Butchering an Empire (on The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, part 7)

Butchering an Empire (on The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, part 7)

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This is the seventh part of a series of articles on The Tyrant Baru Cormorant—part review, part meta, part commentary. For intro and links to the others, go here!

In this one, we consider what Baru’s whole life has built up to: her plan to ‘butcher’ the Masquerade, and bring about a world not ruled by its colonialism.

Barhu’s big plan

If, as we’ve seen, the Masquerade thrives by making everyone dependent on participating in its growth, how can it be destroyed without killing all those who’ve come to depend on it? For so long, Baru could not see an answer; she resigned herself to a vision of apocalyptic war as the only alternative to Falcrest achieving ‘total causal closure’.

In this book, in a meningitis-induced sex dream about her dead girlfriend, she finally figures out her answer: a plan which plays to her strengths, which she believes can bring down the Masquerade without taking everyone else with it. It’s one which plays to her passions and skills, born from her childhood in a trading port and belief in the potential for trade as a good thing, linking people together; a plan which she can pursue under Falcrest’s nose without them realising what she’s hoping to achieve.

At least, that’s the idea. Most other people are not convinced.

Barhu’s plan begins with a new trade route, between Falcrest and the Oriati Mbo—but one that she controls by virtue of an Emperor-granted monopoly. Powered by the enormous wealth she gains from this, she can increasingly take control of the Falcresti economy. This new trade route would link up most of the places we’ve visited in the story so far, bringing immense profit to each:

The route is supposed to connect Segu Mbo in the Southwest to the Stakhieczi in the north, via Taranoke in the Southwest, the Llosydanes in the Northeast, Welthony Harbour in Aurdywnn north of the Llosydanes, and finally passing through the Duchy Vultjag.

Barhu keeps the second part of her plan close to her chest, but she finally explains it in a final meeting with the Brain:

Baru's plan in her own words

1. drive Falcresti investment into her trade monopoly by encouraging speculation
2. encourage use of Oriati assets as a tax haven for the Falcresti elite, and thus take control of most of the Falcresti economy
3. siphon out a portion of this enormous amount of money from Falcrest using fraud
4. use these funds to arm the Oriati
5. the Oriati will attack Falcresti trade, cutting Falcrest out of the equation entirely
6. the Empire, now bankrupt, will be unable to survive

The Brain is not persuaded by Barhu’s plan. While Barhu is obsessed with numbers, she drops the title of the book, and reminds her of the unspoken cost of capitalism:

“You want to be a tyrant,” she said.

“I prefer the term tycoon,” Barhu suggested.

“No. You will be a tyrant. You will be a creator and protector of tyranny. Do you understand what Falcrest does to us, if they have the access given by trade? Trim is outlawed. Family land is bought up and turned to cash crops. Children are worked in the fields. Men are killed and their killings blamed on their own conduct. Women are stripped of their children and brought into prostitution. Their sons are soldiers. Their daughters are sent as maids to the houses of the rich. You are asking me to open our doors to a pack of rabid dogs.”

In my somewhat strained metaphor of Kimbune’s Theorem, Barhu hopes to redirect the vast economic power of Falcrest not to expansion, but to transform it into something different. As she sees it, the vast expanding wealth of Falcrest could be stolen and transformed into vast wealth of Taranoke, Vultjag, the Stakhieczi, the Mbo; we later see her dream of a future world in which a kind of cosmopolitan scientific modernity would develop, complete with uranium-powered carriages, surgery anaesthetised by opiates, and ‘meat golems’ controlled by electricity. The people of this future would be diverse, but all the wealth the would enjoy came from trade.

In short, a perfectly bourgeois vision of the future.

The Brain is, quite rightly in my view, antsy:

“The best way to break a mill is to burn it down, Baru.”

“Not if you want to keep building mills and making flour! The reason Falcrest is winning is because its ways are stronger! I can steal that strength!”

“But it is still Falcrest’s strength. It is still that monstrous pillaging force which treats people like coin and coin like people. And if you try to wield it you are seduced by it. Take Alu into your body instead. Consecrate yourself into my trust.”

“Damn you,” Barhu hissed. “I can do so much more than carry a plague and die young. Don’t you see? The concern that rules this new trade could be mightier than the Republic itself! And I will own it all! I can force Falcrest to give justice to those it’s conquered!”

“Nothing you own by Falcrest’s means is owned by anything but Falcrest. When you think you possess them, that is when they possess you.”

