Drakevarg
Troubadour
Last night a question brewed in my mind regarding Islas Carmesi, the pirate-founded nation I mentioned in The Unknowable Formula. Namely, why anyone other than an aspiring merchant-king or a criminal would want to live there.
For a bit more context, Islas Carmesi is a chain of tropical islands roughly the size of Brazil and was founded as a nation a little over 700 years ago by one Hackett Rotadler, a pirate and alchemist who invented Dragonpowder, an explosive chemical compound that enabled him to make a fortune while guaranteeing his independence. Details on that in the other thread, but the takeaway is that Islas Carmesi's ability to maintain its economic monopoly and by extension its independence has been more or less established as plausible. Now for the harder part...
Islas Carmesi is at its core a conglomerate of industrial, mercantile and criminal enterprises to create a constantly-fluctuating but ultimately stable nation built around the export of Dragonpowder and further sustained by other trade goods, both black market and otherwise. However, while this may be all well and good for the merchant barons and pirate lords at the top and the various coattail-riding entrepreneurs and lowlifes profiting from this structure, in the end all systems must live and die on the backs of the commonfolk.
Now, the curiosity that I'm left with is why the average person - the simple people who work the fields, prepare the food, paint the houses, lay the bricks... why would they ever want to live in a nation as openly and proudly cutthroat as Islas Carmesi? For the common criminal or the merchant class it's easy enough to justify - great risk for great reward. Islas Carmesi is the sort of place that can chew you up and spit you out in an instant, but it's also the sort of place where a pauper can be made royalty with the right combination of guile and luck. But for those with no greater ambition than a full stomach and a roof over their head, it seems like the sort of place where only accident of birth would compel anyone to suffer through such a place.
And that becomes an issue with the origins of this nation - prior to being founded by Captain Rotadler, that region of the world was almost entirely uninhabited - it was initially a mostly-barren desert akin to Egypt or Australia, with a fairly tiny native population especially given the state of the world at the time (a few centuries prior a massive cataclysm had wiped out 99% of the population, which for an already desolate place like this left it practically empty). Its current tropical state is mostly thanks to a few significant global climate changes that occurred after its foundation, so almost all of Islas Carmesi's population is the result of immigration.
Now, one theory floated by me is that the bulk of these commonfolk could simply be slaves - it's a pirate nation with absolutely no legal system to speak of, so it's hardly beyond belief that they would simply abduct the people they need - but one problem that occurs to me with such a theory is that to create the nation as it exists today, with several major cities and possibly the most powerful naval fleet in the world, one would need an enormous working class. Sure many of them would be criminals in their own right, especially among the urban population just out of survival necessity, but for the rural population it seems like such a large concentration of slaves would be impossible to sustain in perpetuity. Revolt would be inevitable, which isn't out of the ordinary for a place like Islas Carmesi, but at the same time makes me wonder how the necessary food supplies and such could be maintained.
Just thought I'd open this thought process up to the public, see what everyone else thought. Input encouraged.
For a bit more context, Islas Carmesi is a chain of tropical islands roughly the size of Brazil and was founded as a nation a little over 700 years ago by one Hackett Rotadler, a pirate and alchemist who invented Dragonpowder, an explosive chemical compound that enabled him to make a fortune while guaranteeing his independence. Details on that in the other thread, but the takeaway is that Islas Carmesi's ability to maintain its economic monopoly and by extension its independence has been more or less established as plausible. Now for the harder part...
Islas Carmesi is at its core a conglomerate of industrial, mercantile and criminal enterprises to create a constantly-fluctuating but ultimately stable nation built around the export of Dragonpowder and further sustained by other trade goods, both black market and otherwise. However, while this may be all well and good for the merchant barons and pirate lords at the top and the various coattail-riding entrepreneurs and lowlifes profiting from this structure, in the end all systems must live and die on the backs of the commonfolk.
Now, the curiosity that I'm left with is why the average person - the simple people who work the fields, prepare the food, paint the houses, lay the bricks... why would they ever want to live in a nation as openly and proudly cutthroat as Islas Carmesi? For the common criminal or the merchant class it's easy enough to justify - great risk for great reward. Islas Carmesi is the sort of place that can chew you up and spit you out in an instant, but it's also the sort of place where a pauper can be made royalty with the right combination of guile and luck. But for those with no greater ambition than a full stomach and a roof over their head, it seems like the sort of place where only accident of birth would compel anyone to suffer through such a place.
And that becomes an issue with the origins of this nation - prior to being founded by Captain Rotadler, that region of the world was almost entirely uninhabited - it was initially a mostly-barren desert akin to Egypt or Australia, with a fairly tiny native population especially given the state of the world at the time (a few centuries prior a massive cataclysm had wiped out 99% of the population, which for an already desolate place like this left it practically empty). Its current tropical state is mostly thanks to a few significant global climate changes that occurred after its foundation, so almost all of Islas Carmesi's population is the result of immigration.
Now, one theory floated by me is that the bulk of these commonfolk could simply be slaves - it's a pirate nation with absolutely no legal system to speak of, so it's hardly beyond belief that they would simply abduct the people they need - but one problem that occurs to me with such a theory is that to create the nation as it exists today, with several major cities and possibly the most powerful naval fleet in the world, one would need an enormous working class. Sure many of them would be criminals in their own right, especially among the urban population just out of survival necessity, but for the rural population it seems like such a large concentration of slaves would be impossible to sustain in perpetuity. Revolt would be inevitable, which isn't out of the ordinary for a place like Islas Carmesi, but at the same time makes me wonder how the necessary food supplies and such could be maintained.
Just thought I'd open this thought process up to the public, see what everyone else thought. Input encouraged.