Albrennia

Commonwealth of Albrennia
Flag Seal of the Commonwealth
Motto: "Hope"
Anthem: I Vow To Thee, My Country
Location of Albrennia
Capital	Providence
Largest city	Wellfleet
Official languages	Rythenean
Ethnic groups	By ethnicity: 49.8% Mixed Auressian 14.8% Rythenean 9.6% Rocian 7.2% Amand 5.4% Tyrnican 3.8% Songhan 3.3% Hwahan 3.1% Rasmi 2.9% other
Demonym(s)	Albrennian
Government	Unitary Presidential Matthean Republic.
• Chancellor	Thomas Goodwin (L)
• Vice Chancellor	William Ames (L)
• Majority Leader	Nicholas Byfield (R)
• Chief Justice	Catherine Noyes
Legislature	Parliament of the Commonwealth
Stages of Independence from Rythene
• Instrument of Governance	15 May 1539
• Congress of Wedayen	7 October 1816
• 12th Amendment to Instrument of Governance	10 February 1817
• Treaty of Dellhaven	21 July 1825
Area
• Total	2,019,286 km2 (779,651 sq mi) (6th)
Population
• 2020 estimate	80,631,224 (4th)
• 2015 census	79,130,514
• Density	39.9/km2 (103.3/sq mi)
GDP (PPP)	2020 estimate
• Total	$5.159 trillion (1st)
• Per capita	$63,985
GDP (nominal)	2020 estimate
• Total	$5.275 trillion (1st)
• Per capita	$65,426
Gini (2020)	48.8 high
HDI (2020)	0.925 very high
Currency	Albrennian Guilder (ALG)

Albrennia, officially the Commonwealth of Albrennia, colloquially often simply the Commonwealth, is a sovereign state and presidential republic in Northeast Marceaunia Major. Situated on the Albren Peninsula, of which it is geographically coterminous, Albrennia is bordered by the Hesperian Ocean to the east, north, and south; by the Gulf of Colrain to the southwest; by Rowlands Bay to the northwest; and by the Lamont Range and [???] to the west. The Commonwealth is a unitary state consisting of of nine major metropolitan administrations and 4,352 rural townships, which together cover an area of 2,019,286 square kilometers (779,650 sq mi) and encompass an estimated population of 80,631,224. It is the fourth-largest nation in Levilion by population, and the sixth-largest by area.

The Albren Peninsula was inhabited by North Marceaunian indigenous peoples from at least 3000 BCE. In 1460, the Rythenean explorer Rufus Albren discovered the peninsula, and all of Marceaunia along with it. From 1504, Rotiferist colonists from Rythene, committed to a heterodox and predestinarian strain of Perendism, settled the Albren Peninsula and established the oldest Auressian society in the New World - driving the indigenous population west of the Isthmus of Lamont in the process. Albrennia remained a Rythean colony for more than three centuries, but its republican government enjoyed substantial autonomy, and it became a center of global trade with a renowned merchant culture. It supported the Rythenean Revolution, contributed directly to the Rythenean war effort, and was granted independence in 1816 at the Congress of Vedayen in order to weaken Rythene's colonial empire.

In the nineteenth century, Albrennia rapidly industrialized and became a major hub for immigration from Auressia and Marceaunia Minor. It intervened repeatedly in Marceaunia Minor: pioneering a new brand of economic imperialism based on private companies' control of natural resources, and developing one of the world's most powerful navies - known simply as the Fleet - to defend its far-flung holdings. In the Panic of 1876, Albrennia suffered a devastating economic collapse, in the wake of which its economy became dominated by a small number of enormous, vertically integrated corporate conglomerates: the Pillars. The dominance of the Pillars generated a wave of labor unrest, finally resolved by the development of the economic and political structure known as the Matthean System. Albrennia was a member of the Coalition in the Great War and of the Allies in the Second Great War, and its naval power made an important contribution to victory in both conflicts. By the end of the twentieth century, Albrennia was a global center of finance and manufacturing, a naval power with reach across Levilion, and a key player in the global economy with interests and investments on every continent.

Albrennia is a unitary presidential constitutional republic, but international observers note its lack of political transparency and accountability, and Albrennian politics tend to be dominated by the Pillars, organized labor, and the permanent civil servants known as the Establishment. Albrennia is a founding member of the Assembly of Marceaunian States (AMS) and has economic, diplomatic, and military agreements with foreign governments around the world; it is especially active in resource-rich smaller nations. It is a confirmed nuclear weapons state and a naval power with few equals and no superiors; the Fleet receives more than 50% of government spending in an average year. It is officially recognized as a great power.

Albrennia is a developed country with Levilion's largest single economy both by nominal GDP ($5.275 trillion) and by purchasing power ($5.159 trillion) - though the overall economy of the Commonwealth of Northern Auressia is much larger than Albrennia's. The Albrennian economy is dominated by manufacturing (especially arms manufacturing and shipbuilding), the electronics and informatics industry, finance and insurance, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and science and technology. Albrennia has few natural resources and is the largest importer in Levilion; it also has the highest rate of investment in foreign nations as a percentage of GDP. It is noted for the Matthean System, in which each sector of the economy is dominated by a single corporate "Pillar" and a single compulsory labor union, and government-mediated corporatist negotiations between the Pillars and organized labor define wage floors, healthcare benefits, and other social welfare programs. The system has provided Albrennian workers with a high standard of living, reflected in the nation's very high Human Development Index. But income inequality between the middle and upper classes remains high (Albrennia has more than 500 billionaires), and the Matthean System means that long-term household-wide unemployment can result in extreme poverty. Albrennia is regarded as an educational leader, with two of the ten highest-ranked universities in Levilion, and it has made major cultural contributions in the fields of music, film, and academic scholarship.

Etymology

Albrennia is named for Rythenean explorer Rufus Albren (1418-1469), who in 1460 discovered Maurceania when he made landfall near modern Sherborn. His subsequent voyages charted the outline of the Gulf of Colrain and Rowland's Bay. By 1490, early maps show that the hammerhead-shaped peninsula of northeastern Marceaunia Major was known as Albren's Land (later the Albren Peninsula). This was Sabarinized in official documents to become Albrennia. While many of the initial Rotiferist settlers wanted their new land to be called Rotifia, and while that name remains in occasional use as a rhetorical reference to traditional Albrennian values, it never caught on widely. Instead, by the 1530s, Rytheneans were referring to the colony as Albrennia - and, notably, to its inhabitants as Albrennians rather than Rytheneans. As the colonists came to think of themselves as Albrennian, so inevitably they came to think of their land as Albrennia. The 1539 Instrument of Governance - the origin of the Albrennian polity - declared that the government of the colony was "His Majesteie's Most Loyal Albrenyan Republicke." Ever since, Albrennia has been the only name used for the nation.

Albrennia is a "Commonwealth" in the historical sense: it is a republic, and "commonwealth" is a literal translation of the Ancient Sabarine res publica, a "public thing" or "shared thing." It is meant to indicate that the government is the shared business of all the citizens, and this meaning has been preserved by democratic reformers and labor activists throughout Albrennian history. Today, many Albrennians refer to their country simply as the Commonwealth, and in Marceaunia this term by itself is generally understood to mean Albrennia, not the Commonwealth of Northern Auressia. More rarely, Albrennians may shorten their country's name to Albren: this is most common in official contexts, and is understood to suggest a certain poetic and nationalist flair. A citizen of Albrennia is an Albrennian, and that term is also correct as applied adjectivally: "Albrennian ships," for example.

History

Main article: History of Albrennia

Indigenous Peoples and Early Settlement

It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of Marceaunia Major migrated from Marceaunia Minor by way of the Adrienne Land Bridge at least 12,000 years ago. By 4,000 years ago, the Paleoaborigines were present in the Albren Peninsula. Archeologists initially believed that the Harpswell Culture represented continuous habitation of the population by the same peoples ever since; it is now thought to be likely that the Harpswell Culture reflects merely the last of multiple waves of migration into the peninsula.

A village of the Hathawekala Confederacy.

