This entry is part 4 in the series Economics In RPGs
Welcome & General Introduction

With each passing entry in this series, we get to ground that is more familiar to all of us – either part of, or directly related to, our everyday lives, or part of the collective zeitgeist concerning the forces that influence those lives. This makes analysis easier (I know more of what I’m talking about and understand it in greater detail) and harder (because this isn’t a history lesson, I want to make these posts interesting to read and containing some novel content that readers will not have previously encountered – and that gets harder because readers also know the subject better).

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.

From A Writing Perspective

I try never to hide things ‘behind a curtain’ here at Campaign Mastery. Not only does a brief discussion of progress on the series (and elsewhere) help give each article an immediacy that might otherwise be lacking, but you never know what will provide the spark of inspiration to a reader. On top of that, I think that relating to readers on a more one-to-one basis – just friends talking together – makes my writing more personable and more accessible.

It’s always interesting, for example, to compare plans to delivered product. When I outlined this week’s post in (optimistic) hopes of including it in Part 3, it had 22 sections with, I thought, a nice logical flow from one section to another, but I hadn’t actually put much thought into the content – too busy focusing on Part 3 and on the many other big projects that I have underway (two of which have now been completed, and several others having advanced in the last week, BTW).

I found time in the intervening week to contemplate the story that is to unfold in this part of the series, and found a different narrative flow – one that I think is (gasp!) better than what was there originally, because it provides scope for some of those original thoughts and perspectives. One of the immediate consequences was highlighting the absence of some material that should have been included, but wasn’t.

This involved reordering some of what was already listed for inclusion, and the addition of some seven additional sections, taking the total to 29 – not counting these preliminaries.

Adventure Parallels

I see a lot of parallels in those changes with the way adventures develop in the course of writing them. I don’t want to get side-tracked too far, but the point is worth explaining, in extremely abbreviated fashion. If you’re looking for more details, consult One word at a time: How I (usually) write a Blog Post – the process is essentially the same. Incidentally, that also shows that this is hardly the first time that the equivalence has come to my attention!

Okay, so my plotlines all start as a single line or paragraph summary:

    A happens, B happens, C happens, A causes D to happen as a result of B, C blocks the obvious solution, D players decide on a solution, E they implement it.

(That’s about as generic as I can make it).

How the pieces of the puzzle interrelate will be different every time, and often rooted in existent campaign circumstances and player-developed characterization & personal histories. This then gets broken down into bullet points:

  • A happens
  • B happens
  • C happens
  • A causes D to happen as a result of B
  • C blocks the obvious solution
  • D players decide on a solution
  • E they implement the solution.

Each of these bullet points then gets broken down into individual events that collectively tell the ‘story’ contained in that “Act” of the adventure. Sometimes, a single PC might be involved, sometimes it will be all of them, the details vary.

A through C comprise three important elements of any adventure – conveying background events that the PCs would be aware of, relaying where the PCs are at the start of their involvement in the adventure, and describing exactly how the PCs come to be involved in the adventure. A fourth element that I usually try to include is advancing the personal lives of the PCs in some fashion, frequently involving players making decisions that won’t impact the PCs right away but which will profoundly influence them at some future point.

  • A happens
    • Scene A1
    • Scene A2
    • Scene A3
  • B happens
    • Scene B1
    • Scene B2
    • Scene B3
  • ….

Here’s the connection: Quite often, when writing (say) Scene C3, I will discover the need to establish something earlier in the adventure, in an A or B section. I might also discover that the adventure will play better, will make more sense, and have more consistent characterization, if something from A or B does not come to the immediate attention of the players. So there is an organic growth in sections, and some redaction, and some conflation (collapsing two scenes into one), and some misdirection, and quite a lot of re-sequencing.

That’s the big advantage of bullet points and a simple word processor – I can move these bullet points around, up or down, as I find necessary or desirable. I can even build alternate paths into the adventure so that there’s scope for greater independence on the part of the players – no railroads in sight.

And, of course, once actual play – or, in the case of an article, writing – starts, all bets are off; this is a plan, not a road map.

One final illustration of the process and results, and I’ll move on:

The next adventure for the Adventurer’s Club campaign is “Lucifer Rising”. The “A, B, and C” sections (plus the D section – PCs personal lives) – comprised about 6 scenes for each PC, with one of these leading directly to the main adventure. So my co-GM and I carefully listed circumstances and developments for each PC, and planned a round-robin in which each PC gets an even share of the spotlight and no-one ever gets two scenes in succession.

When the time came to actually turn these into prepped-and-illustrated text, it became necessary to foreshadow some things, and break some large scenes up, and shuffle a few things around, and the upshot is that the “A through C plus D” now comprise 11 rounds of the round-robbin, and half the adventure, maybe more – and half those scenes didn’t even exist in the original outline, but were designed to bring the party together at the right time to participate in the main adventure.

It was once written that one of the greatest pleasures that can be found exists in creating order from chaos, or words to that effect. That’s what this is – a chaotic maelstrom of plot ingredients that have to be assembled in the right sequence and quantities to tell the singular story of these PCs in this set of circumstances encountering this specific plotline and wrestling it to some sort of conclusion.

Okay, so with that out of the way, let’s move on to what we’re actually here to talk about: Economics in the Age Of Steam! First, the usual preliminaries:

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 – repeated from Part 3

So far, I’ve established a number of important principles.

  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

The general principles contained within these bullet points are important enough that I’m going to be repeating them in the ‘opening salvos’ of the remaining articles in the series.

Industrial Era I: The Age Of Steam

There are those who would argue that the Advent of the (various) East India Trading Companies was the suppression of individuality and the rise of the Corporate Culture – certainly, that was the subtext of the second and third Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. While these events certainly began the process, I think the conclusion draws too long a bow.

Nevertheless, the rise of corporate power to rival that of governments, who had risen to usurp much of the power previously vested in nobility, was a seminal transformation that would come to full flower only in the Age Of Steam. Without this preliminary influence, the latter era would be profoundly different; the fact that the rise of some corporate power of this type was a consequence of dominoes already in motion, and hence more-or-less inevitable, makes no difference.

But it’s worth remembering, for context, exactly how powerful these non-governmental corporate entities were: they largely reduced Government to the roles of ‘Caretakers of the Economy’ and ‘Makers of laws regarding the interaction between corporations and everyone else’. The wealthy owners and stockholders must have felt like they were sitting pretty, perched at the top of the pyramid, the undoubted apex predators of the modern world. A pity, then, that so little was known at the time of the fate of the Dinosaurs and the warnings that fate holds for other Apex predators: when conditions change, survival is threatened from unexpected directions.

1. Rise of the Common Man I: Democracy

Democracy wasn’t a new idea; they had a form of it in ancient Greece, though it wasn’t quite what we would recognize as fitting that term, today. Some writers use the term “modern democracy” to distinguish between the two.

The seeds for ‘Modern Democracy” were sewn in the Magna Carta, way back when. Although those seeds had sent forth buds and shoots in subsequent centuries, it was as the Age Of Steam approached that they came to full flower, in the form of a tax rebellion in an English Colony.