In our own world, we have not exactly seen capitalism severed of empire. The old European empires have officially relinquished their holdings, but not before installing capitalist means of governance which live on; all of us now dance to the strings of the world economy. And the beneficiaries of that economy haven’t changed all that much. Capitalism, as an abstract force, annihilated prior modes of self-sufficient existence just as surely as Falcrest’s ships and incendiary weapons.

But Barhu would be at the top this time! Ready to technocratically ensure that nothing bad comes of her trade concern. So that would make it OK right?

The Brain does not, admittedly, have a much better plan. Her own method is to render herself a sort of messiah—by casting her current body in bronze, and having another person with the same tumour take up the cause—and stoke the various Mbo into war against Falcrest.

The question of whether something other than capitalism could have been born of the end of feudalism is one that we will never be able to definitively answer. In the history we ended up having, capitalism won, at this point anyway. The world was proletarianised: slowly, sometimes through the mindless action of the market but often through the deliberate efforts of the “workers’ movement” and its representatives, the ‘peasantry’ (self-sufficent farmers) that once made up almost the entire world population has been dissolved; at last all of us now depend on the market, and are thereby forced to work for a wage.

This is a process Baru, back in Monster, sees in positive terms, speaking to Svir of her plans to link Aurdwynn into the world market:

“Once their economy values currency instead of land, the peasantry will be able to profit and save off their own labor instead of tithing their incomes for protection—”

Here, we see her plan extend to the world. Barhu, the daughter of traders, the accountant… she cannot imagine how this trade would leave people not with opportunities for saving and profit, but propertyless proletarians structurally necessary for the whole machine to work. The hypothetical meat golems will do the work, right? Just like one day, we’ll be able to stop working because of robots and asteroid mining and clever technocratic computers, as the FALC advocates promise.

So as satisfying as it is to see Barhu absolutely annihilate Cairdine Farrier (we’re getting to that) and get back on her feet, it’s hard not to believe that the many people who point to the ghost of Falcrest in her plans are absolutely right. A ‘better’ Falcrest, perhaps: one without the eugenic obsessions and dreams of centralised control, but still a power that subsumes everything to its expansion.

An economic cancer

I’ve drawn one grandiose metaphor, linking the economic transformation that Barhu hopes to accomplish to the way, with an imaginary argument, exponential growth and decay becomes a contained circular orbit. But an economy is not just a point in a plane; it is a living system. And the book furnishes us another metaphor…

Elsewhere, Barhu muses (while pretending to be lobotoimsed—more on that shortly!) on what it was that enabled Falcrest to rise to its position in the world. She considers many angles, but one of them is Falcrest’s financial system:

There was so much she could say. The matter of money, Falcrest’s wholesale adoption of paper fiat notes and liquidity banking, which allowed them to move value more efficiently: you could not raise money from your people to fund an expedition if all their value was locked up in farmland and lumber and milk. But when it was stored in paper notes in banks then you could borrow from the people without actually taking their property.

Why do we organise our lives around the fiction of money at all? The details of the answer may vary depending on your preferred economic school, but all answers come back to the behaviours that money creates. Money defines a system of impetuses to act, and coordinating dynamics, which take a bunch of people living out our lives and bind us together into an economy moving towards, more or less, a common goal. If the Chartists (briefly described in Graeber’s flawed but fascinating book Debt) are right, and money was born from early states and kings to feed their armies, it was because of its utility in making sure food is grown, organised, transported etc.

So looking past Barhu’s explanation of the plan in terms of abstractions like ‘wealth’ and ‘money’, what she aspires to do is to inject a different organising principle into that developing process—a new system which will, though born of the same substance, rapidly grow to take control of its host’s functions, ultimately (she hopes) fatally.

We could, if we wanted to be cheeky, say she wants to give Falcrest cancer. But like the transmissible cancers of the Cancrioth, like real immortal cancer cell lines such as those taken from Henrietta Lacks, her economic cancer (she hopes) will outlive its original host.

So is she killing Falcrest, or rendering it immortal?

Maybe history can be a guide…

History lessons!

At the end of the book, while listing the scientific basis for their various ideas, Seth speaks briefly to the plausibility of Barhu’s plan:

The economic power of Baru’s notional trade concern is hardly exaggerated. Nor is the possibility of the near-total destruction of an imperial economy by mismanagement on the part of a powerful few: interested readers may look into John Law’s time in France and the neighboring South Sea bubble in England.

