Lands of Red and Gold #90: A Matter of Institutions
“Tjibarri lie in only two ways: everything they say, and everything they do.”
- Gutjanal saying
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The arrival of the Raw Men, and the wondrous and advanced goods they brought, gave a clear lesson to all Aururians who encountered them. Here, it was plain, were a foreign people whose marvellous goods would be wondrous to acquire. Raw Men weapons were desirable almost everywhere, and their luxury goods were also keenly sought-after in most regions.
Some Aururians took this realisation further: obtaining Raw Men goods was useful, but obtaining the knowledge to produce those goods themselves would be even more beneficial.
Some Aururian societies which came to this conclusion sought to apply it only in relatively limited ways. That is, they sought to gain knowledge of particular technologies, most notably weapons and domesticated animals. Even where they tried to acquire broader realms of knowledge, they were still quite focused in their aims. For example, the Atjuntja ironsmiths were successful (by 1645) in persuading the Dutch to provide some metallurgists to teach about blast furnaces and related ironworking technology.
A few Aururian societies adopted a broader approach. They sought to acquire not just particular Raw Men goods and technologies, but a wider spectrum of knowledge and European institutions. For different reasons, the Five Rivers states (particularly Tjibarr) and the Nuttana were both well-placed to adopt their own forms of European institutions and technologies. Both these societies were inspired in part by the recognition that in specific areas, they had knowledge
better than the Raw Men.
In the Five Rivers, the greatest recognition came from their physicians. Five Rivers physicians had an ancient tradition of medical diagnosis and a system of peer review which encouraged them to pass judgement on their fellows’ practices. This tradition had its own misconceptions, but it was free of some mistaken beliefs found in European medical practices. Five Rivers physicians quickly concluded that in several respects Raw Men medicine was inferior to their own practices. In particular, they viewed European doctors has having a disturbing fixation with bleeding men who were already ill or wounded. Attempts to use this practice on Tjibarri patients led to it being thoroughly condemned by the reviewing physicians. This realisation in turn led to Five Rivers physicians making a critical examination of new European knowledge: they did not simply adopt European practices or technologies directly, but they reviewed what was available and decided what they wanted.
For the Nangu and their Nuttana successors, a similar realisation came from navigational technology. The Nangu had adopted Polynesian navigational techniques via the Maori, and added some shipbuilding refinements of their own. Thus, they had access to an independent navigational tradition to Europeans. Nangu sailors who met the Raw Men quickly realised that despite Europeans’ ability to sail across vast distances, in some respects their technology was notably inferior. This was manifested in some simple ways such as the Nangu technique (borrowed directly from the Maori) of reading the waves to identify when a shore was near and the best places to change direction while sailing. Visiting Europeans could not match this. But the most notable examples were when visiting Dutch sailors were trapped on the Island because they could not reliably sail against the prevailing wind. This meant that the Dutch vessels could not make a timely return west back to the Atjuntja realm, while Nangu ships that used Polynesian-inspired tacking technology could undertake the westward voyage even when the winds were not favourable.
In these circumstances, people from both Five Rivers and Nuttana societies drew a clear conclusion: the gap between them and the Raw Men was vast, but not impossible to bridge. They concluded that just as they had things which they could teach the Raw Men, so they in turn were capable of following necessary lessons to acquire that knowledge the Raw Men possessed. And in their own ways, both of them set about gaining this knowledge.
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The Five Rivers societies were the oldest agricultural societies on the continent. This meant in turn that they had a long history of technological development and expanding their own knowledge base, independent of Old World models. As part of this, they had their own forms of educational institutions for preserving and extending knowledge. They did not have libraries or universities on the same scale or structure as in Europe. However, they had predecessor social institutions of study such as temples and guild schools, and were at a socio-political level where they could quickly grasp the benefit of developing these further.
Tjibarr became the first Five Rivers state to put this into practice. This process began with convocations of physicians which gathered to treat the outbreak of Old World diseases. The first great convocation was conducted at Tapiwal [Robinvale] in 1646, to study the outbreak of epidemic typhus in the Five Rivers. This convocation endured for so long and produced so much argument that one of the attending physicians nicknamed it “the place of great disputation” – or, in the Gunnagal language, Tjagarr Panipat [see post
#75].
