History of the Kingdom of Aratacia

This page is a summary of the history of the Kingdom of Aratacia from its establishment as a single state. For the history of the origins of the Aratacian race, see Aratacian People.

## Early Planetary Era and the Foundation of the Kingdom

The Kingdom of Aratacia is an ancient polity. The Kingdom finds its roots on old Coron, the Drodo homeworld, when the Aratacian people were a collection of feuding tribes. These tribes and fiefdoms would be united by a single powerful chieftain named Sevrasi Bolov in a series of wars, eventually crowning himself King of the Aratacians and establishing the Kingdom in 7580 PR. With his coronation and consolidation of Aratacia under a single crown and title, he would also draft the precursor and basis of the modern Aratacian unwritten constitution; a document which described the rights and responsibilities of the Aratacian aristocracy, divided the aristocracy into ranks based on property ownership and wealth, and described the tribute in money, resources, and soldiers each rank was to give the King.

A throughline of Aratacia's pre-spacefaring history would be the steady maturation of its institutions, the further enunciation of the rights of the aristocracy, the extension of these rights to every free person in Aratacia (thus creating the origins for the modern *Aratacei*), and the transition of the King away from an absolutist warlord and to a protector of the people.

The gradual liberalisation of Aratacia's institutions would result in a power shift away from the traditional rural aristocracy and towards the mercantile class. The development of modern banking institutions, responsible government, and collective rule as the privileges of the aristocracy became generalised to the rights of all landed Aratacians would allow Aratacia, already a regional power, to equal its rivals around the rest of the Great Basin and become peerless among the other Aratacic polities in the north and west. Successful colonial ventures overseas would bring huge windfalls to Aratacia's existing sustainable economic growth and provide the nation the resources to fight huge naval wars with the southeastern empires of the Great Basin during Coron's long age of sail. Aratacia's rivals during this period would include the Selpasi Empire along the southern coast of the Great Basin; the Ranscari city-states who occupied the peninsula to the southeast of Aratacia and spent time variably competing against and cooperating with Aratacia for purposes of trade dominance in the Basin; and the Urtasi Empire, a nation which occupied a rich river valley in the southeast of the Basin.

## Middle Planetary Era and the Rise of the Prandac

Industrialisation, in an inchoate state, emerged multiple times during this period of growth in various nations along the Basin. But in every case, the technologies required to kickstart Coron's industrial revolution were seen either as an intellectual curiosity, too expensive to justify the upfront cost in resources, or were seen as a threat by vested interests in artisanal guilds, landed aristocracies, or owners of vast numbers of slaves. Only in Aratacia, with its open institutions and strong pre-existing class of capitalists, did it finally take off in the early 94th century P.R. Industrialisation spread quickly among the Aratacic world, and soon smog-spewing factories could be found in every large city on Aratacic and Ranscari soil as peasants by their millions fled the farms they were now made redundant on by industrial farming techniques to man these factories. The northeastern corner of the Great Basin rocketed ahead of the stagnating and decadent empires to their south and east.

A consequence of this great revolution was a second wave of colonialism, now directed squarely at other Basiner civilizations. The most historically important of these colonisation attempts would be the foundation of the Prandac Empire in the late 94th century. The Prandac Empire was built from opportunism, when a bold group of Ranscari explorers-- most of whom young aristocrats left behind by the industrial revolution-- invested generations' worth of family fortunes into a small flotilla of steam ships and an arsenal of state-of-the-art rifles, breechloading cannons, and belt-fed machine guns. Such ventures were not unusual at the time, and so they left with their Doge's blessing. What *was* unusual, however, would be the final result of their actions.

This intrepid flotilla steamed southbound to the Urtasi Empire. The empire, now millennia-old, was a decayed shell of what it had once been, and despite its ancient prestige made easy picking for those bold enough to take the chance. When the Ranscari expedition made its way to the mouth of the great river which fed the Empire's central river-valley, there was nothing the coastal forts' muzzleloading cannons could do to stop the modern ships and their powerful guns from forcing their way into the very backbone of the empire. Leaving a trail of smouldering forts in their wake, the Ranscari steamed to the capital and demanded the abdication of the Urtasi emperor. When this abdication did not come, the palace was shelled, as was the great port, wrecking the Empire's fleet (most of which were still sailing ships). The Emperor abdicated, and the victorious Ranscari made haste to graft themselves atop the existing Imperial bureaucracy and make the nation their own possession.

