The Economy of Singhapura

The Merchants of Singhapura like to say that the Empire’s first weapon is the Owl. The Military Orders come after it, and after them the schools and the clerks, of whom I have written elsewhere. I have never heard a general dispute this, at least not in public.

Let us therefore speak of money, Your Grace, and begin with the Owl itself. It is so stable, so difficult to forge and so widely used that even kingdoms which detest Singhapura keep their books in it. Once your coin runs your enemy’s markets, conquering him becomes, as one Merchant put it to me, a matter of haggling over the price. This is why some call the Merchants the Fourteenth Chapter.

What follows covers the guilds, the revenues, the trade, and the means by which smaller states come to depend upon the Empire. Daub is already inside this system. If Your Grace is to be held by it, it is better to be a prisoner who is well fed and on good terms with the guards than an animal gnawing at its own leg in a snare.

The Guilds

The Adhiraj licenses monopolies over the important trades to specialist bodies. In exchange, the guilds pay taxes, keep up the quality of their goods, train their members and pay for a share of public works.

Put less politely, it is an arrangement by which a small number of people become very rich. This suits the Treasury well enough. It is far easier to tax a few wealthy men than a great many poor ones, who are difficult to find and more difficult still to squeeze.

More than one scholar has called the whole system a confederation of cartels that smothers anything new. Some have even said so in print.

Some of the resulting inequality is softened by the rajakaariya, the royal duty. Able-bodied adults may volunteer for three months of the year on state projects, in the fallow months between the end of the Maha harvest and the start of the Yala season. Their families receive a yearly stipend of rice and wheat, paid for out of guild taxes. The guilds that paid the most are entitled to put their stamps on the sacks, just beneath the Adhiraj’s seal.

Thus the guilds buy goodwill from the people and the palace, the state gets its labour and feeds the poor, and the Adhiraj gains one more string to pull when a guild steps out of line. The Empire has always been fond of arrangements that do three things at once.

Every guild has a charter. It lets the guild police itself, spells out what it owes in quality, training and tax, sets out how disputes are handled and gives it seats on the imperial advisory councils. Guild courts settle internal quarrels. Imperial judges step in only when matters turn violent, and even then they generally side with the guild, which spares the Empire a great many lawyers.

In Your Grace’s lands, a guild mark means a better price and a better guarantee. In Singhapura it means considerably more. Anyone selling goods without a mark may be brought before a Justice of the Peace, and the seller (and often the maker) arrested and tried in the court of the guild concerned.

Thus, any man may make a thing, and share with his neighbours; but no man may legally profit from the Empire at large without a licence. A man with a good design and no money to build it will either produce small quantities or take it to a guild member in good standing, who manufactures it under his own mark and pays the inventor a lump sum or a share.

Most guilds follow the same ladder: five years as an apprentice, some years as a journeyman charging a day-rate while travelling and learning, and then a masterwork submitted for judgment. There are examinations at every step, supposedly so that talent alone may carry a man through. In practice hardly any guild permits anyone to skip the years of schooling, for fear of skilled Lusians and cheap Tangowanese taking the work.

Together the guilds maintain the Chamber of Craft and Commerce, which meets four times a year to agree what they want from the imperial authorities. It is also where the guild masters decide whom to bribe, and by how much. They are very good at both.

The Foundational Guilds

1) The Miners’ Guild holds the monopoly on everything dug out of the ground. It is the oldest guild, and it began in disputes over how miners were treated. Its early history involves a criminal organization whose name, written down, reads much like the number 689; in the Empire’s shakier days, such organizations were among the few things the nobility feared.

The guild is now in decline, because the mines have moved outward toward the borders, into Wattle and Daub. Your Grace sits at the receiving end of that movement, and I return to this below.

2) The Woodmen’s Guild began the other way about. The state needed someone to manage the imperial forests, so it gathered up scattered gardeners and hunters and made them rangers, planters and woodsmen under its own patronage. Illegal logging soon gave them more to do, and now every forest in Singhapura is theirs. The Military Orders commonly recruit their trackers from the Woodmen.

