The Widening Gyre wrote:This kind of ballooned as I wrote it so spoilered for brevity.NATION APPLICATION
Shortform name: Thammua'th
Real life culture influence: Conculture, Berber
Real life culture of former colonizer: TBD, will discuss in Discord
Population: 95 072 176
GDP (PPP) per capita: $26 872
GDP (nominal) per capita: $16 651
Military manpower (active/reserve): 268 201 professional Defense Committee troops, 142 918 reservist militia
Language(s): Riffian Berber
Nation description: Human settlement in Thammua'th dates back to the origin of anatomically modern humans, with remains found in the southern hills of the country dating back to the early stages of humanity's journey out of Miju. According to genetic analyses modern Thammua'thi are closely related to these remains, and it is likely that the modern population can claim direct descent from those original inhabitants. The Thammua'thi developed a pastoral culture early in the Neolithic, moving up and down the hills and valleys with the seasons. Some of these early pastoralists developed agriculture, cultivating a variety of crops in both the hotter valley bottoms and the cooler highlands, incorporating cultivation into their seasonal movements with herd animals. Civilization therefore developed in a seasonal and small-scale manner, with villages being established at winter and summer sites and communities migrating between them depending on conditions. Only relatively late (circa 5000 BCE) did these early farmers establish communities on the coast and the larger river valleys where sedentary agriculture could be established, and by then the cultural roots of their seasonal rhythms were already in place. These coastal communities grew in prominence with the arrival of the first overseas trading ships from other cultures, and became hubs for the trade of goods like frankincense and coffee further afield. Urbanization along the coasts and the Ighza River continued apace into the third and second millennium BCE, as more lowland-suitable crops were imported from southern Yoju, driving population expansion.
The first states emerged in the late first millennium BCE, centered around the large coastal cities of the Agazdis, or 'the edge', in the language of the highlanders. The highlands continued to be isolated during this period, and did not develop the same state apparatuses for their communities as in the coast. The lowlanders' contact with neighbouring kingdoms in Yoju lead to a linguistic divergence from their highlander brethren in this period, with a pidgin trade tongue called Shiwer becoming dominant and the kings taking on increasingly Yojuan modes of address, court etiquette and culture. The arrival of Islam in the sixth century CE only accelerated this process, with the lowland kings quickly adopting the new religion. The period after Islam's arrival until the 12th century are referred to as the golden age of Shiweran culture, as building campaigns in grand Yojuan style took place throughout the lowlands and the courts of the kings became centres of Islamic scholarship and learning. The arrival of Turkic adventurers through the Isthmus of Aneggaru disrupted the political order between the kingdoms, as their experienced cavalry dominated warfare between the rival lowland states and lead to the ascension of mercenary leaders in the courts of the Agazdis. During this period the lowland states made their first successful forays into the highlands, subjugating large swathes of the countryside by force. The lowland kingdoms began consolidating during this period, and by the 16th century had merged into three major kingdoms; Sith'am, Izthi and Az'ru. The chaos of the period was compounded with the arrival of gunpowder weapons in the early part of the 17th century and culminated with the king of Sith'am, Takfarin, successfully subjugating his neighbours and declaring himself 'paramount king' of the new kingdom of Thammua'th. After this initial conquest he set about completing his subjugation of the highlands, a pursuit that consumed the remainder of his reign and eventually cost him his life at the hands of a highlander ambush of his army while crossing a mountain river. His sons prudently left the pursuit of the campaign to capable generals, and retreated into a lifetime of leisure back in the cities. This campaign, however, catalyzed changes within the highland towns and cities - previously disorganized and dismissive of the lowlander threat as being unable to penetrate the highlands successfully, the new gunpowder weapons posed an existential threat to their ways of life. Treaties of mutual defense began to spread throughout the region and warbands began to coalesce into armies which were capable of using the terrain to destroy better equipped and trained lowlander forces. The generals' campaigns subsided over the decades in the face of this resistance and eventually the kings of Thammua'th stopped sending expeditions altogether, content with trading with the highlanders for valuable incense, coffee and metals in exchange for imported goods from Yoju.
This period of an independent Thammua'thi kingdom came to an end in 1703 with the arrival of a flotilla of [colonizer] ships in the harbour of Sitha'm. Unlike previous traders along the east-west routes, they were not there just to buy coffee, but to demand treaties of preferential trade on behalf of their home nation and the annual payment of tribute. The sitting king balked at this demand and sent the ambassadors packing, but instead of sailing away the fleet opened fire on the palace and fortifications of the city, killing the king and his sons and throwing the city's defenders into disarray. The [colonizer] troops were able to march off their ships and take the city with ease, and placed one of the king's surviving relatives on the throne as a puppet ruler. In the coming months the forces of [colonizer] were able to take the coastal cities of Thammua'th with comparatively little difficulty, but the interior proved restive, and splinter kingdoms emerged in the wake of the conquest, fighting bitter wars against each other and the expeditionary forces sent against them by the occupying authorities in Sitha'm. Initial colonial interest in the country was limited to commercial exploitation so little attention was given to the affairs of the locals, who were able to continue their modes of governance more or less uninterrupted. The middle of the 18th century brought a shift in colonial policy, however, and larger numbers of colonists and troops were brought in to begin settling the country and bringing it under 'modern' modes of governance.
