Lands of Red and Gold #85: The Mask and Mirror
This post gives an overview of events amongst the Atjuntja before and after the Great Death. The Atjuntja have been given little coverage in Lands of Red and Gold for quite some time; this instalment fills in some of the details.
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“The transition from medieval to absolutist age replaced one mode of government with another, but did not reverse the course of injustice. No grand proclamation of Sovereignty could make restitution for the lack of honest Authority. Genuine Authority to command labour comes not from the Real or the Divine, but ultimately from the Ordinary.”
- Benjamin Maimon, The Dissent of Man
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The Middle Country, it is called. Tiayal, in the Atjuntja dialect. Home to a large empire by Aururian standards; the second most populous state on the continent. Ruled by a people who call themselves the Atjuntja, and whose subjects speak mostly-related languages or dialects (depending on how it is defined) and are collectively called the Yaora.
Farming came late to the Middle Country, but its inhabitants were the first to master the art of iron-working. With the aid of iron tools, they made much more use of available arable land, and became the best road-builders on the continent. The Atjuntja road system allowed efficient travel between many points, even to a society whose only beasts of burden were people and dogs. But most notably, it allowed food and people to be brought to the imperial capital.
The White City, the Atjuntja capital was called. Milgawee, in the Atjuntja dialect, but it was renamed in every other dialect of their subject peoples to whichever local words meant “white city.” Naturally, the indigenous interpreters applied the same principle when translating the city’s name into Dutch as Witte Stad, and that was the name by which it would become known in Europe. The White City was the largest city on the continent, which including its seasonal workforce could hold up to two hundred thousand people, and possessed some of the most remarkable architecture and botanical accomplishments in Aururia.
Supplying the White City naturally required control of sufficient food for its large population. But the Atjuntja Empire, under the rule of the King of Kings, went far beyond that. They developed a centralised economy which relied on control of both internal trade and resource production. To the Atjuntja, trade was allowed for merchants (who were also often nobles), but in specified locations and in permitted goods. Much of the economy was in practice controlled by imperial administrators via a tribute system which allocated resources. People’s labour was viewed as one of the resources to be allocated.
As part of the same control, the Atjuntja restricted trade with outlanders, both in terms of specific locations, and also in particular goods. These restrictions mostly applied to the Islanders who were the middlemen in trade with eastern Aururia, but also governed any trade with the hunter-gatherer peoples of the arid interior.
Besides their accomplishments in architecture, what most visitors notice about the Atjuntja is their religion. Or more specifically, one aspect of their religious practices. The Atjuntja religion has a complex view of reality as being the dynamic interaction between positive and negative forces, through the medium of the water cycle (solid, liquid and gas) which drives both the physical and spiritual world. Their faith sees deities and spirits as being merely more powerful mortal entities, includes some of the most detailed astronomical observations in the pre-telescopic world, and anticipates geological facts such as erosion and tectonic uplift long before these were grasped by Europeans. Despite all of this, to outsiders their religion can simply be summed up as “they torture people to death”; for they believe that the best way to avert the negative influence of the cosmos is to appease it by ritual torture (to the pain or the death) and duels between volunteers. The nuances of this practice are not entirely obvious to visitors.
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The Atjuntja achieved many firsts in their interactions with the wider world, not all of them accomplishments which they enjoyed. They were the first Aururians to have any contact with Europeans, and the first to die to gunfire. They were the first to christen the newcomers the Raw Men, and the first to strike trade agreements with them. More unfortunately, they were the first to suffer from European diseases (tuberculosis, syphilis [1], mumps, and chickenpox). They were the first to suffer plagues of Old World rats (more troublesome than the native rodents) which ate through their crops both in the fields and in storage, leading to famines.
Trade with the Dutch, while initially so desirable to the Atjuntja monarchy and nobility, eventually shattered the old Atjuntja economic system. The King of Kings originally dictated terms to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) about the locations and types of trade that would be permitted. The most important part of this was the location, with the trading outposts required to be west of Sunset Point [Cape Leeuwin]. This meant that the internal trade and tribute, via the road network, remained under imperial control.
