Economics In RPGs 3: Pre-Industrial Eras

Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as Nymph by Italian painter Sandro Botticelli – Google Art Project, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29097021
Welcome & General Introduction
Readers may have noticed that the previous part of the series promised the Renaissance and then barely mentioned the subject.
That happened because, at least at first, there wasn’t a lot of economic difference, and what trends later started to manifest themselves were essentially the same trends that drove industrialization in general.
The dog wags the tail, in other words, even if the tail started wagging first.
It must be noted that each part of the series builds heavily on the content from the previous one. While you may be able to get relevant information without doing so, to get the most of out of each, you should have read the preceding article.
A disclaimer: I am not an economist and I’m not trying to turn anyone else into an economist. An awful lot of this content will be simplified, possibly even oversimplified. Bear that in mind as you read.
A second disclaimer: I’m Australian with a working understanding, however imperfect and incomplete, of how the US Economy works, and an even more marginal understanding of how the UK economy works (especially in the post-Brexit era). Most of my readers are from the US, and number two are Brits. Canadians and Australians fight over third place on pretty even terms, so those are the contexts in which what I write will be interpreted. And that means that the imperfection can become an issue.
Any commentary that I make comes from my personal perspective. That’s important to remember. Now, sometimes an outside perspective helps see something that’s not obvious to those who are enmeshed in a system, and sometimes it can mean that you aren’t as clued-in as you should be. So I’ll apologize in advance for any errors or offense.
I’ll repeat these disclaimers at the top of each part in this series.
Related articles
This series joins the many other articles on world-building that have been offered here through the years. Part one contained an extremely abbreviated list of these. There are far too many to list here individually; instead check out
the Campaign Creation page of the Blogdex,
especially the sections on
- Divine Power, Religion, & Theology
- Magic, Sorcery, & The Arcane
- Money & Wealth
- Cities & Architecture
- Politics
- Societies & Nations, and
- Organizations, and
- Races.
Where We’re At
So far, I’ve established a number of important principles.
- Society drives economics – which is perfectly obvious when you think about it, because social patterns and structures define who can earn wealth, the nature of what wealth even is, and what they can spend it on – and those, by definition, are the fundamentals of an economy.
- Economics pressure Societies to evolve – that economic activity encourages some social behaviors and inhibits others, producing the trends that cause societies to evolve. Again, perfectly obvious in hindsight, but not at all obvious at first glance – largely because the changes in society obscure and alter the driving forces and consequences of (1).
- Existing economic and social trends develop in the context of new developments – this point is a little more subtle and obscure. Another way of looking at it is that the existing social patterns define the initial impact that new developments can have on society, and the results tend to be definitive of the new era.
- New developments drive new patterns in both economic and social behavior but it takes time for the dominoes to fall – Just because some consequences get a head start, and are more readily assimilated into the society in general, that does not make them the most profound influences; those may take time to develop, but can be so transformative that they define a new social / political / economic / historic era.
- Each society and its economic infrastructure contain the foundations of the next significant era – this is an obvious consequence of the previous point. But spelling it out like this defines two or perhaps three phases of development, all contained within the envelope of a given social era:
- There’s the initial phase, in which some arbitrary dividing line demarks transition from one social era to another. Economic development and social change is driven exclusively by existing trends.
- There’s the secondary phase, in which new conditions derive from the driving social forces that define the era begin to infiltrate and manifest within the scope permitted by the results of the initial phase.
- Each of the trends in the secondary phase can have an immediate impact or a delayed impact. The first become a part of the unique set of conditions that define the current era, while the second become the seeds of the next social era. There is always a continuity, and you can never really analyze a particular period in history without understanding the foundations that were laid in the preceding era.
Look at the world around us, and you can see these principles playing out as we speak.
Given the impact that they have had on our lives in general, it’s fair to characterize our current era as the ‘digital age’, or perhaps ‘the internet age’. Inherent in, and developing within, most of that era are Artificial Intelligence Systems, from the ‘Expert Systems’ of the 1990s through to the modern AI developments of DALL-E and ChatGPT. Google’s Ad-sense, which selected advertising based on the browsing habits of an individual (and have done so since the late 1990s, more and more effectively), are (in hindsight) a milestone in the development of the new social trends, but only now are we reaching the point where they can intersect with social media to actually change lives significantly enough to consider us at the threshold of a new historical era.
And yet, the world around us doesn’t look all that different from what existed a few years ago, except in fine details – there is a clear continuity to recent history.
At least, that’s my impression – somewhat shaped by the ongoing development of these articles.
The general principles contained within those five bullet points are important enough that I’m going to be adding them to the ‘opening salvos’ of the remaining articles in this series.
From A Writing Perspective
When starting this article, I listed four major sections comprising 6, 11, 14, and 22 subsections, respectively. I knew exactly what each subsection was to contain. But…
53 subsections is a LOT. Each of the articles in this series to date have only managed to include two major sections, and the greater length of the last two proposed sections in this article would leave it triple the size of previous parts, give-or-take. Diligent efforts and a little conflation of subsections have incorporated 31 of them into a single post, which still makes this the longest article in the series to date; the 22-part Age Of Steam was more than would fit.
The good news is that this means that I have a significant head-start on the next part in the series!
The Renaissance, revisited
There came a time when culture and artistic expression seemed to start making great leaps forward, everywhere you looked. Underwritten by noble patrons, it became a measure of your enlightenment and social worth to be bankrolling as many outlets of culture and invention as you could afford. Not even the Church was immune to this measurement of social worth – that’s what gave us the Sistine Chapel.