Over time, indigenous culture and political organization in the Albren Peninsula grew increasingly complex. Agriculture became the basis of life: villages composed of longhouses, each housing an extended family unit, were surrounded by fields of maize and beans. Some time between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, a great prophet named Dekkenorhawi led a religious revival, put an end to the practice of ritual cannibalism and the internecine warfare associated with it, and bound the tribes of the peninsula together into the Hathawekala Confederacy.

In 1460, the Rythenean explorer Rufus Albren made landfall near modern Sherborn, and became the first Auressian to set eyes on Marceaunia. In three subsequent voyages, he would successfully map the Albren Peninsula. Over the next forty years, Rythenean traders came into regular contact with the Hathawekala Confederacy. They brought disease as well as cooking pots and axes, and epidemics of smallpox and measles ravaged the area, reducing the Hathawekala population by half by 1500.

Meanwhile, Rythene found itself in religious turmoil. Following a reformist preacher named Walter Hartcliffe, a new branch of Classical Perendism had emerged: the Rotiferists. Meaning literally "those who follow the direction of the wheel," this term referred to a predestinarian movement. Hartcliffe preached that everything that really matters about the Earth is inevitable and irresistible: the changing of the seasons, the movement of the stars, the tide, the cycle of life and death. Therefore, spiritual balance cannot actually be within the attainment of the individual. All that a man can do is submit himself to the world, to understand its processes and surrender to them. If God so wills it, he will achieve balance, just as the sun rises and the winter turns to spring. If God does not will it, then "not every tree survives the winter," in the old Rotiferist aphorism.

Rufus Albren's first map of the northern Albren Peninsula.

Rotiferism inspired certain distinctive values. Since Rotiferists were constantly and anxiously examining themselves for signs that they were indeed in balance with the world, the denomination acquired a reputation for self-discipline and extremely hard work - the supposed signs of a balanced soul. Since they claimed to derive their predestinarian beliefs by rational deduction from the natural world, they regarded education and literacy as a sacred duty. The movement was dominated by the educated merchant classes, who considered their prosperity a sign of God's balancing work within them. In Rythene, as this reformist proto-bourgeosie ran up repeatedly against the aristocratic elite's hold on politics and religion, it came to feel that the only way to build a truly godly and balanced society was to start over.

In March of 1504, the caravel Springsong sailed from Delhaven with some three hundred Rythenean Rotiferists aboard. They had a safe crossing, and established a settlement at Newhaven. The Hathawekala Confederacy had fallen into disarray under the pressure of epidemic disease, and the colonists were able to play different indigenous factions off against each other, offering the aid of soldiers armed with steel weapons and horses in exchange for food and knowledge of local conditions. By 1515, the colony was firmly established and had begun attracting thousands of immigrants from Rythene per year: this influx consisted mostly of Rotiferists, but it also included many Classical Perendist families who simply wanted free land. By 1530, the eight original cities of the Commonwealth had been founded along the rocky Hesperian seaboard: Providence, Newhaven, Tolland, Alford, Colrain, Wellfleet, Lanesborough, and Sherborn. Within a generation of its founding, Albrennia had become self-sufficient in food and raw materials from Rythene. It was a functioning society in its own right.

Colonial Albrennia

Albrennia was a colony of Rythene for 312 years: well over half of its history. It was the oldest Auressian colony in the New World, and the first to develop sophisticated institutions of its own: by the time the first Tyrnican colonists settled in what is now Audonia, Newhaven had been a major city for almost two centuries. Alford and Tolland Universities, both established in the 1540s, are older than many prestigious institutions on the other side of the Hesperian. The Instrument of Governance adopted by the colony in 1539, and reluctantly ratified by the Rythenean crown two years later, provided for a democratically elected Assembly and Governor. Since the Commonwealth only slightly amended the Instrument of Governance when it became independent, Albrennia has long claimed to have the oldest continuous democratic constitution in the world.

Original 16th-century street, Tolland.

The colony's expansion was slow but steady, pushing the remnants of the Hathawekala beyond the mountains of the Isthmus of Lamont. This was a process of mass ethnic displacement, but the colonists attempted neither assimilation nor extermination of the natives: their goal was to remove the Hathawekala to the interior of Marceaunia Major, not to annihilate them. This was because, already by 1550, Albrennia's culture had evolved to orient it toward the sea; colonists had no desire to press on beyond the Isthmus, for the promise of trade was more alluring than the dangers of further expansion. This campaign of mass displacement explains why very few Native Marceaunian communities, or even individuals of Aboriginal descent, remain in Albrennia today.

As a result of the colonists' limited territorial ambitions, Albrennia ceased to be a frontier society more quickly than many New World colonies. Safe behind its natural border along the Lamont Range, and rendered homogenously Auressian by the mass displacement of the Hathawekala to the west, its economy thrived as it turned the vast pine forests of the Albren Peninsula into a fleet of sailing ships. Those ships, in turn, became the backbone of much of the colonial trade that connected many Auressian nations to their colonies: carrying slaves to Marceaunia Minor, and carrying sugar and rice and coffee and tobacco from the New World back to Auressia. Rythene's 1622 International Market Act, which allowed upper-class Rytheneans (including Albrennians) to trade with the rest of Auressia, was essential to the colony's prosperity: it permitted Albrennian shipping to serve as a crucial link between the New World and the Old, not just between Rythene and its colonies. Most Auressians, by the mid-seventeenth century, no longer really thought of Albrennia as the frontier: it was a place of universities, coffee shops, busy trading ports, and century-old cities - a little piece of the Old World on the shores of the New - and its legions of merchants were a common sight in ports on every shore of the Hesperian.

But as Albrennia became a more established and comfortable place, so too did it change in the process. By the eighteenth century, the voyage of the Springsong was already two centuries in the past, and the Rotiferist majority was consigned to history. Generations of immigrants had come seeking not a godly society but economic opportunity: cheap land, and work on the docks, and the chance to sail the world with the Albrennian merchant marine. While most immigrants continued to hail from Rythene, there were far more Apostolic and mainstream Classical Perendists than Rotiferists. And increasingly, the major cities of Albrennia became a magnet for immigration from Blayk, Vervillia, and Tyrnica as well. The colony remained majority-Auressian only because, while Albrennian merchants were central to the slave trade, slavery itself was banned in Albrennia.

Wellfleet Harbor, c. 1780.

This prohibition testified to the lingering cultural influence of Rotiferist values, even as Albrennia became less and less religiously homogenous. Those values had other consequences, too. Despite constant encroachment by the royal court of Rythene, Albrennian politicians successfully defended their republican colonial government, and old Rotiferist families continued to dominate the colonial capital at Providence. From 1624, Albrennia required municipalities to fund the world's first system of universal primary education, a testament to the centrality of learning in Rotiferism; the great universities of Tolland and Alford, though, remained the preserve of the same old Rotiferist families that controlled the colony's government. Rotiferist values of competition and self-improvement led the colony to abandon all mercantilist protections other than those imposed by Rythene, creating one of the freest markets in the world and turning Albrennian harbors into centers of global commerce. To secure the global trade network that had evolved, the Albrennian Assembly created the Albren Bank in 1757: one of the world's earliest central banks, created not by a sovereign crown but by a mere colonial government. Its purpose was to give the colonial government additional liquidity to support Albrennian companies, by issuing bank notes secured against the government's loans. Albrennia would remain a leading player in global finance forever afterwards.

Independence and Marceaunian Engagement

By the late eighteenth century, Albrennia was already a country of six million souls. It had its own global trading networks and well-developed political institutions, and almost three centuries of its own history. In 1786, Charles IV of Rythene revoked the 1622 International Market Act. This was a fatal threat to Albrennian trade networks, and it infuriated the old Rotiferist elite and the more secular merchant classes alike. Accordingly, when the Rythenean Revolution erupted in 1790, support for the new Republic was almost universal in Albrennia. In turn, the 300-year republican tradition of Albrennia's colonial government earned it a level of respect unique among the Republic's colonies.