However, European trade goods proved extremely desirable – and profitable – to the Atjuntja aristocratic-merchant class. Within a decade of trade being opened, the trade with the VOC was viewed as indispensable. While the King of Kings retained the nominal authority to close off trade, in practice that would have ensured a revolt by the nobles, and the choosing of a new King of Kings.
Worse followed in 1632-1633 when Dutch naval support was essential to suppressing the rebellion of a particularly capable aristocrat named Nyumbin. In the immediate aftermath of the revolt, the VOC obtained permission for a third trading outpost east of Sunset Point, and related concessions which in effect turned their outposts into Dutch-sovereign soil. Over the next few years, they secured unrestricted trade access throughout the Middle Country.
The increasing Dutch trade concessions would probably have been economically manageable, on their own. The Atjuntja economy could potentially have adjusted, particularly since Dutch contact did bring some benefits. Transportation was improving within the Middle Country, mostly thanks to the introduction of beasts of burden such as horses and donkeys, and in some cases due to cheaper waterborne transport – although the VOC conducted only limited intra-Atjuntja trade. The beasts of burden also made farming more efficient.
Some technological improvements also followed, particularly in iron working. Atjuntja ironsmiths were a profession so respected in the Middle Country that even nobles made requests of them, not demands. The ironsmiths made determined efforts to learn the new techniques, and were influential enough that the Atjuntja aristocrat-merchants heeded them. The VOC agreed to bring in expert metalworkers from Europe in exchange for favourable trade treatment. The first blast furnace was constructed near the White City in 1645, and iron production expanded throughout the Middle Country. The Atjuntja also adopted the practice of coinage from the Dutch, which facilitated trade, but caused problems of its own because the bullion used to produce coins was also being exported, leading to shortages of specie.
While there were some gains, the longer-term costs of Dutch contact were less noticeable, but insidious. Despite the few technological improvements such as ironworking, most of the products which the Dutch imported were finished goods, and almost always luxury goods for the use of the Atjuntja aristocracy. The commodities sought in exchange were all natural resources: gold, sandalwood, spices, and dyes. This meant that the Atjuntja aristocracy (and in part the imperial government) increasingly reoriented their economic activity into resource extraction rather than the more sustainable, structured semi-command economy which they had previously operated.
The increasing focus on resource extraction led to several problems, including a focus on key exportable commodities to the neglect of other activities, over-exploitation of resources, and labour unrest. Over-exploitation was most marked by the collapse of Aururian sandalwood production. The Aururian species of sandalwood needs to grow for fifteen to twenty years before it can be viably extracted. The Atjuntja had cultivated sandalwood as a small-scale crop grown in long rotations on some landholdings; a few would come to maturity each year, be harvested, and new trees replanted. In the pursuit of commodities for export, the pressure grew to harvest as much sandalwood as could be found, both the cultivated form and wild trees, and soon enough a collapse in production followed.
To replace the collapsed sandalwood industry, the Atjuntja aristocracy turned to alternative commodities: spices and dyes. Of the spices, sweet peppers were by far the most valuable, feeding a growing market in both Asia and Europe. Other minor spices were also cultivated, primarily mintbushes and white ginger, but these did not command premium prices; while they offered alternative tastes, they were reminiscent enough of other more familiar spices so that those could be substituted instead [2]. The VOC traded in the minor spices because they had some resale value in Asia and could be carried in ships’ holds that would otherwise be empty since they had sold their goods in the Middle Country, but only in rare cases would it trans-ship the minor spices back to Europe. The Atjuntja produced a variety of dyes, but the exportable dyes all came from the same plant; depending on how it was treated, this could produce either true indigo, a brilliant yellow or a functional green colour as dyes.