Well, I am an interested reader. Let’s find out more. (With apologies for people who aren’t concerned with 17th-century economics.)

But I know you like to read about 17th century economic bubbles...John Law's system: fiddly detailsThe South Sea bubble

What to conclude?

John Law got France to go bananas over a colonial expedition that found no resources to exploit; the South Sea bubble got England to go bananas over trafficking slaves to their ostensible enemies. They bankrupted many of the rich of their nations, perhaps even set the stage for the later fall of the French monarchy (though there were many other factors!), but neither episode stopped the empires from functioning as empires. At best, they just slowed them down.

Of course, the nakedly obvious conclusion is that colonialism is utterly, unimaginably evil. But that probably goes without saying.

As far as our world of fiction is concerned, Barhu’s plan is to create a similar speculative bubble to capture most of the wealth of Falcrest in her own colonial monopoly venture. By getting Falcrest to move their wealth offshore, she can create conditions for the Oriati to seize it.

But in practice, what would that mean? We know Falcrest has a fiat currency; what would actually be seized? Military control, perhaps, over the trade in actual, physical goods—and thanks to Barhu, Falcrest would not be able to finance a war to take back. I think that’s the idea, anyway. I guess we’ll find out in the fourth book.

The question that seems all the more pertinent after reading those histories is, would that be enough?

Money is, after all, a fiction. Certainly a powerful fiction, much like the Cancrioth’s magic—a system for getting people to behave in a certain way, a complex of beliefs and behaviours that reproduces itself.

But it is people who sail a warship, not money. Money makes sure that someone prepares them food to eat at the end, money gets those people to sail the boat, but the money is subject to change. When John Law wrecked the French financial system, the French government didn’t disappear: they set to work redoing the money to keep everything ticking over.

In this book, financial shenanigans are enough to force Falcrest’s navy to return to dock (a power play by Falcrest’s Parliament we haven’t yet discussed). But if Falcrest’s control over the world was truly at stake, would the economic snafu be enough to prevent them mobilising all force necessary to take it back? I guess Barhu, no stranger to war economics, thinks so: if Falcrest cannot pay their sailors’ wages, can’t move the chemical ingredients to the Burn workshops, outfit their ships, and do all the things that drive a war economy, they won’t be able to take back any control.

But the social relationships of domination won’t disappear as quickly. As Barhu herself notes, the animating principle of Falcrest is not its money, but something else…

The reason for empire

I said earlier that the series was framed by Baru’s early question of why them, and not us? Why did Falcrest arrive at Taranoke, and not the opposite?

I will quote her full answer now, since it’s one of my fave passages of the book:

Why Falcrest, and not Taranoke?

Or, to cut it a little shorter…

But all of those things were just limbs and muscles on the beast. They explained how Falcrest was conquering the world but not why. A strong man might have the ability to strangle or force a weak man. But nowhere was it written that the strong man was fated to kill or enslave that weak man.

But Falcrest was not an innocent victim of a historical inevitability. Empire required a will, a brain to move the beast, to reach out with appetite, to see other people as the answer to that appetite, to justify the devouring of other peoples as right and necessary and good, to frame slavery and conquest as acts of grace and charity.

Incrasticism had provided that last and most fateful technology. The capability to justify any violence in the name of an ultimate destiny, an engine to inflict misery and to claim that misery as necessary in the quest for utopia. A false science by which the races and sexes could be separated and specialized like workers in a mill. And the endless self-deceptive blind guilty quest to justify that false science, so that the suffering and the misery remained necessary.

This passage reminds me very strongly of the theories on states written by Peter Gelderloos in his book Worshipping Power, which I discussed a little in the previous post. For Gelderloos, empires are just one realisation of the general horror of states; his preferred distinction is between states and stateless people, not organised hierarchically and centrally. Gelderloos is highly dismissive of deterministic, materialist explanations for state development, whether the dubious geographical determinism of people like Jared Diamond, or the Marxist belief in class struggle as the determining factor of history. He writes:

Hundreds or even thousands of years of social evolution, along authoritarian or “homoarchic” lines, were required for the emergence of haves and have-nots, individual property, quantification of value, toilers and parasites. And parallel to these proto-state societies, we have examples of alternative forms of social evolution with an equal technological complexity and similar productive techniques, that chose decentralized forms of organization, and non- or even anti-authoritarian cultural values. As regards societies with little or no economic stratification, there are hundreds of examples of human societies practicing a variety of modes of production and different forms of political organization, from hunter-gatherers in California to agriculturalists in southwest Asia, with no clear pattern, no deterministic link between one and the other. Even among primates of the same species, practicing the exact same “mode of production,” one can find significant differences in the level of hierarchy between different groups.