News of the conquest of the Urtasi Empire, which long ago terrorised the Aratacic peoples with their vast tribute fleets, was celebrated in the all the industrial world. What came next shocked it. Rather than making their conquest the colony of one or another state, the leader of this expedition, Irtaso Prandac, declared a new empire in his own name. Despite the initial shock, the opening up of an entire new colonial frontier was recieved positively, and the new King Irtaso indeed invited mass-migration of Ranscari in particular to his new domain, rapidly changing what had once been an old empire.

## Late Planetary Era and the Defeat of Krastev

By the beginning of the 95th century, Aratacia would be first among a community of industrialised peers which essentially ruled the planet. Every nation around the Great Basin had either industrialised or had been colonised, directly or otherwise, by a rival who had. The core of Coron's financial, political, and cultural institutions were firmly set within the great cities of Aratacic and Ranscari civilization. The conflicts which shaped these nations shaped the world, and so when Aratacia was troubled by the rising power of some of its younger peers, the world too grew troubled.

Along the northwestern border was Krastev. This nation was a dynamic, heavily militarised monarchy which had begun its ascent in the middle of the 93rd century as a small Kusyar duchy at the edge of that Aratacic people's influence. It absorbed its neighbours aggressively, and with the developments in medicine and agriculture that came with the industrial revolution the population of that damp and marginal country exploded, and soon found itself crowding into Krastev's increasingly prestigious cities to work in her factories. The "Free Kusyar" that lived outside of Krastev's borders looked to Aratacia for aid, and so too did the Stjarnavi states far to the north. Even without the cries of her fellow Aratacics, Aratacia was inclined to act: Krastev's political power, increasing industrial might, and strong demographics posed an existential long-term threat to the Kingdom's continued dominance over the Aratacic peoples.

Ultimately, Krastev's growing influence and belligerence would be curbed in a series of spectacularly-bloody wars fought between Aratacia and its Kusyar allies and Krastev and hers, with the new Prandac state playing both sides off of the other. By the end of the Fourth Aratacic War, Krastev would be pacified, its empire partitioned, and the remaining rump state would be made an ally of Aratacia through generous help in postwar rebuilding and significant steps to weed out Krastev's then-entrenched bureaucratic authoritarianism, with it instead being replaced by an Aratacian-style constitutional monarchy.

## Late Planetary Era and the Decline of Aratacia

The defeat of Krastev afforded Aratacia a brief period of time as the only superpower on Coron. With Krastev pacified and part of its empire of Aratacic states, Aratacia busied itself with the intensification of global trade and the security of sealanes. Aratacia exported labour-intensive primary and secondary industries to the still-industrialising world along the southern Basin and across the Western Sea, and retained control of technically-intensive industries, services, and global finance.

This system enriched Aratacia with a trade surplus, and made it the indispensable core of global Drodo civilization. However, this came at the expense of Aratacia's own population. The working and middle classes that formed the core of the Aratacian nation lost their jobs through an inability to compete with overseas wages, and the overfinancialised economic system of Aratacia benefitted a smaller and smaller portion of elites whose productivity was disproportionately increased by innovations in information and communications technology.

Meanwhile, new enemies conspired. Celsis, a vast continental nation across the Western Sea with a long history of colonial exploitation by the Aratacic nations, was a beneficiary of Aratacian-lead globalisation. Two generations of pragmatic authoritarian leaders bootstrapped the Celsine economy to incredible heights through a recklessly-rapid program of industrialisation aided by a vast program of industrial espionage to steal Aratacic technological secrets for reverse engineering. This multigenerational transfer of capital, productive capacity, and technology soon placed Celsis in a position to militarily contest the Western Sea, a contestation backed by atomic missiles. So began one of two major cold wars.

As Aratacia consolidated its power, Prandac used its strong connections to the Ranscari world to siphon expertise and cultivate relations with the sole superpower.