The appellation endured. The same name was applied to future gatherings of physicians over the next two decades, as they met to study and discuss treatments of other diseases both foreign and domestic. These assemblages included the traditional Five Rivers’ medical practice of having five-man panels pass judgement on another physician’s treatment of the diseases. They were also supplemented by the collection of medical treatises, both locally written and those imported from Europe, whether available in translation or only in European languages. The physicians studied these texts as part of their discussions.
The convocations were held at several locations over the next two decades, and sometimes in the other Five Rivers states of Gutjanal and Yigutji. In 1666, the physicians’ conclaves received a permanent residence in Tapiwal. This happened when a wealthy Tjibarri land controller [noble] named Lopitja the White donated his family’s Tapiwal home to serve as a library and meeting hall for physicians. He supported this new institution by providing copies of a wide range of European texts that his family had acquired over the previous few decades. Lopitja’s donation turned the Tjagarr Panipat into a permanent gathering that became Aururia’s first institution of higher learning.
The Tjagarr Panipat thus began life as an institution for the study of medicine, among already accredited physicians. Due to its large collection of reference materials, it quickly evolved into an institution for teaching new physicians. At first, this followed the traditional physicians’ model: a student began as an “apprentice” with one physician, progressed to an “initiate” with another physician, and would be declared “accredited” when three other physicians deemed the initiate worthy to progress to a full physician.
However, in time the physicians expanded their knowledge of similar institutions, and they also now found themselves in a situation where each student was in proximity to many experienced physicians. So this evolved into a system where several accredited physicians taught groups of students about different aspects of medicine, generally in those areas where each physician was recognised as being particularly skilled.
In 1682, senior Tjibarri physicians reached an agreement that they would only allow a student to progress through each grade of membership if they had studied at the Tjagarr Panipat. Physicians in Gutjanal and Yigutji were not so strict in their standards, but studying at the Tjagarr Panipat became an excellent way to build prestige for student physicians from anywhere in the Five Rivers. In 1689, this progression of grades (apprentice, initiate, accredited) became standardised in an official roll maintained at the Tjagarr Panipat. Admission onto the different stages of this roll became the Tjibarri equivalent of university degrees.
The Panipat – or so its name was usually shortened – was created to study medicine. However, the European texts provided by Lopitja and other factional sponsors covered a wide variety of subjects. This meant that the great library of the Panipat attracted would-be students in other fields. Those non-medical students came to learn about other European technologies. In time, they also came to discuss these new technologies with other like-minded students who also gathered at the Panipat. The factional sponsors encouraged this form of attendance, since they were also interested in some of these other fields of knowledge.
By a combination of gifts and pressure, the Panipat’s governing council was persuaded to recognise two other disciplines as worthy of study at the institution. The first was a discipline which they called
Gambirra. This word can be loosely translated as “engineering”, but which in the Gunnagal language also refers to ironworking, silver and gold smithing, and other metal working. At the Panipat, the study of
Gambirra included all aspects of incorporating Raw Men metallurgy and engineering.
The second discipline was
Maranoa; a word which can be approximately translated as “chemistry”, but again, the Gunnagal term is broader.
Maranoa includes the study of any material collected from plants and animals, which includes the processes of obtaining that material, and thus had some overlap with biology.
This new discipline begun in part by the physicians themselves, since they had begun trying to understand the foreign products referred to in Raw Men medical texts. Under factional encouragement, study of
Maranoa expanded to include applications of indigenous products such as incense, dyes, resins and perfumes. It also included wider use of distillation, a technology which in the pre-Houtmanian era had been kept a guild secret amongst physicians and perfume makers. This secret was broken thanks to European knowledge of distillation. So further study included some of the more practical applications of distillation, most notably in methods for maintaining positive spirits among both students and teachers.
Maranoa incorporated study of the most highly desired of all European commodities: gunpowder. However, this was largely a source of frustration to Tjibarri chemists. They had sufficient access to Raw Men texts to know the approximate proportions for gunpowder, but actually producing workable quantities was another matter entirely.
