Cayleb and Merlin disagreement (possible spoilers)

I can see the empire gradually expanding to include island outposts across the oceans. Islands once claimed by harchong or dohlar will be definitly kept and claimed, acting as trading/naval stations.
I doubt they would ever have holdings on haven or Howard, except for the canal across the land bridge.

That pirate haven Trellheim, I think, is going to end up claimed. Those island near harchong, barely populated, I could see that becoming a haven for escaped slaves.

Keith_w wrote:

n7axw wrote:Dilandu's point about monarchies is a good one although it probably doesn't apply to the Safehold story.

Yet there have been Empires whose value is such that they provided atability for their people over an extended time frame...Rome being the most outstanding example.

Democracies and republics don't have a great record in terms of durability either.

I'm no fan of monarchies and artistocracies in real life. Yet they do keep croping up...and simetimes they even work, at least for a while.

Don

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I would like to point out that, except for the time under the "Lord Protector" the British monarchy has lasted 950 years, much of it as a true monarchy, not a constitutional one, and mostly a very successful one. The British Empire as in "The Sun never sets on the British Empire" lasted over 250 years.

The Brits were one of the more successful empires and then when the time foe its dissolution arrived managed it about as gracefully as it could have been done.

Further, they frequently left something positive behind when they pulled out. Witness India, who despite living through difficult times has successfully hung on to parliamentary democracy to the present time.

Don

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Since Merlin's ultimate goal is to get humanity back to the stars, the Empire of Safehold will have plenty of room to expand!

The interesting question is whether Safehold will return to space as a unified planet, or led by the Empire of Charis. Merlin pointed out that any country that didn't embrace the new manufacturing methods and technology would be a non-entity within a generation. So Sodar is going to fall further and further behind...

We really need the Great Reveal so the Proscriptions can be done away with and children can be fitted with NEATs and taught TF technology from a very early age. That will go a long way toward uniting humans as part of the newborn Terran Federation.

OWL and Nahrmahn had better spend a LOT of time in hyper-heuristic mode, since they need to figure out how to take out the OBS, then advance Terran Federation technology to the point that it can wipe out the Gbaba.

As Merlin said "Either there’s going to be some sort of return of the ‘Archangels,’ or there isn’t. Even if there isn’t, we still need to figure out how to neutralize what’s under the Temple and/or the bombardment system eventually.

Actually, now that I think about it, there’s no ‘and/or’ in it—we need to neutralize both of those to be sure something really, really bad doesn’t happen. We’re just under a lot more time pressure to get it done if they are coming back somehow.

“We may or may not be able to accomplish that, but unless we can manage that and get the industrial plant in Nimue’s Cave up and running and replicating itself—with at least a decade or so to spare—we’re still screwed. If we could pull that off, and if we had that decade to work with, we wouldn’t really care if the ‘Archangels’ decided to put in an actual physical reappearance of some sort.”

He smiled coldly. “Give me four or five years of open Federation-level tech to work with, and I will guarantee that anything the ‘Archangels’ bring with them gets blown to hell and gone. And I can think of very few things that would give me more personal satisfaction!"

I'm beginning to agree with those who suggested setting up an orphanage for extremely young children in Nimue's Cave, fitting them with NEATs, and putting them to work building defenses against the return of the Hamilcar, which the Inquisition's secret archives said "had departed in glory." Those archives did not say that it flew into the sun!

It's looking more and more like the Hamilcar may be on a cometary orbit that brings it back to Safehold under maximum stealth every thousand years.

The empire has plenty of available gold and silver to invest in new holdings, enough to make it worth their while to stay loyal.