The expansion of spice and dye production, together with increasing royal gold production, occurred in an environment of declining population and recurrent famines. This inevitably pointed to a troublesome future for Atjuntja subjects. Indeed, labour unrest had been one of the reasons for Nyumbin’s rapid advances during his rebellion in the early 1630s, and unrest only became exacerbated as resource extraction increased in the 1640s and 1650s to supply the ever-growing Dutch demand.
The Atjuntja control of labour relied on three elements. The first element was the ancient custom of labour drafts, where every subject of the King of Kings could be required to perform some form of labour for part of the year. These labour drafts were assigned to recognised purposes such as public works, road-building, construction and repair (particularly within the White City). They were also assigned at prescribed times of the year, usually around the winter when the workers could be spared from the harvest.
The second element was labour in substitute. All holdings – whether family, village, or noble-ruled – were required to provide a certain amount of tribute to the imperial governors for their region. The tribute would be paid in commodities produced in the local region, usually food or other crops. Where the Atjuntja governor required some additional labour beyond the traditional customs of labour drafts, the most common practice was to offer a particular holding the option for labour in substitute, where they could provide workers for the new purpose and be exempted from a specified amount of tribute. Aristocrats usually operated a similar system within the bounds of their own holdings.
The third element was labour in addition. This was additional work performed by workers in a holding, beyond their usual requirements of drafts or tribute, in exchange for some other commodity (usually) or exemption from labour drafts. (For instance, this was usually how kunduri was received by workers in a holding.) Unlike other forms of labour control, labour in addition was usually subject to the agreement of the head of the holding; negotiations were commonplace when identifying a suitable exchange.
Apart from required times for labour draft, the workers of the holdings were free to manage their own labour. In practice this meant that most of their time was spent growing the crops required to pay their tribute, but in the pre-Houtmanian era, most workers had some time available to grow crops or perform other work of their own (or leisure time, if they preferred). Sometimes this work contributed to the private economy, that is, those commodities which the imperial government did not regulate, and so were free to be produced or traded privately. This included any surplus food left over once the holding had fed itself and met its tribute requirements, and also included some of the minor local crops, such as the native forms of tobacco, and some local flavourings such as mint species.
The Atjuntja labour system allowed them to organise the resources of their empire, and maintain a reasonably stable semi-command economy. However, the system came under ever-increasing strain with the epidemics and famines that started in the 1620s and only worsened with every passing decade.
Initially, the governors sought to maintain the existing levels of tribute, despite the reduced population and famines, because the governors themselves were judged on how much tribute they provided to the King of Kings. This provoked some local unrest at first, and then the catastrophe of Nyumbin’s rebellion in 1632-33 made the magnitude of the problems entirely clear to even the most oblivious of White City palace bureaucrats.
After the rebellion, the governors were given more leeway to adjust tribute levels to allow for population declines and famines. However, they were still expected to maximise the tribute provided, and so the governors were usually reluctant to lower the demands on the holdings far enough to satisfy the workers. Worse still, when they did reduce the tribute levels, they usually gave more preference to noble holdings rather than those held communally or by individual families. Sometimes this advantageous treatment was because the governors were bribed or otherwise on friendly terms with the aristocrats, and sometimes it was simply because they feared that angering the nobles would be more likely to produce further revolts.
The problems became worse with the increasing aristocratic demands for resource production in an environment of declining availability of labour. Some aristocrats sought to change the tribute required within their own subordinate holdings, and then offer labour in substitute by working the nobles own lands to produce exportable commodities; in effect, requiring the workers to labour for additional hours for no recompense. When the workers appealed to the local governors (as they had the right to do), sometimes the governors backed the nobles.
A couple of more egregious governors started requiring tribute in indigo, sweet peppers or minor spices, even for holdings which were not capable of producing them. When the holdings complained that they were not able to meet this tribute, the governors generously allowed the workers to provide labour in substitute on holdings which could provide the commodities. In effect, this also required the holdings to perform additional work for the nobles, with no recompense. Even worse, the workers inevitably ended up being required to produce more commodities than were expected in tribute, with the nobles retaining the rest.
