David Weihe writes:
>Also, expect that the Imperials demand taxes in specie (ie, cash money)
>not kind.
This was practised at times in the Byzantine Empire. When things were really rotten, the authorities would often demand the *next years* tax in advance too! At one stage, the poor bastards were paying taxes for the next 54 years in advance! Add to this the fact that often there were rival claimants to the throne demanding the tax all over again (not to mention requisitioning and commandeering all sorts of stuff anyway) and the rapacious taxman of today (hi Neil Robinson!) don't look so bad.
>I imagine that the Riskland settlements are being used just like Canada
>and Australia were in the RW, although that is closer to promoting
>settlements in Afghanistan, in terms of danger.
Life for the early Europeans in Australia weren't no picnic either, and with the weird landscape, flora and fauna, often hostile natives and constant threat of starvation, possibly more like the Risklands than you might think. Unlike Risklands, Australia's first settlements were established as government run penal settlements, and free settlers were not really encouraged until later (by then, life in the colonies was in many ways much better for the lower classes than back home in Old Blighty, and the government fought a losing battle trying to prove how dreadful a place it was as a deterrent to crime!)
The early settlements had an endemic problem with supply of coin, and the official unit of exchange was (liquor) until 1835 when the Brits imported a shipload of Mexican Dollars - this is one of the reasons why our decimal currency today was called dollars rather than pounds). For an excellent read about the early settlement of Australia, I cannot recommend more highly Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore.
Cheers
MOB
Powered by hypermail