Personal studies in ensuing years have shown that the simplified and sanitized mythos of the formation of the United States Of America are, well, a simplified and sanitized form of a far richer and more complex story. To understand it more fully, you need to appreciate the European influence on Benjamin Franklin (especially the influence of the Bohemians), and how these were translated through his publications into a philosophical doctrine; you need to understand the business and commercial realities extant in the Colonies at the time, especially those of Boston; you need to acknowledge the one arena in which Nobility still trumped Politics, and Government still trumped Commerce, War, and that a conflict between France and England led to attempts to clamp down and ‘bleed’ the Colonies of resources that could be used to fight that war; and you need to follow a trail of breadcrumbs through history that led to the Revolution, and the way a group of progressive intellectuals and hard-nosed businessmen came together to transform the philosophies inculcated by Franklin and others into the foundations of a new type of Political relationship between Government and Common Man.

All of which is far too complicated to go into in any further detail here and now! Suffice it to say that Government was rendered a servant of the People (at least in theory), giving the ordinary citizen more (collective) authority and power than ever before.

2. Power distributed

What’s interesting about this is that this represented a contract between the newly-formed proto-government and its citizens (who were given no say in the matter but who grabbed it with both hands – eventually and gradually), completely cutting out the middle-man, the corporations. That it was a continuation of the trend toward distributed power that had begun, arguably, with the Magna Carta was not given a lot of attention at the time – though it is worth noting that the Magna Carta remains at the heart of the American legal system to this day, renamed “Common Law”.

What was new was that the new political structure also distributed responsibility amongst the citizenry, who then conferred it on representatives to act on their behalf. If something needs doing, you tell your representative, and if enough of your fellow citizens agree, they smell it on the wind and either work to have that something done, or risk losing their selection as the representatives of that block of citizenry.

Cynics may suggest that this distributed power didn’t amount to much more than a clever con-job by the Founding Fathers; as anyone who has studied Australian Referendums knows, it’s hard to get a lot of people to agree on a lunch menu, never mind anything more substantial. The wonder of American Democracy is not that it is so hard to get amendments to the Constitution passed, it’s that so many of them were passed, despite the difficulty. Thus, the real authority remained vested right where the Founding Fathers wanted it – in their hands.

This cynical appraisal falls short, in my book. Certainly, with each additional State recognized, the difficulties of further Constitutional amendment increased exponentially, but the Prohibition folly shows that it was still possible. But it did create the ongoing tension between small government and big government, the one attempting to claw power back from the central authority and the other authorizing that central authority to act on behalf of all the smaller holders of power.

3. Rise of the Common Man II: The Gold Rushes

I mentioned these in relation to the Ages of Exploration and Sail, but the biggest Gold Rushes occurred in the Age Of Steam. Individuals could accrue vast wealth from virtually nowhere, and the mobility conferred on them in those eras put individuals in a position to capitalize on the opportunity – if they were brave enough to risk it all. The mythic image of the eccentric prospector has become ingrained in the modern sensibility, but this downplays and satirizes the boldness – or desperation – that was a necessary element in the makeup of those fortune-hunters.

Notably, it was often not those who actually found the precious metals who actually grew wealthy as a result; more commonly, it was those who provided services to those rugged individualists. There was a time, for example, when Laundry was carried by sailing ship from the California goldfields to Hawaii for cleaning and back again – a sweet racket for someone, to be sure!

At the time, this harsh reality did not intrude upon the myth; popular perception was that the lucky could “strike it rich” overnight. Nevertheless, the mere fact that it was possible must have had a profound effect on people, even those not directly engaged in ‘seeking their fortune’ in such financially-perilous pursuits, this is a factor that often seems under-appreciated, but it helps to explain the opportunism that manifests in the second Industrial Era, and the stock-owning frenzy that ultimately led to the Great Depression.

Rags-to-riches stories were not only possible, but everyone knew they were possible; they simply had to wait until fate presented them with their chance, then be brave enough to take a chance and seize the opportunity. This adventurousness plays out in a number of different ways through the time period.

4. An End To Slavery

There is, understandably, a lot of focus on the American divestiture of the slave trade, created by the melodrama of the Civil War; the fact is that Slavery was already dead as a trade through most of the rest of the Western World by the time that conflict started. In many respects, this was slavery’s “last stand” against the progressive forces within society that sought to outlaw it. Although not fully stamped out as a practice by the outcome, it was certainly a milestone and the last chance to reverse the course of events in this social arena.

It’s really difficult to put yourself into the mindset of the newly-emancipated. So much of your perceptions of reality must have been shaped by the events that had shaped your life, and even extremely-accessible depictions such as “Roots” couldn’t fully immerse the viewer in that mindset, though they tried. The TV adaption of Arthur Hailley’s novel was first aired in 1977; I was 14 at the time, the eldest of four children, but all of us (save my youngest brother, not yet 5) watched it avidly. You can judge the impact that it had by my attitude toward the institution of slavery, revealed in part 3.

Certain constituents of that mindset can be appreciated, though – a sense of liberty and freedom, a renewed capacity for pride and self-respect, trepidation over an unknown future, and a sense of hope and opportunity, all must have contributed to the psyche of the emancipated. And there are those themes again, resonating with the attitudes in others created by the awareness of what was possible.

What killed the slave trade? Idealism aside, I don’t know that any explanation that I’ve heard or read fully accounts for it, partly because of the focus on the American experience in that ending. Not that the ending was uniform or complete; there are associational links to Apartheid, which lasted into the 1990s. Certainly, the acceptance of the principles of human rights which found such firm expression in the US Constitution played a part (since those principles are fundamentally incompatible with the practice), but – as I pointed out earlier – the slave trade was already dead or dying elsewhere by the time of the US Civil War. Britain held in 1772 that Slavery was not recognized in British Law, for example. In Scotland, slaves worked in the coal mines until 1799, when an act was passed which established their freedom and made the practice illegal.

Ultimately, I think that economics were what killed the slave trade; mechanization made it possible to do more work with lower overheads without slaves. This enabled men and women of conscience to exercise those consciences, while weakening resistance on the part of the unprincipled and exploitative. Supply vastly exceeded demand, and (as usually happens in such cases), the market collapsed. History, in other words, wiped out the slave trade, and any other interpretation is simply putting a fair dress on an ugly reality. Oh, I have no doubt that there were a few idealists – there always are – but they were tilting at windmills until the social and economic conditions changed for the more progressive. I might wish it otherwise, but that’s a personal reaction.

An appreciation of historical dating

The other factor that is relevant is the popular misconception over when the US Civil War took place. Sure, most Americans can recite the dates (1861-65), but there is always the impression that this was a long time ago, even when discussing the Age of Steam, which started in 1712, or 1764, depending on what you consider the seminal event. Most simply date it to the 1760s and leave the nuances to one side. The key point is that the industrial revolution was already some 60-70 years underway by the time of the Civil War.

I suspect that people conflate the gunpowder weapons of the age of sail with those employed in the Civil War and those used in the War Of Independence, and think therefore that the Civil War and American Revolution were closer together than the Civil War and modern day are. One of the points made in discussing Throw Me A Life-line: A Character Background Planning Tool was that to characters who were adults in the 1930s (when our Pulp Campaign is set), the Civil War existed in living memory, and American Characters would almost certainly have heard first-hand stories from the events. Someone who was 20 in 1865 would be 65 in 1910; someone who was 30 in 1930 would have been ten years old in 1910. There’s plenty of overlap for Grandpa to tell his stories, and for the events of the time to have had a direct influence. Even if you advance the clock to 1938 – the current game year in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, more or less (we keep resetting the clock) – one’s parents would have been influenced by the Civil War, usually through the effect on their upbringing.