The fine arts and cultural displays exploded in all directions – painting, sculpture, music, playwrights, poets, and natural philosophy.
In some respects, this could be seen as a defensive response to the rise of the middle classes in the late Medieval period, in which the power of the Nobility came under the most minimal of threats, albeit ones of their own making. Thrift, efficiency, and greed created the nascent Middle Class, whose members promptly carved out profe4ssional associations that usurped a little of the power that had been the exclusive province of the Nobility previously. To prove their superiority to these nouveau almost-rich, and justify their elevated social standings, the nobility needed to expand their social credentials; simply being seen as pious was no longer enough, even if it did bring the support of the church. Besides, theological circles were in the midst of their own internal politics and power struggles; who knew how stable that support might prove, or how ephemeral?
This progress in the arts of expression and understanding are considered the defining traits of the era. But there were inevitable consequences.
1. The Enlightenment of Limited Hierarchical Authority
First, the Responsibilities of the Nobility toward their subjects had not changed. What changed was that, instead of the backing of a complicit and compliant Faith, these sponsorship gave rise to members of the middle classes who were empowered and funded by the Nobility, who were free to guide and shape the manner of satisfaction of those responsibilities, and who felt free to gently chide and chastise when they were not being performed adequately in the eyes of the artists.
There were limits to how far such criticism could be pushed, but a steady drip can eventually erode even solid rock. The nobility was far less resistant than that, even with the ongoing concept of Divine Right to back them; and even that was slowly progressing and developing in response to the social pressures and realities within which the various Churches existed. Little by little, there was a steady progression toward enlightened rule, in which the power and wealth of the noble was generated by the health of the lesser social classes, and the realization that protecting their prosperity also protected your own.
Not everyone was so enlightened, of course; there were social repressives who saw only the threats to their traditional autonomy; but the new Middle Class were mobile, and fully capable of undermining the wealth of Nobles who did not live up to their end of the unwritten social compacts that characterized the Later Medieval and early Renaissance.
2. The Principle of Objective Understanding
The accurate portrayal of reality in art requires an understanding of the underpinnings of that reality – be it the principles of the physical sciences and geometry or the fundamentals of human anatomy. The natural consequence is that these artisans became students of what was known as Natural Philosophy, and with it came the concept that there was a natural order within the objective reality of the natural world, one whose workings depended not on the opinions or philosophies of others, but yielded the same objective understanding whether one believed in them or not.
Not since the philosophers of ancient Greece had the primacy of observed reality been so elevated over assumption or dogma. All of modern science flows from this fundamental principle. Understanding was not so advanced, then – observations were couched in terms of better understanding of “God’s Creation”, and would be for more than a century. But the beginnings were there.
3. Church Vs Science, Dogma vs Discovery
Inevitably, observations contradicted some part of the accumulated dogma that religions had built up over the centuries, and were interpreted as challenges to the authority of the church. These confrontations between Copernicus, Galileo, and the like, have become the stuff of legend. Even today, some of this tension remains unresolved – there is not as week goes by but that a challenge to Darwinian Evolution floats through my Quora feed. And second only to that collection are flat-earth proponents trying to deny a different objective reality, challenges that also seem to date back to this era.
What’s important to note is that the Churches won almost every one of these challenges. In temporal, day-to-day power, they were still in a position of dominance. What makes those legends of defiance (real or imagined) survive to this day is not that Galileo et. al. won – they didn’t – it’s that they were ultimately proven to be right. And with every victory earned in this era that was subsequently shown to be without merit, the authority of the Faiths to rule was eroded.
Different phases of this ongoing conflict remain a feature of historical eras from this time forward. Until recently, I was confident in the ability of Science to win the day – and even now, Science is forcing concessions to reality from religious authorities – but by resorting to various forms of outright falsehood, religion has been able to claw back some ground in recent years. (It’s not my Intent to take sides in this debate, even though I have strong personal opinions on the subject that inevitably leak out. All I want to do here is acknowledge the conflict and its history),
4. The trend to Decentralized Economics
The progression towards a profession-based Middle Class that characterized the late Medieval era continued through the Renaissance. The economic power of this professional class had to come from somewhere, and those lower on the social ladder had none to give – so the only place from which to draw it was the Nobility. In fact, the Nobles ceded the limited power they gave up of their own accord in pursuit of economic efficiency, as described in part two of this series.
The smallest pebble rolling downhill in a snowy slope can become a huge ball of snow and ice. When the professionals had absorbed all the power and temporal authority that the Nobility were wiling to concede, they started agitating to take more. Sometimes they colluded with like-minded members of other guilds and trade bodies, and sometimes they tried to create alternate paths to power and influence. Thus was born modern politics in its most elementary form.
Sometimes, these efforts failed; and the status remained quo; but the occasional success which did not lead to disaster accumulated.
5. The rise of the Middle Class
Temporal authority thus continued to migrate away from Nobles and to commercial operations and professionals. To monitor the exercising of the authority that was claimed by this middle class, additional professions were created and given the authority to act on behalf of first the crown and then the collective society. The transformation from rule by decree to rule by law was slow and inexorable, and also continues to this day.
As the middle class grew and accrued more wealth and power, they grew from being a minor footnote in the economy of the age to being an equal driver of that economy. This completed the creation of the social conditions described at the start of this discussion, showing that some sort of Renaissance was an inevitable consequence of the practices of the later Medieval. It may not have taken quite the form that it did in our history; that’s a matter for some debate. But something was almost impossible to avoid; at best, repression may have held it back for a while.
