Category Archives: Politics

Building an Economy: Natural Resources

28 Tuesday Feb 2023

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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Having discussed population density and ease of transport, it’s time to finish off our discussion of land by talking about natural resources—and some surprising implications that natural resources can have for economic development, and politics.

(And in retrospect, this one really should have been the first subtopic in land that we discussed, since it really conditions all the others. I’ll correct that in the book to come!)

“Natural resources” can mean many things. One of the most fundamental will be the presence of available food production, from fertile soils and rain or rivers for agriculture, wild plants and herbs for gathering, animals to be hunted, or fish to be—err, fished. If a region does not have enough food production to feed its populace, it will have to depend on imports, which means that it will have to have something to sell to the outside world in order to pay for those imports.

Other things might or might not be a natural resource, depending on the details of your setting. For example, deposits of aluminum will only be valuable if the society has figured out how to smelt aluminum, a surprisingly difficult process. Small streams might be good places to fish, but if the society has developed the technology of the gear (meaning the round turny thing with teeth), streams can also drive watermills to provide kinetic energy for machines in a workshop.

(This also means that advances in technology, or other changes that turn something that was previously useless into something valuable, could bring new prosperity to formerly backward regions—or make them tempting targets for invasion!)

For each region you would need to decide what the key natural resources are for your story, and how abundant they are. The details of them obviously matter; but for our model, we will abstract away from the details (for the moment) and characterize each natural resource (in relative terms) as

  • rich or poor, and
  • concentrated or widely available.

Resource-Poor

If a region is poor in necessary resources, the people will have to either trade for them, substitute some other inferior resource, or do without.

If the people are wealthy—perhaps they are skilled businessmen or traders, or perhaps they are successful pirates—they can sustain a society even in a place with few resources; but they would be dependent on the outside world for most of their essentials, like food, fuel, raw materials, and the like. Essentially, a region with few natural resources stands in a similar relationship to the outside world as a city does with its surroundings: it must produce a lot of economic value to pay for its imports, and it lives and dies with the ability to transport the needed goods.

If the people don’t want to trade for the good they are missing, or the good is simply not available, they may try to use substitutes. For example, the Scottish Highlands had few trees for firewood; instead, the Scots burned peat (something halfway between coal and mud). Few people would prefer burning peat to wood; but it did the job. Similarly, early iron weapons were actually inferior to bronze in most respects, contrary to the common assumption; but bronze is made from both copper and tin in a specialized process, and when the tin trading network across Eurasia was disrupted for unknown reasons, local communities fell back on iron, which was readily available and easy for blacksmiths to forge. (That was a gross simplification of a complex process with many causes, but for our purposes it makes the point.)

If no substitute is available, then the populace will do without. The typical result is widespread poverty (at least in “objective” terms; a people that has never known the telephone will not mourn its lack, and will find plenty of other prestige goods to compete over). If the missing resource was critical to sustaining life, its lack may put a hard cap on how many people can live in the region. In the worst case, the region may simply be empty of people.

(The concentration of the resource matters, but only on the micro-scale; if you have a small amount of wood and no one else has any, you will be prosperous personally, but it won’t affect the rest of the region much.)

Resource-Rich

If a region is rich in natural resources, on the other hand, it could have wildly varying effects depending on whether the resource is mainly used by the region itself, or mainly exported. If the resource is mainly used by the region—either directly, such as foodstuffs, or as an input into some other production, such as timber into shipbuilding or iron into machine production—it will contribute directly to the region’s prosperity. Not only will the region use the resource, the availability of rich resources will tend to encourage the growth of new industries that require that resource (though not automatically; see our later discussion of entrepreneurship). In ideal circumstances, the natural resource serves as fuel for the larger economic engine, being transformed into ever more valuable uses as products move up the chain of production, and the economy will develop in healthy directions.

Problems emerge if the resource is produced mainly for export, however. The economy will tend to develop mainly to facilitate the export of resources, and other industries will be relatively less developed. An economy that is heavily unbalanced in the direction of exporting natural resources (or really, by any other single desirable export) is prone to Dutch Disease. For our purposes, Dutch Disease happens when a particular economic sector generates massive amounts of money from external sources; this could be oil, or timber, a wildly successful service sector such as London banking, or even foreign aid or foreign direct investment. People end up using that money to import new luxuries or to enjoy more local services, diverting revenue and labor away from local productive industries to a degree. (It gets worse if countries have independent currencies with fluctuating values; the vast exports of oil or whatever will cause your country’s currency to strengthen, making imports relatively cheaper, but also kneecapping your other industries such as manufacturing or tourism.)

The result is that even as the growing sector prospers, the other parts of a region’s manufacturing economy will tend to stagnate. If allowed to continue unchecked, the end result of Dutch Disease is to turn the region into a supply region with a hypertrophied primary export sector and a bloated service sector, and relatively little industry otherwise. The region will be excessively dependent on its main export industry and suffer booms and busts along with that industry. (This often happens on a smaller scale with oil towns, mining towns, and the like.)

The Resource Curse

We must also ask if the rich resources are concentrated or widely available. A large timber forest is relatively hard to monopolize, though kings certainly try; and as a result, it would allow a relatively large number of people to support themselves from the resource. But a much more concentrated resource is easier to monopolize, either by the state (a common occurrence) or by a private actor (which might accumulate much of the effective power of a state, as with the “Shell police” in Nigeria). Often, this actually leads to worse outcomes for the region—the so-called “paradox of plenty” or “resource curse.”

Investigating the paradox of plenty, Terry Lynn Karl in her book identified a common pattern in modern oil-dependent states. When oil is first discovered in a previously poor state, the state has a sudden budget surplus—either because it takes control of the oil directly, or heavily taxes the oil companies. With the sudden influx, the state massively raises its spending, usually first on social services, then on subsidies for new heavy-industry as the state tries to translate its new wealth into durable prosperity. Often, taxes on the broad populace are reduced, sometimes to zero. (This is not an unmitigated good; often, regimes reduced taxes and increased subsidies in order to demobilize their populaces and render them indifferent to national politics, the better to rule tyrannically in the absence of popular opposition.)