And so, while every other Auressian colony in Marceaunia succesfully rebelled between 1790 and 1820, Albrennia remained politically bound to Rythene - albeit that many Albrennians now saw that relationship more as an equal partnership than as a colonial yoke. In the War of the Commons, the colonial government nationalized hundreds of merchant vessels and their experienced crews: an act that would go down in history as the origin of the Fleet. This new naval force sailed all the way across the Hesperian Ocean to engage the Tyrnican Navy in pitched battle in the Galene Sea. When the conflict finally ended, it was clear to the victorious monarchists that Albrennia was too important an asset to be allowed to remain in Rythene's hands, but that it was also too powerful in its own right simply to be transferred to another colonial power. The Congress of Vedayen (1816) saw Albrennian independence as the simplest solution to an insoluble problem, and so the Commonwealth gained its sovereignty not on the battlefield but as a grudging gift of its erstwhile enemies.

Textile mill at Sherborn, one of the earliest factories in Marceaunia (built 1824).

Independence brought few immediate changes after 1816. By the 12th Amendment to the Instrument of Governance, Albrennia's colonial governor became the chancellor, its assembly the parliament, and references to the Crown of Rythene were removed; otherwise, politics continued very much as before. But the coming decades would be more tumultuous.

Albrennia began rapidly to industrialize from the 1820s on: a dense network of canals, railroads, textile mills, and eventually armaments factories sprang up, taking advantage of iron and coal deposits in the Lamont Range of western Albrennia. The accelerating demand for labor that resulted, together with Albrennia's political stability in an unstable era, brought another wave of immigration: this time more from Tyrnica and Palia than from Rythene. As Albrennian manufacturing boomed, the Commonwealth began to look abroad for markets, and so it was drawn into the tumultuous affairs of Marceaunia Minor.

The Continental War (1831-1836) witnessed the defeat of the Confederation of Southern Marceaunia by the Aillacan-Rocian Union, followed by the Confederation's collapse altogether. Albrennian companies profited greatly off the war by selling arms and supplies to both sides; Albrennia's status as one of the world's largest arms dealers dates to this period. But when the conflict ended, the real victor was the Free Republic of Audonia: the collapse of the Confederation left Audonia as the dominant commercial and naval power in Marceaunia Minor.

The next twenty-nine years witnessed a contest for influence between Albrennia and Audonia in the emerging markets of the Southern Hemisphere. Albrennian tactics were ruthless, and by the 1850s the Commonwealth had begun the sort of gunboat diplomacy that has characterized its foreign policy ever since: Albrennian merchants would establish themselves in remote corners of Marceaunia Minor, sell guns and buy sugar or bananas or rubber, and call in Fleet gunboats and Marine shore parties when local chiefs or caudillos attempted to back out of the deal. In order to protect these economic adventurers, the Fleet ballooned in size. It absorbed first its civilian superiors in the Department of the Navy, and then most of the budget of the Department of War, and it acquired unique legal privileges and protections as it went. By 1860, Albrennia's army had been reduced to a gendarme force of fewer than ten thousand men, but its navy was among the most powerful in the Western Hemisphere.

Fleet ironclads defeat the Audonian Navy at the Battle of the Fortune Straits, 1867.

Albrennia also pursued an alliance with the Federal Republic of Amandine, which had emerged after the Continental War as the most powerful rival to Audonia in Marceaunia Minor. In the War of the Adrienne Sea (1865-1869), Albrennia's first major war as an independent state, Amand troops and Albrennian Marines seized Audonian forts and trading posts all over Maceaunia Minor, and the Amand Navy and Albrennian Fleet defeated the Audonian Navy. Though Audonia was never invaded, the war marked the end of its preeminence in the affairs of Marceaunia Minor, and its replacement by an Amand-Albrennian axis that lasted for the rest of the nineteenth century. The war also so disrupted life in much of Marceaunia Minor that it sparked a wave of immigration from the continent to Albrennia, sharpening social tensions at home.

After the Treaty of Ste-Lourine, Amandine became the hegemon of Marceaunia Minor, but Albrennia replaced Audonia as the continent's greatest trading power. Albrennia's network of trading posts and "economic adventurers" evolved into a modern web of corporate subsidiaries, trading concessions, monopoly agreements, and anti-smuggling patrols across the Western Hemisphere and beyond. Between 1869 and 1874, politicians and journalists in the Commonwealth first began to speak of their "invisible empire": Albrennian companies bought up plantations and mines throughout Marceaunia Minor, and the Albrennian-Amand alliance ensured the Commonwealth a blind eye from Amandine when it used the Fleet to defend or expand those investments by violence. Economic imperialism, with its risks and riches, has been a consistent feature of Albrennian history ever since.

Pillarization and the Matthean System

Forty years of uninterrupted prosperity and growth came to an abrupt end with the Panic of 1876. A crash in the price of silver made it impossible for the Harp-Wellfleet Bank to redeem millions of guilders in bonds from the Bank of Albren, causing a cascading crisis of confidence in the credit of most big banks and, ultimately, in the value of the Commonwealth guilder itself. To force the crisis under control, the Bank of Albren ultimately switched entirely to a fiat money system, abandoning the silver standard altogether. Then it bailed out the banks with the new paper guilder, known widely as the "greyback." But this did not resolve the crisis: widespread doubt as to the greyback's true value put Albrennian companies abroad at a severe disadvantage against their economic competitors. The Commonwealth responded with fourteen small-scale military interventions in Marceaunia Minor between 1876 and 1880 - mostly shore bombardments and Marine incursions - against towns and companies that refused to accept payment in greybacks. The show of force succeeded: the Albrennian guilder became the first valuable currency in Levilion to be guaranteed not by specie but by the credit of a central bank alone.

The greyback may not be backed by silver, but it is backed by lead.

— Chancellor John J. Heathering, 1879

By 1880, the worst of the economic depression was over, but the Albrennian economy had been changed beyond recognition. Hundreds of companies with origins going back to the sixteenth century were bankrupt. The few corporations that had survived bought up billions of guilders' worth of distressed assets, and many succeeded in consolidating an entire sector of the economy beneath their single corporate umbrella. Almost all shipbuilding - from the iron mines and the lumberyards, to the factories producing screws, to the shipyards themselves - became controlled by Wellfleet Industries. General Armaments had a similar top-to-bottom control of the arms industry. By 1882, the Albrennian economy was unprecedentedly centralized and vertically integrated, with just a dozen corporate conglomerates accounting for nearly three-quarters of GDP. These became known as the Pillars. They have dominated Albrennia's economy and politics ever since.

The General Strike of 1898 saw gun battles in cities across the Commonwealth.

Pillarization enormously increased Albrennia's industrial efficiency: vertical integration reduced transaction costs at every stage of the manufacturing process, and permitted economies of scale that have allowed the Pillars to undercut foreign competitors ever since. But pillarization also created a de facto employer cartelization of the labor market: a small group of corporations, by deciding on a common compensation plan, were able to prevent wage competition across the entire economy. Albrennian workers, previously accustomed to a fairly high standard of living, suffered completely stagnant wages for almost twenty years. Widening economic inequality exacerbated preexisting social inequality, because the native-born, ethnic-Rythenean, mostly Rotiferist Establishment - educated primarily at Tolland and Alford Universities - controlled both the Pillars and the government. Tens of millions of non-Rythenean, Apostolic citizens - many of them immigrants from Tyrnica or Palia, or refugees from the conflicts in Marceaunia Minor - found themselves utterly excluded from economic and political power.

Working-class Albrennians turned to increasingly radical labor activism as the solution to their plight. Local union organizing drives were met with brutality by gendarmes and even Fleet Marines, but organizers tended to succeed anyway: repression only generated a greater pro-union backlash. As one workplace after another unionized, organized labor mirrored the vertical integration of the Pillars: all the unions in the shipbuilding industry federated into the United Brotherhood of Shipwrights, which represented Albrennian workers at every point along Wellfleet Industries' supply chain from the mine to the shipyard. Ultimately, these sectoral unions went one step further; they federated again, creating "one big union": the Albrennian Conference of Labor, or ACL. By 1898, more than seventy percent of Albrennian industrial and farm workers belonged to unions affiliated with the ACL, and there was open talk of syndicalist revolution in most major cities.