Having argued aginst determinacy, and that the formation of state structures tends to precede rather than follow the stratification that Marxists placed as ontologically prior, Gelderloos offers his own interpretation. Over the course of the book, he describes a bewildering variety of paths to state-formation, usually generated ‘secondarily’ from the interaction of a state with a stateless people. How, then, to predict what course a society will follow? Gelderloo’s answer is to refer to a notion of ‘will’—individual intent and a collective ethos:

Turning material and other forms of determinism on their heads, Christopher Boehm, in an extensive survey of stateless societies, demonstrated that the key factor allowing a society to be stateless was not its mode of production or geographic conditions, but an ethical and political determination to prevent the emergence of hierarchy: what he referred to as “reverse dominance hierarchy,” in which special functions were compartmentalized rather than centralized and potential leaders were closely watched, and were abandoned, exiled, or assassinated if they exceeded their powers or acted in a greedy or authoritarian manner. In contrast to a mechanistic trend in academia that would dismiss freedom as a subjective illusion or meaningless concept, we anarchists assert that will, both individual and collective (at which level it is often read as culture), is an indispensable force for shaping our society, our mode of production, and our relationship to the earth.

The motor driving ‘will’

We should definitely accept these cautions—indeed, if one is a communist, one must accept the possibility of a dramatic transformation of the world we live in, and see it as fundamentally contingent, not inevitable. And I don’t particularly need to have faith in the supposed historical inevitability of the great revolution, especially given the track record of such predictions.

At the same time, to draw a line around ‘will’ and leave it unexplained feels like it is a bit of a cop-out. The things we want, that motivate us to act, cannot really be justified (beyond appealing to other, more ‘basic’ wants), but we can observe that they are not fully arbitrary either. After all, much of capitalism’s functioning, is conditioning us to buy what is being sold, go to work even when the boss isn’t there to force us… to play the game and express our desires in its terms.

Stereotypically dogmatic Marxists, of course, may reduce intention entirely to the supposed material ‘interests’ of a person’s class. To be sure, many allow a more subtle account, especially those who throw around words like ‘libinal economy’. Barhu, at least, is (naturally, given her experiences) able to see ‘will’ as something arising from ideology and history; she has seen first hand how Incrasticism is inculcated, and she sees her own desires (as we discussed last time!) as arising from the ‘engine’ of the world.

What of ‘collective will’? Something beyond individual people, evolving in many minds through constant conflict between all those who desire to shape it. We’ve seen that the Masquerade is held together by the spit and glue of blackmail, and that most of its powerful people would not even blink before sending their rivals to a miserable death. Yet “the Masquerade” functions, it can be seen as an actor; it is depressing to think that even those who oppose its project play a part in propagating it, wittingly or not.

To maintain a collective will, we circle back to the theme of control that runs throughout this series: all the schools for abducted, clinical courts and hygienic torture chambers; the ‘corrective’ rapes, operant conditioning, and delusions of eugenics. All of this is intended, in part, to maintain that ‘collective will’ of the empire, and make sure its subjects continue to act as if ‘the Masquerade’ exists. Whether because they believe in it, or because—like the prisoner who seems to escape, only for it to be a cruel illusion—they see no possibility of successful resistance.

This suggests, to me, that disrupting one part of Falcrest’s system—its economy—is not enough to kill the ‘will’ animating Falcrest, and transform whatever’s left of its people into ‘good neighbours’. But given that all these parts are not separate but interdependent, connected to each other through all these feedbacks… it’s not a separate goal either.

What would it take to force Falcrest to give up its imperial aspirations, short of a bigger fish showing up to colonise it in turn?

An aside on denazification

Where’s all this going?

On this specific angle, I’m left with three questions:

1. what’s Seth going to have happen in the next book?
2. what do we think should happen in the next book? artistically, and by our understanding of this little world in a bottle
3. what does Baru’s fictional struggle tell us about our own?

Of course, we’re not going to find the recipe for overthrowing capitalism for genuine communism in a fantasy novel. Still, novels help us frame questions—though as this book repeatedly points out, the person who frames the question has a great deal of power to shape its answer.