A couple of chemists succeeded in making small quantities of gunpowder-like substances. However, they had severe problems with both purity and scale of production. Producing charcoal was straightforward to a society which had been practicing coppicing for millennia, but obtaining sulphur and saltpetre was much more difficult. Meaningful quantities of sulphur were difficult to obtain. With saltpetre there were difficulties both in obtaining the product and in ensuring purity of what they found. So for a long time, Tjibarri chemists were unable to produce gunpowder except as a curiosity.
From its inception, the Tjagarr Panipat applied strict admission standards for both students and teachers. Five Rivers physicians had long followed rigid methods regarding those whom they would accept as apprentices, largely because their own professional reputations could be affected by those whom they chose as students. As the Panipat evolved into the core institute for Tjibarri medicine, admission became a general process rather than relying on the discretion of individual physicians. The governing council of the Panipat set high merit standards for admission to the roll; this involved detailed oral questioning, and often practical demonstrations of skill.
When the Panipat expanded to include scholars of other disciplines, similar strict benchmarks were established for admission in any capacity. Panipat scholars prided themselves on resisting all outside pressure about who was suitable to study at their institution. Occasional exceptions were known for less capable students who were favoured by a particularly influential factional sponsor – usually involving some expansion of facilities or resources. But on the whole, the institution maintained its extremely high admission standards.
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Where Five Rivers societies developed strong educational institutions, the Nangu and their Nuttana successors adopted strong commercial institutions. The Nangu had been strongly commerce-focused long before contact with the Raw Men; they were the premier traders of pre-Houtmanian Aururia. When European contact made them aware of the broader world, the Nangu were keen to expand their trade networks wherever they saw the chance for profit. Indeed, when they encountered European and Asian goods which were demonstrably superior to local commodities, the Nangu were as keen to go visiting to trade for them as Europeans had been in earlier centuries when learning to navigate to Asia in pursuit of spices.
The Nangu became explorers and traders on a wider scale. They took advantage of European charts or geographical knowledge when it was available, or simply ventured into the unknown when they had no other alternatives. The earliest major examples were the three great voyages of Werringi the Bold (later known as Kumgatu): the first circumnavigation of Aururia (1630-31), the first Aururian voyage to Java (1635-6), and the first Aururian voyage to the Philippines and Okinawa (1643).
As part of his voyages, Werringi pioneered two things which would form much of his legacy. Inspired in part by knowledge of the Dutch East India Company, Werringi helped to negotiate the formation of a great Nangu trading association –
nuttana, in their language – for cooperative ventures outside of Aururia. He also established a resupply station at Wujal [Cooktown, Queensland] that would grow into the first of the Nuttana city-states.
The Nangu homeland on the Island, and in turn their entire commercial empire, relied on imported food to prosper. With the plagues and major warfare in the Seven Sisters [Eyre Peninsula], most Nangu had to leave the Island or starve. The largest group of those exiles ended up in the thriving Nuttana lands. From there, they set about expanding on Werringi’s discoveries and building a new commercial empire.
Improvements in Nangu shipbuilding had begun even before the Nuttana was founded. Indeed, part of the motivation for Werringi’s second exploration voyage had been to take advantage of the capabilities of the new ships designed after seeing European examples. Wherever they could, the Nuttana continued to take advantage of opportunities to sail and trade further. They continued to improve their indigenous ship-building tradition, developing larger ships and better navigation. For the most part, they progressed by their own efforts. The only major European contributions were from some early acquisition of charts and tales, the introduction of the compass, and the spread of paper that permitted more convenient chart-making and other navigational record-keeping.
The development of better ships allowed much greater Nuttana exploration. The main part of this exploration was local. The Nuttana began a vigorous exploration and (where possible) establishment of trade contact with coastal societies in northern Aururia, New Guinea and elsewhere in Melanesia, Aotearoa, and nearby parts of Polynesia such as Tonga and Samoa.
Some of this exploration and trade spread much further. Since Werringi’s third voyage, the Nuttana were one of the few societies permitted to trade with Japan, via the subject kingdom of the Ryukyus. This trade was strictly limited and mostly on Japanese terms; the Nuttana bought mainly muskets and sold mainly jeeree [Aururian lemon tea], which had become a desired commodity in the upper echelons of Japanese society. In the 1660s, the beginning of the Anglo-Dutch Wars meant that those countries’ trading companies were much less capable of preventing trade competition from other powers, and the Nuttana took advantage of this to expand their exploration and trading contacts westward into India.
