Inner Colonies

The Inner Colonies is an astrographical region of space, an administrative sector of the Central Galactic Union, and a former province of the Terran Empire. It contains some of the earliest human colonial settlements beyond the inner sphere, and came to comprise some 2 billion cubic lightyears of space. It is a densely-populated region with a reputation for affluence and commerce, containing several hundred member worlds and several thousand colonies with advanced or developed economies based on heavy and light industry, finance, and shipping, as well as service-sector and public-sector. Its worlds have some of the highest standards of living in the entire Republic.
The Inner Colonies were organized into an administrative province in 2555 at the culmination of the Imperial Reform. Most of its worlds were designated as Counties, with about as many Crown Colonies, an indicator of its importance and level of development such that most of its constituent polities were deemed responsible for their own government. Many prominent political and noble families have come from the Inner Colonies region, such as the McGradys of Wallerstein and the former House Marten of Nieuwvaalia. The region's affluence has in turn lent its weight to various political movements, and support from the Inner Colonial magnates was long considered crucial for success. In the early 2600s, the region shifted to being a stronghold of the National Humanists. Several spacer politicians from the Inner Colonies emerged to significantly influence the trajectory of the human nationalist movement in the 2650s and 2660s, such as Shannon McGrady and George Francis Rothschild. Terran victory in the Great War from 2665 to 2675 in part relied on the financial, technological, and industrial capacity of the Inner Colonies.
Since integration into the Central Galactic Union as a sector in 2675, the Inner Colonies has flourished as a core part of the republic. Many of its counties were admitted to the Union as independent member worlds.