In July 1898, tensions boiled over after Fleet Marines gunned down strikers in Sherborn, and the ACL called a general strike. Chancellor Samuel Penry declared martial law, and gun battles between armed strikers and Fleet Marines ensued in several cities, leaving hundreds dead. But the strike successfully shut down the entire Albrennian economy for fifteen days - known in Albrennian labor circles to this day as the Glorious Fifteen. On the sixteenth day, the government capitulated: it recognized the unions, and called a conference of the Pillars and the ACL to discuss fundamental changes to Albrennia's economy and society.

Vice Chancellor Edwin Matthews, the namesake of the Matthean System.

The Providence Conference was chaired by Vice Chancellor Edwin Matthews. It seems to have been clear to all the participants that Albrennia was on the brink of civil war; in avoiding that fate, they painstakingly reached a compromise that fundamentally altered Albrennia's government and economy. That compromise became known (after Matthews) as the Matthean System. It created a new entrance exam on which all university admissions would be based, and it made all universities, including Tolland and Alford, tuition-free: these reforms substantially democratized access to Albrennia's powerful Establishment. But the Conference also allowed the Pillars to retain their unofficial sectoral monopolies, refusing to adopt any antitrust laws that would break them up.

Far more importantly, the Providence Conference recognized the sectoral unions that represented each Pillar's employees, and made union membership compulsory in order for a worker to be hired in any given sector of the economy. Each sector of the economy was thus defined by a single corporate conglomerate and a single labor union, to which all of that Pillar's workers belonged. Every three years, the government would mediate between all of the Pillars and the ACL as a whole, and the results of those negotiations would become law: setting the minimum wage, pensions, healthcare benefits, and unemployment insurance that every employer would have to pay to every worker. Albrennia's welfare state would be paid for directly out of corporate profits, not tax revenue; and it would reflect the result of corporatist bargaining, not legislation. That paradigm shift defines the Matthean System, and it has been the foundation of Albrennia's political economy ever since.

The system has worked fairly well in the 122 years since the Providence Conference, and in the first decades after 1898, it was overwhelmingly successful. The Pillars adjusted to sharply increased labor costs by relying on the unions to improve the skill of workers, which increased per-worker efficiency and boosted overall production. This symbiosis of labor and management was most successful in the arms industry, which in five years made General Armaments the world's largest private arms dealer, but it contributed to a rise in productivity in every Pillar. Albrennia entered the twentieth century as a rising economic power on the world stage.

The Great Wars and the Invisible Empire

General Armaments found a profitable market for its products in the Aillacan-Rocian Union, where Albrennia's "invisible empire" received its greatest setback. Albrennia first backed a coup by the Union's vice president, in hopes of protecting the Pillars' economic interests. This unleashed such dramatic political unrest that in 1904 the Commonwealth was obliged to back a second coup, this time by the Union's landed elite. The new government proved incompetent: it promptly declared war on Amandine, and despite repeated arms deals with Albrennia, it suffered several devastating defeats. The Union military then seized power, expelling and nationalizing Albrennian corporate holdings in the process. By the time peace returned, the Aillacan-Rocian Union had collapsed into civil war, and the Lacasine Republic of Aiyaca had been born: an implacably left-wing polity that has been a frequent foe of Albrennian influence ever since. Moreover, Albrennia had sacrificed its alliance with Amandine, because it had supported the Union government's war with that country. The "invisible empire" had suffered a severe blow.

Fleet Marines supported authoritarian regimes in Rocia and Aiyaca in the 1920s and 1930s.

But a much bigger arms market was opening up in Auressia, as that continent's arms race accelerated toward the outbreak of the First Great War in 1908. General Armaments and Wellfleet Industries sold hundreds of millions of guilders' worth of arms and warships to both the Coalition and the Galene League, and many Auressian historians would later blame Albrennian greed for the outbreak of war. When the war finally came, however, Albrennia immediately joined the Coalition: the Commonwealth's historical ties to Rythene remained powerfully culturally resonant for the Establishment, and the Establishment still controlled the Albrennian government. As the Albrennian Army had already withered into a gendarme force, no Albrennian ground troops were sent to Auressia; but for the second time in history, the Fleet sailed into the Galene Sea. Unlike in the War of the Commons, the Fleet was no longer a hastily assembled force of armed merchantmen; rather, it was product of one of the world's most powerful shipbuilding industries and strongest naval traditions. At the Battle of Evverkäben (1912), the Fleet failed to achieve outright victory, but it bloodied the Tyrnican Navy badly enough to force it into port. Thereafter, the Fleet imposed a crushing blockade that helped to starve Tyrnica out of the war. At the Treaty of Arden in 1914, Albrennia was seated as the equal of the other Coalition nations - an event still remembered today as the moment when Commonwealth became a world power.

In the postwar period, Albrennia was both an asset and a hindrance to Rythene's global dominance. The Albrennian Establishment still felt a deep loyalty to Rythenean culture and republican values, and so the Fleet was a willing partner to the Rythenean Navy in enforcing a vision of maritime law based on free trade and free navigation. By the late 1920s, Albrennia had actually gone further in this regard than Rythene: it was consistently advocating for a more forceful stance against Songha, and unsuccessfully attempted to assemble a coalition to stage a freedom-of-navigation operation through the Straits of Qes.

But Albrennia was in other ways a competitor to Rythene: while the older country remained a major imperial power, Albrennian companies quietly established themselves in Rythenean colonies and purchased lucrative local industries out from under the Rythenean administration. The Commonwealth's "invisible empire" spread across the world like a parasite on Auressia's colonial empires: a global network of corporate subsidiaries and private oilfields, in which the name on a contract mattered more than the flag that flew over a city. In Marceaunia Minor, Albrennia managed to reestablish its alliance with Amandine: both nations had ultimately joined the Coalition in the First Great War, while Audonia remained neutral, and so Albrennian diplomats used wartime public opinion to maneuver Amandine away from Audonia and back into alliance with the Commonwealth. With its southern flank thus secured, Albrennia was able to restore its influence in Rocia: supporting a succession of conservative and authoritarian regimes during Rocia's so-called Años congelados, and receiving control of lucrative mines and agricultural concessions in return. In 1919-20, the Fleet Intelligence Corps even helped the Aiyacan military to stage a coup and place Pablo Pardo in the presidential palace; for the next twenty-eight years, Pardo's regime secured Albrennian access to Aiyaca's cash crops and natural resources, and Albrennian weapons and cash kept Pardo in power. By the mid-1930s, Albrennia's "invisible empire" had reached its apex.

At the Battle of the Qes Straits (1942), the Fleet dealt a devastating blow to Songhan naval power.

Problems were already apparent, though. Waxing Songhan influence in Amandine put pressure on the Amand-Albrennian alliance, since Albrennia remained committed to a hawkish line against Songhan expansion. After more than a decade of issuing lonely warnings about the Songhan threat, both the Albrennian government and the Albrennian public were eager to fight when the Second Great War broke out in 1937. Albrennia joined the Coalition, and the Fleet immediately sailed for Isuan. But after its victories against Tyrnica in the First Great War, the Albrennian military establishment suffered from crippling overconfidence, and it had difficulty working with its new Audonian allies. Alone, the Fleet sought battle with the Songhan Navy to defend the Ta-Puia Archipelago, and was forced to retreat - leaving eight thousand Fleet Marines marooned on the islands, where most of them would perish in battle or from mistreatment after capture. When the Fleet rallied to defend Blaykish Mesonesia, it was shattered again, losing four aircraft carriers and twelve thousand lives. The myth of Albrennian naval invincibility had been obliterated, and the Commonwealth's influence waned accordingly: in Rocia, a new liberal government managed to win election, and was able to negotiate a far more equal trade agreement with the distracted and weakened Albrennians.

