Hartland

The Hartlands were never expected to be powerful nation, or even a nation at all. Where once in ancient days stood a kingdom atop silver veins, the long centuries of Urlandic and later Arvanthan rule exhausted such deposits. Since then, the region has been a mountainous backwater notable for two things: deep forests so replete with game - especially deer - that gave the Hartlands their name, and a relatively isolated natural harbor to the north...which has been conquered on-and-off by every thalassocratic power for a thousand years. It's only other city lay at the most northern navigable part of a great river - a city convenient portage, and little more.

And yet...change came. Wood, you see, is intensely valuable to industrializing economies, and the Hartlands contain deep, primeval forests. Foreign demand grew, and deals were struck between the merchants of the northern city and petty nobility of the portage city. Mills at the fall line turned logs into lumber, and whether by airship or portage were carried off to the wider world. Cash rolled in, and the region became less of a forgotten backwater and more an interconnected economy in its' own right. Factories were built, furniture and finished goods began being made instead of just raw lumber, and exported for greater profits. The two cities grew. Settlement patterns shifted from isolated hunting/farming communities to silviculture boomtowns. Steam power arrived - not powered by coal, but by wood pellets. And so on.

Of course, this came with increased attention from Irna. Royal officials were, as one can imagine, quite displeased that "uppity" local nobles acting above their station and "treasonous" merchants selling to foreign powers. The inevitable tension over authority and taxation escalated ever higher until, at last, it burst into open conflict. Unfortunately for Arvantha, the nations now near-dependent on Hartlander lumber were more than willing to offer arms and armaments to secure continued supply.

most other circumstances, Arvantha could've won, but their famed hussar charges work poorly in thickly forested mountain terrain, and the long-held Hartland hunting traditions blended well with firearms to wreak havoc on supply lines. While the Hartlanders never pushed the royalists out or truly defeated them in the field, the also didn't need to. The might of the kingdom was simply bled dry here and in their other conflict.

And thus, independence, and the mess that came with it. Even now, the formalization of power and the forging of a new nation creates political disputes and factionalism, even as vast tracts of forested land are consolidated for economic use with or without local support. It's an exciting and dynamic time to be alive!

For the Hartlands, I'd been thinking about it like this: >the major portage city as the focal point of a northern Unlandic dialect, presumably related to what the Arvanthans speak, forming a continuum with that tongue as one moves south out of the heavily forested regions and into sprawling plains and heavily farmed areas downriver, but inversely becoming less mutually intelligible with that tongue as one moves north into the forested valleys. >also probably the usual cultural divide between a growing urban center and rural townships being reorganized for resource extraction. I can't imagine that being very pleasant! >clannish "Silvermen" in the more marginal highlands regions, relict populations that until recently were nigh entirely disconnected from outside economics. Less focused on forestry and more on high-altitude ranching of, like, goats and shit. The name derives from what their distant ancestors were known for in ancient times: works of silver. >the northeastern harbor city would hold a significant foreign population. But perhaps foreign is the wrong word, but a centuries-old community of peoples whose original homeland is distant. A local patois of the Hartlander Unlandic dialect and whatever foreign lingua franca took root exists, assuredly with some Silvertongue loanwords. The lifestyle there is almost certainly shaped by access to foreign trade and the bounty of the sea. Bound to the rest of the Hartlands more by mutual economic interest than by culture, though that's changing as growing industry draws laborers of Unlandic stock from the countryside to the port city.

The Hartlands were not home to a substantial population prior to the lumber boom. Depending on their luck and business acumen, local freemen would either become newly minted gentry, selling logging rights to their previously useless highland parcels or destitute beggars as unscrupulous logging companies would use loopholes in the entirely too vague medieval legal codes of the Hartlands. The vast majority of the lumberjacks themselves however would come from the south and from the east. Either escaped slaves from the Aporozhian lands dreaming of a land where man is free or impoverished peasants from Arvantha denied their lands as local nobles increasingly turn to enclosure acts to enlarge their vast rural properties, the newly arrived immigrants had by and large very high hopes for their new homeland.

This enthusiasm was cut short however as many saw themselves stuffed into company towns under strict surveillance of detective agencies in the employ of the biggest logging and saw mill conglomerates. Most of the new arrivals soon started to feel like the places they left were in the end no worse than where they ended up and anger started swelling in the bunk houses.

This proved to be fertile grounds for various agitators and organizers and soon underground societies and brotherhoods of workingmen sprung up across the countries boomtowns. Machinery started mysteriously disappearing. Corporate detectives would somehow end up lost in the woods for months. This situation was almost at the verge of transforming into a real insurrection when the independence war came.