[Colonizer] expeditionary forces, backed by local contingents and engineering corps brought in from the metropole, made significant inroads in pacifying the interior of the country for the first time in centuries, and by the close of the 18th century the highlanders were mostly suppressed. Large-scale plantations of cotton, coffee and spices were begun at this time, tended to by indentured locals and imported labour. The country's population began to grow rapidly with the new infrastructure, with many poor or unemployed workers flooding into the large coastal or riverrine cities as more and more smallhold farms and highlander villages were purchased or seized by the colonial government, which was now fully integrated with the mother country. Several rebellions broke out in the highlands during this period, but they were small and disorganized affairs that were relatively easily quashed by the colonial military. Despite this ability to project military power however, the civil authorities had difficulty exerting control over the highlands, and many communities were able to live more or less free of any government control for the first time in decades. The culmination of colonial ambition in Thammua'th was reached in 1876 with the initiation of the Ayezzim Canal project, cutting through the northern Isthmus of Aneggaru and connecting the Unhae and Ulbyeon Oceans. The city of Anawzi was built at the mouth of this new canal in a natural harbour, and quickly expanded as local labourers were brought in to construct port facilities and infrastructure for the project. The canal was finished with much fanfare in 1886, but it would prove one of the colonial authority's last significant acts. Anti-colonial sentiment had been brewing in the highlands for decades, and a succession of popular highland speakers and writers circulated seditious works among the towns and in the lowlands, framed amidst a general flowering of pre-conquest art and culture facilitated by new printing technologies and infrastructure. These agitators drew upon a growing nationalist sentiment in the highlands, drawing a contrast between their autonomous mode of living and communal politics and the indolence of the ruling class and colonial domination at the hands of [colonizer]. The most stringent of these called for armed revolt, and spent their days being hustled from one safe house to the next and evading the colonial secret police.
The spark that ignited the War of Liberation came in 1892 with onset of a severe drought that lead to the failure of that year's harvest, and thanks to mismanagement and corruption on the part of colonial authorities the grain stockpiles in many cities were not sufficient to make up the deficit. By the fall hunger was rampant and tempers flared. A long lineup for bread in the city of Arimam erupted into a riot, and in the chaos the colonial troops opened fire on the crowd when they attempted to storm the government warehouse. Several dozen were killed in the attack and dozens more injured, and in response the rioters overwhelmed the troopers and beat them to death. The remaining colonial troops fled the city in the ensuing panic, and in a stroke the city was in full insurrection. The local radical agitators wasted no time and declared the insurrection the first strike in a war of national liberation, exhorting all Thammua'thi to rise up against their oppressors. News of the insurrection spread across the country and uprisings broke out throughout the highlands. Many were crushed, particularly those in garrison towns, but others still were successful, and by the end of the year [colonizer] authorities had lost control of most of the highland cities, with the holdouts isolated from the center of imperial control along the coast. The years that followed were a bloody back-and-forth campaign that saw rebel armies fight a vicious irregular war against colonial authorities, utilizing ambushes and the harsh highland terrain to outmaneuver and crush forces much better organized and equipped than they were. The rebels were unable to make serious inroads into the lowlands however, where their lack of artillery and training in conventional warfare placed them at a disadvantage with their colonial counterparts.
Late in 1898 however, a cohort of rebels came into possession of an armory's worth of artillery pieces and put them to good use, besieging and taking the final highland holdouts and garrisons of the colonial authorities before streaming into the lowlands. Post-revolutionary accounts accredit this coup to the defection of a garrison commander and his staff to the rebel cause, but rumours in the foreign press after the war about the presence of foreigners in the rebel armies have fueled speculation about a foreign power arming the rebels - claims the post-revolutionary regime has strenuously denied. Several more key battles were fought in the lowland plains, and by 1901 the rebels were bearing down on the capital of Sith'am and the canal port city of Anawzi, leaving the future of Thammua'th open for the first time in centuries. Elements within the rebel armies opened peace talks with the authorities in Sith'am and their superiors in [colonizer], and after much wrangling agreed on the preliminaries of a treaty. The rebels' gains in the war would be preserved and Thammua'th's independence would be recognized, but the rebels would not be allowed to control the vital Ayezzim Canal or the port city of Anawzi - these would be ruled as condominiums between an independent Thammua'th and [colonizer], with a treaty binding both to allow all non-hostile shipping. This agreement was presented to the people of Thammua'th as a fait d'accompli, but instead it opened the first great political crisis to face the new country. Opinion throughout the country was divided, and dissension within the ranks of the victorious army threatened to throw the country into civil war.
