The third important cruiser role was protecting the Empire. It was complex partly because shadowing the formal British Empire was an informal one, consisting of close trading partners whose governments tended to benefit from British sea dominance. This informal empire was closely connected to the trading operations of the City of London, the financial centre of the United Kingdom and, before the First World War, the single most important financial centre of the world. The City financed world trade, and it well understood that free trade (free, for example, from anti-trade warfare) was key to British prosperity. It was understood that governments would favour Britain and the City if they understood that British sea dominance helped protect them.......... The informal empire seems to have been well understood in the British government, but rarely (if ever) discussed; it has surfaced in historical discussions only in recent years.
Informal empire could be expected to work as long as prospective partners could realistically expect Britain, which generally meant the Royal Navy, to help protect them. When someone wrote that 'trade follows the flag', what was often meant was that a country shielded by the Royal Navy would feel inclined to support that protection by buying British, and using British banks to float it's loans. In a sense informal empire justified the cruiser squadrons maintained on foreign stations between the two world wars. The stations were revived after the Second World War, but could not be maintained for long, as the war had destroyed too much of the British economy
Then there's this in the notes section:
The position of the United States within the informal empire but also as a force attempting to disrupt the formal empire gives some idea of the complexity of informal empire. Much of the formal empire was obtained to support the trading requirements of the informal empire; places like Hong Kong were valuable as trading ports, not in themselves. The British (or at least some of them) seem to have been unique in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in accepting the modern idea that investment and return were what counted, not physical control; hence many modern claims that conquest does not pay. Of course the British (or at least some of them, in government and the City) well understood that control of some territory made it more attractive for informal-empire partners to work with the British.
Right, after that wall-o-text, I think we have a better idea of the tasks and situations faced by both Manticore and the League, IMHO.
One the one hand, prior to the formation of the Star Empire, Manticore was very much in "Informal Empire" mode - no 'overseas territories' to protect, but a major financial and trade centre requiring dispersed squadrons to protect trade with friendly governments buying Manticoran in return for protection. On the other, the League is a "Formal Empire", but must have an "Informal Empire" lurking in the shadows, maintained by the transtellars, OFS and the Bureaucracy. The demands of both explain both the size of Frontier Fleet and why it seems to have an awful lot of Battlecruisers. Trade protection, security and the needs of the "Informal Empire" means going for the most capable platform to fulfill those missions and building as many as can be financially afforded.
What does everyone think?
Also, was RFC aware of the "Informal" British Empire when he created Manticore and it's situation?
Mike.
