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

[Mysterysword]

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.)

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.