6. An accumulation of Technological Improvements
Despite all the obvious progress and enlightenment, the Renaissance was, in many ways, simply a treading of water, an attempt by conservative elements to preserve as much of the status quo as they could despite the many progressive elements at work in their society. Repression was used as a weapon whenever it was deemed necessary and everyone tried to protect their own power bases and keep their positions intact. But there was one factor that could not be overcome; eventually, it rose to overwhelming prominence and brought about a new age.
A direct consequence of the study of reality by Natural Philosophers whose work was founded on the utter practicality of the reproducibility of results (whether you liked them or not), a steady improvement in the technology that was available was both unstoppable and inevitable.
There are two primary (and closely-related) spheres in which such technological refinement tends to have significant immediate impact: communications and transportation. Well, the best form of communications at the time was mail delivered by some form of transportation, and the technology to offer an alternative would not exist for some time to come. It is obvious, then, that refinements in the capabilities of transportation would be the first, and defining, element of the next historical era.

It’s ironic that this ship, with nothing resembline a pirate flag, is described as a ‘pirate ship’ by the artist. Image by Debbie EM from Pixabay
Pre-industrial Era I: The Age Of Discovery
Despite the laudable and noteworthy achievements of the Vikings, Renaissance-era transport was fairly profoundly limited. The vessels were simply unable to support a sufficient crew for long enough while delivering them quickly enough, to facilitate the great voyages of discovery. As the Renaissance unfolded, improvements in technology and vessel design slowly changed that; until at some point, a line can be drawn between the two.
There is little consensus as to exactly where and when that line should be drawn. So far as I am concerned, the change was messier and more subtle than most, and the two historical periods overlap more than a little. This can be discerned from the citation of Darwin amongst the significant figures of the Renaissance, even though he was only in a position to make his pivotal observations in the course of one of those Great Voyages of Discovery.
I, personally, draw the dividing line in the Court of Queen Isabella of Spain, being persuaded by a smooth-tongued wannabe to send an exploratory party to find a new path to India by sea. That might be a manifestation of decades of exposure to American propaganda, I have to admit, but it seems reasonable to me. This was a voyage that would take months if not years, but whose conclusion would profoundly reshape the world that followed in its wake.
1. Professionals
Columbus was very much the definitive prototype of that American Ideal, the self-made man. He rose from obscure and humble beginnings, the son of a Baker, and self-educated. He was widely-traveled as a youth and employed this to become a trader representing a number of Noble families, and was sufficiently successful that he was able to marry the daughter of a Nobleman of Lombardi origins. Sadly, she would pass away less than six years later, while Columbus was on another trading voyage.
His self-educated nature and inaccuracies in some of the documents on which he relied combined to cause Columbus to drastically underestimate the distance that would have to be traversed from Europe to Asia via a western sea voyage. Seeing potent commercial opportunities, he attempted to persuade a number of royal families to back an expedition, but the learned men who evaluated the proposals repeatedly recognized the fallacy in the plan and consequent underestimate of the costs involved, leading them to reject the proposal. Some estimated that Columbus’ budget was only a quarter of the true cost.
Nevertheless, he was sufficiently persuasive that Queen Isabella and Ferdinand II did not reject the proposal completely, but invested in his personal development and well-being, even giving him a salary roughly equivalent of the annual salary of a sailor of the era and giving him a letter instructing all cities and towns within their domain to furnish him with free food and board. Eventually, politics swung in Columbus’ favor, as some became convinced that he would again take his proposal elsewhere. In 1492, the Monarchs promised that he would be given the rank of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and appointed Viceroy and Governor of all the new lands he might claim for Spain.
Despite the impression conveyed by the role assigned him in modern narratives, Columbus never approached the continental US, instead exploring Central and northern South America.
There’s a lot to unpack in this story, but most of it can be packaged under the heading of Professionals: Columbus was from the lower middle class, but by making himself a professional Sailor and Trader and educating himself, he was able to rise to prominence, which he then used as a springboard to his famous voyages. He had the opportunity to become a self-made man. Not long earlier, that would have been close to unthinkable, but demonstrated ability and professional expertise now overruled the social restrictions of birth.
2. Professionalism to Guilds
It didn’t happen everywhere, but in many locations professionals had banded together to protect the collective reputation and authority of their profession, beginning a practice of self-setting of professional standards that continues into the 20th century. As those professionals gain in wealth, status, and authority, so does their collective political ‘muscle’.
3. Wealth plus Authority equals Power
Inevitably, the equation presented above results. This trend was already well-developed in the Renaissance, but it continued and strengthened as the independent traders and craftsmen gained in prestige and wealth. Many of the offices created to monitor the activities of the Guilds and Freemen and enforce the law, and even to codify that law, had started out as representing the Nobility, but increasingly, they were independent arbiters and a civil police force.
4. The Abdication Of Noble Authority
The more power that the Nobles handed off to proxies, expert or otherwise, the less direct authority they had to exercise of their own volition. Rule by decree thus continued to wane throughout the period, and the power of the Nobility became more and more about who they would appoint and who they would (financially) support.
5. The Impact on the Lower Classes
There wasn’t really a lot of change in the lot of the poorest members of society, however. Instead of being beholden to, and exploited by, nobles, they were beholden to, and exploited by, landlords, whose authority ultimately descended from those Nobles but which was no longer under their direct control.
I’m sure that there were cases in which this was an improvement in the ordinary lives of the poor, but it’s known that in several cases, living conditions became even harsher. The middle class had discovered systematized greed, and there was only one population group that they could exploit.