Nevertheless, under the leadership of Chancellor Alfred Temple, Albrennia rallied. Late 1939 to early 1941 witnessed an unprecedented national mobilization: Wellfleet Industries ceased work on all civilian shipping, and managed to produce twelve aircraft carriers, thirty cruisers, and ninety destroyers in twenty months. To crew the new Fleet, Albrennia instituted its first - and thus far only - national draft. The Albrennian admiralty finally learned to work with its Audonian counterpart, and Amandine belatedly joined the Coalition, bringing with it priceless intelligence about Songhan naval movements. In July 1941, acting on Amand intelligence and supported by the Audonian Navy, the Fleet intercepted and practically annihilated a Songhan invasion armada at the Battle of Saint-Baptiste: establishing Allied control of the eastern Demontean and paving the way for Amandine to liberate Blaykish Mesonesia. The next year, Amandine, Audonian, and Blaykish troops seized the southern peninsula of the Qes Straits Zone, and the Fleet used this opening to force a path through the straits: fighting one of the largest naval battles in history, and damaging the Songhan Navy beyond repair. By the end of the war, the Fleet was the single largest force in the Sea of Qes. While Albrennia had not fought on land since the debacle of Ta-Puia, and while it had not contributed in the Auressian Theater at all, its naval might had been crucial to the outcome of the war in the Demontean.

Modern Albrennian History

The Second Great War was a unique historical event: the first time that Albrennia, Amandine, and Audonia had fought together on the same side. In Albrennia, it marked the beginning of a certain limited sense of Marceaunian solidarity: this reached its apex in 1959, when Albrennia became a founding member of the Association of Marceaunian States. To most observers, great-power war in the New World has seemed exceedingly unlikely ever since.

The postwar period brought tensions of other kinds, however. Hawkishly anti-Songhan since the early 1920s, Albrennia was outraged by the relatively generous terms granted to the Empire at the Treaty of Porte-Tordu. Alone among the Allied powers, it remained deeply invested in the Sea of Qes for years after the peace: aggressively patrolling with freedom-of-navigation operations; running Fleet Intelligence Corps operations to slow and destabilize Songha's recovery; and investing heavily in Songha's neighbors, in order to surround the Empire with states fearful of its expansion and sympathetic to Albrennian corporate interests. Albrennian efforts were imperfectly successful, at best, but they did hinder and delay Songha's recovery. They also earned the Commonwealth a lasting enemy in Isuan.

Fleet Marines still supported conservative regimes in Rocia in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2010s.

Engagement in Isuan also distracted Albrennia from Marceaunia Minor, where its "invisible empire" suffered some meaningful setbacks. The dawn of the Pachequist Era in 1947 meant the nationalization of key Albrennian companies in Rocia, where Albrennian influence reached its nadir in the 1950s. Likewise, the Pardo regime in Aiyaca was overthrown by the Illescas Revolution in 1948, driving Albrennian corporations out of that country permanently. Albrennia was able to restore its economic power in Rocia by backing a military coup in 1961, exploiting the Pacheco regime's own political overreach. It has successfully maintained its position ever since: supporting a second coup in 1967, and then the sixteen-year regime of President Horacio Calixto-Ortega - during which Albrennian funding, training, Fleet Marines, and airstrikes were essential in the fight against rural insurgents. Albrennian influence waned in 2002 with the election of President Fernándo Ortolano, but was restored in 2012 with Ortolano's impeachment and replacement by a military-backed, firmly pro-Albrennian government: events in which many in the region suspect the Commonwealth had a hand. The "invisible empire" had an unforeseen consequence, though: violent unrest fueled a wave of immigration from Rocia to Albrennia in the 1980s, making people of Rocian descent the largest ethnic minority in the Commonwealth.

In Aiyaca, Albrennia failed to reestablish its influence: when the Commonwealth sent the Southern Hesperian Fleet to topple Estadias control of Aiyaca by force, a joint Amand-Audonian naval task force confronted the Albrennian expedition and prevented it from entering Aiyacan waters. This 1963 standoff became known as the Callaqua Crisis, and it represented Marceaunia's closest brush with a new great-power war. In the end, Albrennia backed down and its ships retreated. The next year, seizing their advantage, Audonian and Amand businesses managed to dislodge Albrennian corporations from Saint-Baptiste, buying out several lucrative industries and pulling the tiny island mostly out of Albrennia’s sphere of influence. In the face of these setbacks, Albrennia adopted a new diplomatic strategy: for the next twenty years, it sought greater influence within the Amand government. Albrennian diplomats exploited that country's relatively corrupt politics, and the Pillars expanded their investment in Amandine so that Albrennian business became crucial to Amand prosperity. The goal was to prevent any recurrence of the Callaqua Crisis by guaranteeing that Amandine would not interfere with Albrennian actions.

On balance, however, the "invisible empire" grew significantly in the second half of the twentieth century. Auressian decolonization offered the Commonwealth a distinctively Albrennian imperial moment: as the old empires gradually withdrew, Albrennian corporate emissaries arrived to congratulate former colonies on their independence and present enticing offers of investment. When newly independent governments discovered that this left their mines and oil reserves and agriculture owned by Albrennian companies, the Fleet stood ready to discourage any unwise attempts at nationalization: airstrikes, shore bombardment, and Marine incursions backed up Albrennian corporate influence in small nations around the globe. Military spending remained accordingly high, and it continues to account for more than half of the Commonwealth's government budget even in peacetime. Albrennia's influence has not been entirely self-centered, though; as Rythene ceased to be the unilateral arbiter of global order, the Fleet has become Levilion's most prominent anti-piracy and anti-smuggling and free-navigation force - the principal guarantor of the Law of the Sea.

The corporate headquarters of AlbrInfo, the newest Pillar and a global leader in information techology

But in time, the "invisible empire" began to have unforeseen consequences: in response to high labor costs at home, the Pillars quietly began to offshore many of their less-skilled manufacturing operations to other nations where they possessed commercial interests. By 1990, the great majority of radios, televisions, and home appliances produced by Albrennian companies were actually made overseas - especially in Amandine, where labor costs were lower. The result was a crisis unseen since 1876: the collapse of a Pillar conglomerate, the General Helpmeet Group. An immense taxpayer-funded bailout was necessary to rescue GHG's pension and healthcare and unemployment-fund obligations, while at the same time easing the company into bankruptcy. Even so, Albrennia suffered three years of severe recession in the early 1990s.

But GHG's demise coincided with the rise of the newest Pillar: Albrennian Informatics, or AlbrInfo. A uniquely organized conglomerate known as the "Start-Up Pillar," in which employees are able to start their own businesses within the corporate umbrella at will, AlbrInfo has been at the forefront of information technology since the mid-1990s. Many of the search engines and social media platforms used across Levilion are actually AlbrInfo intellectual property. In just twenty years, it has surpassed Wellfleet Industries to become the largest and most profitable Pillar, and its power is beginning to cause significant political unease within the Albrennian Establishment.

Other changes have also arisen. Many communities have never fully recovered from the collapse of GHG - and since Albrennia's entire social safety net is predicated on compulsorily unionized employment, long-term full-household unemployment can result in a depth of poverty hardly known elsewhere in the developed world. The postwar period has also wrought substantial cultural changes in Albrennian society: in a movement led by the universities, which have retained their immense influence ever since the sixteenth century, women have been largely accepted as equals in the workplace. Homosexuality has also been normalized, with even the Rotiferist Church agreeing to perform gay marriages. Not all Albrennians, especially in rural western areas, are comfortable with these changes. Finally, despite a wave of immigration from Marceaunia Minor and Isuan, the Albrennian Establishment remains overwhelmingly white, and tensions over unfair policing and unequal access to political power have provoked repeated bouts of urban unrest.

But despite its flaws, Albrennia remains a critical nation in Levilion's international community. Its position in global trade and finance remains dominant; it is still a leading naval power capable of projecting force within days anywhere in Levilion; and it is prosperous and peaceful enough to remain a locus for immigration from nations developed and developing alike. As the twenty-first century unfolds, its status as a world power is secure.

Geography

The Commonwealth of Albrennia occupies a total area of 2,019,286 square kilometers (779,651 square miles). This figure does not include the various small naval bases, trading concessions, and embassy compounds that the Albrennian government leases from other nations worldwide. Nor does it include the more substantial lands owned by Albrennian corporations in foreign countries: the so-called "invisible empire." Nevertheless, Albrennia remains the sixth-largest nation by land area in Levilion.