The other day, on Quora, someone posted a link to ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man”, which happened to include the date of the song – 1983. Two months from now, that song will be Forty years old. That still boggles my mind, because it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long – 2/3 of my lifetime!? 1/3 sounds about right…

This is important to understand. Adults past the age of 25-30 tend to interpret temporal distances relative to their adolescence onwards; add another 10 years to that, and it’s post-adolescence. I finished school in 1980, so (psychologically) that’s the end of my adolescent time, which would have started about 6 years earlier – call it 1971 to be precocious. My 25th birthday was in 1988, my 30th in 1993, and my 40th in 2003. With those markers in place, let’s place “Sharp-Dressed Man”: when it first came out, I had been an adult for 3 years (trivial) but my teens had started 12 years earlier – more than half of my lifetime. When I was 25, it was 5 years old, which was 1/5th (20%) of my total lifetime, 5/17ths of my post-youth period (~29%), and 5/8ths of my adult life old (40%). At the time, I would have thought of it in terms of the 20% figure, relatively recent. When I was 30, five years later, my perceptions would have shifted to an adjusted middle-figure (10/22nds = 45%) – so still a part of the second part of my life. When I hit 40, it would have been 20/23 of my adult life since it came out – cementing a perception that it was part of the soundtrack to my youth. The distance to it would have then been locked relative to the distance I felt removed from that youth – not very far at all, and certainly not as far removed as the calendar would have it.

The same is true of any other life event – if it happened to me past 25 years old, it is part of my adulthood; if it happened in the 7-12 years preceding that, it is part of my youth; and before that, it was either part of my childhood, or it predated me. Forty was just a few yesterdays ago, not a wholly-ridiculous twenty years! Nor does it seem like 12-going-on-13 years since Campaign Mastery started – it wasn’t in the last five years, so it wasn’t “recently”, but it wasn’t that long ago. Ten years, though, seems a LONG time…

Perceptions of time are inconsistent and easily led astray, is my point, and that plays into when people “feel” the Civil War took place.

A side-note

This can also go a long way toward explaining the differences in attitude to Civil Rights between Blacks & Whites. To whites, the battle was a long time ago, in the 1860s; to blacks, that was just round one in a fight that was only partially won with desegregation in the 1950s – and schools are now as segregated as they were in the 1960s, according to some. The 1950s are a LOT closer to ‘now” than the 1860s – and the scars are that much more fresh. I try to always bear this in mind when something related to the subject comes up.

5. The Role Of Government

Although it wasn’t there yet, the Age Of Steam comprised a transition between government as an enabler of business and manager of society to government as steward of the economy and voice of the people. It still had responsibility for treaties, and for the wars that resulted when those treaties were violated; increasingly, those treaties were about economic relations and trade, not politics or humanity.

Militaries still answered to the government – it was when that relationship broke down that a coup became likely, a pattern that is replicated to this day.

Even the status of government as framers of law was under pressure throughout the age of steam, in the name of providing a stable economic platform for business. This relationship would remain turbulent through subsequent eras – the New Deal used the weapon of business (money) to bolster the economic underpinnings of society while new regulations clawed back authority to the government of the day, but the fact that such regulation was necessary in the first place simply shows how much ground had been ceded to business in the name of prosperity.

6. Locomotives & Robber Barons

Several of these economic and social threads came together in the Age Of Steam to create the Robber Barons.

I’m a long-time fan of the 18xx railroad board game series. This led me to a game (“Railroad Tycoon” I think it was) in my Windows-98 days, in which a player took on the role of an entrepreneur of the railroad industry and competed against the others (computer players), each of which had a profile based on one of the Robber Barons of the railroad era.

Individuals could parley modest beginnings into vast fortunes by hitching their wagons to new industries such a transcontinental railroads. While some seed capital was necessary, those gifted with sufficiently silver tongues could convince others to lend their wealth and resources to business proposals, becoming investors in the business formed to administer the resulting operations.

These businessmen were often real pieces of work – ruthless, greedy, underhanded scoundrels. In reality, there were more of them outside the transport industry than there were within it, as the list provided by this Wikipedia page makes clear. Furs, Steel, Finance, Tobacco, Electric Power, Oil, Barbed Wire, Coal, Steamboats, Copper, and Timber are just some of the fields of enterprise of individuals identified as Robber Barons. Many of the names are also going to be familiar to readers: Astor, Carnegie, Gould, Harriman, Morgan, Rockefeller, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Hearst.

It was common practice for these wealthy entrepreneurs to donate ‘gifts’ to institutions – hospitals, universities and the like – or even to establish them from scratch. Institutions, Buildings, Chairs, & Schools would thus be named after the benefactor who was providing the cash, conferring a certain level of immortality.

At the same time, I can’t help but note the transformative effects that the railroads had on society. Uniform time in the UK resulted from the need to synchronize clocks at all railroad stations so that people could know when the trains would be there to convey them to their destinations, and the impact of the railroads came up time and time again in my research into the history of townships in Arkansas.

Prosperity rode on the steam locomotive, it seems. If the railroad passed through your town, or better yet, stopped there, it would bring trade and wealth; if it bypassed your town, it was at risk of withering and dying.

The railroads enhanced and amplified another existent trend from the age of Sail – travel for social and recreational reasons. It was now possible to take a trip to the seaside for a day or two, or hop down to the nearest major city for shopping and return upon the same day. In fact, the economic influence of a city over a region could be measured to at least some extent by the travel time on the rails.

7. Victorian Sweatshops, Workhouses, & Poorhouses

“In Britain, a workhouse was an institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment. (In Scotland, they were usually known as poorhouses.) The earliest known use of the term workhouse is from 1631.

“The origins of the workhouse can be traced to the Statute of Cambridge 1388, which attempted to address the labor shortages following the Black Death in England by restricting the movement of laborers, and ultimately led to the state becoming responsible for the support of the poor. However, mass unemployment following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the introduction of new technology to replace agricultural workers in particular, and a series of bad harvests, meant that by the early 1830s the established system of poor relief was proving to be unsustainable.

“The New Poor Law of 1834 attempted to reverse the economic trend by discouraging the provision of relief to anyone who refused to enter a workhouse. Some Poor Law authorities hoped to run workhouses at a profit by utilizing the free labor of their inmates. Most were employed on tasks such as breaking stones, crushing bones to produce fertilizer, or picking oakum using a large metal nail known as a spike.

“As the 19th century wore on, workhouses increasingly became refuges for the elderly, infirm, and sick rather than the able-bodied poor, and in 1929 legislation was passed to allow local authorities to take over workhouse infirmaries as municipal hospitals. Although workhouses were formally abolished by the same legislation in 1930, many continued under their new appellation of Public Assistance Institutions under the control of local authorities. It was not until the introduction of the National Assistance Act 1948 that the last vestiges of the Poor Law finally disappeared, and with them the workhouses.”

        — Wikipedia

Conditions

Although there were various attempts to use the labor of inmates for profit, or at least to make the poorhouses self-sustaining, whatever income could be obtained never matched the running costs.

Perpetually short of funds, the poorhouses were nightmarish places of last resort. Although slavery had been abolished in 1799, poorhouses frequently treated those in their care as little better than slaves. There was never enough money for adequate food, adequate clothing, or adequate healthcare.