While the required tribute could be changed over time, both in amount and in the chosen commodities, this had usually only done with good cause, for it inevitably provoked unrest among the holdings. Protests were made to the governors, and in some cases to the White City itself. The King of Kings cared little for the protests of individual holdings – except where made by a prominent noble – and so the governors were largely left unchecked until the matters reached open revolt. Sporadic labour revolts happened throughout the first half of the 1640s, and would have worsened if events had not been overtaken by the latest Old World epidemic: typhus.
Typhus ravaged the Atjuntja; the already famine-affected population were even more vulnerable than other Aururians. The deaths among farmers also affected the harvest and transportation of food, leading to further famines. Altogether, the death toll was about 20% of the population, although the better-nourished aristocracy fared better than most.
The shock of typhus and consequent economic disarray meant that, for a brief time, the royal administration acted decisively. Tribute demands of the governors were reduced, and they in turn were instructed to make concessions for the people of their regions. Religious fervour combined with practicality, with the more egregious or just incompetent governors being the prime choice for volunteers for sacrifice; the King of Kings also accepted volunteers from many of the noble families who had been the subject of the greatest protests.
While the monarch’s actions resolved some of the immediate tensions, the underlying problems had only worsened. The governors’ reductions in tribute were at best in line with the reduction in population, leaving the survivors with equal demands for their work, and in the worst cases were not reduced enough, leaving the demands for labour even higher. The aristocrats’ desire for labour for resource extraction was also unchanged.
So, as the immediate shock of typhus receded, the surviving nobles and governors made fresh efforts to secure additional labour from the diminished holdings. Many workers were often struggling to find sufficient time to produce sufficient food of their own, let alone grow any private crops such as native tobacco.
The situation turned increasingly dire when the imperial government itself began to suffer labour shortages for its most economically critical activity: gold mining. The ancient mines of Golden Blood [Kalgoorlie] were in a harsh semi-desert environment, but contained some of the richest gold reserves in the world. The monarchy had long controlled the gold production, but due to the harshness of the climate, the mining was conducted by slaves who had been sentenced to life punishment. By ancient custom, labour drafts were not used in the gold mines.
With the ever-declining population, the imperial government faced difficulties extracting the desired amount of gold: not enough slaves had survived, and not enough new criminals could be found to be sent as slaves. This was only exacerbated by the gradual adoption of coinage: many of those coins were simply traded as gold to the Dutch. This caused pressure from the nobles, as well as weakening the imperial government’s own resources. This led the King of Kings to issue a proclamation that labour draftees could be used in the gold mines.
This decision could best be described as a misjudgement.
The popular view of the gold mines was that working in them was a death sentence. This was in part a misconception; while the climate was harsh, the slaves were not worked to death. The horrors of the gold mines were due to rumour, not truth; after all, slaves almost never returned to describe the conditions. The imperial government had tacitly encouraged those rumours over the previous decades and centuries, since it made slavery seen as a greater deterrent to revolt. Unfortunately, the imperial government gravely underestimated the level of revulsion that was produced by a declaration of labour draftees being used in the gold mines. Most of the affected workers believed that they would never return alive.
The result was a widespread labour revolt, originating in Corram Yibbal [Bunbury] where the first workers had been drafted, but spreading quickly to other parts of the Middle Country. Unlike many previous rebellions, this was a rebellion of workers rather than being led by the aristocracy; even nobles who generally resented the imperial government were horrified at a revolt which could affect their own ability to control labour for their crops.
The labour revolt was christened the Blood-Gold Revolt – for obvious reasons. What was perhaps most notable about it was the method the rebels used to choose their leaders. Without any leaders who claimed aristocratic authority, they decided instead on a council of leaders. For choosing those leaders, they used a form of election – though not one that closely paralleled historical liberal democracy.