I genuinely don’t feel like I know if these books will end up in a victory, or a final tragedy—or whether I’ll agree with the presentation of whatever future Seth chooses! Though, more than any other fiction I’ve read in a long time, I feel like they grasp what’s at stake in this world.

Perhaps Baru’s trade venture will succeed beyond her dreams, and as such we will see her world end up on the same course as our own, with the national empires eventually giving way to an internationalised capitalism as the true power (the ‘divided god’ in the words of the Chǔang collective). Perhaps, with Oriati trim rather than Falcresti self-interest shaping the motives of this economy, trade will not come to rule over people; the Falcresti economic instruments will die off (‘wither away’ we might even say) with the state that spawned them, and the products of work will move according to need, coordinated by some other principle than profit. Though it’s hardly clear how this will happen.

And perhaps Baru and co. will find themselves needing to be overthrown as the power goes to her head. Perhaps Tain Shir will finally get to exact her revenge. (Actually that seems pretty plausible! That gun has spent a long time waiting to be fired.)

Of course, perhaps the possibilities raised by the lightning-soaked continent in the East of Baru’s world will throw a wrench in all of her plans, and something totally unpredictable will happen. I trust Seth enough to believe it will be well-founded in what has come so far.

But for all this to mean something beyond ‘that was a good fucking book’? Like Baru, all of us who read this are in positions where we’re deeply involved in a truly despicable system—and like Baru, we must play along for now, awaiting our opportunity to cause damage that matters and prove that their control over us wasn’t real. Like Baru, we must look to our own power—though collective power, rather than individual, holds more promise for most of us I suspect!

Much of Baru’s framing, of butchering an empire, is still relevant: we face the problem of ‘reconfiguring’ what can be salvaged of capitalism, and destroying what cannot. Whatever happens ‘next’, we must still eat.

When writing a pseudo-historical novel like this, there are some very difficult lines to walk. The miserableness of real history means it’s hard to reach for too happy an ending—nobody wants to be like “oh, oppressed people of the world, if you’d only done this, you could have killed the European empires and been free back in the 1700s”. I don’t think Baru is likely to do that, at all. But that leaves a different space: bittersweet endings, recognition of limits.

Of course, conversely, we also don’t want to shackle ourselves to history: by imagining what might have gone differently, in other circumstances, we keep open the imagined possibility that things will go differently the next time around. A ‘horizon of communism’.

I wish I could say, having considered all these angles, taught myself this history, I now have a clear insight into our real world, a tool to focus me. I do not have anything so definite… but I still appreciate the chance to consider.

Speculative speculation

Let’s imagine some ways Baru’s plan could go down, in a spectrum of outcomes…

She fucking dies

It could easily simply be that Baru tries to cheat death one too many times, somewhere along the way. She’s already risked sepsis and survived meningitis and has lobotomy picks inside her brain, not to mention all the people who are very keen to kill her. An unlikely outcome, since this is a novel, but within the fiction Baru has no guarantee that, say, Farrier’s secret contingency won’t blow her up, or she won’t catch a tropical disease on her voyages, or suffer whatever other nasty little fate. Or perhaps her bluff about the Brain’s rutterbook, which threatens the whole venture, could fail to be solved in time, so her first expedition runs out of supplies somewhere and everyone dies of thirst and scurvy. Or they piss off someone in Segu Mbo, or whoever’s on the far side. There’s a lot of ways she can die!

Assume, therefore, that Baru simply disappears; nobody knows what happened to her voyage. Her surviving friends, or perhaps one of the other Cryptarchs may take over her venture—if only to exploit it for some other scheme, since Baru is probably the only cryptarch who really believes in her trade venture right now. If Falcrest does manage to pull it off, they get stinking rich, and maybe Vultjag gets integrated into a new capitalist economy. ‘Total causal closure’ doesn’t happen because that’s just their ruling-class delusion, but they get plenty of chances to make peoples’ lives miserable… until eventually the long arc of everyday resistance manages to turn into a successful anticolonial rebellion.

In terms of making their rule permanent, it is unclear how effective Falcrest’s indoctrination apparatus has been in making their rule seem legitimate; the use of direct force is probably too fresh. But as we’ve seen, they’ve been doing a very effective job of wiping out prior modes of existence and integrating people into their economic system, so even if the centralised power bloc breaks, the ghost of Falcrest may take a long, long time to exorcise.

