Social-Politicals, Economic Order, and City-States: Politics in Eorzea

What, you expected me to post a 20,000 word essay on the lore?

No, I'm not very qualified. But I know some of you are.

Please share your views. Thanks. :p

(For instance, examples of good quests and story arcs which acknowledge these issues, characters which are good examples of the effects and implications of such issues, and insight on how the Eorzean world order works. And how we could improve the in-game presentation of all this, to improve the game overall.

Examples:
East Aldenard Trading Company, an entity, and its implications. How the Ruby Sea pirates reacted were also interesting.
City-states versus nation-states, a concept. How this concept in Eorzea will likely differ from our world, yet which parts do not differ.
Social-political effects on the commonfolk, handled quite well in Heavensward. A few questlines in Stormblood such as the quarry one touch on social-economical impacts.
How economic order works in Eorzea, for the Garleans, and past civilizations of other eras.
Lots of questlines deal with powerstruggles. Share and compare them.
Does the game have newspapers? Cameras? How do we spread information, and what examples of socio-political implications are there?
And more!

Here's a fun ramble of half-remembered facts I've had about the East Aldenard Trading Company(EATC), and its real-life counterpart, the British Empire's East India Company(EIC).

Despite how the EATC and Lolorito is repeatedly being portrayed as super-rich and powerful, they don't seem like that much of an overall threat, compared to the EIC. At its founding in 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted the EIC a Royal Charter, giving the company ridiculous amounts of power, including the authority to print and distribute its own currency outside of England, and to wage war. It also may or may not have been the only corporation in history to conquer a sovereign nation.

It also established and ran colonies, many of which are independant countries today. Lolorito owning one building in Kugane is the equivalent of a kid pitching a tent in their home's backyard, in comparison.

As we can see, despite the boogeyman nature of the EATC in Eorzea, it has yet to pull off any of the stunts that the EIC performed. Part of this may be that the EIC certainly had the backing and approval of the British royal family, while Nanamo and her supporters see the EATC as political opponents on a good day, and traitors-in-waiting on a bad one. Or maybe it's that the EATC doesn't have its own standing army, which the EIC did.

Fun fact: The EIC's personal army actually outnumbered the British Army, at some points being twice the size. It used this army to take over and rule India through a system of puppets. But, ultimately, it couldn't stick around forever, and the EIC was dissolved in 1874. Meanwhile, the EATC is about 30 years old.

Moving on to other things, I've often wondered why Eorzea seems to have no banks whatsoever. It's true that the earliest bankers were goldsmiths, who stored peoples' deposits of precious metals, but Ul'dahn goldsmiths don't seem to perform this service at all.

Anyway, if we really wanted to establish the EATC as a bigger threat, they should start with recruiting their own army, instead of dipping into the Brass Blades and paying off the Crystal Braves. But then again, there are a couple of possible reasons why the EATC won't do this:

1. Political obstruction from Nanamo, who doesn't want to let Lolorito have any more power.
2. Keeping an army on standby is expensive, even more so in a population-depleted region like Eorzea, after the Calamity. So, perhaps it's best to maintain a mercenary army, as the Venetian Empire did.

The Brass Blades are Lolorito's personal army. He pays them, hence why all the Blades turned on us during the Parting Glass incident.

There is known to be at least one newspaper in Eorzea, the Mythril Eye. Various seasonal quests deal with it, as well as the Lightning event and the ARR Hilidbrand line.

The rest... I'm not too keen on. I'm more a philosopher than a politician or economist.

I once created a similar thread, but it never got very far, mainly because there's too much conjecture involved, so it's very easy to go off-topic instead of discussing actual FFXIV lore. Here's hoping you have better luck with this thread. ;)

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Originally Posted by Raqrie_Tohka

Does the game have newspapers? Cameras? How do we spread information, and what examples of socio-political implications are there?

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Originally Posted by Cilia

There is known to be at least one newspaper in Eorzea, the Mythril Eye.

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Each of the southern city-states has its own newspaper. Limsa Lominsa's rag is the Harbor Herald. Gridania's paper of record is The Raven. Cameras don't exist, but there are clearly skilled illustrators in Eorzea, if Alphinaud's talent is anything to go by.

As for social implications, I don't have any idea, except that literacy is not supposed to be widespread. Among the Spoken races, the hyur — and the midlanders in particular — are supposed to be the most literate. But this little detail has been lost in implementation, as I don't recall any scene where there's an NPC who confesses to being unable to read.

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Originally Posted by Raqrie_Tohka

City-states versus nation-states, a concept. How this concept in Eorzea will likely differ from our world, yet which parts do not differ.

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There's not much to compare between Eorzea and Europe's own experience of nation-states. Back in 1.0, there was a greater sense of the city-states being tiny outposts of civilisation amid a realm of dangerous wilderness, but that is no longer the case.