6. Patronage: the path to Prosperity
But there was an escape: Apprenticeship, and dreams of Patronage, presented a two-step path from nobody to Aristocracy, from the bottom (or close to it) to the lower reaches of the top. Of course, getting there was only half the fight – there were always those who would seek to cast you back down so that they could usurp whatever influence you had acquired along the way. Defining it as entry into a hotbed of political intrigue would be understating the case very dramatically.
Fortunately for those with a little less ambition or ability, this was a journey with many alternative stops along the way. Many of the wealthier families, themselves just below the ranks of the Peerage, sought to emulate the Nobility and provide Patronage. Others sought reflected prestige by finding those artisans who would eventually receive Royal Patronage. And some sought to simply become the preferred purveyor of goods and services to the Nobility, permitting them to promote the prestige of their work-product.
Every professional was expected to train the next generation, and there were usually incentives and benefits to taking on apprentices. So there were many measures of success and many roads to achieving it. Ultimately, all these pathways to prosperity are interpretations of Patronage, one way or another.
7. Rags To Riches: The Principle of Social Mobility
The existence of so many pathways to a better standard of success, some of them reaching into the uppermost levels of society, entrenched the concept of social mobility; regardless of your starting point, it was possible to elevate yourself through hard work and success and demonstrated forms of social propriety that you belonged to a higher stratum. Ability was a silk road to better times in the future, and there was always access to a further step up the slippery social slope from wherever you ended up.
Going ‘all the way to the top’ was rare, even the subject of myth, but the potential was there.
8. The Decline Of Dogma?
It seems a certainty that the demonstrated success of practical scientific advance and skill would have weakened the grip of dogma and religion on the populace. Three things stood in the way of such a development.
The first was that the Churches offered an alternative pathway to the top, one that was dependent on a completely different set of capacities than the less certain, more overt, choice. This sucked away much of the impetus that was generated by the surge of practicality. The second was that the Church excelled at laying claim to the strokes of inspiration that led to these practical developments, and being publicly critical of the Faith remained a quick path from social position to obscurity. The third factor was the mutual support network that had arisen between ruling nobles and the representatives of the Faith; while Divine Right was no longer publicly accepted as strongly as it had been, the Churches retained a lot of temporal power, and they used it to support those nobles who were ‘friends of the faithful”. Patronage again, but of a different stripe.
The battle may have been a defensive one, but the conflict wasn’t even publicly acknowledged – that’s how much capability the church had at its disposal for the squashing of those who directly challenged it.
9. The Last Defense Of Nobility
The authority of Nobility, and of the Churches, soon received a major boost, thanks to a new economic development: the discovery of new provinces with valuable commodities. The Spices of the East Indies, Sugar, Rum, Silver, Gold, Rubies and Emeralds… the list goes on and on. It seemed like every expedition brought a flood of new wealth into the coffers of the Nobles who underwrote the journeys of discovery, and those of the Churches who didn’t stand in the way.
Get in the way? On the contrary, they sent devotees into the wilderness on these expeditions to ‘convert the heathens and savages’. And since the locals were the source of the new wealth, however exploited, the church could cut off the spigot any time they really wanted to – once. Doing so would be tantamount to a declaration of war with the Monarchy, something that would benefit neither.
The vast treasures that they claimed gave the Nobility lots of money to splash around on patronages and military expenditures. Not so much that it couldn’t be frittered away on meaningless little wars in Europe, or their projections of power elsewhere; great trading empires would come and go, rise and fall, in the years to come. But the infusion of wealth, and the power that came with it, bolstered the positions of both Nobility and Church into the next era to come: The Age Of Sail.
10. Genre: Conquistadors
There have not been many RPGs to exploit this particular genre – in fact, there have been so few that Campaign Mastery doesn’t even list them as a genre type. But there have been a few – OI vaguely remember one with Black and White artwork that revolved around Ponce de Leon and the quest for the fountain of youth, and another (with no artwork) that cast the protagonists as Inca tribesmen seeking to defend their homeland against these invaders with their ‘thunder-sticks’.
Where there are two, it seems certain that there have been others.
I can certainly see the appeal of a Fantasy/Pirates campaign in which the PCs are a group of Conquistadors who earnestly believe in the virtues that are supposed to be definitive of the Nobility, seeking to survive and prosper in a world full of corrupt Churchmen, Ignoble rivals, and hostile natives. Heck, I see a lot of parallels with the Rebellion from Star Wars! Everyone’s against them, but something – perhaps atoning for some past misdeeds before they became enlightened – keeps them in the neighborhood, trying to beat the odds…

It’s even more ironic, given the previous image, that this vessel is described simply as a tall ship… Image by Brian Kingston from Pixabay
Pre-industrial Era II: The Age Of Sail
Just as the Age of Discovery blends into the Renaissance so well that dividing lines can be disputed (or even ignored altogether), so the Age Of Sail blends with the Age of Exploration. Nevertheless, there are some pronounced differences that distinguish the two.
One difference should be pointed out from the outset, as a means of framing the discussion: In the Renaissance, Power earned wealth; in the Age of Exploration, the two were on a more-or-less equal footing; in the Age Of Sail, money produces power.
1. The Educated Elite
The peerage is no longer able to lay claim to the right to rule by decree, but they remain wealthy landowners; the source of their power has shifted, as has (to some extent) what they can and can’t do with it, but the power itself remains. What’s vanished to a certain extent is any entitlement to advantage; although they start life with advantages, nonetheless. It is then up to the members of the Peerage to convert the potential represented by those advantages into wealth and power.
Those who succeed in doing so remain in an elite social class, with a second group of successful newcomers hot on their heels; the latter having earned (or stolen) vast wealth, and leveraged that into positions of power and privilege, they lack only the inherited prestige of titled ancestry.