One voice however quieted the crisis before it could begin, when the great poet-philosopher Tunaruz broke her silence and supported the treaty. A beloved figure amongst the general populace and famous for being one of the first great lights of the Thammua'thi national awakening, her speech in front of an assembly of generals and people in Sith'am catalyzed a swell in support for the treaty, and in the face of broad public support the Treaty of Anawzi was ratified in late 1903, with Tunaruz symbolically signing on behalf of the people. With the war finally ended, the rebel leadership in Sith'am was faced with the question of transitioning into a civilian government. Tunaruz and the circle of 'national idealists', as her party became known, advocated for the calling of a nationwide assembly to draft a new constitution for the country, while others demanded the immediate unilateral declaration of a republic along Yojuan lines. Tunaruz's party eventually carried the day, and an assembly was called for the spring of 1904, with delegates called for from every community over 5000 people - communities smaller than this were encouraged to band together and form new voting blocs that could in turn send delegates. The delegates that came together were slanted towards the establishment of as minimal a central government as possible, preferring to let the individual communities of Thammua'th govern themselves. The republican voices in the assembly were powerful, however, and throughout the spring and summer of that year a compromise framework was established where a standing national government would be maintained that handled national defense, foreign affairs and the creation of a charter of rights for all citizens, elected by the national assembly which would in turn be re-elected every five years. This new constitution was ratified on October 28th of 1904, with most of the new committee being made up of heroes of the revolutionary war.
The postwar period of Thammua'th’s history was one of reconstruction and isolation, with the country’s attention and resources going towards rebuilding the nation’s shattered infrastructure and feeding its people. During this period the aging Tunaruz continued to develop her ‘national idealism’, delivering frequent letters to the nation that were reprinted across Thammua'th and which garnered her a significant following. She saw the world as a harsh place, dominated by imperialists and capitalists that sought to exploit and control all that they came across. Only by organizing and resisting these foreign influences and the corrupting nature of capitalism could Thammua'th survive, and she argued that the preservation of their traditional way of life and the rejection of materialism was the most effective means of binding the nation together and making them collectively unpalatable to conquest. By the time Tunaruz passed away at the age of 73 in 1926 her idealist followers held political sway in large portions of the country, particularly the highlands and the rural lowlands. Under her followers’ influence the constitution was amended in 1931 to increase the powers of the central government, giving it the ability to direct and provision resources for the ‘development of the nation’, and immediately set about a grand infrastructure-building campaign, laying telegraph lines, building roads and hospitals and attempting to bring the benefits of modernity to its people without compromising Tunaruz’s vision of a federation of autonomous communities. This internal focus and treaty-mandated neutrality allowed Thammua'th to remain relatively unscathed throughout the Eulhae War, and it emerged a relatively poor but developing country in the postwar order. Foreign investment in much of the country was stifled due to the strict restrictions put in place by the central government, with the exception of the Anawzi Territory, which grew as the pace of growth in west Yoju quickened, and standing as island of modernity in a country that had seemingly rejected it.
By the 1960's the pace of development had stalled. The aging revolutionary generation was becoming increasingly conservative and unwilling to enact reforms or bring in the outside expertise and resources needed to continue the process of modernizing the country. This was contrasted with both a new generation of national idealists, who were increasingly of the notion that the revolution Tunaruz helped bring into being had to be a progression into a new future, not a reversion to the past, and cohorts of Yojuan-influenced republicans from the lowlands and Anawzi, who believed that Thammua'th should adopt a more formal state structure and open up to strategic foreign trade and investment. This conflict came to the surface in the elections to the national assembly of 1974, which resulted in none of the camps retaining enough delegates to form a government. A stalemate ensued for the next ten months, until increasing unrest in Sith'am catalyzed a coalition between the 'formalists' and the old revolutionary faction, successfully excluding the more radical neo-idealists from the government. With this new mandate the national assembly amended the constitution of 1931 to give the government greater discretionary powers over the activities of the towns and cities and over foreign investment, which began to move into the country in earnest. As the last of the revolutionary generation died off, the formalists inherited the reigns of power in earnest, framing themselves in the public consciousness as the inheritors of the great project of Tunaruz and the country's bulwark against the global capitalist order. The neo-idealist faction did not die away however, and as the 21st century dawned and reached its mid-morning the strain of heightened foreign investment and institutional corruption within the formalist government has become more and more apparent. The stage is set for another clash over the fate of the nation, and without the last of the revolutionary heroes to act as a moderating force it has the potential to erupt into violence unseen since the creation of the country.
Are you willing to drastically alter your nation in order to fit with Tiandi canon?: Yes
Main nation on NS: The Widening Gyre
Main/puppet/NPC: to be created
Link to map claim (optional): In blue
How did you find out about Tiandi?: The P2TM thread
Mostly provisional at this point, especially about the nature of Islam and its entry into the region and colonization - will discuss on Discord as needed.
This is really cool. Accepted!