“A government inquiry into conditions in the Andover workhouse in 1845 found that starving paupers were reduced to fighting over the rotting bones they were supposed to be grinding, to suck out the marrow.”

“Some Poor Law Unions opted to send destitute children to the British colonies, in particular to Canada and Australia, where it was hoped the fruits of their labor would contribute to the defense of the empire and enable the colonies to buy more British exports.”

        — Wikipedia, same article

It was quite common for the wealthier members of society to donate goods and money to the poorhouses, and this was often the difference between the poorhouse closing its doors or remaining viable.

It was also normal for whole families to enter the poorhouse at the same time – there was no-one to look after the children if a parent was forced into one by economic distress, so not placing them in a workhouse would have been both cruel and a potential death sentence. For those who were almost making ends meet, a compromise might be to place the children in such an institution until the parents got back on their feet. To the credit of many, these parents did return for their children after securing a more stable income, and there were also a few success stories of children who learned a trade sufficient to give them a secure, even prosperous, life as an adult.

Orphanages

“By the early nineteenth century, the problem of abandoned children in urban areas, especially London, began to reach alarming proportions.

“The workhouse system, instituted in 1834, although often brutal, was an attempt at the time to house orphans as well as other vulnerable people in society who could not support themselves in exchange for work.

“Conditions, especially for the women and children, were so bad as to cause an outcry among the social reform-minded middle-class; some of Charles Dickens’ most famous novels, including Oliver Twist, highlighted the plight of the vulnerable and the often abusive conditions that were prevalent in the London orphanages.

“Clamor for change led to the birth of the orphanage movement. In England, the movement really took off in the mid-19th century although orphanages such as the Orphan Working Home in 1758 and the Bristol Asylum for Poor Orphan Girls in 1795, had been set up earlier. Private orphanages were founded by private benefactors; these often received royal patronage and government oversight.”

        — Wikipedia

In The USA

“Orphanages were also set up in the United States from the early 19th century.

“In 1806, the first private orphanage in New York (the Orphan Asylum Society, now Graham Windham) was co-founded by Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, widow of Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

“Under the influence of Charles Loring Brace, foster care became a popular alternative from the mid-19th century.”

        — Wikipedia, same article

America didn’t just copy the Orphanage model through the Age Of Steam; according to historical research by the University Of Virginia, they also copied the poorhouse concept and relied on philanthropic donations to care for those who were poverty-stricken.

But there were a couple of alternatives that were also popular. “The contract system placed dependent persons under the care of a homeowner or farmer who offered to care for them for a lump sum. The process of “auctioning” the destitute resulted in an individual or family being placed with a local couple or family bidding the lowest amount of public funding needed to care for them. It should be noted the contract system and auctioning the poor were not prevalent outside rural or lightly populated areas. Part of the reason was evidence that the practice of entrusting the care of the poor to the lowest bidder essentially legalized abusive behavior and near starvation existence.”

        — Poor Relief in Early America by John E. Hansan, Ph.D. (2011) | Virginia Commonwealth         University Social Welfare History Project, retrieved May 22, 2023.

The haves and have-nots

These sections are included to show that despite the prospering of the middle and upper classes, there were some at the lower end of society who were left behind. Caring for these and other unfortunates was a vital element of the economies of the era.

Society is often, rather simplistically, divided into the “haves” and “have nots”; the problem is that people will fall into one category or the other based not on their true economic circumstances, but on the (often unspecified) commodity that they either “have” or “have not”. If the criteria is swimming pools, then I”m a “Have Not”, for example, but if the criteria is a roof over my head and regular food supply, then I’m a “have”.

The reality is that there is a whole spectrum of social economic standards, and individual cases who fall somewhere on the line between ‘filthy rich” and “homeless and destitute”. The lower down this scale that you go, the greater the dependence on government and social institutions like charities, and the smaller your economic clout.

How many homeless vote in elections? If the majority did so, would homeless programs receive a funding boost? The questions may be rhetorical, but the problem is not.

In prior ages, demand for workers outstripped supply, and the responsibility for those who were unable to contribute while primarily belonging to the family, was shared by the entire village or local population. There was often a military career or work as a laborer or miner for those with no other escape from poverty.

In the Age Of Steam, for the first time, the workforce begins to outstrip the economic need for workers, but there were no social safety nets. The poorhouses were the result.

Above the poverty-stricken are the poor, who have little wealth and little power, but who make ends meet, and above them are the lower-middle class, who can afford to buy things and have some level of discretionary spending, and so on up the economic ladder. Each step up increases individual wealth and power, but holds fewer members once past the middle class; collectively, they have less inherent political power as a class. However, wealth is a multiplier of political authority, especially in the US, so the wealthy tend to wield disproportionate power.

The end of the poorhouses

Ultimately, heightened prosperity through industry reached the point where governments and institutions could afford more humane alternatives to the poorhouses. Many became asylums or hospitals or ordinary schools, though those outcomes were largely features of the Age of Internal Combustion, to be dealt with in Part 5 of this series.

They went the way of the slave trade, and for the same reasons. Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the problem of the poorest in society, as homelessness shows.

8. Rise of the Common Man II: The Middle Class expands downwards

That’s not to say that there weren’t new standards of prosperity being set in this era, because there were. People who were no longer needed to tend farms migrated to the cities, and became lower-level tradesmen – chimney sweeps, street cleaners, laborers, and the like. Some learned a trade and became plumbers and builders – both necessary in order to house those migrating. Others became entertainers through natural ability or steady hard work.

The more prosperity there was, the more capacity for prosperity seemed to increase.

A key concept in economics is that a single dollar can produce many dollars of economic impact as it passes from one hand to another in exchange for goods and services. This gives rise to the concept of money ‘circulating’ in the economy. Individual to Retailer to wholesaler to manufacturer to financier/stockholder, with the various levels of government taking ‘their share’ at each step of the chain.

It can be argued that it’s only if too many of those dollars end up flowing into the hands of one individual who then holds onto them, that economic trouble results. Disparity in wealth is the result, but its’ arguable that philanthropy is a counterbalancing economic influence, at least in the Age Of Steam (as noted earlier).

It is, perhaps, also worth noting that philanthropy has made a bit of a comeback in recent times – Gates, Bezos, and Musk all have strong philanthropic histories – and all of them coinciding with an age in which economic disparity is again a serious concern.

9. The Responsibility Of The Gentry

Readers may have noticed that until this point, there’s been virtually no mention of the Gentry. They were once the dominant force, now they are a footnote.

Over the age of Sail and into the Age Of Steam, their responsibilities shifted; not only are they heads and architects of many social programs and charitable institutions, they are largely expected these days to pay their own way. They have taken on the role of authorizers of government and protector of the commons against excesses by the government; they provide a long-term stability that extends beyond election cycles.

That is, they do these things in places where they have not been abolished. The question then becomes, what has taken over these functions in places like the USA where this has occurred?

That’s a question whose answers change from era to era, but in some respects, the answer is always “No-one”. At other times, charities, non-profits, private philanthropists, or even the government itself have taken on part or all of that role.

Party Politics

Arguably, at times and to a limited extent, the two dominant political parties have also stepped into the breach – the Republican championing of small government helping keep the tax burden on the lower economic brackets moderate, and encouraging small businesses that can employ those without incomes, while the Democrats champion the environment in which they live, the educational system that can permit subsequent generations to escape the poverty trap, and other social aspects of their lives – at least in theory and according to the dogma of each party. And so long as they stick to those principles, both have valid points to make.