3) The Guild of Stonemasons and Carpenters builds whatever is meant to last, from bridges and city walls down to a good chair. They work with Taprobane on magical reinforcement for imperial projects. They also share people with the Boiling Rock chapter of the Military Orders, whose engineers and magicians pass through the guild while serving and often join it upon retirement. The man who builds a siege ramp at twenty-five is quite likely to be building a temple at fifty.

4) The Farmers’ and Butchers’ Guild is the last of the old four, and it now manages the whole food supply. They advise on irrigation, grow the crops, raise and slaughter the cattle, and handle storage, grain reserves, markets and haulage. Land ownership, however, is hereditary, and thus the movers and shakers of the Guild are almost always those who own the fields.

The Artisan Guilds

1) The Metalsmiths’ Guild takes whatever the Miners extract and makes it into everything from ploughshares to swords. It began as a company of armourers grown too old for the Military Orders. Its inner circle, the Weaponsmiths, are the finest of them, and they work directly with the Orders on everything from plain blades to enchanted arms. They have far more say than their numbers suggest.

2) The Jewelers and Artificers’ Guild attends to gold, silver and fine ornament; smiths for people with more money than sense, as the saying goes. More usefully, it is where inventors end up when their work fits no other guild, so most new devices enter the guild system through it. Its best customers are the other guilds, who pay a great deal for its methods.

3) The Guild of Weavers, Dyers, and Tailors handles anything made of thread, from a farmer’s underclothes to a priest’s ceremonial robes. Merchants who think this a small trade have never watched what a jump in the price of wool or batik does to a city.

4) The Tanners and Leatherworkers’ Guild deals in hides and leather. It is necessary work and it is foul, which is why the law keeps their yards outside the city walls. I have little else to say about them.

5) The Bakers’ Guild is legally separate from the Farmers’, in the same way the Metalsmiths are separate from the Miners. They make bread, cake and sweets. During the Age of Sponsored Heroes they hired Sir Galahitiya the Crisp, which is the first recorded case of a guild paying for a hero. Several nobles known for their entertainments are said to receive regular wagonloads of complimentary pastry.

6) The Distillers’ Company ferments fruit and grain and sells the result as wine, beer and arrack. They own a good many of Singhapura’s orchards and do not get along with the Farmers’. Of late they have been buying up large tracts of land in the Empire’s outlying kingdoms in which to grow what they need.

9) The Glassblowers’ Guild is the youngest of the artisan guilds, and nearly all its members are magicians. They make everything from bottles and windows to the lenses and vessels on which Lusian alchemy and serious magical work depend, and they guard their techniques closely. The University and the Haugris Church both need them badly. For such a quiet body, they have two very powerful friends.

The Service Guilds

1) The Merchants’ Guild began life as the Loghaulers, Supply, and Trailmakers’ Guild, became the Merchants and Bankers’ Guild, and is now the richest and most powerful body in Singhapura after the state itself. It oversees every major trade route on land and sea, and it manages much of the Empire’s banking together with the Treasury and Taprobane. It has done so since the Restoration, when it took its lessons from the Lusian banks and began to mint the Owl.

Anyone who moves goods or money over any distance has had to stay in its good graces. Merchants are rarely nobles, yet nearly every noble family keeps part of its fortune in the Guild’s coffers, and very few of them ignore a Merchant’s advice in private. I expect Wattle and Daub are no different.

The Military Orders number thirteen Chapters; it is not by accident that the Merchants are called the Fourteenth.

2) The Surgeons’ Guild keeps hospitals in every large city and goes onto battlefields under a flag of truce.

Officially it belongs to no church or university. In fact its members overlap heavily with the healers of the Haugris Church, the Temple of Eighteen, the Iron Pagoda and Taprobane, and with healers inside the Empire and out of it, so the Empire often sends Surgeons on diplomatic errands. Whoever wishes the whole Empire to turn and look at him need only threaten the Surgeons.

