Summarize

"Extract from recorded lecture on “The Imp in Your Pocket” by Michael Mantarakis, recorded November 16th, 2020—

Gold! Gold has excited the imaginations of mankind since our earliest, forgotten years. The Noble Metal, which the ancients thought always remained aloof and did not combine with others – not entirely true, but combinations are relatively rare compared to other metals – and which stood out due to its colour and lustre. The scientists now tell us that the colour arises from Webb-Popham relativistic effects; I could not explain that, as it’s not my area of expertise, but imagine that. The theory which changed our understanding of the universe was always on open display before us, if we had had the eyes to see, and gave rise to the colour of gold which has fascinated and obsessed us for thousands of years.[1] As soon as there was civilisation of any kind, be it Sumer or ancient Egypt or even the lesser-known Proto-Caucasians, we find elaborate tombs with kings and princes buried with gold jewellery.[2] We all know the cautionary myth of King Midas from my people, who turned everything he touched to gold – whether he wanted to or not. It is most probably an origin myth to explain the rivers of the lands of Lydia and Phrygia, in modern Anatolia in the Eternal State, producing gold that made the later King Croesus legendarily rich.

Gold is so central to our imagination of wealth that we frequently forget that the reason why it is so valuable is its rarity. Perhaps that sounds obvious, but I don’t think people appreciate just how rare gold is. Ninety percent of all the gold ever mined in human history was mined since the California Goldrush in 1818-19.[3] Even today, all the gold ever mined would fit in a cube about seventy feet on each side. Or, to put it another way, about enough to fill just under four Global Games swimming pools.[4] (Shocked audience reaction) Before 1818, it’d have fitted into a cube only thirty or so feet on each side – which would easily fit into the House of Commons chamber, for example. Nobody guess how long it would stay there before the politicians decided to start taxing it. (Audience laughter) But just think about that, all the gold in the world in one place would only be that much. Now remember all the depictions in fiction that have shown pirates or unscrupulous wealthy villains with ships full, vaults full, of gold.[4] To the economically literate, such scenes are as absurd as if one watched a film in which one character was twenty feet tall and drove a mobile powered by eggs and nobody seemed to notice or comment on it!

Gold’s scarcity is what makes it so valuable and so relatively stable, for the most part, but also causes problems with using it as a currency. When we tie the money in circulation to a specific commodity – especially a highly limited one – that limits our economic growth. Of course, it was never the case that when currency was backed by a precious metal, the amount of money in circulation was tied to the amount of that metal alone. The key principle of banking is that a bank can always theoretically pay out commodity coinage, which is inherently valuable, such as gold or silver coins, to any account holder who walks in and asks for it. This works, providing that not every account holder walks in at once and asks for it, because the bank is moving their limited amount of money around in order to fulfil transactions elsewhere. If this does happen, in the case of a ‘run on the bank’, then the bank will be unable to refund them all and will collapse, unless it is rescued by emergency funds from elsewhere. (Audience grumbles) Nonetheless, even though a small amount of gold can physically stay in the vault of one bank and be theoretically loaned out again and again through promissory notes, fixing currency to a limited commodity still inherently limits economic growth.

In order to do that with gold, or any commodity, of course, one already requires a stable banking system and a state to back it up – though historically banks have backed up states as well! For much of history, the only state strong and stable enough to be able to operate such a system was China. China could issue fiat currency, paper money, for internal use long before anyone in Europe trusted it. Even the Roman Empire found its own economy disrupted by forces from the China trade.[5] The Chinese economy was always founded on silver as the chief commodity, along with silk early on, but silver ingots were hoarded rather than exchanged until the Ming dynasty. Even though China was still largely inward-looking at this time, we can see how the interaction of European and Novamundine influences with Chinese ones helped set the monetary policy of the later world. The Spanish had obtained vast silver mines from the Novamund and silver began to flood into the Far East as a means of exchange. The Ming statesman Wang Juzheng implemented what we would later recognise as China’s silver standard, collecting taxes in silver taels rather than rice. It had been an indirect European influence, by making silver more available, that had helped set China’s economic policy; in later centuries, this attachment to silver would feed back, as China in turn influenced the West.