There were no political parties until after the American Revolution. That makes them a phenomenon of the Age Of Steam. The histories of the parties in North America is convoluted and not entirely relevant to this discussion; suffice it to say that what is articulated above were the party positions through to the election of Barak Obama in 2008. Since then, two parties have become polarized to such an extent that bipartisanship, negotiation, and cooperation sometimes seems an impossible dream.

They most definitely were not the positions of the dominant parties at the start of the American Adventure. George Washington ran unopposed in 1789 and 1792. In 1796, it was Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party against John Adams’ Federalists. Adams supported a strong central government and championed the commercial interests of the North, while Jefferson supported States Rights and the Agrarian interests of the South. Fascinatingly, while Adams was elected, several Federalists refused to vote for his chosen Vice-president, giving that position to Jefferson. A measure of how times have changed – the two made it work.

A key point to make is that where an individual stood on social issues would be defined by the politics of the day – you can’t blindly apply the demographics of today, the results won’t make sense.

10. General Education & the Discovery of Talent

More than had ever been the case before, the opportunity for talent to catapult one out of one social stratum into another was prevalent – but limited. Those consigned to the poorhouses arguably had less opportunity than others – but should their talents be recognized, the philanthropic connections made the connection to a sponsor far shorter and easier to bridge. The trick was to get noticed in the right way.

This is also the era in which the changing economic and social landscape encouraged education for the broader public, and not just the wealthy. Details will vary from one country to another, and should be researched when the question is relevant.

In The USA

In so many respects of their early society, America was derivative of the practices in England, so it is refreshing to observe that in this arena, they got there first.

“Colonial New England encouraged its towns to support free public schools funded by taxation. In the early 19th century, Massachusetts took the lead in education reform and public education with programs designed by Horace Mann that were widely emulated across the North. Teachers were specially trained in normal schools and taught the three Rs (of reading, writing, and arithmetic) and also history and geography. Public education was at the elementary level in most places.

“In 1823, Samuel Read Hall founded the first normal school, the Columbian School in Concord, Vermont, aimed at improving the quality of the burgeoning common school system by producing more qualified teachers.

“After the Civil War (1861-1865), the cities began building high schools. The South was far behind northern standards on every educational measure and gave weak support to its segregated all-black schools. However, northern philanthropy and northern churches provided assistance to private black colleges across the South. Religious denominations across the country [also] set up … private colleges.

“During Reconstruction, the Office of Education was created in an attempt to standardize educational reform across the country. While supportive of educational improvement, the office lacked the power to enforce policies in any state.

“States passed laws to make schooling compulsory between 1852 (Massachusetts) and 1917 (Mississippi).”

        — Wikipedia – Education In the United States – 19th Century

In England

Until 1870 all schools [in England] were charitable or private institutions, but in that year the Elementary Education Act 1870 permitted local governments to complement the existing elementary schools in order to fill any gaps.

The history of education in England extends all the way back to the Saxon settlement of England, and the first cathedral schools which were established in 597 and 604.

“Nineteenth century reforms expanded education provision and introduced widespread state-funded schools. By the 1880s education was compulsory for children aged 5 to 10, with the school leaving age progressively raised since then

“There was an unprecedented expansion of education and apprenticeships in Tudor England [where] … Edward VI reorganized grammar schools and instituted new ones so that there was a national system of ‘free grammar schools.’ In theory these were open to all, offering free tuition to those who could not afford to pay fees.

“Boys were allowed to go to school and began at the age of 4, they then moved to grammar school when they were 7 years old. Girls were either kept at home by their parents to help with housework or sent out to work to bring money in for the family. Apprenticeships were the main route for youths to enter skilled trades and crafts

Unfortunately, after this promising beginning, the English education system suffered reverses. There often wasn’t enough money, and private endowments were already commonplace by the 1640s.

A further blow took place in the early 18th century, when “entrepreneurs began to resist the restrictions of the apprenticeship system, and a legal ruling established that the Statute of Apprentices did not apply to trades that were not in existence when it was passed in 1563, thus excluding many new 18th century industries.”

“In the 19th century the Church of England sponsored most formal education until the government established free, compulsory education towards the end of that century.”

        — quotes from Wikipedia – History of Education in England

11. Emancipation, Egalitarianism, Suffrage, & Equality

The age of Steam has been shown to be a time in which there was Emancipation and increasing Egalitarianism. Other social advances were beginning to demand recognition – equality (although this theoretically already existed after the US Civil War, the reality in practice was often different, especially in the American South) and Suffrage.

“Women’s suffrage is, by definition, the right of women to vote. This was the goal of the suffragists, who believed in using legal means, as well as the suffragettes, who used extremist measures. Short-lived suffrage equity was drafted into provisions of the State of New Jersey’s first, 1776 Constitution, which extended the Right to Vote to unwed female landholders and black land owners.

“However, the document did not specify an Amendment procedure, and the provision was subsequently replaced in 1844 by the adoption of the succeeding constitution, which reverted to ‘all white male’ suffrage restrictions.”

This pattern was not confined to the state of New Jersey; for example, in Sweden, conditional women’s suffrage was in effect during the Age of Liberty (1718-1772) – but then removed.

Internationally

New Zealand was the first to confer Women’s Suffrage but they were not an independent Nation at the time. Australia soon followed, but had also not yet been granted independence.

The first province to continuously allow women to vote was Pitcairn Islands in 1838, and the first sovereign nation was Norway in 1913

The Kingdom of Hawai’i was in the box seat for the honor, having instituted universal suffrage in 1840, but they had rescinded it in 1852. Some US States had women’s suffrage long before it became nationwide; it was a notion that was growing in strength throughout the Age of Steam. Exactly what the local legal position was at any given time and place therefore needs specific research when the information is needed.

That said, because games are played by a modern audience and this is fairly fundamental, I recommend that – if necessary – suffrage be artificially inserted into a campaign world.

Implications

There are all sorts of rights and expectations that generally come along with suffrage – the right to inherit, the right to own property, the right to work and retain payment, the right to own a business, and therefore the right to economic participation – and the right to pay taxes. Universal education, as already discussed, is not necessarily a given – but, once again, avoiding a discriminatory stance against a PC probably justifies at least something in this direction, regardless of historical reality.

Civil Rights?

Whether or not the same egalitarianism should be extended to the question of Civil Rights is far more problematic. This fight has been going on a lot longer, and passions are higher as a consequence. I once would have assumed a ‘yes’ answer to this question, but discussions with a black contact in America have revised that decision; she was firmly of the notion that such a choice would cheapen the struggle, and the sacrifices made in the past.

My current thinking is therefore that historical accuracy should be the starting point in this respect, but that this should be discussed with any player who might be affected beforehand. And, if their character is directly affected, it would be wise to allow them to land at least a couple of blows in the cause, even if these are not to be decisive.

However, there are certain campaign genres in which fantasy is a much stronger component, especially Steampunk – in such cases, I would diverge from historical Canon (maybe dumping the issue of racial prejudice onto some non-human species like Orcs.

12. Individuality & Eccentricity

America is all about individualism in the face of anything attempting to force conformity, or so various sources would have me believe. I think the reality is that there remain social norms that are considered acceptable, but that anything not mandated by those norms is tolerable – and everyone is encouraged to find something in that line to call their own.