What else could check Falcrest’s growth? Baru’s trade circle is a lot smaller than our world; unlike the nations of Europe, Falcrest has no comparable colonialist powers to rival it. However, the Mbo could very easily go through a process of ‘late development’ in order to match Falcrest’s economic power, even without the Falcresti precipitating it, following the lines of the enclosures in our world; with vastly more natural resources, a ‘modernised’ Mbo which swallows some of Falcrest’s mythology could be a terrible thing (c.f. Imperial Germany or Japan for what happens when latecomers try to get into the colonialism game). Or even in advance of that, the Brain’s cult movement could precipitate the apocalyptic war she hopes for.

This is the default scenario; the question then is what difference Baru could potentially make?

It goes like real history

Baru kicks off her speculation bubble, and starts colonisation/trade efforts, but it doesn’t prove nearly as lucrative as she imagines, or at least the profits are slow to come through and people start to get doubts. The bubble collapses, and she is left bailing out a sinking ship as everyone wants out. An economic catastrophe, and maybe a speedbump in Falcrest’s self-reproduction, but if we know anything about capitalism is that it is surprisingly adept at moving its problems around to avoid breaking altogether.

Exactly how this plays out depends somewhat on the nitty gritty financial details. Unlike France and Britain, we haven’t heard tell of Falcrest being insolvent, and they already have fiat currency so unlike the bubbles we read about, there’s no question of uncertain transition from a gold standard. Like earlier speculative bubbles such as the tulip bubble, the frenzy for getting hold of Baru’s shares could go down as an embarassing episode of history, but not one that would destroy the host nation. In the Dutch case, the Dutch courts essentially voided many of the tulip-related futures contracts as being based on ‘gambling’, leaving people with their tulips.

Alternatively, it could go like more recent housing bubbles, and kick off an economic depression that requires significant action by the state to save the capitalist system. One thing I’m not sure about, and no doubt has many different people making all sorts of claims, is how far the collapse of the American housing bubble interfered with its ability to carry out its various foreign wars. The impression I have is that, even in a time of mass unemployment, America still pretty much issued a blank cheque to its military, then primarily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. But I don’t know how to verify that.

There have been cases where economic failure has preceded total collapse of a state, but we’ll consider them shortly.

She gets caught

Let’s suppose, instead, that the first stage of Baru’s plan goes without major hitch: she sets up a vastly profitable trade route between Aurdwynn and the Black Tea Ocean, managed by Falcrest, and gets everyone to convert their money into shares in her enterprise. She embezzles money into the hands of her Oriati, Taranoki and Vultjag allies, letting them arm up and prepare, all the while publicly playing the part of the loyal Falcresti capitalist. Falcrest attempts to initiate its usual eugenic programs wherever it sets up its factors, but Baru is able to run enough interference to scupper these efforts.

But she’s hardly the only accountant/savant in Falcrest, so maybe someone will get wise to what she’s doing, and dob her in. It could end up being a much larger-scale version of her whole betrayal in Aurdwynn: the people moving to seize control of trade find lots of marines waiting. I don’t think the story is going to go there—it would be thematically inappropriate and deeply unsatisfying—but that’s another risk she’s playing.

In this case, Falcrest would be able to reap the benefits of Baru’s trade route, and spread incrasticism universally. Lots of colonialism, a heavy serving of genocide, we’ve seen what Falcrest do and they’d have no more reason to change. The only alternative would be the Brain’s apocalyptic war movement. There’s not much more to say about this.

But what if Baru ‘wins’?

Economic failure absolutely can lead to collapse of a political bloc, in the right context. The obvious modern example to me is the end of the Cold War.

The fall of the Soviet Union

So how would this go in Falcrest, if Incrasticism fell from grace? Perhaps the true believers in eugenics would splinter into tiny sects and cults, while irridentist figureheads would try to gain power with promises to restore Falcrest to glory. Perhaps the former colonies of Falcrest would see bloody purges and contests for control, like the Kyprist-Canaat conflict in Tyrant. Meanwhile, as the upstart empire falls, the Mbo would become ascendant again—especially since Baru’s plan involves them gaining a lot of Falcresti wealth.

And what’s the long-term consequence? If we’re going by Soviet analogy, it may be a little early to tell, given it’s only thirty years ago that the USSR fell. Baru’s world is in a very different historical situation, with feudalism still ruling in most parts.