The Atjuntja monarchy was itself elective, with the King of Kings being elected by the “kings” of the thirteen Atjuntja noble families. This process of election was sometimes pro forma, where there was one clear heir, but was sometimes a genuine debate among the kings about the merits of candidates. The kings were themselves chosen in a similar manner by eligible members of the noble families. So, to the people of the Middle Country, election thus meant a group of prominent, successful people meeting to deliberate on who had the best qualities of leadership, and then electing that leader.
The rebels sought a method of identifying successful, wealthy farmers – wealth being deemed a sign of foresight and good land management. They needed a criterion that would identify the best farmers, without including too many of the less successful farmers. They settled on ownership of an imported donkey, since that required that a farmer be of more than average prosperity to take part in the election. While the term “donkey vote” would be disparaged in modern Aururian political discourse, the form of election they used would nonetheless be influential.
The Blood-Gold rebels had very little direct military success – they failed to capture a single garrison-city, although they besieged several. But the widespread nature of the revolt meant that the King of Kings quickly concluded that suppressing the rebels would be more expensive than was worthwhile, to say nothing of costing even more valuable labour. He opted for the alternative of proclaiming a new range of crimes that were punishable with slavery, and stopped any further attempts to use labour draftees in the gold mines. With this proclamation, and a few subsequent battlefield victories against more ambitious rebels, the revolt was crushed.
Despite the military failure of the revolt, it made clear the increasing strains on the Atjuntja Empire. With the struggle for labour ever more severe, the King of Kings turned to an alternative source: the Dutch. He asked the VOC factor at the White City if the Company could supply slaves to work in the gold mines. After some back-and-forth communications between the White City and Batavia, the first boatload of unfortunate Javanese slaves landed in Coenstad [Esperance] in 1660, for work in the gold mines inland.
Two years later, the Great Death arrived in Coenstad, spreading from the deserts to the east, and from there, it spread throughout the Atjuntja realm. The Middle Country would never be the same again.
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In Aururia, the 1660s and 1670s would become known as the Time of the Great Dying. The Middle Country suffered as badly as any other region, and worse than some.
The Great Death [measles] was the first and worst of the great plagues that spread through the Third World during this era. The death toll was severe: about 30% of the surviving population met their end during the Great Death. While the death rates were highest amongst the lower classes, the Great Death was no respecter of rank: the elderly King of Kings, Manyal Tjaanuc, survived the plague, but he lost six of his nineteen sons [3]. All told, the Middle Country had about 920,000 people left after the end of the Great Death; barely more than half of the pre-contact population of 1.75 million.
The massive death toll and population displacement turned the Atjuntja economy and labour system into chaos. Many people fled their existing lands, either in fear of the coming plague or in response to the death doll. Many smaller holdings and even some small towns were abandoned entirely, with the survivors moving to more populous areas.
In such a situation, the usual imperial controls over population movement or tribute were simply impossible to enforce. Instead, the imperial administrators did their best to collect what tribute they could from the people who had established themselves in new areas. In between trying to prevent revolts, or suppress those which had started.
During the plague itself, the imperial government turned to its traditional religious efforts to resolve it. Most of Manyal Tjuaanuc’s many surviving brothers were called on to volunteer to be sacrificed to the death to appease the Lord. Some of his sons followed, together with a whole host of nobles. Nothing abated the Great Death. After the third of his sons was sacrificed, the King of Kings stopped any further shedding of royal blood, although the nobles’ efforts continued a while longer.
When the immediate deaths from the plague had largely stopped, the imperial government did what it could to maintain order and prevent imperial rule being turned into a polite fiction in the far-flung royal provinces. In this, they faced severe challenges, for unrest was commonplace in the decade that followed. Sometimes this came in the form of open revolt, and sometimes in the form of simple refusal to pay tribute or to supply labour.