Some of those somethings are more acceptable than others, it should be noted, but there is less “Jock Vs Nerd” mentality in place in this period of history. In the 1960s, being a “whiz at chess” put you firmly into Jock cross-hairs; in the 1860s, not so much. Instead, you are likely to be regarded as a prodigy and sponsored to further education.

England in particular, and Britain in general, are far more working-class conservative, but that simply means that those social boundaries are drawn tighter – until, quite suddenly, they aren’t. There’s an inner ring of conservatism, but outside of that, almost anything goes – so long as it doesn’t annoy or interfere with others. And, if you are outrageous enough, or entertaining enough, even those limits can be weakened or overcome, graduating you from a status of “an odd bird” to an outright “eccentric”.

This is almost as true in the Age Of Steam is it is through the 20th century.

An avid birdwatcher is an “odd duck”. Their social nonconformity is blessed by society, and tolerated. Someone who insists that the Crows are conspiring against them is first thought to be joking – “having a lark” or “having us on” – but, if serious, is definitely into the range of eccentric or socially-unacceptable; there’s no middle ground.

Eccentrics are tolerated, even welcomed, for their entertainment value, and sometimes as a social gadfly if they are seen to be advocating for a worthy cause; the socially-unacceptable are shunned to a far greater extent than would be the case in the US.

The freedom to be eccentric can be hard for Americans to wrap their heads around at times. This is just a small start on the subject.

13. Leisure and Wealth

In both cases, two things are required in order for this liberty to exist: the leisure time to pursue the matter, and the wealth to do so.

Both become increasingly available in the course throughout the Age of Steam. I can best illustrate this with an example from American folklore: the Cat Lady.

To an American, this is verging on the antisocial and mentally disturbed. To the English, if the cats are properly cared for, and don’t intrude on their rights to enjoy their personal foibles and space, she is verging on the eccentric, but is treated exactly the same as anyone else. Unless she is a brilliant comedian, though, she had better not cross those lines – don’t annoy others and don’t neglect the pets. Either of those pushes her from Eccentric to Pariah.

14. A Cure For What Ails You

Medical science exploded in the age of Internal Combustion, but the seeds were there in the Age of Steam. The problem was that because there was no scientific testing, and no governmental standards or controls, anyone could claim just about anything to be a cure for something.

The terms “Snake Oil” and “Nostrum” and “Home Remedy” all stem from this time period.

Many of their notions may have been wrong, even dangerous, but they were serious about trying to cure whatever they thought the problem was.

“During the … 18th century, science was held in high esteem and physicians upgraded their social status by becoming more scientific. The health field was crowded with self-trained barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, drug peddlers, and charlatans.

“Across Europe medical schools relied primarily on lectures and readings. The final year student would have limited clinical experience by trailing the professor through the wards. Laboratory work was uncommon, and dissections were rarely done because of legal restrictions on cadavers. Most schools were small, and only Edinburgh, Scotland, with 11,000 alumni, produced large numbers of graduates.

“The practice of medicine changed [in the 19th century] in the face of rapid advances in science, as well as new approaches by physicians. Hospital doctors began much more systematic analysis of patients’ symptoms in diagnosis. Among the more powerful new techniques were anesthesia, and the development of both antiseptic and aseptic operating theaters. Effective cures were developed for certain endemic infectious diseases.”

Many of the most lethal diseases declined in impact, but there are those who now claim that this was “due more to improvements in public health and nutrition than to advances in medicine”; others suggest that medicine, and the approach taken to it, was responsible for those improvements in public health and nutrition. It’s an argument that I’m not qualified to buy into.

“Medicine was revolutionized in the 19th century and beyond by advances in chemistry, laboratory techniques, and equipment. Old ideas of infectious disease epidemiology were gradually replaced by advances in bacteriology and virology.

        — quotes from Wikipedia – History of Medicine

15. The Gold & Silver Standards

“A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold. The gold standard was the basis for the international monetary system from the 1870s to the early 1920s.” (It would be reinstated later in the 1920s, terminated again in 1932, then reinstated again from 1944 until 1971, but those dates are way outside the scope of this article).

“Historically, the silver standard and bimetallism have been more common than the gold standard.

“Great Britain accidentally adopted a de facto gold standard in 1717 when Sir Isaac Newton, then-master of the Royal Mint, set the exchange rate of silver to gold too low, thus causing silver coins to go out of circulation.

“As Great Britain became the world’s leading financial and commercial power in the 19th century, other states increasingly adopted Britain’s monetary system.”

“Up until 1850 only Britain and a few of its colonies were on the gold standard, with the majority of other countries being on the silver standard. France and the United States were two of the more notable countries on the bimetallic standard.

“The nearly-coincidental California gold rush of 1849 and the Australian gold rushes of 1851 significantly increased world gold supplies and the minting of gold francs and dollars.”

        — quotes from Wikipedia – Gold Standard

Consequences

With a currency pegged to a defined value, expressed as a certain weight of a commodity, the size of the economy is dictated by the amount of that commodity.

When more gold is found, a gold standard economy has more money to spend, and more money in circulation.

More people buy goods and services, which can lead to scarcity, which drives prices up.

Counterbalancing this to some extent is the fact that part of the value of a commodity is its rarity. Find more gold, and the value of gold dips a little.

Counterbalancing that are various mechanisms that take gold out of circulation – a central bank that adds to its reserves, a bank that does the same thing, a church that uses gold as a decoration, a private owner who sticks gold away in a vault instead of spending it.

It can be seen that a gold standard alone is not a guarantee of stable prices for goods and commodities, but it does actually help in that respect; and without growth in expenses, there is little pressure on wages, so the whole system is somewhat more stable.

Advantages

The following section is largely paraphrased from the same source cited above, and the quote is also from that source.

There are five major advantages recognized by modern economists as resulting from a fixed-commodity standard – whether that standard is Venetian Glass, Diamonds, Gold, Salt, Spices, or fluffy pink elephants.

1. A gold standard doesn’t permit some types of financial repression – in particular, deficit spending. You either have the money to spend on something, or you don’t.

2. While long-term price stability is considered an attribute of the gold standard, at least historically, analysis has shown that in the short term there can be significantly more volatility.

3. Currency Crises – the abrupt rise in the repayment cost of foreign debt – are far less frequent under a gold standard, because there is less currency volatility.

4. The gold standard provides fixed exchange rates between nations, which reduces uncertainty in international trade. This is complicated by the “price-specie flow mechanism”, which is a little bit less complicated than it sounds:

“Gold used to pay for imports reduces the money supply of importing nations, causing deflation, which makes them more competitive, while the importation of gold by net exporters serves to increase their money supply, causing inflation, making them less competitive.”

5. Hyper-inflation is less likely to occur, by definition, because it is caused by a loss of trust in a failing currency and the governments who create that currency.

Disadvantages

The following section is largely paraphrased from the same source cited above.

There are a whole heap of disadvantages, though.

1. Gold isn’t distributed equally throughout the world. A gold standard disproportionately benefits those countries that produce gold.

2. Some economists believe that the gold standard acts as a limit to economic growth. In particular, productivity gains do not cause the economy to grow, causing an effective scarcity of wealth to result; not only is this false-to-fact, the reduced credit in the economy that results inhibits investment, and this can cause an economy to stall.

3. Monetary policy can no longer be used to stabilize a currency prior to or during a recession because there is a fixed amount of money in the economy.