Albrennia occupies the entirety of the Albren Peninsula of northeastern Marceaunia Minor, and is almost entirely surrounded by water. It is is bordered by the North Hesperian Ocean to the east, north, and south; by the Gulf of Colrain to the southwest; and by Rowlands Bay to the northwest. To the due west, its natural border is the mountainous Isthmus of Lamont, where Albrennia's westward expansion ceased in the sixteenth century. In general, Albrennia includes three geographic zones: an area of long rolling hills along the rocky, jagged coast; a central highlands region of granite ridgelines and long, narrow glacial lakes; and the Lamont Range of the west, a spine of Precambrian mountains characterized by steep but low peaks, narrow valleys, and rich deposits of coal and iron.

Albrennia is a heavily urbanized society.

The coastal hills are by far the most populated area of Albrennia: home to all nine of its major cities, more than eighty percent of the population, and the great majority of the arable land. It is very densely populated and heavily urbanized; the Wellfleet-Newhaven megalopolis, for example, is a continuous metropolitan area stretching for 120 miles along the eastern coast - home to twelve million people. Some of Levilion's great cities are to be found in this region: the preserved 16th-century Old Quarter of Newhaven; the high-rises of Alford, linked by soaring skyways; the downtown of Providence, with food trucks and art galleries from every corner of the globe. But outside the major cities, the coastal hills are primarily owned by Reynolds Midland & Co. - the Pillar that has all but monopolized Albrennia's agricultural and food-processing industry. That conglomerate has created a manmade landscape of continuous, systematically irrigated fields, subdivided and leased to farmers. This treeless, rolling expanse is crisscrossed by canals and railroads and highways, and dotted by preplanned company towns. It is far from a tourist attraction, but it makes the most of Albrennia's limited arable land. Only a few areas of famously beautiful deciduous forests remain as national parks.

Further inland, the sparsely-populated central highlands contain Albrennia's most spectacular scenery. Originally, primeval forests of white pine and spruce covered these rocky hills, but Albrennia's early settlers clear-cut more than half of them in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in order to build the nation's original trading fleet. Today, most of the remaining forests are protected as national parks. So is much of the rest of the highlands, where the absence of forests has created a starkly beautiful landscape of bare rock and purple heather around clear glacial finger lakes. Only about five percent of Albrennia's population lives in the highlands, though the area comprises thirty percent of the Commonwealth's land area; those who do choose this secluded life are an odd mix of retired millionaires and reclusive environmentalists who have opted out of the corporate rat-race. The regional economy relies on artisanal cheesemaking and charcuterie - a cottage industry that remains outside the control of the Pillars - and on tourism; tens of millions of Albrennians from the coastal cities vacation in the highlands every year, as do millions of visitors from overseas. A hunting lodge in the highlands is a quintessential mark of the Albrennian Establishment, and the Chancellor has an official country estate located here.

The Albrennian Osprey is the national animal, and the world's fastest seabird.

The Commonwealth's western border lies along the Isthmus of Lamont. The Isthmus is dominated by mountains: a spine of Precambrian rock that raises long, relatively low ridgelines encompassing narrow, steep-sided valleys. The region is exceedingly rich in coal and iron, and remains dominated by mining towns associated with corporate subsidiaries of seven different Pillars. It is culturally distinct from the rest of Albrennia: far more socially conservative and libertarian, and far more socialist. The Lamont Range has long been one of the heartlands of the Albrennian labor movement, and dominates the conservative wing of the Labor Party. Lamonters are also substantially overrepresented in the ranks of the Fleet Marine Corps. The Lamont Range remains an area of substantial underinvestment, with measurably worse infrastructure, lower average incomes, and poorer educational and healthcare outcomes than the rest of the Commonwealth. And it suffers the cultural disdain of urban Albrennians, who imagine the Lamonter as an illiterate, shoeless bigot.

Albrennia has a humid continental climate, ranging in Köppen classification from Dfb in the north to Dfa in the south. Winters are long and cold with heavy snow, especially in the north; in the south, winters are still harsh, but the summers are longer and warmer. Spring tends to be short, but autumn is glorious in those small areas of the coastal hills where deciduous forest remains: Albrennian fall foliage is a famous tourist attraction. Precipitation is heavy across most of the country, especially in the coastal hills: most locations receive more than 50 inches of rain and snow per year. The Commonwealth suffers regular blizzards and occasional floods, especially during the hurricanes and nor'easters that emerge in the North Hesperian, but otherwise has a low occurrence of extreme weather events.

Albrennia's ecology is less diverse than that of many Marceaunian nations: it is home to 134 mammal species, 312 bird species, 117 reptile species, and 86 amphibian species. Among the most well-known of these are the wooly deer - one of the largest deer species in the world - and the Albrennian osprey, the world's fastest seabird. The Commonwealth has 35 national parks, concentrated heavily in the central highlands but also encompassing remaining old-growth forest in the coastal hills. The Bureau of Environmental Management is responsible for enforcing the Clean Springs Act and the Osprey Act, the legislative bases for environmental protection in Albrennia. The Bureau faces many challenges, including Albrennia's partial reliance on coal from the Lamont Range; the status of nuclear power plants located in most major metropolitan areas; the ecological implications of intensive monoculture farming across much of the coastal hills; and substantial air and water pollution, both in the Lamont Range and in poorer areas of many cities.

Major Metropolitan Areas

68 percent of Albrennians live in just eight major metropolitan areas: these date back to the sixteenth century, and are represented by the eight stars on the Albrennian flag. Today, the Big Eight enjoy a substantial degree of self-government, and each is home to at least five million people. Each city has a unique history, economy, and culture, and these play a crucial role in most Albrennians' identity.

• Providence: The national capital, Providence is famous for its diversity: it is the initial destination for most immigrants to Albrennia. A twelve-block area of downtown Providence is often claimed to have restaurants, art galleries, and musical venues reflecting more different cultures than anywhere else on Earth. The principal employers are the Commonwealth government and the George Greenhill Company, which is headquartered on the Providence waterfront and has most of its news, film, and TV studios in the city. The stereotypical Providence native is cosmopolitan, ambitious, and greatly concerned with appearances.

• Newhaven: The oldest city in Albrennia - established in 1504 by the Springsong Pilgrims - Newhaven is famous for the Old Quarter: a cobblestone warren of pedestrian streets at the city's center where the original sixteenth-century town is preserved. This is one of the best-preserved and largest areas of original Rythenean half-timbered architecture anywhere on either side of the Hesperian. Newhaven also hosts the Albrennian Institute of Visual Arts and the Matthews Center for the Performing Arts. The largest employers are Alford Outfitters (which is headquartered in Alford but has most of its manufacturing facilities outside Newhaven) and Highland Mutual, which is based in the city. The stereotypical Newhavenite is sophisticated, affluent, and minimally aware of anything outside Newhaven.

• Tolland: One of Albrennia's two great university cities, Tolland is famously divided between the beautiful, gated 16th-century campus of Tolland University and the tough working-class city outside. The latter is dominated by Palian-Albrennians and Rocian-Albrennians, and was one of the strongholds of the early Albrennian labor movement. General Locomotive Co. is headquartered in Tolland and has most of its factories here; General Helpmeet Group was also based in Tolland, and its collapse in 1990 left large areas of this city more economically deprived than anywhere else in Albrennia. The stereotypical Tollander is either a struggling Palian-speaking autoworker, or a tweedy left-wing intellectual prone to performative solidarity with the cause of labor.

• Alford: Albrennia's other great university city, Alford is home not just to Alford University but to six other major institutes of higher learning. Most of these specialize in science and technology, creating one of the greatest concentrated brain trusts in Levilion. The town suffered a devastating fire in 1917 and has since been repeatedly redeveloped by innovative urban planners: today, the downtown is a green city dominated by parkland, out of which rise glass skyscrapers connected by skyways and elevated passenger trains. The main employers are Euterpia Laboratories and AlbrInfo, which constructed its massive corporate headquarters just outside Alford. The stereotypical Alfordian is young, smart, self-involved, and extremely online.

• Colrain: Albrennia's traditional gateway to Marceaunia Minor, Colrain is an old-fashioned port city with a nineteenth-century brick downtown and a 200-year-old fish market. Today, the fishing industry is mostly controlled by Reynolds Midland, but Colrain's seafaring culture remains strong. The city has Albrennia's second-largest cargo port and hosts the Fleet Academy and the Commonwealth War College. Its largest employers are OCN Resources and Osprey Industries, both of which are headquartered in the city: the former at the port, the latter in an immense complex of aircraft hangars and assembly lines twenty miles to the north. The stereotypical Colrain resident is tough, pragmatic, and unpleasantly blunt.

