done to save costs on frontier wars and protect the fur trade as much as anything.
Likewise, it was the British attempt to reform and rationalize the structure of the Imperial edifice that disappointed the colonists.
For most of the 18th century the structure of British engagement with their empire had been grossly neglectful and corrupt when it wasn't a morass of sloth, a continuous but rather lacksidasical negotiation between various interest groups and lobbyists, tempered by a determination not to spend money if it could be avoided at all, except in wartime.
But it had the virtues of its vices; it was extremely modest, and mostly left British colonists overseas to their own devices as much as possible, except for some mercantalist regulations -- and the ones the colonists disliked, they just avoided, and the British sighed and looked the other way. In fact, the system probably functioned on balance to take golden guineas out of the pockets of Britons and put them in those of the merchants and planters in the Americas.
Eg., the bounty system on colonial indigo gave South Carolina a valuable export crop, at the cost of making British textile manufacturers buy an inferior, overpriced American product at the expense of cheaper and better French Caribbean alternatives.
The whole attempt to "reform" the Empire after 1765 is an illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences, and of the profound truth of the maxim "if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it". Be modest and don't delude yourself that you understand how things work.
If the British government after 1765 had been willing to just muddle along in the old way, the political unity of the English-speaking world probably wouldn't have been broken.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
IOW, the First British Empire fell apart because, uncharacteristically, the UK Gov't tried to be rational, even radical, in the 1760's.
I wonder what we might have seen if the British had been content to bumble along the same way they had been doing after 1763, as before that year?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: to be fair, the British taxpayer (the highest-taxed people in the world at the period) had coughed up huge sums to end the "French and Indian" threat to the colonists once and for all.
Plenty of colonists -fought- in that war, but their elected governments were singularly reluctant to -pay- for any of it, though colonial farmers and merchants were making a mint off government contracts for army supplies and so forth.
Naturally enough British taxpayers resented the fact that they paid the highest taxes in the world, Americans paid the lowest and higher per-capita incomes, and so much of it was spent for the colonies' benefit.
Hence the attempts to pay at least some of the military and administrative costs by levies on the colonies.
But even if all the imposts proposed (not just the ones passed, but all of them that were even brought before Parliament) had been implemented and paid in full...
... the British government would -still- have been spending more in the 13 Colonies than it collected there; in other words, taking golden guineas out of British pockets and handing them over to Americans.
An unpleasant lesson about necessary costs of government was learned by the newly independent American government, and hence Shays Rebellion and the Whiskey Revolt and much other unpleasantness.
In fact, American incomes fell by 40% by the end of the Revolutionary War and didn't recover to the 1775 level until the 1820's. By which time Britain was in the middle of the Industrial Revolution and prospering as never before.
Harry Turtledove did an interesting alternate history, THE TWO GEORGES, set in a world in which the colonies and Britain were reconciled (the title refers to a famous painting of George Washington and King George shaking hands), and the US is sort of a giant Canada.
It's amusing. I don't agree with all the worldbuilding -- eg., if the mainland colonies had stayed in the Empire, I don't think slave emancipation would have come as early as 1834 -- but it's worth reading.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, irritation and frustration in the UK proper over how British taxpayers bore virtually all the burden of defending the empire while the American colonies paid almost nothing lay behind the 1760's attempts at evening out that burden.
Yes, Shays Rebellion and the Whisky Revolt brought home to the new US that it was not going to be exempted from the problems all gov'ts have to face.
I did read with interest Turtledove's THE TWO GEORGES. Yes, you are almost certainly correct, abolishing slavery in the British Empire would have been harder and taken longer if the American colonies had not broken away.
Ad astra! Sean
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