However, state spending often grew much faster than oil revenues, as new interest groups form to feast on the new state largesse. Moreover, efforts to nurture new industries often failed, overcome by the mismatch between the planned new industries and the existing technological competence of the society, the resulting inability of the economy to support the planned new industries (as Jane Jacobs discusses), the eventual growth of political patronage in subsidized or state-owned industries, and their resulting implosion from ineptitude. Factor in the effects of the Dutch Disease and consequent inflation, and the economy as a whole actually suffers from the new oil wealth. Many petro-states found that they could no longer feed themselves without imports, as local food production was crowded out by inflation and the lack of farm labor.

The ultimate beneficiaries, however, are the state itself (which grows massively from the new revenue) and the new stratum of state functionaries that fills all the new state jobs. But such prosperity is brittle, depending as it does on the revenue from oil. When oil prices suddenly fell in the mid-1980s, these states faced crippling crises that lasted decades.

Matters are less bad in states that already have strong state institutions, even if their economies are heavily dependent on the resource in question. Alaska, for example, managed to avoid the worst ravages of the resource curse by distributing much of its oil wealth directly to its citizens each year. The temptations of rentier-state gluttony are certainly present, but mitigated by the preexisting power of the citizenry and the strong tradition of limited government.

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This post has already gone on too long, but you can already see that the effects of a region’s natural-resource endowment can provide great fodder for plot conflict. And once you add in a few elements from the other building blocks of an economy? Yowza.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders, along with some overlap with the planned third book, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when they will be finished, but it should be fun!)

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Building an Economy: Ease of Transport

22 Wednesday Feb 2023

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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In our last post, we started building a model for how to think of a region’s geography with three major factors: population density, ease of transport, and natural resources. Here, we will discuss the second factor, ease of transport.

We’ve referenced the importance of transport several times before, including with regard to cities and touching on it briefly in Book 1 of my “Politics for Worldbuilders” series during the discussion of the Nobility. Now we’re going to discuss transport squarely. It plays vital roles for economic activity, the placement of cities, and politics.

Let’s begin by assuming that a given territory can be easy to cross, difficult to cross, or have particular constrained routes such as rivers or valleys that allow for easy transport but can also be easily controlled. Each of these options generates its own set of possibilities.

Trade

The easier it is to transport goods and people, the easier it is to trade—you have to be able to get your goods to buyers without too much cost, and on the flip side you have to be able to access raw materials. If transport is cheap and easy, a lot of trade becomes feasible and economic activity will tend to flourish. Cities will be supported by food transports and shipments of raw materials such as iron ore or coal, paid for by the goods and services they generate, and they can also trade finished goods with each other and with their surrounding rural areas.

Similarly, the easier that transport is, the easier it is to stay current on news from distant places. This is somewhat less of a factor in our modern era of instant communication, rather than having to wait for the latest ship from far-off shores; but even today, there needs to be people on site to report what is going on, who want to report it to you or to an audience that includes you. This is more likely when transportation is easy and cheap.

If transport is difficult—the territory is a rugged mountain range, for instance—trade becomes difficult as well. People will have to depend more on their own production, rather than producing for trade with distant buyers. Villages will be inward-focused, struggling to produce their own food, clothes, tools, and other goods. Traveling peddlers might come along every month or three, or not at all. Cities will be rare, placed in the few places where transport is relatively easier, and more likely to be administrative/garrison cities supported by the government than commercial or industrial cities, simply because it is so hard to produce anything and transport it out to buyers. Economic activity as a whole will be stunted as a result.

(Many scholars believe that this is one of the reasons for the relatively low economic growth of the inland part of the African continent and Eurasia. In contrast to Europe, which features long coastlines and many rivers that penetrate into the hinterlands, Africa and Eurasia are mostly landlocked and have few rivers. As a result, areas along the coast and next to rivers will tend to flourish more than inland areas that have a relatively difficult time getting goods to market.)

Trade and production in places with difficult travel will tend to focus on valuable and rare goods if they are present, such as gold, spices, uranium, and the like. If there is enough money to be made, governments or merchants will invest in roads or other transport at fantastical expense that go directly to the production site and nowhere else, in order to make extraction easier. This will create path-dependency effects that favor continued focus on the extractive industry, rather than allowing the economy to broaden and deepen in healthier ways. The region will likely become a supply region. If no such valuables are present, economic activity will simply stagnate. People will focus on producing their own needs, or else migrate to greener pastures if available.

If transport is possible through otherwise rough terrain down particular pathways such as rivers or valleys, we can expect these roads to become the focus of military conflict or economic competition. Whoever controls them will be able to profit from the trade that goes through them, and if the pathways are the key enablers of trade between vast regions then the rewards might be great indeed.

Note that if the transport situation changes—new roads are built, or somebody invents magical zeppelins, or the mountain pass suffers an avalanche and is blocked until spring—the effects on the society might be profoundly good or bad. There is certainly a story to be written here, about who would benefit from such changes, who would be threatened, and what they would do about it.

Politics

Just as trade is easier if travel is easier, so is power projection. It is no accident that the Roman Empire spent incredible effort on building its famed roads.

Political boundaries often map onto geographic boundaries such as rivers or mountain ranges, simply because it is hard to transport armies across, or to enforce laws or collect taxes on the other side. The more rugged the terrain, the more likely that an area will feature a patchwork of smaller domains rather than a unified government. (This is part of why Afghanistan continues to be the graveyard of empires.) As with trade, nominal distances as the crow flies matter less than travel time. This is particularly true with the transmission of information; the less information that can get through, the less likely that an empire or other political unit can maintain its control and the more likely that control will devolve to a more local level.

And naturally, the political situation will have effects on the economic one as well, good or bad. A vast regime might enable more internal trade, as Rome did, or it might ruthlessly squeeze its subjects, as Rome also did at various times. A patchwork of small principalities might be littered with obstacles to trade and feature frequent conflicts, or it might become a fecund region promoting creativity and economic development.

You can see how these factors interrelate. A government might build roads for military purposes, which then have the side effect of stimulating new economic activity. The interstate highway system in the United States, and the Autobahn in Germany, are good examples. So is the rail system in much of Europe. Or a transportation system built for commercial purposes might be adopted for military ones, such as airplanes.

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All in all, the ease of transport across a territory will dramatically condition what happens there and how people live. For worldbuilders, we can readily exploit some of the challenges that this presents in our stories.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders, along with some overlap with the planned third book, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when they will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Building an Economy: Population Density

20 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, War, Writing

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After a great deal of procrastination, it’s time to revisit the Land/Labor/Capital triad, identified by the classical economists like Adam Smith and the like as the key factors of production.