4. Banking Crises, in which a bank does not have sufficient liquidity to pay customers, become more common.

5. Deflation punishes debtors, causing debt burdens to rise, which causes borrowers to cut spending in order to direct more money to the debt. Lenders become wealthier under these conditions, but many will save some the gains, reducing the strength of the economy.

6. Inflation countermeasures are more difficult because they need to be backed by hard currency. This causes recessions to be longer and more intense.

There are a number of others, but those are the high points.

16. Oil & Resource Booms & Busts

Booms and busts in other commodities will always occur, but a floating currency tied to the hypothetical strength of the total economy mean that changes in the value of a currency are smoother than if the currency were tied to specific commodity. These market variations can have impacts as profound as a recession or even depression.

The reasons for this can be a little counter-intuitive, so let me see if I can explain it.

Let’s say that the economy contains $1 million in currency. That 1 million represents the value of everything else in the economy – so if there is suddenly a lot more of something else, like oil, the value of everything else has to fall, so that the total stays at $1 million. That means that more of the economy is suddenly tied up in oil – and the glut of supply makes the price of oil plunge. And there is always an overreaction – if everyone could rely on everyone else dropping oil prices by the right amount, everything would be fine, but you can’t. Oil producing countries don’t want to drop the value of oil, they want to sell it – effectively adding more gold to the economy, so that it grows by the amount of extra oil produced. That means that the countries that buy oil have to drop the price of oil by more, and the price that will eventually be settled on is one big guesstimate. yes, there will be a correction, eventually, but in the meantime, there’s that much less money to spend on anything else.

In other words, the currency can’t act as a shock absorber when your oil price (or whatever) hits a pothole or a speed-bump.

17. Wage Slavery & The Mines

“Slavery was abolished” – it says so, right there in black and white, earlier in this article. But along with the caveats offered at the time, there are still more that need to at least get mentioned.

There are many terms for this type of slavery – in America, it’s most commonly known as Debt Bondage, but the more general term in use these days is Truck Wages.

It works like this: worker puts in a hard day’s work, exceeding their daily quota. They get paid a fixed hourly wage for this plus they might get a small bonus for any excess over quota – but their pay will be docked if they don’t make quota. Comes payday, they expect to get a certain amount – only to find that the cost of the meals and accommodation provided by the company have been deducted, at whatever rates the company deems ‘fair and reasonable’, and the balance is paid in tokens that can only be redeemed at the company store – at whatever prices the company deems ‘fair and reasonable’. The net result being that you have effectively no money to show for your efforts – but you still have to work or you won’t get to eat.

This sort of scheme was rife in a number of industries, notably including the coal mines and steelworks of the Age Of Steam. This was especially true in the first half, but the practice (or variations on it) persist to this day; the United Nations estimated that there were 8.1 Million people still subject to it in 2005.

There have been numerous attempts to stamp this practice out, but it’s notoriously hard to do so. This is the sort of labor relations of which a true robber baron would be proud.

18. Steamships

The rise of the steamship had a profound effect on international trade. Not only could individual vessels carry many times the weight in goods, they cut a transit that would have taken months to weeks, or weeks to days. And they could do it cheaper.

Commodities that needed some preservative technique could be shipped ‘fresh’. Fish were often carried upriver in England on steamships, giving rise to the “Fish And Chips Shop”, for example.

Arguably, though, it was the travel time that was the biggest impact. if you were a clothing maker, for example, and it now only took one week for your materials to be delivered instead of four, you could cut the amount of money tied up in supplies to 1/4 of what it was. Similarly, if it only took one week to get your product to market instead of four, you could cut the money tied up in inventory to 1/4. This meant that establishing such a business required a lot less capitol, and was a lot more easily turned profitable.

The impact doesn’t end there, though. By only reducing materials and inventory by 50%, you could double the range of markets that you could reach, vastly expanding your potential clientele – and profitability. And you’re still making bigger profits because the transport costs are less.

From the point of view of the business owner, this is all good. But, it meant that you were competing against others from further afield – so there was an immediate downward pressure on prices; everything that could be shipped suddenly became cheaper, sometimes massively cheaper. So the consumer benefits too, finding that whatever they have to spend goes further.

Ignoring the impact of the Steamship is like ignoring the impact of the Railroad, and for exactly the same reason.

Now, combine the two – train to steamship to train to market – and your products can suddenly be competing globally..

19. Rise of the Common Man III: Professional Guilds to Labor Unions

The Professional Guilds of the ages of sail provided the template, but labor unions (known as trade unions in England) were an inevitable response to the combination of social progress and work practices of the era.

“While a commonly held mistaken view holds modern trade unionism to be a product of Marxism, the earliest modern trade unions predate Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) by almost a century (and Marx’s writings themselves frequently address the prior existence of the workers’ movements of his time), with the first recorded labor strike in the United States by the Philadelphia printers in 1786

“The origins of modern trade unions can be traced back to 18th-century Britain, where the Industrial Revolution drew masses of people, including dependents, peasants and immigrants, into cities. Britain had ended the practice of serfdom in 1574, but the vast majority of people remained as tenant-farmers on estates owned by the landed aristocracy. This transition was not merely one of relocation from rural to urban environs; rather, the nature of industrial work created a new class of ‘worker’.

“Workers sold their work as labor and took directions from employers, giving up part of their freedom and self-agency in the service of a master.”

Critics called this arrangement ‘Wage Slavery’ but had no idea what real wage slavery (described earlier) was.

The road to modern trade unions was a rocky one, collective bargaining frequently deemed illegal, but the inequality of bargaining power between employer and individual worker made some sort of organization and coordination not only essential bur inevitable.

This was the common man wresting some measure of control over his life away from both government and employer. Business in general was strongly disapproving, but outside the US, encountered little success in removing them.

In Australia, it’s still illegal to stop someone from joining a trade union (I’m not sure about the status in England). However, government policies that (in theory) grant greater negotiating power to the individual have been eroding union membership here, and it wouldn’t surprise me if something similar were happening there.

In the US, Republican legislatures have eroded workers’ rights so significantly that an employee can be dismissed for any reason the employer likes (unless they are part of a population group protected from such treatment. If he doesn’t like the color of your socks, you can be gone. If he doesn’t like mustaches, you’re gone. If he doesn’t like your bumper sticker, you’re gone – unless that sticker references your religious faith or something similar.

Labor unions continued the trend of decentralizing power that has already been mentioned – ironically by centralizing it around a different center, albeit one that was democratically selected.

        — quotes from Wikipedia – Trade union

20. Wealth distributed

The impact of trade unions was for wages to start going up and working conditions to start improving. This ate into the profitability of businesses, but they could afford it, thanks to the Rail/Steamship boom. What it did do was increase the bottom line for a myriad of low-and middle-income workers – and they turned right around and spent that money. Most of the time, any savings were only temporary. The result was a slow but steady trend toward a consumer-oriented society, as businesses arose for these workers to spend their money in, and manufacturers arose to make the goods to stock those businesses, and infrastructure sprung up to connect the two.

An individual’s spending power might be one-one thousandth that of one of the captains of industry who owned these commercial ventures, or less. But put 10,000 of them together to create a ‘market’ for your goods, or 100,000, and they possessed a lot of clout. Public Opinion became an extremely potent social force, one that the union movement was able to occasionally harness when dealing with a particularly egregious situation.

