[X] Stewardship
The arguments went back and forth between the king and the Minister of the Treasurer and the President of the Crown Bank and they consulted with scholars and philosophers. Arguments were had, voices raised, ritual unarmed combat engaged in, and in the end two conclusions were reached:
1. A person had some 'natural right' to their property that could not be involuntarily override
2. People also had 'contractual obligations' that interacted with natural rights in complex ways
In the end these two facts could not completely override each other. People had right to not have their property unilaterally stripped from them, but they also had certain obligations that did not get them out of breach of contract. Philosophically taxation rested upon this latter part, something that the king very much agreed had to be true, even if he also did not like the idea that the kingship in of itself was not a natural right but a contractual obligation, like some radicals suggested. The only way to resolve this tension was to take up the unpopular compromise position of stewardship, whereby if a debtor refused to allow their collateral be taken in a failure to repay a loan situation then they could elect to surrender their finances to a Crown approved accountant in order to manage their income and assets until such time that the owed funds might be repaid, plus interest for the additional time taken to recoup the initial loss.
Almost immediately it ran into problems with many soon realizing that they almost preferred poverty to the level of control some of the accountants tried to inflict upon them, as well as some of the more distant accountants soon becoming hopelessly corrupt in skimming funds that were supposed to be going to the bank and/or their wards. This was particularly bad among the more distant Gylruv communities, who were of course the ones who had the most problem with the bank in the first place.
Then a Tortun prince went bankrupt. The initial loan had been issued to aid in the development of a mine and ironworks to refine the ores produced, but then said prince got into a cataclysmic war with a fellow Tortun prince and ended up penniless. Deciding that he preferred to essentially restructure the payment plan and suffer some personal indignity rather than have assets stripped, he surrendered finances to the Crown Bank, at which point the accountants helped restructure and reorder the principality. They were gone within two years, but the remarkable recovery prompted other princes to realize they could essentially buy financial advisers, which prompted a flood of attempts to get loans that the Crown Bank almost immediately had to start turning down en masse because they were being made in obvious bad faith. This however caused the Tortun emperor to freak out and nearly declare war at the 'attempt to steal my subjects away from me!'
This sharply curtailed the ability of the People to safely issue loans to foreigners, and quickly resulted in the option of financial stewardship being removed from any kingdom other than among the People and the Gylruv, and in general the idea quickly died out as a bad plan, although it did give the People considerable experience in how to assess individual and organizational fundamentals, and how to restructure loans when difficulties were encountered.
Most of all though, the philosophical debates that had brought the People to the position that there was a tension between natural rights and contractual obligations rippled out through their academics and philosophies, and through their universities into the wider philosophical conversation going on in and around Syffryn. Among the People the most influenced were the radical abolitionists, who stated that all men possessed natural rights granted by the divine to self-determination that made slavery an abomination towards man and heaven. Furthermore, ideas began to bubble up about the relationship between the ruled and rulers. If a lord had a natural right to the land and a peasant had a natural right to their freedom, then a lord might compel rent only through the contractual fulfillment of obligations such as military protection, educated administration, and food security. A lord who failed in these obligations lost all right to compel their tenants to pay them, and while they could remove their tenants from their land, they also could not compel any new tenants to associate with them.
When applied to them many nobles did not particularly care for the idea, but many kept coming back to it when they considered that this also applied to the king. Soon enough the idea was spreading like wildfire among the low nobility, the ones with enough education to grasp the idea but not so much land that they felt a particular need to always have peasants on hand to work it for them. In fact, as lands were consolidated through Acts and bankruptcies, a sub-class of itinerant labourers had appeared, typically young men who sold their services at times of intense activity such as planting or harvest because they had little prospect of their own farms to work. For many smallholders the idea of contractual relations between them and the people who helped work their land seemed very natural and equitable for all.
However, the most dramatic application of this philosophy came not from the People but from the Halvyni. The Tortun and Vortuga both had ancient claims on the territories of the Halvyni, and had managed to press their claims with considerable vigour. Badly mauled in the most recent conflict, the Halvyni king had essentially sold a number of colonies, including a few in North-Eastern Mahaxia as part of war indemnities. The colonies on the other hand had broken out into open revolt, claiming that their king's failure to protect them now meant that their relationship with him was broken and they were not his to sell. There were several colonies, and while only a few had auctioned off they had all decided to band together, calling themselves the United Provinces of Mahaxia. The Hespranxer, while not happy with the idea of the Vortuga expanding their Mahaxian holdings, also felt that the UPM might be a direct threat to their own North Mahaxian colonies and were taking an aggressive stance that might see them fight everyone if it meant protecting their supplies of gold, sugar, tobacco, coffee, and spices from the Vortuga and radical revolutionaries. The Sketch and Kielmyr both saw this as an opportunity to pounce on confused and unprotected shipping to bloody the noses of their various rivals.
And while too distant to influence things directly, the People did have a few options to take advantage of the situation
What did they do? (Pick two)
[] Vortuga are distracted, blow up their Monsoon Sea trade posts (0.9x)
[] Halvyni are distracted, knock over their Undikus colonies (0.7x)
[] Fan the flames, turn this colonial war into a Syffryn continental war! (1x)
[] Offer cheap credit to the Sketch and Kielmyr to cause more trouble (1.2x)
[] Enemies are distracted, take the time to finish unification with the Gylruv (1.2x)
[] Tortun is distracted, the Gylruv and Styrmyr could bite off eastern provinces! (1x)
[] Whole lot of angry sailors there, they could make great privateers if hired by the right person (1.2x)
[] You know who could use a whole bunch of angry philosophers taking about the obligations of the ruled and their rulers? The patchwork nightmare of provinces that is the Tortun (1.1x)
