Free Western Colonies

Self-rule that nobody granted¶

The Free Colonies were not founded on a principle. They were founded on a shortage.

Practical necessity and mutual dependence shaped them from the earliest days. Governance grew out of shared risk and negotiated obligation, which is a polite way of saying that when the relief ships stopped coming the settlements that survived were the ones that started asking each other for help instead. By the time anyone in a metropole thought to ask who was in charge out there, the answer had been settled for two generations and was not a person.

We will ask, and write when we know.

Reply of a Free Colonies assembly to a request for the name of its governor

No moment to point at¶

There was no declaration. No war of independence, no treaty, no date a chronicler can set down.

There was a great deal of correspondence that went unanswered, and eventually stopped being sent. Officials died and were not replaced and the assemblies that had been doing the work anyway simply carried on doing it. Twice a crown has attempted to establish exactly when it lost the west, and both inquiries returned the same unsatisfying finding: at no point did anything happen.

The head start was not luck, and Fairwater knows exactly how long it was and who paid for it. See The Third Tide.

This is the deepest thing about the Free Colonies and the reason no power has yet found a grip on them. There is nothing to revoke. Fairwater holds no charter that could be withdrawn, signed no compact that could be broken, and claims no independence that could be denied, because claiming it would concede that somebody had a say.

The faith they kept¶

They kept the Order of the Sacred Light, the same faith as the crowns they no longer answer to, and have never explained why.

Clerks in Vaurmont and Grismere have argued for a century over whether this is sentiment or the shrewdest diplomatic decision in the west. It means a Free Colonies port is not heretical ground. It means an Aethrassian captain can hear mass there. It means the one instrument that could have made the west a crusade instead makes it a parish, and the Order, which has views about many things, has never once been asked to have a view about this.

The assemblies¶

Government is a set of standing negotiations rather than an office, and it is slower than anything else on the map.

Every settlement sends who it likes. Agreements bind those who agreed and nobody else. There is no capital, Fairwater being merely the port where the assemblies most often sit, and no executive, and no army beyond what the settlements raise between them when the case has been made to each of them separately.

It should not work. It works because everyone involved has a very short list of things they actually need from each other, and four generations of practice at getting exactly those things and nothing more.

Meeting them¶

The most reasonable neighbour on any map. They trade, they honour agreements, they have no interest in your territory and considerable interest in your surplus.

Every metropole finds them infuriating for precisely these reasons. There is no lever. You cannot threaten a capital they do not have, cannot buy a court they never built, and cannot punish a defection that never formally occurred. What you can do is sell them grain, which is what everyone ends up doing.

What the rolls record¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter, Deep Mine.