(Side note: modern economists consider entrepreneurship to be a fourth factor of production. I’m still trying to figure out whether there is a nice way to characterize entrepreneurship in our model, as it would obviously lend itself to strong stories.)

Remember, we’re not trying to explain everything about an economy from the ground up. We’re trying to build a relatively simple, yet powerful and flexible framework that worldbuilders can use to quickly mock up the contours of their invented societies. Once the bones are in place, you are then in a position to dive into all the cool little details, confident that they will be consistent with the structuring logic.

So when we talk about land, we’re going to focus on three broad variables—each of which can have surprisingly powerful implications:

  • Population density
  • Ease of transport
  • Natural resources

Really, these are interrelated. For example, you can’t have a dense population without lots of food, and and an easy way to get the food to people. Still, it’s useful to consider them separately to keep everything straight in our heads. Let’s begin with population density.

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If you want to have a country or region with a high population density, that implies several things. We already noted the need for lots of food and efficient transportation of it. On the other hand, you don’t necessarily need to have urban cities, if people are living in densely placed villages and growing their own food with intensive agricultural methods. (It will mean that animal husbandry will likely use methods that require little land, rather than pasture-grazing.) And the material standard of living might still be low if most people are producing food, rather than more specialized goods. Still, the more people there are living close together, the more opportunities for specialization and exchange, and the more likely that the economy will develop more complexity.

Conversely, if the population is thinly spread, the people might still be relatively prosperous. They could have large herds of livestock that move from place to place, or practice a carefree foraging lifestyle where they only spend a few hours a day gathering food and use the rest of their time making luxuries, playing games, fighting with neighbors (!), or relaxing. Or they might be desperately poor, if the land is not very productive and they all have to work hard to feed themselves, since there are few opportunities for trade. With a thinly spread populace that cannot sustain specialization and exchange, chances are that the energy surplus of the society will be small, which limits the development of their society and culture. (And you can see how the productivity of the land interacts with population density.)

So whether you choose to have a dense population or not, you can play around with what that looks like for you and your story.

But what about the political effects of a dense population, or its opposite?

Note that the more thinly spread the population, the harder it is to control the territory. If you are being oppressed by a ruler, or landlord, or moneylender, or cruel family members or whatever, you always have the option to pull up stakes and run; and all else equal, it is more difficult for a ruler to stop you if the population is thin. This is because fortifying the border to keep people in would be too expensive, compared to the number of people being contained. By contrast, if the society has a dense population, it is relatively more efficient to fortify the border even at great expense, because of the large number of people you will be able to contain and control.

Jeffrey Herbst argues that this is one of the key differences between the experience of Western Europe and of precolonial Africa; Western Europe, being densely populated and urbanized, made it worthwhile for rulers to fortify their borders, the better to control the moments of their people (as well as to defend against invasion!). In Africa, however, the landscape was so vast compared to the populace that there was little practical way to control the territory as such. Instead, African rulers focused on strategies to control people directly—ties of loyalty or marriage for some, enslavement and physical domination for others.

Let’s see why. When seeking wealth or other resources, a ruler must ask a key question: is it easier to exploit one’s own people, or someone else? If your people are easily controlled and restrained, it will be relatively easier to tax them. If your people can move around easily, however, then they will not tolerate heavy taxation. On the other hand, if your army can also move around easily, it becomes more attractive to invade your neighbors and cart away plunder, in goods or people.

So as a broad pattern, we see regions of high population density focus on fortification of borders and relatively high reliance on taxation or other means to generate resources from their own people (which does not exclude invading and pillaging neighbors, of course!); and regions of low population density feature relatively higher mobility, societies that feature relatively less political coercion and taxation, and lots of raiding of neighbors for treasure and slaves.

Of course, rulers can also change the population density of their territory. A very common pattern, as James C. Scott tells us, was for city rulers to concentrate the surrounding populations by force within the city walls, and have them cultivate fields that were within easy reach of the city (and the city’s military). This allowed them to tax their peasantry’s output more easily than if farmers were living in distant villages.

So when you’re creating a new territory, think about the population density of the land, and then consider what consequences flow from that. The implications for your story might be surprising.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders, along with some overlap with the planned third book, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when they will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Taxation and Conflict

17 Saturday Dec 2022

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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Worldbuilders often have settings in which tax policies are key drivers of conflict. This is as it should be, given that taxes often drive conflict in the real world, for very good reasons. But typically, the decisions that a fictional ruler face are boiled down to “Do I want money? If so, tax everything that moves.” In the real world, things are more complex. And introducing a bit of carefully chosen complexity into your stories can make the conflicts a lot more interesting.

Our current discussion is based on the seminal model of Margaret Levi. Based on a deep review of the history of governments, Levi starts from the assumption that in general, sovereigns want to maximize their tax revenue. But this does not simply mean jacking taxes up as high as they can go.

First of all, the more you tax, the more opposition you get from those being taxed. This is obvious, but it has some notable consequences. A weaker regime will be able to tax less, because serious opposition could bring it down. Additionally, taxes will tend to fall more heavily on social groups that are less able to resist the government (often because they are poor!), or who depend on the government more, or who would benefit directly from the additional government projects that the tax revenues would fund and are thus more willing to bear the burden. In any event, the rulers will have to limit their taxation if they don’t want to antagonize the people.

Second, the higher the tax rate, the more that economic activity becomes depressed as many businesses simply become unprofitable. Moreover, it becomes worth it for people to rearrange their businesses to pay less tax, or even cheat on their taxes altogether. As a result, if you increase taxes by ten percent, say, your tax revenue will rise by somewhat less than ten percent. And at a certain point, tax collection actually goes down with higher taxes. (This concept is popularly known as the Laffer Curve.)

So a ruler will have to figure out the optimal tax policy for generating revenue. This is a difficult problem, especially if you don’t have a lot of data about the economy. Often, rulers get it wrong and set the tax rate too high for the amount of revenue they want to collect. (It is much less common to set the tax rate too low!)

This basic issue also functions across time periods; collecting lots of taxes this year will often mean that the economy’s growth will slow down in the future, reducing tax collection later. As a result, Levi notes that a major factor in the taxation decisions of sovereigns was their discount rate—that is, how willing they are to forego money today in exchange for more money tomorrow. 