Further challenges came from the spread of new religious movements. The Atjuntja had always imposed state control on religion, which they viewed as part of the proper social order. A non-believer who failed to follow the proper rites of the Lord and Lady could bring disaster not just on themself, but on the broader community. Islanders and the Dutch were permitted to follow their own religious rites in their appointed trading stations, but were forbidden from proselytising, and any locals who converted faced the death penalty. A very few people converted in private, but they usually took care to perform the proper public rites.
In the turbulent times of the Great Dying, such strictures failed. The widespread suffering, and particularly the failure of all the orthodox rites to do anything to alleviate it, meant that faith in the Atjuntja religion was broken. New religious movements appeared, as some of the secret converts now became public in pronouncing their faiths as what was needed to restore the Middle Country.
Two main religious movements appeared. One was a much-corrupted form of Dutch Calvinism, which proclaimed that the faith of the Raw Men was what permitted them to survive the Great Death without suffering, and that to endure both this and future plagues, the Atjuntja had to convert and become part of the elect. The other was an Islander-inspired form of Plirism, which declared that the imperial government and aristocracy had brought the Middle Country out of balance by their actions, and that no round of sacrifices could avert it; only embracing the guidance of the Sevenfold Path could accomplish that.
The surviving imperial authorities sometimes stamped out the converts, at the point of a sword if necessary, particularly if more vocal zealots called for the replacement of imperial rule entirely. In some regions, particularly where labour was already short, the imperial administrators decided to leave well enough alone, and settled simply for suppressing any unorthodox worship which was too public.
For all of the post-Great Death tumult, the King of Kings maintained his rule. Three pillars supported imperial control of the Middle Country: the imperial near-monopoly on European arms; the lack of coordination amongst rebels; and control of the external supply of labour.
Thanks to Dutch support, the imperial government had almost a complete monopoly on European arms. Most muskets and horses were still controlled by the King of Kings’ forces. A few English and French smugglers intermittently sold muskets to rebels, but even when they did so, supplies of powder were limited for the rebels. Control of cannon remained completely in the hands of imperial forces, which made it easy to break into any enemy-controlled fortifications, while their own garrison-cities remained nearly impregnable.
Likewise, while revolts, refusals to labour, religious protests, and noble revolts all happened in the first decade of the Great Dying, they were not well-coordinated. Rebellions were generally localised, whether because of concern over too much tribute, a more than usually successful Plirite preacher, or a noble who decided to take control of labour for his own purposes rather than for imperial tribute. Such rebellions did not usually spread far, and rarely happened simultaneously. This let the (much-reduced) imperial forces quell any revolts one by one, without being too overstretched.
The third pillar, and perhaps the strongest, was control of the external labour supply. More precisely, the imperial control of the slave trade. Due to previous rebellions, the King of Kings had been forced to allow the VOC open trade in all commodities. However, this agreement did not include traffic in people, since imperial policy had viewed labour drafts and slavery as separate from trade. The slave trade which had been opened on the eve of the Great Death thus fell under control of imperial edict. The terms of this were not highly restrictive – the VOC had too much power for that – but did allow for the King of Kings or one of his governors to prohibit the selling of slaves to any region or individual noble. This meant that the ability to close off the slave trade was a very effective lever that the King of Kings or imperial governors could wield against rebellious nobles.
In the post-Great Death world, the previous scarcities of labour seemed abundance by comparison. Labour drafts were perforce much reduced, leaving much public works poorly maintained or abandoned entirely. Maintenance of even the essential road network and the main royal buildings in the White City required a new source of labour. Nobles, too, continued to call out for labour to grow the spices that they wanted to trade for Dutch goods. The King of Kings thus called for a major expansion in the slave trade; the question was whether the Dutch could supply it.
The first slaves which the VOC had supplied came from Java, but this posed a twofold problem for the Dutch: firstly there were not that many potential slaves available, and secondly it did not suit the best sailing routes. The main VOC trade routes relied on sending ships from Europe to the Cape of Good Hope, and then sailing east using the strong westerly winds of the Roaring Forties. Ships could not return via this route, and so swung north to the East Indies and India, returning to Europe via the monsoonal winds of the more northerly Indian Ocean. While it was possible to sail south from Java to Aururia, it was not more difficult, and meant that those ships could not be used to bring spices back to Europe.