China is the best-known example of a silver standard economy, but silver was the basis of a lot more economies than gold throughout history, from the Sumerians onwards. Gold first rose to prominence as the primary basis of an economy due to an accidental decision by famous scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who was also Master of the Royal Mint at the time, which undervalued silver in England compared to gold. ‘Bad money drove out good’ and England, then a rising power, became dependent on gold, while silver coins flowed out of the country to Europe as they could be melted down for higher than their face value. This naturally also influenced matters here in what would become the ENA. This early push for gold was abortive, though, when England was invaded by the French and she lost much of her gold reserves.[6]

Europe in general had been damaged and exhausted by the Jacobin Wars, while China had been unexpectedly opened to further trade by the rebellion during the Three Emperors’ War that gave rise to the Nanfeng dynasty.[7] Visionary leaders in both Europe and China realised that this was an opportunity to help rebuild after their respective wars, and trade between China – those parts controlled by the Nanfeng – and the rest of the world dramatically accelerated during this period. Prior to this point, China under the old Qing dynasty had been backward, inward-looking and reluctant to trade. The Qing might be foreign invaders, Manchus, but despite that, or because of that, they seemed eager to embrace the more autarkic parts of Confucianism, more than many of the native Han dynasties in fact. The Qing steadily reduced trade to only one city, Canton, modern Hanjing, and would only accept one commodity, silver – though from the ENA, Appalachian ginseng was a second trade commodity.[8] At the same time, European and Novamundine powers became more and more hungry and impatient for China’s bounty of trade products; tea, porcelain, lacquerware and silk chief among them. The trade was seen as nothing more than a trickle to Europeans and treasuries were being emptied of silver. Unscrupulous traders began illegally trading the drug opium to Chinese merchants. The Qing government proved ineffectual at cracking down on this, encouraging others to try the same, and even the more legitimate major trading companies tried it. The British East India Company infamously caused a famine in Bengal in 1770 by forcing farmers to grow opium poppies instead of food, all to feed the ravenous trade balance.

The Three Emperors’ War and the rise of the Nanfeng, the later Feng, changed all that. The Feng might have been birthed in part by secret societies with the romantic goal of overthrowing foreign rule, but they were also run by hard-headed businessmen who knew Europeans better than anyone in China, and also knew how to strike a deal. Both Nanfeng and Europeans were in weak positions. Twenty years earlier or later, a country like France could have sent a fleet to try to enforce its will on the Chinese traders. (Audience reaction) Yes, I mean no disrespect to the Chinese people by saying so, I don’t seek to compare them to a country like Yapon! But things were in turmoil at the time and a strong foreign force could have forced an unequal deal on the Nanfeng. Fortunately for China, damaged Europe was in no place to do so. A new trading arrangement grew up as a partnership of equals, as both Europe and the Nanfeng rebuilt and rose again together, and we in the Novamund rose to join them. The Nanfeng were able to severely limit the opium trade and actually enforce it, unlike their Qing predecessors; though opium was valuable, the European traders mostly recognised that it was better to stick to providing the less valuable but more reliable trade goods which the Qing had previously turned their noses up at. The old Dutch were the only ones who tried to carry on the opium trade surreptitiously, and we all know what happened to them. The Nanfeng proved that they could force a country out of the China trade if it broke its treaty obligations, and the fact that the Dutch collapsed soon afterwards in the Popular Wars rammed the point home.

I mention all this because Nanfeng China, Feng China’s, integration into a global economy changed everything. China had never truly been as aloof from the world as its rulers might like to think, but this direct involvement was a new concept altogether. China was not merely a silver sink anymore, but a part of an economic system, with silver flowing out as well as in, paying for European weapons and training and steam technology. And from the Novamund as well, of course. Silver was the primary exchange commodity of world trade, with China also influencing Siam and, later, the Indian nations after the Great Jihad after the establishment of their colony of Jushina.