Nationalism, in the European context, is driven very much by ethnic or language. Eorzea is significantly different because 1) linguistic differences don't appear to exist between the city-states; and 2) the city-states are remarkably cosmopolitan.

In contrast, the "nations" of Eorzea, being cities to begin with, are distinguished more by their respective history, traditions and ideologies. In this sense, the city-states have more in common with the cities of the Italian Renaissance, than with the nation-states of pre-modern Europe.

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Originally Posted by Raqrie_Tohka

Social-political effects on the commonfolk, handled quite well in Heavensward. A few questlines in Stormblood such as the quarry one touch on social-economical impacts.
How economic order works in Eorzea.

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This was discussed here: I Want to Know About Eorzean Economics

Yes to newspapers. The Mythril Eye was mentioned in the post above me, and there's also The Raven and The Harbor Herald.

edit whoops beat me to it ;)

But to suggest a lazy person's economic overview, Eorzea's economy/ies remind me of the pre-industrial-revolution guilds system in western Europe. Skilled artisans, specialists, and sometime noble patrons grouped together in a system of apprenticeship and small markets, hugely supplemented by patron funding and commissioned work. I don't know that I'd say we've entered manufactory systems yet, either; even Ul'dah, with a huge open market, interregional trading, and a sense of capital, relies on individual craftsmen, personal wealth, and small-scale work orders for trade and labourer guilds like the miners. As opposed to, say, a factory-labour-based economy with currency defined, printed, and stockpiled by banks or credit unions.

It's three in the morning here so I can't go into details, but the 50-60 BTN questline does involve a reporter from the Raven and her articles on the state of Ishgardian agriculture.

Also agreed on the obvious inspiration for the East Aldenard Trading Company being the British East India Company. Which made me predisposed to view the EATC with suspicion, given the whole deal with the EIC starting and prosecuting the Opium Wars. (I'm Chinese, so my ancestors were on the losing side.)

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Originally Posted by YianKutku

Also agreed on the obvious inspiration for the East Aldenard Trading Company being the British East India Company. Which made me predisposed to view the EATC with suspicion, given the whole deal with the EIC starting and prosecuting the Opium Wars. (I'm Chinese, so my ancestors were on the losing side.)

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To be fair, would the Opium Wars have even started, had the Emperors of China not decided to come down hard on the opium trade? Statistics aren't that reliable, but some sources say that 90% of Chinese men were addicted to opium. You can't cut off a customer base like that and expect the opium to go nowhere. (The furthest back I can trace my ancestry is to my great-grandparents, who fled the civil war at the end of the Qing dynasty, and sailed south to settle in a British colony.)

Anyway, upon further research, turns out the Mirage Trust does contain a bank. Makes the one I created for my fanfic a little superfluous, but oh well.

In the interest of crunching population numbers, I also dug up the only reference to hard figures for Eorzean populations I can find in the lorebook: The Immortal Flames has 3 Main Brigades, with 236 men each. That doesn't include the Bloodsworn, so let's assume that are another 200. That would mean that (236x3)+200 would make the total number of Immortal Flames... 908. It is specifically said that the other Grand Companies are bigger, but by how much isn't stated. Assuming that they're at least twice the size of the Immortal Flames, we have a total of maybe 5000 people for the entirety of the Grand Companies. Not counting the Temple Knights, or each city-state's personal authority, which we might also assume are bigger than that. Anyone else mind extrapolating how big the Brass Blades should be in comparison to the Immortal Flames? Once we can guess at their numbers, we can also guess at the total population of Ul'dah, since there should be an average ratio of police to population.

Finally, on the Brass Blades: The lorebook states that they're employed by the Syndicate as a whole. So, on paper, they're not Lolorito's personal army. While many of them do answer only to the Monetarists (which is only Lolorito since the other prominent moneypopoto got chopped) there are a fair few who do serve the city at large. Fufulupa is just one example.

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Originally Posted by Mysterysword

To be fair, would the Opium Wars have even started, had the Emperors of China not decided to come down hard on the opium trade? Statistics aren't that reliable, but some sources say that 90% of Chinese men were addicted to opium. You can't cut off a customer base like that and expect the opium to go nowhere. (The furthest back I can trace my ancestry is to my great-grandparents, who fled the civil war at the end of the Qing dynasty, and sailed south to settle in a British colony.)

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Eminently fair. While I am skeptical of the 90% number, that's beside the point that a large portion of the populace were addicted, and the Emperors of China were definitely too heavy-handed in their decrees.

(I can only trace my ancestry a few more generations beyond what you could. My parents' generation migrated south to Indonesia and Singapore for economic opportunities, since the Japanese invasion wiped out the family's wealth.)