• Wellfleet: The largest city in Albrennia, and one of the largest in Levilion, Wellfleet is a true metropolis. It is not considered a beautiful city: the downtown is a grid of boxy skyscrapers, surrounded by seemingly endless neighborhoods of brick apartment blocks interspersed with small parks. Wellfleet is defined by the Albrennian military-industrial complex: both Wellfleet Industries and General Armaments are headquartered here, and the city hosts the largest shipyard in Levilion. Close to half of the Commonwealth's government spending goes directly to Wellfleet, paying for new warships and new guns and keeping millions of Wellfleeters employed. Crime is a problem, and Wellfleet law enforcement has been repeatedly censured for brutality and racism. But Wellfleet inspires fierce loyalty. It is a city of real communities: ethnic enclaves, close-knit neighborhoods, and union locals with century-old histories. The stereotypical Wellfleeter is a proud factory worker, deeply loyal to family and community, and largely ignorant of the world outside his or her neighborhood - much less outside of Wellfleet.

• Lanesborough: A modest city until the 1880s, Lanesborough boomed during Pillarization, when Reynolds Midland & Co. bought up most of the farmland in Albrennia and began leasing it back to farmers. Reynolds Midland was headquartered in Lanesborough, and the city grew up around the company instead of vice versa. It is a planned city, full of green space and old-fashioned tram lines. But Reynolds Midland still owns almost all the actual land in Lanesborough, and all the residents are merely tenants. The conglomerate's extensive and unwelcome control of daily life has made Lanesborough the last remaining labor battleground in Albrennia: the only place where strikes and lockouts remain commonplace. The rest of the Commonwealth is inclined to regard it as a failed Potemkin Village, and the stereotypical Lanesborough resident as a justifiably surly corporate drone whose house, car, and favorite restaurant are all on loan from Reynolds Midland.

• Sherborn: The smallest and farthest north of the Big Eight, Sherborn is a cold, blustery, unusually friendly city. It has an atypical density of small businesses that have resisted Pillarization, and a reputation for producing entrepreneurs. The quality of life is generally felt to be better here than in any other major Albrennian city, especially for families with children - notwithstanding the terrible weather. The largest employer is Alleine-Sherborn, a hometown Pillar that has made a point over the decades of reinvesting back into Sherborn's community institutions. Notably, the Sherborn Wolves are the most successful rugby team in the Albrennian Rugby Union. The stereotypical Sherbornite is friendly, hardworking, unusually religious, and somewhat condescending to everyone not from Sherborn.

Politics

Albrennia is a unitary presidential constitutional republic, which claims to have Levilion's oldest continuous democratic constitution: the Instrument of Governance of 1539, originally adopted in the early colonial period. It is a rule-of-law state with a robust tradition of judicial review and individual rights. Nevertheless, international observers note that almost nonexistent campaign finance regulations mean that Pillar conglomerates and organized labor exercise an outsized influence on the outcome of elections, and thus on government policy. Moreover, Albrennia's powerful permanent civil service remains overwhelmingly staffed by ethnic-Rythenean, Rotiferist men educated at Tolland or Alford: the so-called "Establishment." Albrennia is distinguished by the Matthean System, which delegates substantial areas of state responsibility to private industry through government-mediated corporatist bargaining between corporate conglomerates and powerful labor unions. While Albrennia is not a federal system, municipal administrations have a high degree of delegated self-government; they are responsible for primary and secondary education, local law enforcement, and other day-to-day duties.

The Instrument of Governance dates back to 1539, making it by some accounts the oldest democratic constitution in Levilion.

The Albrennian government is based on a system of checks and balances defined by the text of the Instrument of Governance. The unicameral Parliament is composed of 255 members elected by plurality vote from equipopulational single-member districts for six-year terms. It has sole power of the purse, originates formal legislation, and has the power of impeachment over any member of the government. The chancellor is elected by a plurality of the nationwide popular vote for a six-year term; he is the chief executive of the Commonwealth and admiral-in-chief of the Fleet. The chancellor is the head of the Chancellery, Albrennia's powerful administrative state, and can appoint or remove agency heads. Lower-level civil servants, however, have career tenure and can only be fired for cause. In practice, the chancellery has primary responsibility for the day-to-day running of the country: the chancellor adopts "interpretive memoranda" that define existing law in certain ways, and these form the basis for actual government policy. Since the National Security Act of 1927, the chancellor has had the power to sign trade deals and to deploy the Fleet overseas without seeking Parliament's formal consent. Parliament's primary remaining check on executive authority is its ability to threaten funding through its control of the budgetary process.

The Instrument of Governance has been amended 34 times, and these amendments primarily define the scope of Albrennians' individual and collective rights. The Instrument guarantees equality before the law, and forbids invidious discrimination by the state, labor unions, or the Pillars. It protects rights to human dignity, privacy, bodily autonomy, humane treatment, and due process of law. Freedom of conscience, religion, and speech are strongly protected, as is the right to vote, stand for election, and form a political party. These rights extend to corporations and labor unions, and justify those institutions' power in Albrennian elections. Property rights are very strongly protected, and the Albrennian government's powers of eminent domain are strictly circumscribed. Economic rights are considered collective rather than individual, which is why the law requires compulsory unionization: the Instrument of Governance protects the right of workers to bargain collectively, not the right of individuals to choose whether to join a union. Nor is there any individual right to start a business that is infringed by the Pillars' de facto monopolies. Slavery has been banned in Albrennia since 1556.

Both the structural provisions and the rights provisions of the Instrument of Governance are defined by Albrennia's courts using principles derived from Rythenean common law. Judges are appointed by the chancellor from a list of candidates chosen by a panel of permanent civil servants within the Ministry of Justice; they serve for life unless impeached. All courts have power of judicial review to void any government action or law as contrary to the Instrument of Governance; this power extends to elements of the triennial Grand Bargain between the Pillars and the ACL, since it carries the force of law. The decision of the Court of Cassation is final in all such matters. The role of multimillion-guilder campaign contributions in the electoral process means that most Albrennians report greater trust in the courts than in Parliament or the Chancellery.

The Matthean System

The Matthean System was the product of the Providence Conference of 1891, and is named for that Conference's chairman, Vice Chancellor Edwin Matthews. It was an attempt to reconcile the Pillarization of the Albrennian economy with workers' rights. As implemented by the 29th, 30th, and 31st Amendments to the Instrument of Governance, the Matthean System combines democratic politics with a corporatist political economy. Its central feature is that certain state responsibilities are delegated to private industry, and given the force of law by government-mediated negotiations between organized labor and corporate conglomerates.

In Albrennia, twelve major corporate conglomerates - the Pillars - account for more than three-quarters of the gross domestic product. The absence of antitrust laws means that each Pillar represents an unofficial sectoral monopoly: Wellfleet Industries controls all shipbuilding in Albrennia, for example. The Pillars are also vertically integrated. For example, corporate subsidiaries of Wellfleet Industries control every stage of the shipbuilding process, from the iron mines and lumber yards to the paint factories to the shipyard itself. Each Pillar exercises equivalent control over its own sector of the economy, from agriculture and food processing to information technology. The Pillars resolve disputes among themselves through the Albrennian Commercial Council, on which each Pillar is represented by delegates.

Each sector of the economy also has one labor union, to which all employees of that sector's Pillar belong. These unions are compulsory: by law, a Pillar can only hire members of its sector's union. Thus, for example, all employees of Wellfleet Industries must be members of the United Brotherhood of Shipwrights, and Wellfleet Industries can fire them only for cause. Therefore, Albrennia has twelve major labor unions, one for each of the twelve Pillars. All twelve of these sectoral unions, in turn, are members of "one big union": the Albrennian Conference of Labor, or ACL. The ACL therefore ultimately represents every Pillar employee, and includes 71 percent of Albrennian workers (the remainder work mostly for the government, for the Fleet, or for small retail businesses, or they are classified as managers).