By the early 1660s, the VOC resolved both of these difficulties in the process of solving another problem. The island of Madagascar had seen both English and Dutch colonial attempts during the early seventeenth century, all of which ultimately failed due to disease, climate and hostile Malagasy. However, some of the survivors of those attempts, together with shipwrecked sailors, had turned to piracy, preying on both English and Dutch ships sailing to and from the Orient.
During the 1650s, the VOC made a concerted attempt to defeat these pirates. This involved building up friendly relations with the Malagasy kingdoms, which mostly involved selling arms and other European goods. The introduction of better weapons led the Malagasy to expand their slaving raids on each other, and to sell some of these slaves to the Dutch in exchange for more weapons. This meant that by the 1660s the VOC now had a suitable source of slaves available, conveniently located near the best sailing route to the Middle Country.
Given the requests of the King of Kings, the VOC was quick to send ships to Madagascar that were capable of transporting slaves. The first unfortunate Malagasy slaves arrived in the White City in 1663. This marked the beginning of what would be a long period of importing Malagasy and African slaves into Aururia.
The unfortunate slaves were used for purposes where the imperial governors and aristocrats could not, or would not, use labour draftees. A significant proportion were used in gold mining. The gold which the slave miners produced allowed the King of Kings to pay both for those slaves and for others who were used to replace labour drafts in road construction, and in construction and maintenance of the White City.
Most of the rest of the slaves were sold to the aristocrats, who used the slaves to expand their production of cash crops – or, in many cases, restore some of the production which had been lost with the Great Death. The most significant cash crop continued to be sweet peppers, with dyes and minor spices providing supplementary crops. In sweet pepper production, slaves were increasingly needed not just for cultivation but for irrigation works, since the imperial administration no longer had the labour drafts to maintain much of an irrigation system [4].
The nobles were fortunate (though the slaves were not), in that just as they wanted more and more slave labour, so the Dutch in turn wanted more and more sweet peppers. Sweet peppers were highly desirable spices in both Asia and Europe. However, unlike some other spices (such as nutmeg and mace), the VOC could not control the supply to ensure that prices remained high. The production of common sweet peppers was impossible to monopolise, since they were grown throughout almost all of the farming areas of Aururia and Aotearoa. The English and French (and occasionally Portuguese) traded with most of those regions, and thus no-one could monopolise the trade. Instead, the Dutch sought to make profits from sweet peppers based on volume, rather than premium prices.
With the increasing supply of slave labour, the aristocracy gradually became more tolerant – and, indeed, reliant – on imperial authority. So as the 1660s drew to a close, it appeared that the Atjuntja Empire had weathered the worst consequences of the Great Death, and even begun a very slow recovery.
Unfortunately, other Old World diseases were still waiting their opportunity to cross into Aururia.
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[1] Although syphilis may have originally come from the New World.
[2] Mintbushes (Prostanthera rotundifolia and relatives) are sometimes called “native thyme”, having a flavour somewhat reminiscent of thyme or mint. White ginger, historically called native ginger (Alpinia caerulea) also produces flavours similar to ginger. These flavours are distinctive enough from the more familiar Old World equivalents that they can command some value as imported spices, but are not sufficient to replace locally available spices entirely.
[3] Atjuntja monarchs have many wives. Manyal Tjaanuc has in fact been more restrained than the norm, to have so few sons.
[4] Sweet peppers are naturally subalpine crops which prefer cooler temperatures and higher rainfall. This can be managed in the lowlands by growing them partially shaded – generally on the south side of wattle groves – and by generous irrigation. However, sustaining the required irrigation systems became much more difficult in the labour-scarce Middle Country after the effects of the Great Death.
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Thoughts?