One might have expected a change to a gold standard to be driven by the repeated goldrushes of the nineteenth century. This certainly dramatically increased the gold supply and made gold more viable as a means of currency exchange. In the short term, however, many goldrushes close together caused a destabilisation in the price of gold. Neither precious metal alone could entirely supply the exchange needs of the rapidly-industrialising and –developing interior of this nation and what was then the UPSA. Local banks were often set up, illegally issuing paper money backed by nothing more than wishful thinking, frequently collapsing and wiping out savings every time there was an economic ripple.[9] But they existed because people needed the ability to save and invest to keep up with the pace of economic development, driven in part by new technology such as steam engines and railways. Floods of immigrants left Europe for here in the ENA, the UPSA and Antipodea. The situation was highly volatile.

The Electrum Standard, which still carries connotations of being ‘the good old days’ whose passing is bemoaned by greybeards – even though no-one lives now for truly remembers it – formally came about later than many imagine it did, in 1883.[10] Informally, however, it had already begun to form organically. The repeated injection of large quantities of gold into the global economy, and the fact that that economy was gradually incorporating more and more of the world, gradually led to an increased use of gold to underwrite the industrialised economies of the Arc of Power here in the ENA, the River Plate in the UPSA, the coal belt of northwestern Europe, and the Moscow-Petrograd corridor in Russia. At the same time, Nanfeng China continued to increase in power and importance and still ran her trade on a silver basis. Silver mines across the New World, most famously perhaps in the Californian province of Argentina, continued to produce and farmers remained wedded to silver as an easier means of exchange.[11] Diamonds and other gemstones were also entering the world economy in much larger quantities than before, largely from the Cape Republic as well as the gem mines of Cambodia in the Siamese Empire. Initially this led to widespread economic disruption, before cartels agreed to limit the diamond supplies; later, after the Societist takeover of several African diamond-producing regions,[12] the Combine would use control of this market as an economic weapon, like their better-known attempted use of oil.

The volatility of the world economic situation in 1883 was demonstrated by the fact that a global depression, the Panic of 1883, was set off by the relatively minor incident of isolated crop failures due to a volcanic eruption in the Nusantara. The exchange rate of gold to silver had proved too unstable, and this had led to several bank collapses. Now, for the first time, world powers met in Antwerp to agree to fix the gold-to-silver standard exchange, initially at 15:1. Hopes that this could be maintained indefinitely proved fruitless, however, necessitating regular meetings of what became known as the World Numismatics Council (Audience reaction) Of course, this was before the rise of Societism made terms like that politically charged. Yes, every three years or so the WNC would meet to fix the rate of exchange. There was still a lag, leading to situations like the earlier one in England I mentioned, where silver coins might become more inherently valuable than their face value and lead to illegal currency flows and melting down to ingots. Gold became more and more important as a more stable rate of mining from Africa replaced the stop-start disruption of the goldrushes, and even China began unofficial defining its external markets in terms of gold. The global gold market would not be affected by issues of supply – other than mines pausing operations due to war – until the Trondek goldrush of 1933.[13]

The Antwerp System had its flaws, but it served to moderate global financial volatility until it failed with the outbreak of the Pandoric War in 1896.[14] Perhaps the surprising part is that the Electrum Standard did not collapse immediately as more and more powerful nations suspended interconvertibility and began to print fiat money to fund their war efforts. An important factor in keeping the heart of the system stable was the neutrality of France and the Marseilles Protocol. (Audience reaction) Yes, France’s position has been much-criticised on moral grounds, but in terms of the world’s economy, a league of armed neutrality backed by what was then the biggest economy on Earth meant that trade could continue to function under the wartime conditions. By effectively threatening to intervene on one side or the other to tip the balance, the French – backed up by the Italians and a host of minor allies – were able to protect the status of neutral shipping on the high seas. This had a number of consequences. For example, attempts to blockade import-dependent nations such as Germany into starvation all failed. No power was willing to risk sinking a ship sailing an obviously fictitious neutral flag of convenience lest it antagonise the French. This worked both ways, of course; in order to constitute a credible threat, the French had to scatter their forces across the world to be ready to intervene, which meant that they were unable to put down the Dufresnais Revolution, for example.

