Dafmeister wrote:I've not read much about the early Star Kingdom, but did I'm not sure that the original colonist were given lands at the start. I was under the impression that the process of giving out lands came about when the colony switched from corporate-form government to a monarchy in the aftermath of the plague, with the original colonists vested with estates, titles and seats in the new House of Lords to ensure they'd continue to run things when the second wave of colonists began to arrive.
Nope.
The original colonists, who had invested in the expedition (as well as making the trip), all received "land grants" based on the percentage of their contribution to the cost of the expedition. That is, if you and your family had ponied up 2% of the colony's total investment, then you and your family received 2%
of the distributed lands at the time of colonization. As has been noted, "lands" was a term which covered a whole host of "natural resources" which would be owned and/or regulated and administered.
Only a limited percentage of the total available "lands" was distributed even to the original colonists. (This was one of the things which made it possible to set aside a third of the surface of Sphinx for the treecats in perpetuity once they were discovered.) The remainder was jointly/corporately owned by the entire colony, to be administered by the Manticore Colony LTD's Board of Directors, which was transformed into the governing authority of the new star system. I don't have the exact percentage which went into immediate distribution in front of me at the moment, but it wasn't huge, because the whole idea was that the remainder of the undistributed lands (that portion of that which wasn't permanently set aside as nature preserves or for similar purposes) would be available to be sold as a major cash-producing resource for the government. (And
this is the primary reason that the possibility of the treecats' sapience posed a serious financial threat to certain citizens of the Star Kingdom. Many of them had purchased options on land not yet distributed from the government to provide an immediate modest cash flow. Those options locked in a set purchase price for any "land" option, which was virtually certain to be far less than the market value at the time the government finally sold that land. If the treecats had been declared the sole, sapient owners of Sphinx, every one of those options would have become worthless.) Note that the government income derived from the later sale of lands we are talking here would be basically
local cash revenues, distinct from those cash reserves still held back on Old Earth. The reason, of course, was that those Old Earth reserves were effectively unavailable for day-to-day expenses in Manticore due to the distance between the Manticore Binary System and Sol.
One of the major advantages of being an original investor/shareholder/colonist was that one got a much greater degree of
choice about what "lands" one received. That is, values were assigned to all of the available tracts, and the original colonists were able to choose the tracts they wanted (equal in value to their investment credits) on a first-come/first-served basis. The order in which they were allowed to choose was randomly selected, so someone who was receiving a relatively small allotment might have been able to grab off the equivalent of Boardwalk and Park Place because he got in first. In addition, shareholders were entitled to pool their allotments, so long as a binding contract for how the acquired "lands" would then be distributed was executed before the "lands" in question were selected.
When the Plague hit, the original form of government was converted from that of a Board of Directors, elected by vote of all shareholders, into a monarchial form of government, and the original shareholders acquired patents of nobility, with their aristocratic rank determined on the basis of their net worth, which obviously depended upon the "lands" they'd initially received,
plus anything they might have acquired since through investment, entrepreneurship, purchase, or trade. Quite a few of the new "barons" and "baronesses" were people who had been considered the equivalent of "yeoman farmers" before their ennoblement, and quite a few of those new "barons" and "baronesses" continued to be rutabaga farmers (or whatever)
after receiving their shiny new titles. As has been said many times, this was a deliberate move to ensure that political power remained concentrated in the hands of the original colonists (and their families) in the face of the massive influx of new citizens they hoped to see arriving in response to the Star Kingdom's deliberate recruitment to replace losses to the Plague.
Once the new constitution had been put into place and a recruiting strategy — the funded travel to Manticore, paid for using funds from Old Earth, coupled with the ability to buy "lands" in the Star Kingdom at bargain prices (or receive lands without purchase equal in value to the percentage of their own passages the colonists paid for) — had been agreed upon, one of the Manticoran frigates was dispatched back to the Sol System with a representative of the newly crowned King Roger I to set things in motion.
During the colonization — or perhaps I should say re-colonization — period, there was much more traffic
into Manticore than there had ever been before. Chartered vessels were the primary means by which the new colonists were delivered to their destination. Because of the nature of the recruiting effort, both the new colonists and the star systems from which they were recruited
and the crews of their transport vessels were fully informed about the nature of the Plague, and you can be certain that the transports were very, very careful about the extent of their contact with the planetary surfaces. The same was obviously true of anyone who might wish to
flee Manticore. However, aside from the frigates (owned and controlled by the government)
there were no hyper-capable vessels available in the Manticore Binary System itself. That is, the only way that someone trying to out run the infection could have left the star system would have been aboard one of the government's wholly-owned frigates or (later) aboard one of the transports which had delivered new colonists to the system. As a consequence, there was effectively no chance of anyone getting out unnoted by the authorities both at their point of departure and their eventual point of arrival. I suppose that in theory someone might have been able to bribe the crew of one of the transports, although it seems unlikely to me that anybody serving in the closed environment of a starship's environmental system would even consider bringing aboard someone who might be infected with a deadly disease for a voyage which would last months. Of course, what do I know?
Anyway, I hope this answers some of the questions and speculation.