(A quick example: suppose you have an opportunity to invest $100 today, and in a month you’ll get back $110 guaranteed. If you have money in the bank and won’t miss $100, you’ll happily invest the money for a good return. If you only have $100, on the other hand, and you need to spend it on food, it’s another matter entirely. Still, you might be willing to invest the hundred dollars if you would get back a thousand; for that much money, you’ll find some way to last the month. In the first case, you have a relatively low discount rate; you can afford to be patient. In the second case, you have a relatively high discount rate; you need money today, and it would take a massive amount of money in the future to get you to give up what you have.)

Levi notes that sovereigns facing a crisis—particularly a war—needed lots of money today, and were more willing to raise taxes for current revenue even if it harmed future growth, and even if it provoked domestic opposition (to a point). In other words, these rulers had a very high discount rate.

Next, certain types of taxes take different types of bureaucratic infrastructure; if you don’t have the infrastructure, you can’t levy the tax. For example, to tax incomes, you need a way to monitor how much money people make. This is tremendously hard, which is why direct income taxes across all of society were nearly unknown until the early 1900s. And some kinds of taxes would cost more to administer than you would actually raise!

A sovereign will then want to invest in new bureaucracy, to be able to collect more taxes in the future. But such investment takes money and time, and it usually provokes opposition from society—people resent intrusions into their privacy, and know that higher taxes are going to result in the future.

Levi’s model thus has a number of moving parts, including:

  • the discount rate of the sovereign;
  • the capability of the tax-collection apparatus;
  • transaction costs for commerce, and for tax collection (which include information/monitoring costs, and fees, operating expenses, and other forms of friction); and
  • the relative bargaining power of the state versus different classes in society.

Levi’s entire discussion includes many other complex facets, including the concept of quasi-voluntary compliance which I already touched upon in Beyond Kings and Princesses in the discussion of bureaucracy; I hope to write about more from Levi in future posts. But even this starting overview provides some useful tools for worldbuilders looking to juice up their political conflicts.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Pirate Ships

20 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Economics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation, Writing

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We briefly mentioned Peter Leeson’s work on the economics of pirate ships already; now, let’s take a closer look. (Because honestly, who doesn’t like pirate ships?)

In his study of pirate ships between 1682 and 1726, Leeson identified several remarkable features of how pirate ships were run, especially when compared to civilian merchant ships or naval vessels. While the latter vessels were run autocratically, with an all-powerful captain who could not be gainsaid, pirate ships were typically run along democratic lines:

  • they were governed by written articles of association, which had to be adopted unanimously;
  • they featured separation of powers between the captain, who controlled duty assignments and tactical authority, and a popularly elected quartermaster, who controlled the money and administered discipline—and the crews could replace either of these figures if they were abusing their power; and
  • crew members were typically paid in equal shares of the plunder (the captain and quartermaster typically got two shares), net of costs for repairing the ship or medical care and bonuses for the wounded.

Why? Leeson argues that pirate crews had to solve several problems in order to function well. First and most pressing was the risk that the captain could abuse his position. A frequent scourge of civilian ships was that the captain, nominally the omnipotent representative of the ship’s investor-owners back on shore, would exploit his power to harm the crew members, or enrich himself at the owners’ expense. This is an example of a principal-agent problem. (Indeed, many sailors turned to piracy in order to escape such exploitative captains.) But on a pirate ship, usually the sailors were the “owners” of the ship; and they would not tolerate a captain who would abuse them or divert “their” plunder.

Second, pirate crews were fairly large—the average pirate ship had some 80 crewmen (and some had many more, or even fleets of ships such as the expedition of Captain Morgan), as opposed to merchant ships which carried 13-17 men. (By contrast, naval ships often carried hundreds of sailors.)  With such large crews, it became harder to monitor individual sailors’ behavior. Yet harmony aboard ship needed to be maintained if the crews were to fight well. Disputes needed to be prevented, or resolved peacefully.

In response, pirate crews (which often shared ideas between them) soon developed a system of formal governance, with strong democratic features, well before any national governments adopted separation of powers or democratic voting. Ships’ crews drew up written articles of association (and so did pirate fleets, when several ships joined together for particular expeditions), which had to be approved unanimously. These articles laid down rules for the ship, and assigned different authorities to the captain, the quartermaster, and the other officers. They also specified how officers could be removed by popular vote.

The captain had total control over decisions during battle, and the assignment of ship’s duties. But he had no control over discipline, or over the plunder. That was the job of the quartermaster. Yet the quartermaster too was constrained; he was typically not allowed to store the plunder under lock and key, and many crews had a system of random searches to detect if a quartermaster (or any other crewman) was stealing plunder. Theft was punished severely, usually with marooning or execution.

Interestingly, Leeson finds that privateers—“legal” pirates whose activities were sanctioned by their governments—shared some of these features. They too paid out plunder in equal or nearly equal shares, and also used written constitutions. Leeson concludes that profit sharing and written constitutions must have been an efficient solution to the problem of keeping order among large crews, far from home.

But few privateers had the checks-and-balances system of captain and quartermaster, or democratic governance. (At least, not officially; Leeson doesn’t discuss how many privateers would engage in unsanctioned piracy on the side.) This was likely due to the need to enforce the authority of the ship’s government, just as merchant ships needed to enforce the authority of the absent owners. Pirates, lacking fealty to a distant authority, didn’t have this problem.

Leeson and other academics such as David Skarbek look at several other forms of organization, such as stateless societies in Africa, or prison gangs; and I hope to write more about these. But the basic takeaway for worldbuilders is that certain kinds of settings, like a pirate ship, present certain kinds of problems that the people have to solve. And the way that they solve those problems can make for fascinating stories.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Trading with Bandits

13 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Credit, Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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Suppose you were a merchant going into the mountains, seeking to trade for rare spices. The local clans know where the spices are; but they would much rather kill you and take all of your trade goods than part with their own valuable spices, even in a profitable exchange. You know this, and they know you know this. Is there any way that you can trade with the locals anyway, and escape with your life and a good profit?