Because France never suspended the Electrum Standard within its own economic bloc, the French economy became even more dominant over the course of the war as the ENA, UPSA and China all began to exhaust their reserves. However, France then fell into a trap. When the UPSA was replaced with the Societist Combine, the Combine defaulted on most Meridian debts – which largely came at the expense of France, whose banks had continued to lend to Meridians throughout the war. (Indistinct reaction from audience) Well, some would say so, perhaps. Prime Minister Leclerc built the International Expeditionary Force out of Marseilles Protocol troops and sent it to the Combine after the war, not to try to suppress Societism as is often thought today, but to try to secure French-owned businesses and French subjects there. In the end, this effort was largely a failure. The French economy had strengthened due to not suffering the same rise in military spending to fund the Pandoric War effort that other nations had, but France just ended up spending on its military for the IEF intervention instead.

Nations attempted to rebuild the Antwerp System after the war, more out of a vague sense of wishful thinking than with any plan in mind. Nostalgics associated the Electrum Standard with prosperity, and confused cause and effect.[15] The loss of the UPSA and much of the Hermandad to the interconnected global economy, as Alfarus built his inward-looking ‘udarkismo’ system, was an elephant in the room that gradually began to undermine the standard. The reconstructed Antwerp System limped on, its obvious fragilities ignored by those who did not wish to see them, until 1917. The Panic of 1917 was triggered by Guatemala defaulting on a war reparations payment coupled to a political and economic crisis in Corea. However, something similar could have happened at any time, if enough isolated problems had come together at once so that financiers could not try to head them off. Discussing the response to the Panic of 1917 would take more than one lecture in itself, but it dealt a fatal blow to the Electrum Standard. While still publicly professing that any suspension in the system was temporary, national banks once again suspended interconvertibility with gold and silver and began to print fiat money to increase the money supply. This stabilised creaking parts of the economy in the short term, but also led to rapid inflation.

The Panic of 1917 exposed a double standard in how financiers and markets responded to this intervention. Small and friendless nations could not unilaterally print money without sparking bank runs and collapses as capital fled the country for stabler markets. By contrast, great powers such as France, Russia and the ENA were said to have their currencies ‘backed by steel’ rather than gold or silver; in other words, their military power was itself regarded as a security to protect investments and prevent internal mob violence from overturning banks. This allowed these countries to intervene to protect the economies of smaller allies via loans, while making their governments beholden to them. China also did this, notably to Corea, but China itself had probably suffered the least of the major powers in the Panic to begin with. The most dramatic collapse in the Panic came in Belgium, precisely because King Maximilian IV acted as though Belgium was a great power and immune to criticism, while ignoring the fact that his own heavy-handed interventions in politics had made investors and banks jittery. He arrogantly rejected French financial aid which might have saved his position. The obviously-rigged election of 1918 led to a public uprising which was put down only with Russian help, effectively reducing Belgium to a Russian puppet and setting it on the course for destruction in the Black Twenties.[16]

This unstable state of fiat currency being the global norm would continue throughout the Black Twenties, as both war and plague response consumed public funds. Inflation and debt both skyrocketed. Despite China and Siam’s neutrality, the economic chaos began to bleed into their economies as well. China’s sometimes overly strict responses to plague outbreaks damaged its economy and made it a hostile market to European and American investors who otherwise might have seen China as a safe harbour with the war back home. Societist success in the War of 1926 (Audience reaction) made Alfaran udarkismo seem more attractive to the nations, and some, such as Corea and later Panchala, would attempt to imitate it – with disastrous consequences, for those nations did not have access to a large chunk of the world’s resources in bondage as Alfarus did.

The post-Black Twenties boom resulted in increased prosperity but not, initially, increased stability. The volatility of the fiat-based economy continued, though many had gotten used to stop-start inflation and regular currency and wage crises as the ‘new normal’ as it had been over a decade since the Panic of 1917. What initially prompted a rethink was what became known as the Shock of 1934, an economic wobble probably caused initially by rumours about French trade policy with respect to Bisnaga and Péousie, coupled to the aftereffects of the Trondek goldrush. Financial experts generally agree that this could have been a new major contraction if it had not been tackled by quick and audacious action by the central banks of France, Russia and the Empire. China had still yet to fully re-engage in the global markets following the political crisis of 1930-31, which would be significant.