With their traditional sources of income often diverted into the hands of others, estates begin to come under economic threat for the first time, and the easiest means of addressing this problem is to arrange marriages between those with the titles and those with the wealth to support those titles, conferring legitimacy on the latter and prosperity on the former.
One of the biggest advantages that the peerage can offer its children is a first-rate education, one that qualifies them for positions of authority and command. With the newfound dominance of wealth as the source and measure of power, this ensures that the elite are in positions that enable them to dominate, economically. To some extent, this buffers them from the changes, giving rise to the trope of the layabout inheritor of wealth and privilege who assume entitlement by reason of privileged birth – an entitlement that the ‘real world’ eventually beats out of them.
For the first time, then, there is a significant pathway for downward social mobility from the ranks of the formerly privileged, and a sense that titles have to be earned, and re-earned over and over again. There were always such pathways, but they were previously seen as ignoble falls from grace; now they are perceived as justice meted out by harsh reality. This counterbalances, to some extent, the upward social mobility that arrived in the Age of Exploration.
2. Politics Of The Wealthy
With positions under threat of poverty and irrelevance, and power in the hands of the wealthy regardless of origins, politics as something distinct from relationships between the noble families of Europe, and distinct from the internal politics of Theological bodies, emerges. Politics is sometimes referred to as ‘the game that never ends’, with every day presenting a new challenge to prestige and authority; this is very much a modern perspective on the subject, and one that derives from this era.
3. Brilliance Alone
Another indication of how significantly lives had transformed can be found in the treatment of natural genius. In days gone by, no matter how gifted a peasant might have been, talent was rarely recognized unless it happened to apply to a narrow band of ‘acceptable’ pursuits; social class restrictions dominated. In the Renaissance, it became a signal of prestige to unearth these talented people and sponsor their endeavors, but this was still something of a hit-and-miss affair.
The Age of Exploration saw it become possible for the best of the best to rise from lower-class birth to high social position, but it was usually necessary to hitch one’s wagon to someone already possessed of privilege in order to use them as a stepping-stone; even the archetypal example offered, Columbus, was dependent on the continued success of the wealthy families that he represented; had they failed, at least some of the blame would have landed at his doorstep, potentially bringing his social ascent to an end. His own success and ability helped stave off that downfall, so both were well-served by the arrangement, until he no longer needed their commercial patronage.
In the Age Of Sail, even this patronage became less important, because there were now other sources of wealth. The brilliant innovator could now approach men of wealth directly, and – should those men be convinced of the potential offered by the innovator – could have their research funded. For the first time, brilliance alone presented a pathway to a form of prosperity and privilege that had evolved to meet the needs of those who qualified to receive it.
This opened up the number of clever people who were able to contribute to society, and the accumulated benefits they produced for their societies are the source of the great acceleration in learning that became so noticeable in the 20th century. At one point in time, it was easily possible for a witness to the first object leaving the solar system to have been alive and aware of events when the first heavier-than-air flight occurred. Such individuals would now be 120 years of age, so it is unlikely to still be true, but twenty years ago, there would have been a number of centenarians who meet the description.
4. The Ascension of Economic Power
The treasure-troves being brought into the economies of Europe by the colonists and exploiters had delayed the eclipsing of the old Nobility, but wealth ‘there for the taking’ was a finite resource, and could only delay the inevitable. Increasingly, it became necessary to invest time, money, sweat, and blood before potential earnings became actual ones. Commercial operations, used to the concept of such investments, thrived and prospered even more than individuals.
To a certain extent, this could be seen as a continuation of the trend toward decentralized wealth and privilege; no longer focused on discrete individuals, but diffused throughout the administrative leadership of a collective with the singular purpose of pursuing profit.
Economic power was increasingly the dominant force within society, taking control of the resources that had once been the exclusive domain of those with birthrights amongst the peerage. To those living in such times, it must have seemed that this development had already been taken to its logical extreme – from our privileged positions, we now know better, but one would have been prescient indeed to foresee the age of steam and the robber barons and captains of industry that it made possible.
The extent to which economic power dominated can be observed through another factor: tithing and the common bartering of goods were practices that had largely been shed from society over the course of the Renaissance, and the last vestiges had died out in the Age Of Exploration. Everyone, from tenant farmer to landowner, received payment in currency, paid taxes on those receipts, and spent the balance (if any) as they saw fit – with a myriad of opportunists presenting alternatives on which to divest such pittances. Many such pittances created prosperity, and many such sources of prosperity created wealth.
In politics, too, these developments played a part. For the first time, a sense of national identity arose that was divorced from, or at least at arms’ remove, from the noble families who ruled.
5. The East India Trading Company
Perhaps the most powerful example of mercantile economic power is the rise of the East India Trading Company. Without looking it up, how many can name the founders and directors of this famous and infamous institution? I can’t, and I’m reasonably well-informed on the subject, but there is a view that these individuals are less important than the company that they ruled.
To be fair, much of what is known or perceived about the East India Trading Company is fiction, a blending together of the stories of two different entities: The Dutch East India Company and the East India Company of Britain, together with occasional contributions from the histories of other institutions such as the French East India Company and the Swedish East India Company (sensing a common thread, here?) Conflating all of these into a mythical super-organization is false-to-fact but resonates so strongly with the twentieth-century experiences of mega-corporations that it was, perhaps, inevitable.
There was also a Genoese one, a Danish one, and an Austrian one – and that’s not an exhaustive list!