There are a few ways to entice the locals to trade peacefully. One is to invest in military strength to deter attack—hiring bodyguards or improving your own martial skill. Another is to offer the possibility of repeated interactions, meaning that you will keep coming back with more trade goods if each trip goes well. Therefore, if the locals behave peacefully they will end up making far more profit over time than if they simply plunder your caravan. (This strategy only works if the locals trust you to come back, and if their time preference isn’t heavily weighted to short-term gains rather than long-term gains. If they need lots of money today, they might be willing to plunder you and sacrifice the long-term profit.)

Another method was to threaten the bandits with retribution from your allies, even if they are not present at the time. Your own weakness could be counterbalanced by the strength of your allies. This was one of the perks of being a Roman citizen, for example—everyone knew that a Roman was inviolate. If you harmed a Roman, you could expect legionnaires to be knocking on your door in short order. This did not prevent banditry entirely, but it certainly kept it to a much lower level.

All well and good; but let’s spice things up a bit. What if the merchant were the bandit, and the local clan were too weak to resist? And what if the clan had a permanent village, so they couldn’t simply escape from the traveling merchants until they had passed by? The merchants have powerful weapons, and while they wouldn’t mind striking a fair bargain if they needed to, they would cheerfully sack the village and take all of its valuables and people as booty if they thought it worthwhile.

If the weaker party is immobile and cannot escape, the above methods to induce peaceful trade no longer work. By assumption, the village is unable to invest in greater strength. And since the merchants are mobile, the village cannot easily threaten it with retribution from its allies. Repeated interactions are trickier too; merchant expeditions are expensive, and the merchants would want a high enough profit margin to be worth the bother.

So what is there to do?

I shamelessly stole the title of this post from the journal article it is based on, by Peter Leeson. Leeson, who would later enjoy some fame for his work on the economics of pirate ships, investigated our second case with the dangerous merchants and weak village, and gained some insights by looking at trading patterns in Central Africa. There, trade networks would connect producer villages deep in the interior with the European trade outposts on the coasts. The producer villages were at constant risk of being attacked by the merchant caravans, so they developed two major strategies to protect themselves.

The first strategy, paradoxically enough, was to demand that the merchants paid their side of the bargain upfront, and extend credit to the village. The village would then provide its own goods to the merchants the next time they came by. This allowed the village to reduce its stores of plunderable goods during the merchants’ first visit, since they wouldn’t need to pay right away. That way, the merchants would have less reason to plunder the village, since there would be little booty to plunder. And when the merchants came back, they had already paid for their goods and would have little incentive to use violence—unless the village tried to cheat them and withhold payment.

Since the merchants were stronger than the village, they could safely extend credit and know that they could punish the village for cheating if they needed to. (The reverse would not have been true; the village could not dare pay goods up front—that is, lend money—to the merchants, because they could not possibly enforce the bargain.) And the merchants had an incentive to play along: if the village didn’t think it was safe to stockpile its trade goods, it would simply produce no goods for trade and only enough to subsist on. That would make it unprofitable for traveling merchants to come all the way out and plunder them, discouraging violence.

But there was still a problem: what if the village makes a bargain with one set of merchants, then produces the trade goods that it owes, only to be attacked by another set of merchants?

To mitigate this risk, the village would expect the merchants that it bargained with to protect the village from other merchants. That is, part of what the village was trading for was protection. It was worth it for the merchants; they would lose out if their precious trade goods were stolen by some other group of merchants.

Still, the whole business was touch and go. For the system to work as described, the merchants had to be sufficiently patient to prefer long-term riches to short-term plunder, and be able to protect the village and enforce exclusivity against other merchants—and the village had to be able to reduce its stock of trade goods to unprofitable levels for the merchant, to make plundering a poor proposition and induce the merchant to offer credit. If the village’s trade goods were of the sort that was difficult to deplete or hide (such as livestock, or slaves or people who might be enslaved), then the village would have a difficult time indeed avoiding attack.

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In your own worldbuilding, you might not necessarily have these specific situations. But the concepts involved are delicious for generating story conflict. Stakes are high, incentives can balance on the edge of a knife, and much will depend on the characters involved. A good deal can be messed up by an impatient character, or implacable enemies might recognize an alignment of interests that can encourage the first tentative steps toward peace.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Economies Dependent on Outside Investment

26 Wednesday Oct 2022

Posted by in Economics, Finance, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation

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One of the most trafficked posts on this blog is a brief discussion of “Varieties of Capitalism” theory, pointing out how some capitalist economies feature a set of institutions that foster a more dynamic economy and radical innovation, and others have institutions that foster a more sedate, “managed” economy featuring more incremental innovation. (As far as I can surmise from web traffic stats, some comparative-politics professor at San Francisco State University must have noticed the post and included it in a course syllabus. I’m flattered!)

But in the years since I left grad school, the field has marched on. Apparently, scholars have identified at least one other “variety” of capitalism that fills in a bunch of empirical gaps of prior theory. This is the dependent market economy (DME), whose distinguishing feature is that it relies heavily on the foreign investment of outsiders for capital—typically transnational corporations. In this post, I’ll briefly discuss the key features of the DME that would be useful for worldbuilders.

The first economies to be designated as DMEs were found in Eastern and Central Europe, countries that had formerly been dominated by the Soviet Union. They featured an unusual combination of factors: a populace that was reasonably well educated and technically skilled, yet still had low wages, and where the countries’ economic institutions had been totally wiped away and could be built afresh according to the preferences of anyone with enough clout. These were the transnational corporations, who are always on the lookout for skilled, cheap labor. They used the lure of their massive investment to induce the former Warsaw Pact countries to establish institutions that were favorable to company interests—and turned these countries into favored sites for the assembly of “semistandardized industrial goods.”

What are the features of the DME, and the institutions that develop there?

  • A population that had reasonable technical skill—but not too much, or they could develop their own indigenous industries and not be dependent on outside investment.
  • Low wages.
  • A massively disproportionate level of foreign direct investment that dominates the economy, usually because of the lack of domestic capital. (For example, in 2007 Hungary and the Czech Republic both had FDI equal roughly half of their entire gross domestic product.)
  • Governance that is largely controlled by transnational corporate hierarchies, so local company subsidiaries take orders from the parent companies back home. (They also receive funding from back home, rather than relying on local banks or the stock market.)
  • Weak labor laws and no national labor unions.
  • On the other hand, individual companies typically treat their workers well in relative terms, because they don’t want their supply chains disrupted; so management and labor tend to work closely together, company by company. (But companies try to avoid simply paying higher wages, which defeats the point of the exercise!)
  • Little investment in worker training or a public education system, and the education system’s reorientation to the specific skill needs of the transnational companies, because companies don’t want to spend a lot of money or make it easy for their workers to leave, and because the DME is not meant to develop new technology—only to implement the technologies developed elsewhere.
  • Sectors of the economy where the country has a clear comparative advantage, such as the assembly of automobiles or electronics, are dominated by foreign ownership. The same is often true of the banking system, which needs a lot of capital. Meanwhile, less competitive segments of the economy remain in domestic hands, but languish. If left unchecked, this division could lead to tensions between wealthier and poorer worker groups in society.