The greatest testament of Nuttana exploration during this period came from the accomplishments of Korowal the Navigator. In 1683, he led the first Nuttana expedition to circumnavigate the southern hemisphere. He led his ships on the circumpolar route that followed the strong winds of the Roaring Forties, visiting all three of the great capes along the way (Cape Horn, the Cape of Good Hope, and Cape Leeuwin) before returning home to Wujal.
The Old World plagues affected the Nuttana, naturally, but they maintained their population much better than any other Aururian society. Partly this was because their geographic isolation allowed them to make much more effective use of quarantine. Partly this was because many Nuttana had caught the plagues while on trading voyages to the Old World, and so were able to care for the sick during the epidemics. Mostly, though, it was because the Nuttana had built up systems of recruiting labour, voluntary and otherwise, that allowed them to maintain an effective labour force despite the plagues.
Between the 1640s and the 1680s, the Nuttana established a wide-scale commercial empire (and, partly, colonial empire) across much of the Western Pacific. The biggest component of the trading network was in slaves/indentured labourers, and the commodities produced by them. For the Nangu descendants who formed the core of the Nuttana were mostly non-agricultural specialists: shipbuilders, craftsmen, sailors, and traders. The early Nuttana had obtained food by recruiting Kiyungu from the south on five-year terms to work as farmers inland from Wujal. Many of those Kiyungu remained as free farmers afterwards, and in their heritage the Nuttana were almost as much Kiyungu as they were Nangu.
With the population collapse of the plagues, and with desired expansion into new products, the supply of Kiyungu labourers was not sufficient for Nuttana demand. So they turned to new sources for recruiting indentured labourers and, eventually, slaves. Their preferred early recruits were Papuans, who were familiar with growing sugar, and who were mostly immune to Old World diseases. These were supplemented by peoples from Melanesia and Polynesia, particularly the Solomon Islands. Sometimes these labourers were willingly recruited for a term of years, but sometimes they were made slaves by their own people; chiefs were keen to obtain Nuttana goods, but often had few commodities other than people to offer in exchange.
The largest source of slaves, though, came from Aotearoa. The large population and endemic warfare of the Land of the Long White Cloud meant that there was a large supply of slaves available, to those who had commodities which the Maori wanted in exchange. The Nuttana grew sugar in abundance, and when they came to Aotearoa, they often sold the sugar in exchange for slaves who would in turn produce more.
In keeping with Maori practice, most of these slaves were male; female slaves were mostly kept in the home kingdom. The Nuttana did not permit slaves to marry except to other slaves, believing that a marriage between slave and free would bring disharmony. So while Maori made up a large percentage of the Nuttana population in any given year, few of those enslaved Maori would leave descendants.
In their homeland in north-eastern Aururia, the Nuttana used slaves to grow large amounts of sugar, and smaller quantities of jeeree and spices. The sugar was traded across Aotearoa and southern and eastern Aururia. The jeeree was traded into the East Indies, the Ryukyus, and sometimes further afield into India and China; the spices were traded across all of those regions as well as into Melanesia. They sold some iron tools into Papua, and to a lesser degree elsewhere in Melanesia and Polynesia. From Papua they bought some sugar as well, together with bird of paradise feathers and other minor commodities, occasionally food such as sago, but often they bought people. From the rest of Melanesia, they traded for coconuts which became a delicacy in the Nuttana-city states, but the main commodity they purchased was people. The Nuttana sold sugar and muskets further south into Aururia, with the main products they received in exchange being larger supplies of spices and jeeree which they would on-sell into Asia, and sometimes gold when they went far enough south to the Yadji realm and the Cider Isle (Tasmania). In Aotearoa they sold sugar and muskets, and bought rope and textiles of New Zealand flax, as well as a large supply of slaves. From India they brought cotton textiles, gunpowder, and some manufactured goods; from China they bought silk and other luxury goods such as porcelain.