Perhaps the best place to start in comprehending the overlaps and proper attribution of historical roles played by this plethora of institutions is with this disambiguation page, from which that list (and its links) derive. Note the timelines of the different organizations, which are listed in sequence of their founding.
Although it was not the first East India company to be founded to exploit trade with India, the dominant player in modern perceptions is the Dutch East India Company, more accurately titled the United East India Company. This amalgamated several existing companies to form the first joint-stock company in the world, in which any resident of the United Provinces of the Netherlands could buy or sell shares through several secondary markets, one of which became the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. It was granted a 21-year monopoly by the Dutch government to trade in Asia, possessed quasi-government powers including the ability to make laws, wage wars, imprison and execute convicts, negotiate treaties, mint its own currency, and establish colonies. Statistically, the VOC eclipsed its rivals in the Asian trade between 1602 and 1796, during which time it sent almost a million Europeans to work in the Asian trading theater on 4,785 ships. The rest of Europe combined sent 882,412 people over a similar time-frame.
The nearest rival to the VOC was the English (later British) East India Company, which had a total of 2,690 ships and shipped a mere one-fifth of the tonnage of the Dutch company. At its peak, though, the EIC was considered the largest corporation in the world, and it seized control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and colonized a number of areas in Southeast Asia, using its 260,000 soldiers – twice the size of the British Army of the time. Eventually, it would eclipse the VOC, but only after the latter had ceased operations; it had a profound impact the global balance of trade, and were almost single-handed in creating the British Empire.
That’s how dominant economic power became in this era – private corporations had more power and wealth than governments, who had more power and authority than the historical peerage.
6. The Plight Of The Commons
Just because there was a pathway out of poverty for the cream of the naturally-gifted, and the poor were viewed as cogs in the economic machinery, that didn’t do much to better the lives of those who didn’t meet the standard of being exceptional. With little power over their own economic positions, it must have seemed to many that only the names of their masters had changed. Other people dictated how much their labors and products were worth, and how much they had to pay for access to the land that made farming and farm produce possible, and so on.
It was never formally described as such, but it was nevertheless a form of wage slavery, one in which the poor were ground up by the machinery of society for the betterment of the already-prosperous and wealthy.
7. The Slave Trade
Of course, even the poorest were better off than those victimized to the ultimate extreme of enslavement. This was a means of getting a day’s labor done while only spending a pittance of what it would have cost to pay someone to perform the same work. Although I deliberately left it off the list, slaves were another of those natural resources that were exploited starting in the Age of Exploration.
The increased workforce made expansion possible that would otherwise have taken decades if it were economically-possible at all, revealing another operating principle of modern economics – opportunities for employment will expand, in any prosperous economy, to the limits of the available workforce.
Connection to Now
There is a resonance with the current economic situation in our post-COVID world, at least here in Australia (and I see many similarities with the US economic situation) in that many businesses, especially in the agricultural sector had grown reliant on cheap labor imported from elsewhere. With Covid, that mobile workforce was largely halted, forcing businesses to adapt to employing locals; because the work is hard and pays relatively poorly, many viewed these as undesirable jobs, but even a partial employment boost was enough to empty the pool of available labor, leaving many operations struggling to recruit the workers that they needed for continued growth. Combining this with the pent-up demand for goods and services and the strain on economic supply chains and you have a high-demand low-supply situation that inevitably demands price rises (so that businesses can recruit in a constricted labor market). Where this will lead is beyond the scope of this part of this series, but was its original purpose – simply because of the high level of misinformation that I was seeing on the subject.
Personally, I find the concept of slavery to be repugnant, even as I am forced to accept the historical reality. It doesn’t matter that some were not abused; enough were, and it remains an affront that they had no power to alter their circumstances, being completely dependent on the goodwill of their ‘masters’. In many ways, this was a more modern recapitulation of the system of serfs and peasants, as though the emancipation of the lowest rungs of society demanded that these indentured laborers be replaced in order that those who profited from the exploitation of the workforce could continue to do so. This is an attitude that encompasses many aspects of my gaming worlds, however unrealistic it might be – slavers are always the bad guys and those who fight the practice are heroes, however flawed in other aspects of their personality they might be. Others may not feel this to the same extent or strength; it’s a bias that I’m happy to acknowledge.
Slavery was rife and expanding throughout the age of Sail. It was taken as the right of the social betters from Europe to dominate and exploit the ‘social inferiors’ – islanders, indigenous populations, and African natives. It took time for this to change, and even now the process can be considered incomplete.
The economics of the slave trade have to be understood as an essential component of the broader economic times; and not something that can be conveniently ignored, however uncomfortable a subject it might be.
8. Genre: Arrrh, There be Pirates
Strictly speaking, Pirates are a feature of the Age Of Discovery that preceded the Age Of Sail. The Pirates Of The Caribbean movies are set in the more contemporary era, however, and found their stories on the premise of the last dregs of the more noble past age confronting the reality of the modern day, of romanticism vs a harsh political and economic reality.
This underpinning gives a greater resonance between a modern audience and the characters of the time, enlarging the popularity of the whole genre, but in and of itself, it’s not enough.
My Pulp co-GM and I have frequently discussed the concepts of niche genres and come to the conclusion that such only really succeed in the era of Blockbusters by using infusions of something else. There was a time – Douglas Fairbanks etc – when a Pirate movie could stand on its own feet and be profitable, but the genre waned as the 20th century unfolded. A few attempts in the later 20th century to re-fire the genre, such as Master And Commander, didn’t flop but didn’t set the movie world on fire, either.