We thus have another model for what an economy could look like, and why it would look that way. True, few worldbuilders will be working with a direct analogue to something like the collapse of the Iron Curtain; but if you’re thoughtful, you can extract useful principles from the foregoing for use in your work.

There are additional types of economies—chiefly the typical “dependency” economy (or supply region) that is exploited for basic commodities; the “patrimonialist” society with high corruption, patron-client networks, informal arrangements, and pervasive insecurity; and the incoherent mishmash that borrows features from several other economies which don’t necessarily work well in combination. I hope to explore some of these more in later writing.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Different Types of Colonies

12 Wednesday Oct 2022

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation

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Adam Smith, in the fourth book of his Wealth of Nations, has a section discussing colonies—of particular interest to him, since at the time of his writing European powers were far more interested in establishing overseas colonies than they had been since Ancient Rome. His discussion is useful to worldbuilders, since he conveniently lists three categories of colonies, to which we will add a fourth (of somewhat lesser importance). And we love our simple-yet-powerful classifications, indeed we do!

A colony, for our purposes, is when a country sends a significant number of its people to settle in a place outside of its official borders, but within its control. The colony may be more or less autonomous and may even be self-governing, to a point. Certainly, the mother country has less control over a colony than over its “home” territory. And sometimes this matters.

A colony can be founded for one of the following reasons (and once founded, can take on aspects of the others—as with cities):

  • to relieve population pressure in the home country;
  • to relieve political unrest by giving opportunities to the dispossessed;
  • to secure riches, or the promise of them; or
  • for geopolitical or military advantage.

Smith begins his survey with the ancient Greeks (he could have added the Phoenicians, if he cared to). The city-states of these societies often had limited territory, and few prospects to gain more territory in the same neighborhood, since they were surrounded by hostile neighbors. As their populations grew, the only way they could provide for the growing populace was to send much of the people abroad, usually by ship, to explore distant lands and form colonies where prospects were good. Smith notes that these colonies were often autonomous of the mother country, writing their own constitutions, choosing their own leaders, and being effectively independent. (Smith slightly overstates the point; colonies often sent regular tribute to their mother country, and often were expected to support the foreign policies of the mother country by custom. But colonies did often break free of such expectations.) Also, the colonists often formed a cross-section of their societies, with people of all classes going abroad.

By contrast, when Rome formed colonies in its conquered territories, they were intended not to relieve population pressure, but to provide some measure of opportunity to the desperately poor of Roman society. The Roman economy and property laws tended to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, and left large numbers of people with no land or capital. To prevent unrest or even rebellion, the Romans encouraged their poorest to go abroad to farm new lands outside of Rome proper; those who moved to the colonies were awarded generous land grants. (Note that this was a change from the earliest Roman colonies, which were placed in defensive positions on the coastline or in strategic locations in conquered regions; these earlier colonies would thus be of our fourth type.) One could draw parallels to the role of Britain’s colonies in the Americas in providing a safe haven for religious or political dissidents, which had the beneficial effect of cooling down sectarian tensions in Britain.

The original European colonies in the Americas, meanwhile, were motivated strictly by personal enrichment for the first explorers and administrators. Columbus was hoping to find a lucrative shortcut to India; when he found the West Indies instead, he exaggerated the prevalence of gold and silver among the natives in order to keep his royal patrons happy. He thus encouraged generations of adventurers and brigands to set sail for the New World. (Both they and the monarchs who bankrolled them were avidly looking for gold and silver supposedly in the possession of the natives, but they found little. The new colonies eventually became prosperous, but it often took fifty or a hundred years, by which time the original investors were typically bankrupt.) These sorts of colonists were usually skewed towards military men and government administrators, especially if there was a native populace that could be enslaved for the heavy labor.

Similarly, the European colonies in Africa of the 1800s and 1900s were meant typically to extract resources, rather than to provide accommodations for excess population or to offload political instability. With a few exceptions (such as South Africa or Algeria), large numbers of Europeans did not move to the African colonies to live; typically, the Europeans were technical specialists like engineers, government administrators, and security personnel. They were interested in developing the societies they ruled only to the degree needed to efficiently harvest resources like diamonds, rubber, or uranium—and no further. The entire economy of such colonies was organized around resource extraction and export.

Finally, Smith omits mention of colonies that were placed primarily for military purposes. We mentioned the early Roman colonies; in more modern times, we could look at the role of Gibraltar for Britain, or the various islands in the Pacific grabbed by one great power or another. Such colonies were meant to support permanent military deployments far from their home base so that the mother country could project power, and would consist of the military forces, their families, and the families of various other specialists and artisans needed to support a permanent settlement.

In short, if you feature colonial powers in your worldbuilding, think about why the colonies were placed in the first place (at great expense and risk), and how that influences the location, population demographics, and subsequent histories of the colonies.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Moral Economies

02 Sunday Oct 2022

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders

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If a sharecropper grows food on a landlord’s land, how are the profits split between them? How should they be split? And what is the effect of those moral expectations when things go wrong, and there’s not enough food to go around? (And how can we exploit such conflicts in our fiction?)

I’ve mentioned James C. Scott before, and will probably mention him many times to come. His early book The Moral Economy of the Peasant discussed this issue in detail, in the context of the peasant societies of Southeast Asia. In these societies, peasants could be roughly divided into three groups: those who had their own farmland, those who were impelled to sell their land to landlords and become sharecroppers, and those who were pushed out of even this position and were reduced to landless laborers.

Over time, more and more peasants lost their land and became sharecroppers, as the ups and downs of agricultural life caught farmers in dire straits and allowed those with surplus capital to benefit. But for our immediate purposes, the interesting action occurred with the sharecroppers. The “traditional” system was to sell your land to some magnate in your own village or a village nearby, who would take a large chunk of the harvest—say, 30 or 40%.

