As she breaks free of Farrier’s story, Baru hatches a grand new grand plan. But can it possibly achieve the desired result? Perhaps 17th-century economic history can help us!
Here we are! The latest Tyrant Baru Cormorant essay, and the one whose title I borrowed for the whole series.*
This one is probably like… the one it’s all been building up to, in that Baru’s whole project to overthrow the Masquerade has been her motivation the entire series. In Tyrant, she finally reaches a perspective on what drives the Masquerade, and settles on a plan to co-opt its power.
So this essay covers a whole load of ground! I ended up talking about…
the details of Baru’s plan, and how it relates to the book’s other themes, such as cancer
the history of 17th-century economic speculation bubbles, namely John Law’s ‘System’ for financing the colonisation of “Louisiana” in France, and the South Sea Company slave-trading bubble in England, with a view to asking how much they disrupted the functioning of their host’s colonialism
the function of the social fiction of money and property in a society, and wondering how easy it is to reconfigure when the coordinating system of money is disrupted
Baru’s theorisation of the historical reasons for empire and state-formation, in light of Gelderloos, and consideration of ‘collective will’
the history of denazification in Germany, and the effectiveness of forcibly changing a prevailing ideology
speculative scenarios for Baru’s plan, with reference to the fall of the Soviet Union
If that sounds fun to you, strap in! I’m really proud of this one and I hope it proves enjoyable [and that I didn’t make any egregious historical errors!].
*Here’s where we are in the whole Baru Cormorant review/meta/commentary project:
The engine driven by the past [introduction, optional recap]
An odd flavour of history [on defamiliarisation and the purpose of “worldbuilding”]
Anti-Wizardischte Aktion [examining the Cancrioth, & a discussion of magic, in light of court wizards and Stations of the Tide]
Mason dust in the wound [on Baru’s personal arc, and analysing the notion of trim in relation to Agamben’s theory of ‘bare life’ vs. ‘civilised life’]
The corpse-hollow [how the book handles genocide: agency, and Baru’s ecological angle on why genocide is so horrific]
Kimbune’s Theorem [on exponential growth as a unifying theme, Euler’s formula as a metaphor, and predator-prey dynamics in ecology]
Butchering an empire [what kills modern empires? will Baru’s plan actually work?]
Horse-archers and Anti-Mannism [wip; all about the gends]
The maniple [wip; on things happening to brains]
Replication [wip; what techniques I can take away if I want to write a story like this]