It was remarked at the time that, despite those three great powers having been at each others’ throats not long ago, their bankers had acted for the good of all, because maintaining a stable global economy was in the interests of all people. This ultimately led to Jerzy Rytlewski’s ‘Carltonist Pacifism’, a critique and counter to Societism in which Rytlewski argues that this impetus towards economic cooperation could subsume military goals and so prevent war. Of course, in many ways it was just a restatement of similar ideas from the Long Peace, which the Societists had already rejected – that long period of peace for economically-driven reasons had eventually ended.

I digress. The sequence of events that led to the establishment of the Gold Standard is a complicated, confusing – and frequently confused – one. There are many times I have read monogrammes by otherwise intelligent writers who confidently state causes for this establishment, causes which had not actually happened yet! Sometimes it can be difficult to separate causes and consequences, as this was an eventful period and a broad shift in one direction can be hard to unpick. Nowadays the ASL likes to stir up controversy among historians for its own sake, but the so-called ‘Auric Controversy’ over the Gold Standard is as old as the standard itself. Many economic historians argue that the establishment of the standard possessed an almost Paleian inevitability to it, driven by the changing nature of the world market and the increased gold supply. Many others argue, with equal eloquence, that the establishment of the standard was an unlikely event which came about only because of a precise combination of chance factors, such as the identities of individual treasury ministers and the absence of China from the table at a critical time.

The latter factor was certainly significant. China’s use of silver for its internal market had always helped underpin the Electrum Standard, but following plague and crisis there, this factor in favour of a role for silver in the world markets had declined. The old UPSA had also been a substantial voice in favour of silver, being a major producer of the metal from the mines in its client states of Peru and (to a lesser extent) Mexico.[17] The ‘Golden Sun and Silver Torch’, though with other symbolic meanings to the Meridians, could also be seen as a declaration in favour of the Electrum Standard. The UPSA had been replaced with the udarkist Combine, which had its own ideas about currency standards which I’ll get to later. Even if the Combine had been participating in these debates, it now had access to substantially more gold than the UPSA had, possessing the Congo and beginning to develop gold mines there.

In the absence of the Chinese and Meridian voices pushing for silver, the debate was now dominated by the Empire, France and Russia. Within those nations were internal voices for silver, but these too were growing less important. Continental France had mostly used gold internally, with silver being more important for colonial trade with and within Bisnaga.[18] As it was now clear that the wind was blowing in favour of Bisnagi independence, a standard based on gold only seemed more in the interest of propping up the domestic French economy.

Here in the Empire, the primary supporters of silver had been farmers and miners in the West, away from the Arc of Power. There had always been a loud minority in the industrialised east arguing for a gold standard, but this had not seemed politically feasible when the other world powers were wedded to electrum. Now, a few things had changed. Industry was spreading to more cities in the interior, the farming sector had been heavily disrupted by the Black Twenties, and the party system had been shattered by both the war and then electoral reform. There was no coherent pro-silver voter bloc anymore; even though the leading Pioneer party was drawing on what should have been pro-silver demographics, in this brave new world of coalitions, the government was also being backed by pro-gold east coasters. Opposition to the gold standard would mostly come on the Confederal level of politics, with the eventual establishment of the Agrarian Party of Michigan and the Argentine Party of Westernesse and its neighbours,[19] which would go on to merge into today’s Agri-Argent Party. For the moment, pro-gold voices were in the majority.

In Russia, things were not so democratic, of course, but there were similar factors involving the industrialisation of the interior and wealthy industrialists gaining an increasingly loud voice in the Imperial Soviet at the expense of traditional aristocrats. Russia also brought along Romulan Italy as an important partner, and Italy also argued in favour of gold.