Had any of these changes taken place in isolation, it’s likely that they would have failed. Each needed the other to progressively alter the economic environment that next step.

21. Opportunity distributed

Of course, all those new operations – retailer, wholesaler, warehouse owner, distributor, freighter, manufacturer, and materials supplier – all needed to employ staff. Plus accountants and bookkeepers and lawyers, and so on.

To go with the industrial boom of the Steam Age, there was a boom in employment opportunities. The number of unemployed and unemployable slowly began to drop. Preparing more people for employment demanded better educational standards. And that produced a greater demand for the goods and services that an educated people demand, such as books and plays and dining choices and holidays.

22. Inherited Advantages

The children of old nobility, those who had acquired fortunes during the age of sail, and the robber barons were no more assured of a life of ease than had their antecedents in the now-bygone era. But they had advantages that ordinary people could only dream of – education, and life experiences, and access to capital, and contacts amongst the other wealthy and powerful and opportunities to use all this to their benefit.

Fortunately for society as a whole, most of them were also raised with a sense of obligation, and those who did not feel that sense quickly had one drummed into them; then, as now, everyone looks down on those who feel entitled or who behave arrogantly. By and large, they are not begrudged that initial advantage; that’s something that their ancestors or parents earned for them. It’s what they do with it that matters, just as what an ordinary person does with his or her personal gifts makes the difference in how they are perceived.

23. Genre: Murder most Foul

Closing in on the end of this article now – with about 20 minutes to deadline, I might just make it!

There are, essentially, four major genre categories that find a home in this time period, and the first are the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. It always surprised me a little that these weren’t more popular RPG fodder – right up until I realized that creating credible mysteries without railroading plots was a lot harder than it looked.

But then I realized that those “How To Host A Murder” sets are solidly a part of this genre – and heck, even my sister has played one or two (complete with full costuming, a step that my games have never demanded).

The economy in such games is better dealt with by ignoring it except when it’s relevant, What’s more, it should be treated as a static phenomenon, again unless economic and social change is an inherent part of the plotline. For the most part, it all just is, and always will be, unchanging.

And any change that should occur for plot reasons should be cast as generally a positive one, even if that means you have to be selective about the voice used to brief the players on the things their characters need to know – pick someone who has clearly benefited from the changes.

24. Genre: Things Man Was Not Meant To Know

The second genre contains cryptid hunters, explorers of lost cities, uncivilized wildernesses, exotic tombs, and hollow earths. But more than that, they contain those who stand as guardians against the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, those supernatural horrors that plot and scheme to take over the idyllic world of the Age Of Steam.

It matters not if they derive from Lost Lemuria, Sunken Atlantis, or some nameless Shadow Plane. It matters not if you sought out the confrontation, or have been tumbled into events head over heels.

The wealthy are always suspicious in such campaigns, because they have both the material means to satisfy idle curiosity, the world travels to put them in contact with such curiosities, and the loss of direct power that can breed anger over circumstances. Since you can’t address this without the social baggage and history that comes along with it, this genre is best addressed not by ignoring the transformative events that have swept across society, but by reveling in them.

25. Genre: Steampunk

Steampunk is, as I announced earlier in the series, not my forte. In fact, I know very little about what the genre is like to play – though I did employ some steampunk conceptually in describing the Mexico of my superhero campaign, admittedly without knowing exactly what I was doing.

So, here’s the skinny of the general principles I employed, phrased in the form of a recipe for success (I hope).

Pick an era, and a decade. Pick a second era for the current levels of science and technology, one that differs from the first by at least a decade. The first is the society and technological capability of the world around the PCs; the difference has to be explained through the use and manifestations of “industrialized magic”.

For example, I might pick the 1940s for the first era, and the 1870s for the second. That’s a 70-year gap, in which a lot of technological impacts have been experienced. They have hot air balloons and locomotives and machine guns and poison gasses and tanks and personal transportation – but all of it is based on ‘Industrial magic”, in whole or in part. In fact, it would be ubiquitous – everything you encounter would be ‘touched’ by it in some manner. Everything from the way lamps get lit to the way private secretaries carry out their duties. There would be robber barons who have gotten rich bringing this new technology to the masses. There would be some sort of magical radio – mass communications will have begun. And so on; everything that you describe has to be examined for a fun, magical, twist.

The economy is going to be as described, complete with changes and transformations, but always with the most positive spin on things that you can imagine – except, perhaps, for those who have been left behind, and who are dark and resentful. Every campaign needs some bad guys, after all!

26. Genre: Early Pulp & Other Gaslight

I’ve left “Other gaslight” in to cover anything that I haven’t though of, but there’s nothing that fits the category that’s coming to mind.

That leaves Early Pulp. To me, this also goes under another name – American Pulp, i.e. tough hard-boiled detectives chasing shadowy criminals through bars and warehouses. The more fantastic elements of European Pulp are part of an era a decade or two hence.

The primary reason is that there is nothing that is definitive of the early pulp era that isn’t part of this earlier period – save, perhaps, for the glossy automobiles. The pulp genre, i think, actually straddles the two eras, and takes advantage of that fact. It also steals liberally from the “Things Man Was Not Meant To Know” genre, if you hadn’t noticed.

27 Empires Colliding

The age of steam ends with one last hurrah for the old school, as political alliances deriving, in part, from still older relationships between royal families (both alliances and conflicts) create a domino effect that plunges the world into war. In the buildup to this event, the petrol engine is (essentially) perfected, supplanting steam power with gasoline and diesel, heavier-than-air flight begins, electrification begins, radio broadcasts commence, silent movies, speakeasies and prohibition – and the limitations of the Gold Standard and the wild optimism of the age comes home to roost. It’s not a sudden change; it happens piecemeal over the span of about a decade, and then continues to plunge headlong into a future of machinery and engineering. And space opera. And Pulp. It’s going to be a lot of fun – and hopefully, shorter than this outing!

In part 1:

  1. Introduction
  2. General Concepts and A Model Economy
  3. The Economics of an Absolute Monarchy (The Early Medieval)

In part 2:

  1. The Economics of Limited Monarchies (The Later Medieval & Renaissance)
  2. In-Game Economics: Fantasy Games

In Part 3:

  1. The Renaissance, revisited
  2. Pre-Industrial Economics I: The Age of Exploration
  3. Pre-Industrial Economics II: The Age of Sail

In this part:

  1. Industrial Economies I: The Age Of Steam
  2. In-game Economics: Gaslight-era

Planned for part 5:

  1. Industrial Economics II: The Age Of Internal Combustion
  2. Industrial Economics III: War & Depression
  3. In-Game Economics: Pulp-era

Planned for parts 6-7:

  1. Tech Economics I: The Gold Standard
  2. Tech Economics II: Resources & Regulation
  3. Tech Economics III: Inflation & Hyper-inflation
  4. Tech Economics IV: Commercialism, Deregulation, Privatization, & Greed

Planned for parts 8-10:

  1. Digital Economics
  2. Post-Pandemic Economics
  3. In-Game Economics: Modern
  4. Future Economics I: Dystopian
  5. In-Game Economics: Dystopian Futures
  6. Future Economics I: Utopian
  7. In-Game Economics: Utopian Futures
  8. In-Game Economics: Space Opera

The plan is to do an article on something else next week. Which one of the several ideas I have on hold I’ll be excited enough to develop, I don’t yet know – just that it will be different from history and economics!



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