Vilageidiotx

Do The Eagles Circle The Mountains? - A Eastern "Middle Ages" Fantasy RP

Venice is a little cliche now though.

If I were you, this is what I would do. Since we already have sea merchant states, I would go a different direction. Maybe a "He who control's the spice control's the universe" situation where you have a nation or city state sitting on a rare, and very popular, resource. It has to be something that can make a city rich, while being impossible to find anywhere else. Luckily, this is fantasy, so you have options. Perhaps it is a naturally occurring drug that sprouts from the earth, like liquid LSD or some shit, that is incredibly valuable amongst the spiritual. Maybe it is something more mineral, like a type of glass that bubbles up from the ground and, when tempered a certain way, becomes as hard as steel. Maybe it is a full blow apocalypse-making crater so rich with meteorite stone that your city grew rich on it. Either way, the point is that you have a small state with a lot of money. This means merchants could become richer then land lords. They don't own companies or buy patches of land. Banking becomes a big business for them, since land-bound caravans would want binders for insurance and the ability to transfer money back and forth, since there would always be a risk of being robbed along the road. Other men pull their money by milking all the people in town with money in their pocket. And others might use illegal means, like selling goods at a discount price and then paying highwaymen to steal the goods back for them.

Banking families would rule the state, since they have the most money and the most invested in foreign affairs. These banking families have cohorts in every trade port they can get their hands on, and they have the ability to manipulate politics based on their interests by controlling what foreigners get loans. They might even give gifts to particularly useful allies.

England the 51st state.

And giving India to Gandhi... tsk tsk. What would Kipling think if he saw you now?

Do The Eagles Circle The Mountains? - A Eastern "Middle Ages" Fantasy RP

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I want to say something about guilds too. But I don't think guild practice was ever heavily competing with someone. At least not at a local level. And they wouldn't but out anything.

Then again, I think guilds were fairly internalized in their structure. The apprentices would be doing the menial shit required to produce what it was the guild produced, which would pass on to the higher skilled journey men who worked on more complex shit while the masters directed it all. So it's probably not a viable model of comparison either.

@Dinh AaronMk

The important thing to remember is that nobody was mass producing here, so there was always a demand. The guild would control its membership so that there was no trouble. The nice think about skilled labor, especially in a market where there is no cheap unskilled equivalant, is that skilled labor can always bargain. If somebody tries to bring the blacksmith down to the level of the wage worker, he won't be able to find blacksmiths who are willing to work for him.

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By small businesses, I was thinking that perhaps a farmer with acres full of vegetables goes into the market to sell. I was thinking that perhaps by investing in this farmer, the investor can put that farmer in a more lucrative position and gives his farm more attention and is able to sell off more of his product. The investor makes money off of shares, and the farmer makes money because he is selling more of his cabbages than he ever did before. Though I could be far off, since I am not super familiar with medieval trade practices.

Also assuming that someone is in possession of a mineral rich location full of metal veins, my hypothetical merchant can either wrest control of it by buying it out. Or that the person who has it on their property doesn't have the money or means to mine the valuable metal, so the merchant can invest in that and supply miners and equipment. Your examples of taverns, brothels, and ships are also good!

Nothing smells as good as the exploitation of your people.

@Spoopy Scary

Yeh, i'm afraid this is all too modern.

Farming was much more straight forward back then. Most land would be owned by wealthy land lords who collected rent from the farmers who lived on his land. They would grow the crops and keep a percentage to eat, or sell in their local markets. Some of this land would be communal so the peasants could grow whatever they felt like, or could keep livestock. The land lord owned the land by right and didn't have to pay anything for it. There was no paying for seed, or gas, or utilities. And they didn't have to compete so much, because a lack of industrialism meant that the output of farms was relatively low since everything had to be done by hand. There wasn't really a place for an investor to swoop in and invent "Chiquita Potato".

These weren't consumer cultures. The wealthy would buy rare oriental clothe and the like, but there was not enough wealth being created as a whole for any sort of consumer culture to evolve. Because everything takes more work to make, everything has more value. A guy is just happy he can afford shoes, so "Ye Olde Nike's" doesn't really have a market.

Also, in this time period tenant law was sort of peculiar. I think in theory you could sell land like that, but it wasn't really done. I suppose part of it is that land was worth too much. For an investor to buy land, he would have to somehow pay the owner more than he could get out of it. It doesn't help that land was attached to social standing. When a guy sells his land, what happens next? He can't move into the suburbs because there are no suburbs. Does he just become a rich peasant? Does he move in with his wifes family and content himself as a vassal to his father-in-law?

And too, its not like the miners are needing bulldozers or anything. They can make most of their equipment by themselves. Hell, this was true as recently as the gold rushes of the 19th century, and is why most of the investors of that time were more into land speculation than equipment.

This is why I tend to say that what we think of as capitalism is actually a recent invention. Sure, the mechanics have been there since the first guy traded seashells for a handjob, but modern capitalism hinges on the effects of industrialization.

Do The Eagles Circle The Mountains? - A Eastern "Middle Ages" Fantasy RP

Real quickly, before I post something and end up making myself look like an idiot, is writing in first person frowned upon? I originally assumed that the "thousands of characters" part in the OP meant we'd be using (and therefore speaking from the point of view of) multiple characters.

@Maavoimat

It's not frowned upon per-see, you won't get kicked out or anything, but we don't tend to do it.

