The Viner Dimension

Equality is infectious

Another part that would have helped was that point in the Agreement of the People, about ending conscription. Too often those imperial armies were made up of conscripts, or some other form of enlistment so close to conscription that it would have been much the same. But in the Commonwealth, if people were in the forces, they wanted to be there.

And if they had to fight, they had something to fight for - rather than solely for the private profit of someone else. Instead, fighting for their homes. Fighting for something they believed in. Big difference.

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That's also a big catch for local rulers, though. The egalitarianism of the Commonwealth wasn't something incidental, that could be easily overridden and ignored: it was right at the core of how it worked. In that sense, it was kind of infectious - it spread its egalitarianism everywhere it went.

For the local Nabob of Nowheresville and every other grandiose Grandee, the Commonwealth's offer must have put them in one heck of a dilemma. On their own, most of them would have had no chance against the empire-builders' 'guns, germs and steel' - most non-European nations and so-called 'native peoples' learnt that lesson pretty quick, too many of them the hard way and too late. In that sense, joining the Commonwealth was probably the only way to get some form of protection from everyone else's empire-games. But it also meant that the local rulers' own existing privilege-games and hierarchies would become a whole lot harder to keep propping up: everyone would win except for those whose so-called 'power' depended on stealing from others, or making someone else lose. Awkward...

I've seen a few notes about that in Aunt Kat's papers: local rulers signing up to the Commonwealth, but still trying to control trade, trying to control everything, applying more and more severe oppression against their own people to try to keep their own oligarchies and kleptocracies going for as long as possible. Didn't work. In our own timeline, the East India Company or whatever imposed its own rule instead; but in their world, looks like the Commonwealth quietly waited them out. The empire-builders would move in, for a while; but somehow those vinery-based defences would also appear, in the hands of the ordinary people, pushing the empire-builders out again - and pushing the kleptocrats out as well.

When it's done right, equality is infectious...