By far, though, the single biggest factor was simply that people were sick of economic volatility and wanted to try something new to try to stabilise the world markets. Simply trying to rebuild the glory days of the Antwerp System from the Long Peace had already been showed to be flawed. Now, important voices such as French Prime Minister (and former Controller-General) Loïc Caouissin argued that the world had changed and a monometallic gold-based standard would bring stability and fend off currency crises. Caouissin pointed to the vastly increased supply of gold to the world market from Pérousie, the Cape Republic, Russia, Natal, and the Empire. The Trondek goldrush had also not destabilised the price of gold to the point that many had predicted.

At the Passau Conference of 1935, representatives from over a dozen governments agreed the so-called ‘Passau System’, which would be ratified by all major economies except the Combine over the next couple of years.[20] The Passau System locked all currencies to a fixed rate of exchange with gold, with the goal of prevent competitive currency devaluations and tying down inflation. In practice, a 3% rate of deviation was permitted in case of emergency, with nations expected to take action to remedy any shift beyond this by buying foreign currency.

Where the Passau System struggled was that the nations were, understandably, reluctant to create any kind of arbitration body to take action against any who violated the rules. Despite this, compromise built on compromise until the Transoceanic Office for Financial Standards (TOFS) was created and ratified in 1936.[21] TOFS’s ruling executive consisted of a council of eight, with permanent seats for representatives of the Empire, Russia and France and five rotating members drawn from other participating nations. China initially refused to take part, attempting to continue its former policies. In 1940, however, the Chinese government U-turned and joined TOFS in return for a constitutional change to create an existing permanent seat, saving face. Part of the reason for China’s move was the increasing development of gold mines in China’s own territory, leading the Gold Standard to become more favourable towards Chinese interests.

I should explain that one part of the shift to gold was that it banned or restricted the coinage of ‘free silver’ as it had been known. Historically, in most nations it would be possible to take a silver ingot to a mint and have it minted into legal-tender silver coins. The Passau System, by contrast, heavily restricted this former right, which was viewed with outrage in more silver-dependent parts of the world.

The gold-based Passau System would form the foundation for the world economy for more than twenty years, from 1935 until the Crash of 1956 which helped trigger the Sunrise War. This era would be one of near-unprecedented peace and prosperity, eclipsing even the Long Peace in terms of rises of standard of living. This was driven in part by new technology, produced by industrial companies which benefited from the stability that the Gold Standard had imposed. Nonetheless, there were also many losers as well as winners. I already mentioned agriculture, which suffered from the effects of the limited gold supply. While the Passau System stabilised prices and sharply cut inflation compared to the last decade, it also somewhat tied the hands of central banks to respond to minor crises, which could lead to individual bank failures.

In terms of nations, winners and losers were not always easy to predict. As I said, China was a fervent opponent of the Gold Standard but ultimately ended up benefiting from it. Germany’s economy also recovered under gold after much scepticism from German society. Several African nations suffered short-term disruption but then also benefited, being gold producers themselves. (This is one of those factors which I say people sometimes cite as causes of the Passau System, even though the voices of African nations were not heard until the Toulon Conference which took place after Passau!) The Indian nations generally suffered a decline from the shift to gold, which in Bisnaga was viewed as an act of spite on the part of the French. The effect of the stabilisation on both prices and wages was seen both positively and negatively by workers in different industries, depending on the context they had started with. One reason why the novelty of electrical technologies are so associated with this period is that their producers still had room to expand their markets in the new artificially gold-restricted world, and attracted workers with high wages as a consequence.

In all this, I haven’t talked about what the Societists were doing, of course. In the last years of Alfarus before the Silent Revolution, a new Societist economic policy had been pioneered by Josephus Kalvus. Kalvus argued that a key lesson of the Black Twenties and the War of 1926 was that coal was in decline as a source of energy, and was increasingly being replaced by oil and its derivatives.[22] Firstly, he claimed that the Combine could effectively blackmail the world if it was able to control most sources of oil. (Audience reaction) Yes, well, nobody ever said it was realistic. Kalvus had some legitimate points about oil, but he was also a legacy of the fact that anyone who could rise to the top in the late Alfaran period was someone who was more skilled at political survival and bluffing his way through the so-called meritocratic tests than he was at his actual job. The Combine did have access to the vast oil reserves of Venezuela, but they should have known that, even at the time, the Empire, New Ireland, Persia and Russia had oil fields far too vast for the Societists to have any hope of trying to establish a near-monopoly. And this was before the oil in Araby, Guinea and the German Sea, among others, was discovered. Kalvus did have more success with a similar argument about trying to control the world’s rubber supply, I should said, which led to a push for alternatives and a drive towards pseulac…that’s another story.