The expansion of the Nuttana trading network brought with it an expansion in influence and informal colonialism. Their Nangu predecessors had developed colonial outposts and in some cases economic hegemony over much of southern Aururia; the Nuttana did the same across much of their new trading network. The Nuttana did not claim formal control over other territories, partly because they were wary of angering the Raw Men too much, and partly in keeping with the ancient Nangu tradition of informal influence. But they established effective client states in some of the northerly Kiyungu city-states such as Quamba [Mackay], and the kingdom of Ngutti [Yamba] that had been carved out of Daluming during the civil war there, and in parts of Melanesia. In Aotearoa, they did not establish client states in the same way, but wielded some influence over the Plirite kingdoms which fought against their traditionalist or French-backed rivals.
The expansion of their trade network, and particularly trade with Europeans and Japan, led the Nuttana to develop new commercial institutions. An early form of this was their development of the Nuttana trading association itself, which was based on their then-limited Nangu understanding of joint-stock European trading companies. With their increasing commercial links and far-flung trade outposts, the Nuttana were quick to take up or adopt other foreign institutions to suit their needs.
The Nuttana were among the first Aururian societies to adopt coinage. They gained knowledge of the principles from European inspiration, and used bullion obtained from their own trade with the Cider Isle and the Yadji. Coinage greatly facilitated trade within the internal Nuttana economy.
Record-keeping had always been an essential part of Nangu commerce, but their methods became much more sophisticated. In large part this was due to knowledge of paper-making, which allowed them to keep much more extensive records. Over time, and thanks to numerous enquiries by inquisitive Nangu, the Nuttana learned about Arabic numerals and European accounting systems, including double-entry bookkeeping. This permitted much more accurate commercial records, and so this, too, facilitated the expansion of Nuttana trade.
In some instances, the Nuttana did not adopt European institutions even when they became familiar with them. For instance, at first the Nuttana had a limited understanding of joint-stock companies, and thus formed their own trading association. However, when they learned more about the European form, they still did not adopt it. The Nuttana had developed their own system of profit-sharing from their trading voyages, where a set percentage of a vessel’s profits went to its crew, and another set percentage to the owning bloodline, while the rest was divided amongst the other five Nuttana bloodlines in specified proportions. As their economy expanded, the Nuttana developed their own system of shared equity and transfer of trading rights or profits between individuals and bloodlines, but they did not adopt any direct equivalent to joint stock companies.
The expansion of equity and profit-sharing systems in turn became part of the broader Nuttana legal revolution. In this case, they were only indirectly inspired by European contact, and more precisely by trading disputes. Other inspiration came from managing the different customs and practices of the other peoples (especially Kiyungu) who were being incorporated into Nuttana society.
Their Nangu predecessors had relied mainly on sworn agreements, with disputes being either mediated by honoured priests or referred to their Council. Such practices became impractical with so many different peoples and customers. Being Plirite they had a keen interest in orderly conduct and resolution of disputes, and so a new field emerging in codifying contracts and other forms of law. Plirite priests developed broader roles as jurists and were heavily involved in developing the new legal codes, including those regarding slavery. The Nuttana legal system had a heavy emphasis on contract law, with harsh penalties for breach of faith or failure to deliver on contract.
Some of the new institutions which the Nuttana developed were industrial, not commercial. From the Javanese and then the Indians, they acquired technology for processing sugar cane: mills for grinding and crushing the sugar cane, then boiling the juice to produce the gravelly sugar that was the foundation of Nuttana wealth. From their contact with China and the tea produced there, the Nuttana were inspired to try new forms of processing jeeree. They developed new flavours by allowing the leaves to fully ferment in a similar manner to the production of Chinese black tea. The new forms of jeeree had both stronger flavours and preserved better than traditional jeeree, which added to the export potential of the crop.
The Nuttana’s new institutions brought them increasing wealth, despite the ongoing problems of Old World plagues. Yet these institutions did not eliminate the threat from foreign powers; in some ways, this made them a more attractive target.
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“Trade involves a constant struggle in peace and wars between the countries of Europe as to who carries off the greatest amount. The Dutch, the English and the French are the main combatants in this struggle.”
- Jean-Baptiste Colbert, memoir to King Louis XIII of France, 1662
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Thoughts?