Pirates Of The Caribbean succeeded by ladeling in great infusions of fantasy, a few horror overtones, and drenching the whole in a cloak of comedy. Each of these brought in additional support from a different community of fans, and the combination was enough to create a hit. But that subtle philosophic element underpins everything, throwing in a broader context to the swashbuckling.
Seventh Sea is the premium representative of the Pirates genre in RPGs (and on of the outstanding crowdfunding success stories in TTRPGs. It also throws in slabs of fantasy and some deeper philosophical territory to underpin the game world, substituting exploration and politics and action-adventure for much of the comedy of POTC; and yet, I would lay odds that most Seventh-Sea campaigns occasionally – ‘lapse’ is the wrong word – into comic overtones, if not into genuine farce. Most campaigns do, regardless of genre, to be fair; very little can be grim and gritty and serious all the time without a little sunshine for contrast, every now and then.
I don’t think we’ll ever be able to fully extricate the occasional burst of lightheartedness from the Pirate genre. It’s here to stay. The combination also resonates with another, more recent hit, this one set in deep space – the Guardians Of The Galaxy movie series. Strip away the super-heroics and the sci-fi elements, and what you are left with is an expression of the same swlect-band-against-the-world philosophic underpinning and the same comedic overtones.
9. Exploration to Colonialism and Expansion
Another significant difference between this era and that which preceded it is the psychological shift from exploration and looting / pillaging to systematic exploitation of resources. As described earlier, the wealth that was easy money for the taking had all been taken; what remained was greater in total value, but would require more to extract.
The resulting exploitation often came in a package deal with colonial attitudes. These undervalued native cultures and civilization, even to the point of trying to stamp these out (generally unsuccessfully) and overvalued the worth of ‘western’ society, largely by setting the metrics of measurement to suit themselves and elevating technological prowess to primacy amongst them. There is no doubt that these contributions to local societies were valuable, but the technological ascendancy did not equate to superiority in other fields, like ethics and morality. Just the opposite, it sometimes seems – but that’s because we are judging the whole based on the worst excesses and not the general standard.
Those ‘worst excesses’ were deplorable, there can be no doubt. Whether we’re talking about the Indian subcontinent, the Opium Wars, the dispossession of Native Americans and Canadians, or the abuse of Islanders, and Australian First Nations peoples, there’s plenty of dirt to go around.
Another contentious element (from a modern perspective) is the conversion and proselytizing of the natives to the religious beliefs of the West. If you are a believer, this is entirely justifiable under the notion of saving the souls of the natives; if you aren’t, its using dogma and religion to claim temporal authority via a religious back-door. Frankly, I don’t think there is<./em> a right answer in this aspect of colonialism; for what the religious authorities did to be “wrong”, you first have to believe that they did not believe that they were doing the “right thing”; without that guilty secret, the worst they can be accused of is misjudgment and arrogance, because if they truly believed, they had no other choice but to be driven by that belief.
Of course, the enslavement of some is the most egregious of these activities, as stated earlier – at least in my view. Doing better than that is, as the saying goes, a low bar to slither over.
The colonies were designed and intended to force the local populations into a global market for the goods and products that they could supply, an economic driver aimed at profiteering to benefit those Europeans who sponsored and established the colonies. That’s the economic reality that has to be taken into account in any analysis of the era.
10. More Rags To Riches
Administration of these colonies opened up still more channels for rags-to-riches stories. You could enlist as a sailor or man-at-arms, work your way up in military rank, retire from that and release yourself into an administrative position, and climb the social ladder until returning to your home ports with wealth and a record of ‘public service’ that made you a respectable member of society.
I have no doubt that some of those who followed this pathway sincerely tried to do the best that they could for the natives given over to their authority; the holy books at the root of the religions of the time, as now, were replete with instructions to care for others, be generous and honest, and so on, and these would have been taken to heart be many. But there were none to stay impulses toward domination, and plenty of opportunity for frustration to spill over into hostility when the natives forcefully assimilated ‘refused’ to see the ‘benefits’ of assimilation.
10a. Gold Fevers
I find it enlightening to contrast and compare an aspect of the era that followed with the colonialism of the Age Of Sail: Gold Fever and the Gold Rushes, in particular those of North America and here in my native Australia. Gold Fever led the victims to stake their entire existence on the prospect of striking it rich, and excused any lengths to which one would go in pursuit of that goal. The colonies were simply a less-directly valuable ‘gold’, and the resulting imperialism was the consequence of the blind pursuit of that ‘fortune’.
The Gold Rushes serve as a functional metaphor for the colonial exploitation of existing populations – right down to those who profited from the sale of ‘kit’ to those out to make a ‘name’ for themselves. Throw in the arrogance of assumed cultural superiority, and the recipe is complete; in the quest for wealth through dominion, any brutality or injustice was tolerable, when the ‘fever’ was at its height.
I bear this in mind whenever an analogous situation arises in a game, be it a government ‘trading’ with Orcs or a space colony which has been established on a world already inhabited. Even in an era of enlightenment, unless there is constant supervision, a cycle of excess and exploitation will arise.
11. Genre: The Wild West
I’ve never been a big fan of Westerns, for some reason. I’ve never played in, or run, a Wild West RPG. Nevertheless, there have been the occasional isolated example that has penetrated my defensive armor against such things – movies like Evil Roy Slade, TV series like F Troop, and the misadventures of Cattlepunk in Knights Of The Dinner Table, to name three. So my ability to exert any sort of expertise in dealing with this genre is limited and largely second-hand.
There are, for example, a lot of similarities between elements of the Superhero genre and the concepts that lie at the heart of the Wild West of American Myth, and I have extensive experience and expertise in the Superheroic genre that can be translated across that genre divide. All of which means that there’s the potential for me to offer advice and analysis of substance, but readers should probably take my contributions with a grain of salt; they may look good in theory, but have no practical value.