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Finally, on the Brass Blades: The lorebook states that they're employed by the Syndicate as a whole. So, on paper, they're not Lolorito's personal army. While many of them do answer only to the Monetarists (which is only Lolorito since the other prominent moneypopoto got chopped) there are a fair few who do serve the city at large. Fufulupa is just one example.

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It does bring up the question of what the arrangement was like prior to 2.55, though. It's well known that Lolorito and Teledji were not fond of one another, and the Brass Blades being in the pay of "the Syndicate as a whole" makes me wonder if Brass Blade were ever pitted against Brass Blade in yet another power jockeying play between the two.

I mean, I know Brass Blades have arrested other Brass Blades with alarming frequency, but one side tends to be following the official rules when doing so.

The third (now second) Monetarist on the Syndicate, Fyrgeiss, still has his private Stone Torches army, so the Brass Blades would be redundant.

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Originally Posted by YianKutku

Eminently fair. While I am skeptical of the 90% number, that's beside the point that a large portion of the populace were addicted, and the Emperors of China were definitely too heavy-handed in their decrees.

(I can only trace my ancestry a few more generations beyond what you could. My parents' generation migrated south to Indonesia and Singapore for economic opportunities, since the Japanese invasion wiped out the family's wealth.)

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Well, they were the Emperors of China. Were they ever known to be light-handed in their decrees concerning things they didn't like? Not that the British were blameless either, since getting an entire country addicted to a drug, just to facilitate trade, is more than a little... extreme. Also, the Chinese apparently weren't executing opium merchants right off the bat, though maybe that's just because they didn't know the definition of "drug dealer" back then. Coincidentally, my country does execute drug dealers, or even people simply caught with certain amounts of any drug. It sure makes for a fun time when you can compare your government to the Chinese Empire and have the latter come off as more lenient!

(My ancestors were apparently all illiterate farmers and craftsmen, which means a distinct lack of any sort of family registry. My parents' generation was the first to have every member be literate, mostly because they were the first to grow up in an independent country, not a colony. But it would be difficult to trace anyway, since they emigrated from all over China - my maternal grandfather came from Kinmen as a teenager, sometime in the 1930s. The most I know is that we have distant relatives in Taiwan.)

I kind of think that, while Lolorito and Teledji didn't like each other, their businesses operate in different, and sometimes complementary, industries, so it's difficult to think of how a power play between them could've resulted in an outright Brass Blades mobilisation. They did have a much more important opponent in the form of the Royalists, after all, who command both the Sultansworn and the Immortal Flames.

As for Fyrgeiss, well, he may be a Monetarist, but he may as well be nonexistent for all he's done in the story. It feels almost racist, that the entire 2.55-3.0 story involved only the Lalafell members of the Syndicate, with Fyrgeiss and God not even being mentioned.

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Originally Posted by Mysterysword

Coincidentally, my country does execute drug dealers, or even people simply caught with certain amounts of any drug.

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I did suspect when you mentioned your family sailed south from China to a British colony, but with this... fellow Singaporean?

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I kind of think that, while Lolorito and Teledji didn't like each other, their businesses operate in different, and sometimes complementary, industries, so it's difficult to think of how a power play between them could've resulted in an outright Brass Blades mobilisation. They did have a much more important opponent in the form of the Royalists, after all, who command both the Sultansworn and the Immortal Flames.

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Given the state of Ul'dahn politics when we start ARR, though, it's very clear that the Royalists are pretty much beaten down into near-irrelevancy, with only Raubahn in that camp on the Syndicate. Even the Sultansworn got infiltrated/bribed by Monetarists, as the 30-50 PLD questline showed. (Not to mention how we apparently slaughter several more Sultansworn who merely had the misfortune to follow Jenlyns's mistaken orders.) At that point, the Monetarists didn't really have much to fear.

On the one hand, I can imagine Lolorito and Teledji restricting themselves to political maneuvering in the backrooms, since outright violence by the Brass Blades is too messy. On the other hand, what happened in 2.55 is supremely messy, so clearly that's not a restraining factor in their decisions.

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As for Fyrgeiss, well, he may be a Monetarist, but he may as well be nonexistent for all he's done in the story. It feels almost racist, that the entire 2.55-3.0 story involved only the Lalafell members of the Syndicate, with Fyrgeiss and God not even being mentioned.

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I don't actually recall seeing Godbert present in any Syndicate meeting cutscenes. (I could have missed something early on, when I didn't know about his significance.) I suspect Fyrgeiss is a Monetarist only in the sense that he believes that money should be primary, rather than actively opposing the Sultanate.

Godbert's personal investment in any situation is probably inversely proportional to how much clothing he's wearing at the time.