Personally, I feel that first person only works when there is just one perspective. RP's involve multiple perspectives by necessity (even if you yourself are only playing one character, the other people in the RP have their own separate characters.) It's much easier to remember who is rping who if they use third person.

Do The Eagles Circle The Mountains? - A Eastern "Middle Ages" Fantasy RP

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This is very cool and helpful information, so thanks for that. The banking seems like a good practice, especially if that banker has a far and wide influence, and would be good for a merchant after they got their career off the ground. But assuming the merchant is already wealthy: wouldn't it also be viable to go around and place investments in small private businesses? To get those businesses what they need and off the ground in exchange for a share of their profits. Going around and doing that for multiple merchants eventually leads to you earning income from all over the place. You hire a guy with a wagon to pick up the cash and some mercenaries to escort him, they come back, pay them, and now you have a pile of currency in your basement. Eventually, especially for viable business ideas, you can buy them out.

A corporation might not work well, because like you said, there's a lack of effective communication. But you can still own plenty of different shops and whatnot, also act as an investor, and monopolize an area of trade in particular regions.

@Spoopy Scary

Well, "Small private business" is more of a modern thing. The modern small business comes from industrialism making things cheap. At this time period, things we would call "Businesses" were mostly owned by wealthy people, and everything else was skilled labor. This is why merchants tended to be the focus of bankers in those days. Off the top of my head, the closest thing to a small business I can think of would be an Inn or a Brothel.

What you are describing is basically normal business practices between individuals, but you are inserting trademark law in there somehow. "Buying out" a Merchant would be buying his stuff and selling it yourself, which would make you just another merchant. You could definitely buy up inns and brothels and ships, that's what a wealthy merchant would do. Ships are the dangerous investment that pays off the most, while inns, stables, and brothels are the rare example of a business that doesn't require specialized labor, though they won't exactly make you super-wealthy. Other things, like blacksmiths or cobblers, wouldn't sell out because their labor set is so specialized they don't have any reason to sell out. They aren't in competition with so many other blacksmiths that they can't make do on their own.

Do The Eagles Circle The Mountains? - A Eastern "Middle Ages" Fantasy RP

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Probably more to the tune of, "How can we pay off the Mongols and Jurchens to keep them from climbing our walls!"

@Dinh AaronMk

Obligatory

Do The Eagles Circle The Mountains? - A Eastern "Middle Ages" Fantasy RP

So it's very similar, but without the added impetus of overseas trade or long distance military expeditions.

EDIT: And the Vietnamese no doubt traded in Pho. There isn't another culture on this earth that can make a broth that stands up to Vietnamese broth.

England the 51st state.

Starve them to death? We didn't do that. We gave them McDonalds.

England the 51st state.

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@Dead Girl

Do The Eagles Circle The Mountains? - A Eastern "Middle Ages" Fantasy RP

Merchant states tended to be Oligarchies.

It can definitely happen in a medieval context. Most medieval style states were governed through power by land ownership, but there were some places where local land lords could not compete with the merchants in terms of practicable power. Renaissance Italy is the most famous example of this, though Germany had examples of this phenomena as well. This was especially common in Europe because of the importance of eastern trade to the European market. Theoretically, most Merchant states begin with the nobles being supplanted by the Merchants. It might not be some shady illuminati type thing, but shady illuminati type things are for people who don't understand human behavior and need to simplify it my creating singular hive minds.

If you are going to recreate a medieval version of this, you have to boil these things down to their essentials. Medieval people do not have savings accounts unless you count the coins they sew into their mattresses. High level economics centers around your ability to give out loans and your relationship with long distance trade. Insurance is the guy selling binders on the dock. Instead of a stock market, you have merchants banding together to invest in a voyage in exchange for an equal split of the profit. Banks are guys in the market writing checks that look more like IOU's than anything else, which are being purchased (with interest) by travelers afraid of being robbed and can be exchanged for money at any banker in league with the check-writer (and he has friends in ever important port, so you don't have to worry about that. If he writes too many false checks he know's he'll be stabbed by some sailor anyway, or hanged by the captain of the guard if there are actually laws in place about this sort of thing).

If you want to do a shady company style plot, I would go with the bankers. Look at the Templars, and the rise of the Medici's, to see how this is done in an old school context. Remember that this is a world devoid of Adam Smith's. There are no Free Trade Agreements, and we don't have the communication systems that make large corporations doable. It's unlikely anybody in this culture understands simple economic concepts like "inflation", considering how Rome fought their inflation by hanging coin clippers and minting more coinage because they thought the material in the previous ones must have been inferior to have depreciated in value. I am pretty sure one of the biggest parts of the Medici's rise to power is that they were an early adopter of double entry bookkeeping (to simple modern folk, medieval Quicken.) In this culture, "interest rates" aren't controlled, but are something you haggle with the town Jew over if you need a loan for a set of armor to go-a-crusading with (you'll pay him back with a loaf of sugar from the holy land when you get back because that shit is in vogue now).

I use Europe as the model because I don't really know how this worked beyond Europe and the Middle East. I would assume India worked the same way (minus a town Jew), but I don't recall ever hearing of any banking systems that were not European. I'm just spitting this shit off the top of my head though. You might need to google for the details here.

EDIT: Black markets weren't much of a thing because there wasn't enough regulation to make them practical. Simply put, you need shit that is both illegal and affordable for there to be a noticeable black market for it.