The Matthean System makes Albrennia's welfare programs the product of corporatist bargaining between capital and labor, not the result of legislation.

Every three years, the Albrennian Chancellery mediates negotiations between the ACL and the Commercial Council. These negotiations are called the Grand Bargain. The Grand Bargain sets the pay, benefits, and workplace safety standards that all Albrennian businesses will be required to provide to all Albrennian workers. It decides the Albrennian minimum wage; it writes the health insurance plan that all employers must provide; it defines the pension plans and unemployment insurance that all employers must offer; and it sets safety standards for every workplace. Both the ACL and the Commercial Council must sign each Grand Bargain. If they take more than a month to do so, the 31st Amendment requires the government to impose an indefinite, nationwide, unpaid holiday in order to incentivize compromise.

Once the Grand Bargain is signed, it carries the force of law: any employer that does not provide the minimum wage, benefits, pension, and safety standards is criminally liable upon pain of fine and even imprisonment. This applies even to small businesses that have resisted Pillarization, and so were not represented by the Commercial Council. On the other hand, any strike, lockout, or slowdown by workers - except as retaliation for an employer breach of the Bargain - is not legally protected: employers can fire striking workers without violating their union contracts. Because employers are required by law to provide such a wide array of social benefits, the Albrennian government does not offer welfare payments, food assistance, or public housing of its own.

The Matthean System confers three major benefits. First, it largely ensures labor peace: it gives unions a forum in which to negotiate the best deal possible for all workers nationwide, and gives the Pillars mostly strike-free workplaces. Second, it provides every Albrennian worker with health insurance, a pension, unemployment insurance, a safe workplace, and a decent wage. The Matthean System is thus responsible for the Commonwealth's high standard of living. Third, the Grand Bargain makes employers pay directly for the Albrennian welfare state: the burden of paying for workers' health and pension expenses is met by corporate profits, not by tax revenue, and so it falls directly on those most able to pay. Relieved of that burden, the government can keep taxes relatively low, and invest far more of its own budget into the Fleet.

The Matthean System also has one major flaw. As long as a household has one employed member, that worker's pay, health insurance, and pension should provide for the rest of the household. Even if the breadwinner loses his job, his unemployment insurance will meet the household's expenses for a few years; and if he is disabled, then his pension will support the household indefinitely. But if years pass when no one in a household is either employed or drawing a pension, then the entire household has no social safety net: for Albrennia has no public welfare payments, and no government food or housing assistance. Its entire welfare state is conditioned upon employment. The one percent of Albrennians who are chronically unemployed therefore face exposure to a level of poverty unknown anywhere else in the developed world.

The Establishment

Nearly five million Albrennians work for the government - not including the 800,000 more who serve in the Fleet. Most of Albrennia's public employees are municipal in nature, but close to a million work for the Chancellery. These roles typically require substantial higher education and specialized skill, and carry civil service protections: Chancellery employees cannot be fired except for gross misconduct, and can appeal their dismissal in court. Accordingly, although chancellors and ministers may come and go, there is very little turnover among the career administrators who keep the Albrennian government running. This cadre of bureaucrats has its own institutional culture and norms, and its members have great latitude over how they apply Parliament's laws and the Chancellor's interpretive memoranda. They are widely seen as the real power in the Albrennian government, and are known collectively as the Establishment.

William Hildersham, Permanent Special Secretary for Marceaunia Minor, embodied the power of the Establishment in the mid-20th century.

Because hiring decisions are made by the existing civil service, the Establishment is a self-perpetuating culture. It is mostly white, Rotiferist, ethnic-Rythenean, male, upper-class, and educated at Tolland or Alford. It remains that way because civil servants who match that description hire new civil servants who also match it. Despite this, there is a deep meritocratic streak in the Establishment: while it is far easier to enter the civil service if one fits the traditional profile, one's ability to rise through the Establishment's ranks still depends on work ethic, analytical skill, and intellectual agility.

The Establishment stands for certain political principles. It is pragmatic rather than ideological, and views itself as an honest mediator between the Pillars and labor. It scrupulously avoids affiliation with either political party, though its policy priorities strongly influence both. Its view of foreign affairs is grounded in realpolitik, and it is comfortable with ruthless measures to advance Albrennian interests abroad. Nevertheless, the Establishment does have certain fixed philosophical positions: it is committedly pro-Rythenean, and loyal to a broad liberal tradition derived from the Rythenean Revolution. Most of all, the Establishment values the responsible, competent, undemonstrative exercise of power; it may not be publicly accountable, but it is a culture of public service all the same.

The Establishment is also associated with a certain cultural style. Senior civil servants are rich, but not millionaires: they have nice apartments or townhouses in Providence, and perhaps a beach house on the Gulf of Colrain or a hunting lodge in the central highlands. They wear a lot of tweed and drive Audonian or Auressian cars. They read poetry and military history, and enjoy the opera. They often served as junior officers in the Fleet at the start of their careers, and have small collections of Idican antiques. They speak several languages. They are Rotiferists, and active in charitable societies associated with their church. This image is deeply rooted in Abrennian culture as the model of responsible leadership, and even elected politicians frequently imitate it in order to borrow some of the Establishment's prestige.

Political Parties

Albrennia has two major political parties: the Reform Party and the Labor Party. The parties are not ideologically polarized; each includes conservative, moderate, and liberal wings. Traditionally, the Labor Party draws most of its support from blue-collar workers and powerful labor unions, while the Reform Party is more associated with the professional classes and the influence of the Pillars. They have different political styles, histories, symbols, and cultural identities. But this does not entail mutually opposing ideological positions. In fact, Albrennian politics is characterized by a broad consensus on many issues - a consensus shaped by the Establishment's influence on public policy. Both parties support the Matthean System, though they back different sides within it; both parties agree that the Fleet must remain a naval power with few equals and no superiors; both parties recognize the value of the "invisible empire" and of good relations with Audonia and Amandine. That broad consensus produces a high degree of bipartisan cooperation.

As a result, many of Albrennia's most controversial political issues cut across party lines: dividing each party's liberal and conservative wings, instead of separating the parties from each other. Immigration tops the list; Albrennia has long maintained an open-door policy, resettling tens of thousands of refugees per year and resisting a fixed cap on work visa applications. This policy is supported both by Labor Party liberals (who see it as a moral imperative), and by Reform Party moderates and liberals (who see it as necessary to meet the Pillars' demand for labor). Labor Party moderates and conservatives support greater immigration restrictions, fearing that wages will fall if the labor pool grows faster than profits; Reform Party conservatives likewise support more restrictions aimed at preserving the "Rythenean character" of Albrennia.

This sort of ideological alignment across party lines is fairly common. A progressive coalition of Reform Party liberals and moderates with Labor Party liberals has been responsible for lifting legal restrictions on homosexuality over the last two decades. By contrast, a somewhat overlapping conservative coalition of Reform Party conservatives and moderates with Labor Party conservatives has been responsible for blocking legislation on police reform and affirmative action. Significantly, though, these controversial issues are matters of social policy: they involve questions of gender, sexuality, race, and cultural identity. Albrennians are divided on these questions, but on on economic, military, and foreign policy, the Establishment-dominated consensus remains strong in both parties.

Economy

Trade and Finance

Science and Technology

Military-Industrial Complex Energy, Infrastructure, and Transport

Pillarization and Organized Labor

This is about industry, not necessarily retail: independent stores, restaurants, etc.

• Albrennian Informatics (AlbrInfo): information technology

• Wellfleet Industries: civilian and military shipbuilding

• General Armaments: military weapons and ground vehicles

• Reynolds Midland & Co.: food and beverages

• Euterpia Laboratories: pharmaceuticals and hospitals

• Highland Mutual: insurance; a publicly regulated utility

• Alleine-Sherborn: banking and finance, primarily handling foreign money since the Pillars all have vertically integrated financial institutions

• General Locomotive Co.: civilian automobiles, trucks, and trains

• OCN Resources: energy: oil, coal, nuclear; a publicly regulated utility

• Osprey Industries: civilian and military aircraft

• Alford Outfitters: apparel, watches, shoes, and other personal products

• The George Greenhill Company: media and entertainment