But in exchange for such a large share, the peasantry expected something in return. This magnate was more than your landlord; he was expected to be a patron as well, protecting the welfare of the sharecroppers when times were bad and harvests poor. Depending on how bad things got, landlords might be expected to reduce their share of the harvest, extend low-interest loans to the sharecroppers to tide them over, or even to open their storehouses and share out some of their accumulated grain.

That is, landlords were expected to insure the subsistence of the sharecroppers, and only their commitment to do that would justify their taking so much of the harvest in good times, and their claimed social position as landlord and patron. This is what Scott called the “moral economy of the peasant.”

Sometimes, landlords reneged on their social obligations and withheld food during bad times. Or worse, landlords actually increased their demands on the peasantry, in order to stabilize their own incomes at the expense of the peasants. (This was a particular hallmark of the colonial European regimes that took power in Southeast Asia in the late 1800s and early 1900s.) Doing so was hazardous, since starving peasants with nothing to lose would sometimes rise up and massacre the landlords, and seize what food they could find. They would feel justified in doing so: the landlords had violated the moral economy. They had broken the bargain.

But in the early 1900s, excessive demands on the peasantry in Southeast Asia became more and more common as two things changed in tandem:

  • local patrons were gradually replaced by absentee landlords who lived in the cities, away from the villages; and
  • regime security forces became stronger, and better able to repress peasant uprisings.

For more on what happened in that case, read Scott’s book. (And in writing this post, I came across the article that apparently inspired Scott, a nice discussion of food riots in 18th-century England, which the author argues were undergirded by a similar moral economy; summary here.) For our purposes, we should focus on the key question: in bad times, whose position is stabilized at whose expense? And what moral system or expectation is being upheld, or violated, in the process?

This shows up frequently in “modern” society. Insurance companies, for example, collect money from us every month based on the promise of making us whole if some catastrophe happens. If we suffer a loss but the insurance company denies the claim, we feel betrayed, as if we had been robbed. On the other hand, if (say) a massive hurricane sweeps through an area and wipes out all the housing, property insurers may face the prospect of bankruptcy and go running to the government for a bailout. The bailout, in turn, would ultimately be financed by taxpayers, so the justness of the bailout would partly depend on the how just the tax system is. And so on.

The government itself taxes us a great deal, but we only acquiesce if we think that the government is seeing to our wellbeing in return. In bad times, the government is supposed to protect us from harm, or at least cushion the blow. If it does not, then the government will have a hard time justifying its taxation. And taxpayers will feel a moral right to object and demand better, perhaps at gunpoint.

In general, we tend to have a moral expectation that the wealthy and the powerful protect the welfare of the poor, especially if the wealthy became so on the back of the poor. This is a moral economy, a set of expectations that are overlaid on “normal” economic relations and help to constrain them. (You can imagine other types of moral economy rather than the patron/client model. For example, what if rather than guaranteeing subsistence, the economy was “supposed” to guarantee opportunity? Or provide a pure meritocracy, in which the unmeritable deserve to suffer?)

Unfortunately, it often happens that the powerful elites stabilize their own position at the expense of the weak masses, as happened in Southeast Asia during the Great Depression. This causes great suffering or even starvation; and it can also sow the seeds of revolutionary violence, if the weak are able to rise up. In the very worst case, as Joseph Tainter teaches us, it can lead to entire societies collapsing: if elites make greater and greater demands on their societies even when times are bad, eventually the societies are unable to meet those demands and the society implodes. (What will arise in its place is a different question. Sometimes the answer is “nothing,” if the society wipes itself out via starvation and violence.)

To recap, in your worldbuilding, it is worth asking these questions:

  • What moral expectations do the weak have of the powerful, especially if the powerful become so on the back of the weak?
  • Whose income, wealth, or social station is being stabilized at the expense of whom?

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Addendum: The posts in this series are intended to go into books of my planned series Politics for Worldbuilders, the first book of which is already published. I had initially planned the second book to be Tyranny for Worldbuilders, which would discuss various techniques of state rule and how they are resisted. But as I’ve been writing out these posts, I realized that I was trying to mash too many concepts into the same book (state capacity, and authoritarianism, and political economy, to name a few), and they didn’t coexist nicely. So I’ve decided to split off the discussions of political economy into their own book, which will be the new Book Two in the series. At present, the plan is that this book will start with the concepts discussed in this post, and build on them with the other “Building the Economy” posts as well as other posts on political conflicts revolving around economics. I think that the book writing will go a lot faster now that I have a more focused plan.

Watch this space!

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Building an Economy: Money, Part 1

14 Sunday Aug 2022

Posted by in Economics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation

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Living in our modern world, we have certain assumptions about how money works. But historically, money has taken many more forms than we are used to. That’s actually good news for writers: if you want to do something cool with your setting’s system of money, there’s a wealth of concepts to play with (no pun intended).

In this post, I’m not trying to give you a crash course on what money is. (There’s a decent article on Wikipedia that does the job, though it is perhaps too heavily influenced by David Graeber’s work.) Instead, let’s drill down and ask when a particular form of money might be more useful, to the political regime, than other forms.

In a nutshell, people tend to form different kinds of economic relationships depending on the kind of interpersonal relationships they have:

  • A family unit tends to be run as a dictatorship (with all financial decisions being made by the head) or a political community (different members have different inputs into the decision process, and eventually some sort of guiding consensus is reached). Family members might loan each other money or buy and sell between them, but these relationships are often highly conditioned by the “normal” expectations between family members.
  • Good friends or neighbors will often give each other reciprocal gifts, trying to stay more or less in balance over the long run; or they will extend and receive loans of goods or services, trusting that debts will be settled in some form in the future. Cash deals might occur, but in general cash feels somehow gauche, cheapening the social bonds between people.
  • With more casual acquaintances or people you don’t know well, but who live in the same economic community as you, you tend to do business on a cash basis—using a shared currency that is preferred in that economic community. Loaning money to people you may never see again is unwise, but you still operate in a shared social-economic framework and share a currency that you, and the people around you, value.
  • If two utter foreigners meet—living in entirely separate societies, sharing no long-term economic relationships so that they do not have a mutually-valued currency to use—they will resort to barter, directly exchanging useful goods that each party has and the other party wants. They cannot rely on any shared system of economic value, because there is none. Instead, the scope of the relationship is narrowed to the purely functional. (In today’s world, this has become vanishingly rare; even people on opposite sides of the globe can transact in dollars, euros, or bitcoin.)