The Economy Itself

I have already said that the Owl is what lets the Empire reach so far. Sixty Mice make an Alligator, and sixty Alligators make an Owl. The Taprobane University Currency Control Division makes the coin impossible to forge and spends its days studying exchange rates and whatever might threaten the Owl’s value. The Treasury backs the coin with a public pledge of land, artefacts, magic and grain, and it has kept that pledge so faithfully that even Singhapura’s enemies trust it.

Taxes come next. There can be no peace among peoples without armies, no armies without pay, and no pay without taxes, wrote the general Munasinha, and Singhapura has taken him more seriously than most. The principal revenues are land tariffs, customs duties, guild fees and a head tax on every household recorded in the provinces.

The official reason for the head tax is the strain large households put upon roads and services. The real reason, which Your Grace may find more persuasive, is that it makes large families expensive, and large families produce the idle and angry young men who become bandits and militia.

Then there is food, about which Singhapura’s historians worry more than anything else. The Empire treats feeding itself as a matter of survival. A well-fed people is a strong one, and the surplus supports the Owl and buys the goodwill of whichever minor kingdom the Empire happens to be courting. Men will put up with a great deal if they know where the next meal is coming from. The First Ebbing, when the Temple’s crusade marched north without provisions and drowned in the monsoon, is remembered in every Treasury office for a reason.

The North sends the Empire metal, furs, rarewoods and artefacts, and receives food, manufactured goods and magical services in return. Wattle is the gateway for that trade, and especially for the trade with Ealdorfold, whose ores and alloys are among the most important things the Empire buys.

Tangowan sends rarewoods, gems and pearls from its hundreds of islands. Lusia sends art, architecture and the finest mechanical devices in the world. Lusian banks and contract lawyers have worked so far into Singhapura’s economy that the Empire keeps quiet alliances with particular Lusian city-states, and meddles in their politics when its money is at stake.

The Rosantic League sends books, printing presses and the free companies that fight for whoever is paying this season. In return it buys tea, medicine, clothing, fine ornaments and grain in great quantities, and it would dearly love more Owls and more access to the University.

The difficulty is that the League is in pieces. A bargain with Valdermach does not bind Brenmark, and a contract with a free company signed through Orvaine carries no guarantee that the Diet will enforce it should the company walk away. The Merchants’ Guild keeps a delegation in Valdermach chiefly to manage this, so that Singhapura receives what it paid for whichever Rosantic it happens to be dealing with.

Singhapura does not export weapons. It sends out grain, tea, medicine, clothing, jewellery and spices, and a great deal of half-finished material made to a single standard. Every craftsman in the world needs good material somewhere between the raw ore and the finished piece, and almost nobody can make it the same way twice. Singhapura has made certain that it owns a large share of that trade.

Last comes knowledge. Taprobane and the Lesser Theoretical University of Daub are both things the Empire places on the table when it negotiates. Other states will pay handsomely for magical help with town planning, farming, enchanted roadworks and the running of a government.

Consider all of these together, Your Grace, and you will see that in every one of these relationships Singhapura is the party that could better afford to walk away. The North needs Singhapura’s grain more than Singhapura needs any single mine. Tangowan’s gems are handsome, and there are other gems. A Rosantic press may be taken apart and copied, and then Singhapura may print its own books.

Of What This Means for Daub

Three matters follow from all this, and I set them out in order of urgency.

First, the mines and the steel. The Miners’ Guild is in decline because the ore has moved north and the Empire is now pushing north after it. Daub sits upon iron, tin, lead and coal. More than that, the Staanbyrig steel that the Empire cannot make for itself comes by sea from Roke’s Landing to Wattle, and from Wattle overland through Daub and the Hooniyang Pass to Giridhora. There is no other road for it.