But that was only half of Kalvus’ argument. He also claimed that the Societist udarkist currency unit, the shikullus (later replaced with the mundo), should be based on the global value of oil, believing that the entire economy should follow the oil supply. It should have been obvious that, with new oilfields and exploitation techniques being regularly discovered and new technologies that consumed oil also changing the demand side of the equation, this was a recipe for chaos. However, as I said, in the late Alfaran period few were still willing to speak up and criticise an obviously disastrous idea.

It was a significant moment for the future of Societism. Both Danubia and the Eternal State politely declined to join this attempt at a new world order. The former was, perhaps, not surprising to the Combine by this point, but the second was a shock – the Combine had thought their advisors had been establishing control in Constantinople. Regardless, Kalvus’ ‘Oil Standard’ was predictably disastrous and the Combine had abandoned it in 1936, only one year after its adoption. To the Societist mind, being forced to publicly retract a former policy was a bigger sin than the negative effects the policy had had in the first place. By this point, it is suspected that Alfarus had suffered a stroke and his regime was really being run by Madame Alfara behind the scenes.[23]

Whoever gave the order, Kalvus was publicly executed for his crimes, being called ‘a traitor to humanity and a soldier of the mind’, reflecting the Societist idea that all soldiers were murderers worthy of execution (though in the case of their own Celatores it was conveniently delayed eighty years). Now, one public execution, even captured on film, might not carry enough impact, as Kalvus’ policy had inflicted harm on loyal Societists from Carolina to the Nusantara, and all were angry. Alfarus, or Alfara, promptly had a few dozen political prisoners executed in the centre of the various Zones’ capitals and just told them it was Kalvus. There’s some debate about whether the message had meant to be that these people were supposed to be Kalvus’ collaborators and there was a mistake, but it appears that thousands of Societists both watched Kalvus’ execution in Zon1Urb1 on a propaganda reel at the picture-house and then went down the road to their own town square and saw it again there. If true – it is hard to say as much of this is based on the debatable accounts of refugees – it certainly must have undermined public trust in Alfarus’ regime.

As you probably know, Alfarus died not long after this. There are many reasons why the continuity regime led by Alfara soon collapsed amid a tide of public anger and we got the Silent Revolution. Alfarus had made a lot of enemies over the years who were suddenly willing to speak out. But our usual picture of the Silent Revolution is of massed mobs of Black Guards torching public art depicting Alfarus, young men who had formerly been just as loyal to the Kapud as the famous Markus Garzius. What turned them against him? Perhaps the fact that so many of them had lost savings thanks to the instability unleashed by this man whom, publicly, had seemed to have the Kapud’s backing…

*

(Lt Tindale’s note)

Uh-oh, he seems to be coming upstairs now. Toodle-pip!





[1] To oversimplify, the colour of an object arises from white light (a mixture of colours) striking it and not all colours being equally reflected or transmitted through. This is due to energy gaps between electron orbitals in the atoms or molecules comprising the object; light of the right energy (which is proportional to frequency which defines colour) to match a gap can be absorbed by an electron to briefly promote it to the higher orbital. A colourless object typically looks colourless because the energy gaps between its electron orbitals are all too large for any colour of light we can see to bridge the gap and be absorbed (higher-energy ultraviolet light may be absorbed, hence those objects will stand out on UV cameras). Most metals, in their pure form, fall into this category and are described as ‘grey’ or ‘silvery’, i.e. colourless. Gold (and, more obscurely, caesium) are heavy enough that their electrons begin to ‘orbit’ at a speed close to that of light, which means according to Einsteinian relativity, they gain mass. This in turn changes the energy gaps, narrowing them to the point that gold absorbs blue light from the white light spectrum, the rest of the spectrum being reflected back so it looks yellow to our eyes. In a world without relativistic effects, gold would just look like silver.