Let’s consider some practicalities instead. To guarantee profitable trade, she needs people to uphold property relations, which means ultimately, that her allies (those who hope to continue to profit off the trade route after Falcrest is cut out of the equation) must maintain the same monopoly on ‘legitimate’ violence that Falcrest once operated. After all, if one group can attack the trade posts and seize the wealth, who’s to stop another?

And that, of course, means that she needs to guarantee to the sailors plying her trade route that they won’t have their goods suddenly seized by rebel movements or pirates or such. Somehow, Baru needs to keep the ships sailing back and forth and profiting at her ports, even as the currency (Falcresti fiat notes) ceases to have backing (the ability to buy from the powerful Falcresti economy). The Brain was right to say she would, in effect, become a tyrant; instead of the favour of Falcrest, authority would now flow from proximity to Baru. Which is a rather alarming thought: Baru has resolutely opposed Incrasticism, but (despite Farrier’s best efforts), she’s a firm believer in Baru-knows-best-ism, and we’ve already seen what extreme lengths she’s prepared to go to in pursuit of her projects.

So effecting this transition would be the real kicker. Note from the historical anecdote we explored back in the second article that, when Vasco da Gama was bombarding Kozhikode to try and take over the Indian-Ocean spice trade, it completely froze trade on the Indian ocean for several months. Those months could spell famine in the places which have come to depend on Baru’s trade, such as the Llosydanes; perhaps Baru could secure some legitimacy by organising relief efforts.

Even with Falcrest’s economy gutted, it would hardly give up without a fight. Every rich bastard in the city would be clamouring to get their investment back in existential terror. The government’s big problem would be successfully mobilising a military force, when all its wealth is in the form of investment into Baru’s system. To take back its factories and trade posts, it would need to plausibly promise recompense to everyone involved in supplying their army.

Unfucking the financial system and getting the pieces moving again would take time; it might provoke infighting, given disagreement over how to take back their power. That time would give Baru’s allies a chance to create a defence, and unlike Falcrest, they would (if Baru plays her cards right) have plenty of wealth to feed and equip a fighting force. That’s the hope.

Supposing they succeed; what then? Baru would inherit a traumatised world, that’s just seen decades of hot and cold war, genocide, eugenics and other kinds of violence. Wherever Falcrest went, it’s been accompanied by plague and death. It’s disrupted the chain of reproduction of many social systems and traditions. That would continue to have consequences. People who had once lived people together as neighbours might form ethnonationalist movements and purge those they deem Other, like we’ve seen of the Canaat. Bloody revenge would be carried out on whoever had plausibly been associated with Falcrest.

Baru sees her trade route, and the foundation of a new economic system, as a way to thread the needle between Falcresti rule and total collapse. But given the way things have played out so far, it seems like it would be pretty miraculous for her to continue to hold things together, rather than to dissolve into what American counterinsurgency theorists term a situation of ‘competitive control’. Moreover, even if she was to succeed, she would face the usual problem of charismatic, unifying tyrants: creating a system of social reproduction which would outlive her, instead of seeing her empire dissolve in secession squabbles as quickly as it was built.

And what do we think, as anarchists? Is Baru’s failure what we want?

What’s scary in Baru’s plan to me is that there is little basis for an alternative way of life; Falcresti control would break down, but the structures which maintain it (or something like it) would have fertile ground to bounce back, because the people would see no alternative but rule-by-violence or death. But perhaps I have too little trust in people.

The Mbo, at least, remain robust and healthy despite the harms they took in the war; if Baru manages to avoid her trade system becoming a wedge of Incrastic values then it should survive the transition. Perhaps that, at least, gives room for some kind of non-Falcresti order to gradually form in the devastated places. Perhaps even in the years prior to her dramatic final coup, Baru’s interference as the person managing trade can help create room for pockets of an alternative world to survive and be born.

But that’s a lot to ask of one woman. It won’t all be down to Baru. After all, Baru’s eternal flaw is putting it all on herself. It seems unlikely that her current band of friends will let her forget to ask ‘what happens next?’, or that Baru’s conspiracy is the only real enemy Falcrest has. (This is always a limit of fiction; we can only consider what is portrayed on the pages.)

So Bryn, we’re up to the 10k word mark. Give us an answer—will it work?

Maybe. ;)

Ugh. Fine then. Should it work?

My hope is that whatever happens in Book 3, it will continue to surprise me. Cop-out answer, I know. But it’s the honest one: I think either a good or bad outcome could be made compelling.