As news that the Imperial banners were assembling at Irniac to march north broke out in the local press, the boomtowns of the Hartlands exploded into revolutionary frenzy. Men spontaneously assembled at saloons and town-houses and demanded rifles and ammo to meet the Royal Hussars their rugged enthusiasm barely contained by local police. Its in this atmosphere of general chaos that the many underground societies decided to strike and declared a general convention of workingmen in one of the largest of the logging towns. It was there that the Lumber Workers Industrial Union was officially born. The first act of the newly united organisation was the raising of "Volunteer Battalions" to help safeguard the country.

While the official authorities were most distrustful of these units they were still inducted into the official command structure of the newly developing Hartland armed forces, despite the protests and indignation of the logging companies. However the general staff was under the impression that fighting the Royalists and Revolutionaries at the same time would be fatal to the newly formed state.

The war ended up being easier to manage than anyone in the Hartlands previously anticipated and at its conclusion, a constitution for the new state was drafted which explicitly legalised trade unions and allowed them a certain amount of privileges, in exchange of the disarmament of the VBs.

This move proved to be almost as damning for the LWIU as the for the Big 4 lumber conglomerates. A radical well organized minority of the union, mainly based in the eastern provinces had fully expected that once victory over the Royalists was secure, the LWIU would march on the capital to dislodge the hated fatcats and other barons of industry.

The move by the more moderate majority and the collective leadership to acquiesce to the government's demands was met with fury, violence and accusations of scabbing. The radicals reformed themselves into the illegal IWW (Industrial Wood Workers) and went on to continue the armed struggle. This low level insurgency in the east would take 7 long years to fully squash causing untold misery to the population and bad stock ratings for the lumber companies. The IWW would over time morph from a purely industrial union to encompass and organize many marginalised groups the LWIU wouldn't touch with a 10 ft logging pole, like the remote Silvermen whose ancestral territories are increasingly being expropriated by logging operations, prison labour, prostitutes and smugglers. While still illegal and shunned by polite society, the IWW has however found sympathy with many of the newly minted urbanites, mainly the intelligentsia and art circles.

Meanwhile the companies used the legalisation of unions as an opportunity to start their own so called "yellow" union, the AFL (Allied Federation of Lumberjacks), a blatant attempt to steal influence on the back of the LWIU that has been relentlessly mocked in union press.

At present s a delicate balance between the companies and the unions has established itself. While currently all signs point towards a slow détente as the war between labour and capital moves out of the streets and into courts it would not take much for Hartlander society to plunge itself into conflict once more if for example a worldwide economic crisis were to occur. But what are the chances of that?

'Bout the best banjo picker I know in the whole Republic is a carpenter by trade, lives in Moelven. He's the one that taught me this tune. https://youtu.be/UwTJbrZUz3I So I asked him, how come it got the name Grüntal March and he says "Oh that's when they sent the militia down to Grüntal in Sagbruk".

Actually it was from someone else down in Sagbruk that I learned the whole story of Grüntal. It happened bout twenty years ago. The lumberjacks had been trying to organize under the ILWU at the time, but the lumber companies pulled of a real slick deal, they paid the state government and got state prisoners, convicts, to work in the exploitations. Well the lumberjacks protested, said it wasn't fair for convict labour to be competing with free labour and that they couldn't organize under those conditions. The governor didn't pay any attention to their petitions so one dark night several hundred lumberjacks walked down to the prison stockade and at gunpoint they demanded the warden free all the prisoners. They burned down the stockade, helped the prisoners escape across state borders to Larvik.

Well for four years they called it the Grüntal rebellion. The governor was forced to send down troops from Saggen and Astor and some of the battles had as many as two or three thousand people in it. Of course the lumber workers won every battle but the last one. They were actually starved into submission by a year long siege of the town. The whole thing looked like they'd lost the struggle against the convict-labour system, but as so often happens in history, the fact they'd put up a struggle got them some publicity. So all round Sagbruk people became aware of this prison labour system and a new governor was elected with a plank in his platform of getting rid of said system, and he did, so all wasn't lost in the end. Sagbruk became the first Hartland state to ban this controversial practice. This was followed a few years later in Tinnset, but sadly remains in place elsewhere.

I was going for more of a Maine kind of aesthetic blended with the way resource extraction really fucks with nations and foreigner-populated ports in the vein of Norse Dublin or Chinese Singapore. Toss in some French inspiration from the Machine de Marly for maximum wood-based madness.

Not that I'm complaining much about the way you took it, I'd already thought there would be a conflict with the landowners claiming ever-greater tracts of timberland and formalizing those claims under the new legal structure, driving centuries-old communities onto ever slimmer portions of the country, essentially forcing them to work for the only real game in town, and doing that fucked up colonial thing where resource production and exports are focused above local food production causing food insecurity issues. I wasn't angling towards union/labor tensions, but they make sense.

Regardless, the growing pains of an industrializing world make for good conflict!