[2] ‘Proto-Caucasians’ refers to the people known in OTL to archaeologists as ‘the Maykop culture’.

[3] The same statistic is true of the later California Goldrush in OTL.

[4] There are far too many examples of this from OTL fiction to count, but a good example is in the Tintin books “The Secret of the Unicorn” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure” vs their loose film adaptation from 2011. The books, realistically, depict the treasure as a couple of handfuls of gold and jewels which fit into a small container and are worth enough to set Captain Haddock up for life. The film depicts a pirate ship absurdly full of so much golden treasure that it would represent perhaps a quarter of the entire amount of mined gold that existed in the world in the 1600s!

[5] This is slightly misleadingly phrased, as China did not start using paper money until the 7th century, after the Roman Empire had already fallen.

[6] Unlike OTL, where the British Empire’s dominance of world trade after 1815 helped drive the push towards the Gold Standard internationally, in addition to an increased gold supply from the nineteenth century goldrushes.

[7] Some historians have started referring to the Feng dynasty pre-Pandoric War (i.e. before it reunified China under its rule with the destruction of the Beiqing) as the ‘Nanfeng’ (Southern Feng). This is a historiographic term coined after the fact, like ‘Byzantine Empire’, and was not used at the time. It has not caught on very widely (yet).

[8] See Part #104 in Volume III.

[9] This was also true of the United States in the early-to-mid nineteenth century in OTL.

[10] See Part #270 in Volume VII.

[11] Argentina is the region known in OTL as Nevada (a false friend, meaning Land of Silver; the term Platinea is used for OTL Argentina in TTL).

[12] See Part #265 in Volume VII.

[13] Trondek is another transliteration of the name Klondike. Why is the Klondike goldrush delayed 37 years compared to OTL? Primarily because that region was especially difficult to reach by any prospectors until after the Black Twenties; theoretically claimed by the Russians, in practice largely uninhabited by anyone other than its native peoples (who traded with the Superior Republic) and then subject to the issue that the Americans had built the deliberately incompatible and militarised Rexoc railway in the area to prevent the Russians being able to use captured American railways in a war.

[14] There are major implications from TTL’s different economic history at this point. In OTL, the shift to a global Gold Standard was driven by Germany and the United States deciding to abandon bimetallism in favour of gold, preceded by the French-led Latin Monetary Union. There were many consequences of this; those on American farmers are fairly well known, but it also led to the fall of the Indian rupee and was a major cause of the Panic of 1873, among much else.

[15] See Part #270 in Volume VII.

[16] See Part #275 in Volume VIII.

[17] Peru is also a gold producer, but to a lesser relative extent.

[18] In OTL, British India remained on the silver standard (as had traditionally been used there for centuries – the word ‘rupee’ literally means engraved silver) even though Britain itself was on the gold standard. This did not change until the 1890s, when India moved to the gold standard with mixed but mostly negative consequences.

[19] There is a double meaning to ‘Argentine Party’, as this term has already been coined in TTL to describe political centrism (as opposed to right-wing doradism, gold, and left-wing cobrism, copper). Naturally, all of this makes this period extremely confusing to understand (especially in Sweden and Ireland) when parties named after gold or silver can have positions on the gold standard that have nothing to do with their name!

[20] It’s not mentioned here, but the choice of Passau was partly the symbolism that it was here in 1552 that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V guaranteed Lutheran religious freedoms in the Peace of Passau (which led to the Peace of Augsburg). As was joked at the time, if Passau could heal the rifts in the the realm of God, perhaps it could also do the same to the realm of Mammon.

[21] We are now entering the era in which words like ‘International’ or ‘Global’ are starting to carry negative connotations due to association with Societism, hence awkward compromises like ‘Transoceanic’.

[22] See Part #295 in Volume VIII for a different, related perspective on the Societists and oil.

[23] This is not really an accurate way to refer to Alfarus’ wife, but people outside the Combine often use similar ones – see footnote to Part #285 in Volume VIII."