The Empire’s need for these materials is the strongest cards in Your Grace’s hand. I would advise Your Grace to learn precisely what passes through Daub, in what quantity, and what the Empire pays for it elsewhere.

Second, the Merchants. Daub’s own Guild is built upon the Singhapura model; its banking runs through Singhapura hands. This cannot be undone without ruining the city’s trade, and I do not advise attempting it. I urge Your Grace instead to cultivate the network rather than compete with it; the Guild has more to lose from Daub’s collapse than from Your Grace’s prosperity.

Third, the coin. Daub trades in Owls, and will continue to. Your Grace must therefore understand that every debasement, every shortage and every rumour concerning the Owl is decided in Singhapura. Keep a man in the Empire who reads the exchange rates, and keep grain and materials in reserve.

The Wealth of Kingdoms by Adithya Vidanapathirana is where Singhapura political economy begins. He argues that a kingdom’s wealth lies in what its people can make and how well their work is organized and exchanged, and not in the gold heaped up in its treasury. This was called radical when it appeared. Today every schoolboy repeats it. His chapter on guild monopolies is fair to both sides, and he observes that a system which shuts out competitors also shuts out anyone who might correct its mistakes.

On the Debasement of Coin and the Ruin of Princes by Somadasa Karunaratne is required reading in Taprobane’s faculty of Applied Economics. He went through every recorded case of a ruler clipping or thinning the coin to escape a short-term difficulty, and found that every one of those economies eventually collapsed. The Currency Control Division was founded the year after he presented his findings to Yodhasena III.

The Art of the Tax Farm: On Revenue, Armies, and their Limits by Nissanka Pathiranage is the standard work on how Singhapura raises money, and the one most often misquoted in budget meetings. He begins from Munasinha’s line about armies and pay, and works through how states have raised revenue, what each method costs those who pay it, and the point at which the cost begins to undo the peace it was meant to buy.

On the head tax, he agrees that it restrains the provincial population. He also notes that it restrains provincial output, and with it the tax the provinces yield, and he leaves the reader to finish the thought. The Ministry of the Interior has been arguing with that chapter for thirty years.

On the Winds of Commerce: Being an Account of What Moves Between Kingdoms and Why by Mahinda Wickramasinghe is where to begin on Singhapura’s trade. He showed that successful kingdoms trade what they make most cheaply relative to their neighbours, which is often not what they have most of. His other point is the one Singhapura built itself upon. Any rich state can commission its own luxuries, and raw ore may be bought anywhere; but steel cut to the same dimensions every time, and glass blown to the same thickness every time, are hard to come by, and very few states have organized themselves to make them.

The saying tyranny, but on a full stomach comes from Granary and the Throne by Sumedha Bandaranayake. His argument is short. A kingdom that grows its own food cannot be starved into submission. A kingdom that does not has already surrendered the most important part of its independence, whatever its treaties may say.

The Counting House and the Crown: On the Partnership of Money and Power by Ratnapala Dissanayake concerns the Merchants’ Guild bank and the imperial treasury. He argues that each is bound to the other. The state cannot borrow at the scale it requires without the Guild, and the Guild cannot collect on its loans without the state’s courts and soldiers. So much of Daub’s money passes through Guild hands that I think Your Grace will find this one worth the evening.

On the Tributary System and Its Malcontents by Dharmakirti Ratnasekara is the most careful study from outside of how Singhapura deals with its trading partners and tributaries. He holds that the Empire is built upon trade first and armies second. A state comes to depend upon Singhapura’s goods; then it adopts the Owl; then its banks are tied in; then it needs Taprobane’s magic; and by the time the soldiers arrive there is little left to decide.

He is careful to say that this does not make the Empire kinder than any other, only cheaper to run, since the price of absorption is paid in advance through trade rather than afterward in blood. Read the chapter on states that are half in and half out of the Empire. Daub is one of them.

Folio XX · Other Records of Note

Transcribed by Victor Konara