So, here’s my take on the Wild West Genre, for whatever it’s worth: The genre, as a whole, straddles two different eras: that of Sail (which is why it’s being referenced now), and the age of steam that follows. The broader concepts can be subdivided into three general categories.
- The Exploration Throwback – pioneering explorations into the unknown that are more strongly related to the Age Of Discovery and provide an outlet for those who yearn for the far horizon and being the first to find or do something. This aspect of the pioneering spirit is the one that was tapped to create Star Trek when it was sold to Paramount Studios and Desilu as “Wagon Train To The Stars”.
- The Outsider Of Justice – a loner stumbles across an isolated and lawless town and is persuaded to become the lawman who will pacify it. Or the independent-minded lawman dispatched from a distant authority to become law and order in the lawless west. This is the part of the Western Myth that was actually co-opted into Star Trek, and its also the part that resonates most strongly with the superheroic genre, and a lot of general action-adventure movies. Heck, there’s a lot of resonance with Dr Who, too.
- The quest for life and prosperity (and sometimes redemption) in an unforgiving environment surrounded by hostile forces – with the Wilder aspects of the Wild West muzzled (if not tamed), it becomes possible to eke out a living while dreaming of prosperity. Challenges will need to be overcome, but there is vast potential for social and economic gain if you can meet those demands. I’ve drawn on this concept any number of times in all sorts of genres, from Science Fiction settings to Fantasy adventures – sometimes, these are a gateway to a larger background, sometimes they are part of an ongoing series of smaller-scale confrontations.
Obviously, the last is the one that contains the Gold Rushes, and the Barbary Coast, and driving the Railroads west, and therefore are the part that crosses over into the Age Of Steam (no steam, no railroads!).
In all cases, finding some analogy that you can get a handle on is the key to unlocking the genre if you aren’t already an aficionado. With this foundation, I would not hesitate to run a Western adventure or campaign if I were asked to.
But it would be critical to understand the economics – where does the wealth come from, who has it, what are they doing with it, what opportunities does it present to those who don’t have it, and how do those without, survive?
12. Revolution Is In The Air
The rise of individualism, the redistribution of power and authority into a colonial mold, inevitably leads to revolutions as those with some power come into conflict with those who traditionally held power in their own right. Although history contains a few other examples that could be used, the one that everyone knows something about is the American Revolution. Colonial Rebellion, sometimes successful and sometimes suppressed, are the hallmarks of a paradigm shift into the Age Of Steam – even though they may predate or post-date the actual rise of Steam and Industry. .
Such revolutions and attempted revolutions are an inevitable response to the abuses of colonialism, and usher in an age of political turbulence that lead to the Victorian Gaslight period, a fertile setting for RPGs of many different and diverse genres.
But that’s for next time. For now, it’s time to wrap up this post and revise the series plan – and I’ll see you all next time!
Even in this relatively primitive economy, you can see some of the trends and practices evolving that we take for granted in the modern era, but the evolution of economic model in our history took a turn before those trends really manifested themselves, going from an Absolute Monarchy to a Limited Monarchy, and in the process sewing the seeds of both the Pre-industrial and Steam-age economies.
In part 1:
- Introduction
- General Concepts and A Model Economy
- The Economics of an Absolute Monarchy (The Early Medieval)
In part 2:
- The Economics of Limited Monarchies (The Later Medieval & Renaissance)
- In-Game Economics: Fantasy Games
In this part:
- The Renaissance, revisited
- Pre-Industrial Economics I: The Age of Exploration
- Pre-Industrial Economics II: The Age of Sail
Planned for part 4:
- Industrial Economies I: The Age Of Steam
- In-game Economics: Gaslight-era
Planned for part 5:
- Industrial Economics II: The Age Of Internal Combustion
- Industrial Economics III: War & Depression
- In-Game Economics: Pulp-era
Planned for parts 6-7:
- Tech Economics I: The Gold Standard
- Tech Economics II: Resources & Regulation
- Tech Economics III: Inflation & Hyper-inflation
- Tech Economics IV: Commercialism, Deregulation, Privatization, & Greed
Planned for parts 8-10:
- Digital Economics
- Post-Pandemic Economics
- In-Game Economics: Modern
- Future Economics I: Dystopian
- In-Game Economics: Dystopian Futures
- Future Economics I: Utopian
- In-Game Economics: Utopian Futures
- In-Game Economics: Space Opera
The game plan at the moment is to do 1-2 parts of the series, then interrupt it for an unrelated stand-alone article on some other subject before resuming. But don’t hold me to that schedule, it’s subject to change without notice!
- Economics In RPGs 1: The Early Medieval
- Economics In RPGs 2: The Later Medieval
- Economics In RPGs 3: Pre-Industrial Eras
- Economics In RPGs 4: The Age Of Steam
- Economics In RPGs 5a: Electric Age Ch. 1
- Economics In RPGs 5b: Electric Age Ch. 2
- Economics In RPGs 6a: Pre-Digital Tech Age Ch 1
- Economics In RPGs 6b: Pre-Digital Tech Age Ch 2
- Economics In RPGs 6c: Pre-Digital Tech Age Ch 3
- Economics In RPGs 7: Economic Realities
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 1
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 2
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 3
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 4
- Economics In RPGs 8: The Digital Age Ch 5
- Economics In RPGs 9: In-Game Economics
Discover more from Campaign Mastery
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Comments Off on Economics In RPGs 3: Pre-Industrial Eras