From this sketch, it seems that the less trust you share with someone else, the more likely you will do business with tangible goods (like wheat, cows, or gold and silver coins) rather than relationship goods (like debt and gratitude).

Unsurprisingly, we see in history that money has taken several forms, but we can lump them into four main categories: commodities, representative currency or tokens, coins, and fiat. In real life these ideal forms sometimes mixed with each other at the margins, but we can start by understanding the pure forms.

Commodities

In trade relationships, some communities will tend to produce particular trade goods like olive oil, tin, colorful beads, and the like, and trade them for other goods from other communities. Over time, settled trade routes tend to develop, with predictable trade goods and expectations surrounding their exchange. Eventually, commodities like grain, timber, spices, or precious metals develop standard forms, measurements, and relative values with each other. For example, in the Ancient Near East, the Mesopotamian sheqel became a standard weight for gold, silver, and copper, used widely across the region. Egypt used a different system of weights and measures, as did the seafaring Mediterranean societies, and international traders had to be fluent with all three systems.

In a more modern context, think of how cigarettes are used as money in prison, or in areas wracked by war and dislocation.

For commodities to play the role of money usually means that there is no better money available. Trust is low, shared economic frameworks are weak or absent, and political authority is fragmented. A government would usually prefer a different monetary system if possible, because the other systems provide more ways for government to skim off the top or enforce its own authority (see below). On the other hand, if the government itself controls a commodity source—a gold mine, or wheat fields, or similar—then it will be happy for a barter system to standardize around its commodity.

Tokens

Commodities are heavy. They are also expensive to transport. (One estimate was that to carry gold bullion from Rome to Naples in the Renaissance era, it cost about 10% of the gold’s value in pack animals and bodyguards!) Unavoidable if you actually need the commodity for functional reasons; but if you only need it as money, wouldn’t it be nice if you could carry a piece of paper that could be traded to some trusted authority in exchange for, say, 100 bushels of wheat?

Alternatively, tokens can represent not an asset, but a liability—I borrow money from you, and in return give you a piece of parchment or paper or a stone tablet that entitles the bearer to get money from me. The paper represents my debt; it also makes it easier to borrow, since the lender can sell the debt to another party if she needs the money early.

Tokens allow for commerce to be much more efficient that having to rely on raw commodities as money. But they also tend to restructure commerce around those trusted authorities that hold the raw commodities in storage—merchants, banks, temples, governments, and the like. Thus, wherever possible, the regime will want to encourage such tokens both to generate more economic activity and to keep the economy’s focus on itself. Governments especially love debt tokens, since they can thus borrow large sums by creating new money (right up to the point that the money loses its value…).

Tokens can also be an especially useful way to make tax collection easier. One fascinating example of this was in colonial America. Colonial governments would issue “bills of credit” as paper notes that could be used to pay the bearer’s tax bill. The bills had an expiration date; so as the expiration grew closer, people with large tax burdens would tend to collect these bills and then use them to pay the taxman, at which point the bills would be burned. In theory, issuance of bills of credit would be restricted to a reasonable level, commensurate with the general tax burden. However, colonial governments often were tempted to issue too much “free money,” with results so dire that the American Constitution specifically banned the states from issuing bills of credit (see Art. 10).

On a more “squishy” level, a token currency can strengthen communal bonds compared to commodities, since each transaction implicitly endorses the token system undergirding the currency.

Coinage

Surprisingly, gold and silver coins were a later development than token money, first emerging (as far as we know) in the 6th century BCE in Asia Minor. They combined the “intrinsic” value of a commodity with the “brand power” of the issuing government. So in political situations that were on the less stable side, or that featured lots of trade between neighboring (and sometimes hostile) countries, a coin-based system might make more sense than a token system.

Why issue coins? Two main reasons:

  • If your coins became desirable, or else you actually banned the use of foreign coins within your realm, it would stimulate local demand for the coins.
  • If you issued your coins for more than the raw metal was worth—either because of the abovementioned demand for the coins, or because you were secretly debasing the coinage with base metals—then you would earn a profit on the difference, called seigniorage.

Thus, there were two competing impulses: to keep the currency strong so people would want to use it, or to lower the precious-metal content in order to make short-term gains (at the expense of an eventual economic crisis). Stable societies tended to prefer a strong currency. If people trusted that Tyre’s silver drachma actually contained a drachma of silver, they would prefer Tyrian coins to those of (for example) Rome, which frequently debased their silver denarii with copper. As a result, coins that were known to be sound tended to circulate at a premium, compared to coins from less stable governments.

A heavily debased coin, meanwhile, could effectively act more as a fiat currency (see below) than one backed by valuable metal. (This illustrates that the categories we are discussing are more conceptual than actual; a currency can have attributes from multiple categories.)

Fiat

Fiat is the system we generally use today: governments issue money that only has value because they say it does, and they demand that taxes and other debts are paid with that currency. Governments would obviously want to issue fiat currency, if they can; it basically lets them expropriate a vast amount of value by “growing money on trees,” so to speak.

The drawback is that weak or unstable regimes quickly see their currencies become worthless. Even regimes that aren’t in danger of collapse can destroy their currencies, by issuing too much of it. Hyperinflation is basically impossible for commodities or coins (even heavily debased coins), but is historically common for fiat currencies. The temptation for governments to overspend seems far too powerful in the long run.

Now, fiat currencies do have some virtues. Under prudent management, they can allow the money supply to be much more responsive to economic conditions than even a token-based system, avoiding deflationary spirals that can crush debtors. In the United States, we managed to somehow not mess up a period of low inflation for roughly thirty years. (But that seems to be over for now.)

In general, a fiat currency is a way for governments to try and create a store of value (and borrow lots of money in the process) through sheer force of will. Sometimes it works. But more than any other form of currency, fiat relies fundamentally on trust in the issuing government. No more trust, no more fiat money.

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Hopefully, this has been a useful look at different currencies, and some of the conflicts that can be expressed through them. And as we know, conflict = plot.

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Tyranny for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)