Robert Sallade wrote: > > And the phrase, "the best defense is a strong offense," means...? The > arms race of any century is driven by the need not to destroy others, > but to safeguard resources. The best way to safeguard resources is to > take what you can defend and then improve on what you used > (offensively). This makes others think twice about trying to take > things back or forces them to improve technology so that you can't > take more. Means not much except as sophistry. Or I could simply say that it is double-plus-ungood (-; And actually, quite a few arms races are driven precisely by the need to destroy others. > >>> The technological state assumes that the Empire is still agrarian >>> and therefore cannot sustain an extremely large population so I'd >>> think that 15 to 20 million would be the best it could do. With that >>> number of people there is bound to be socio-economic and >>> geographical differences in the manner of speech. >> >> This seems much too conservative. Agrarian France had 26M+; Britain, >> 5.6M+. Europe as a whole could not have been less than 60M, and the >> Empire is *at least* as large as Europe, to judge from travelling >> times (before teleportation, that is). China must have had at least >> 100M. . . . ah, I just pulled out my Braudel. In 1650, he cites a >> population for europe (including European Russia) of 100M; > > > Good examples, but one thing stands out here. The largest single > empire you mention is 100M. The rest are continental populations. > > The second highest you quote for a single population is 25M which is > not that much higher than my estimate. That's hardly the point, though; population density or size or the carrying capacity of the land is not determined by the political entity. France is surely *much* smaller than the Empire, so a pre-industrial population density similar to France's is hardly impossible. If you want to judge how densely populated the Empire *can* be, you need as a reference point not just earth empires, but earth geographic populations. When you do, you see that a Dragaeran population of 10s, even 100s of millions, is possible to feed over the equivalent land area, to a first approximation--this is true of agrarian societies generally. To see what the actual story is, you would have to know the rough amount of arable land, and the Dragaeran birth/death rates. > Remember that agrarian does not mean subsistence farming. You cannot > form an empire on providing goods and services without a means to feed > the population. The vast majority of the population is involved with > farming (the Teckla), therefore most of the Empire deals with food. > The balancing act of resource management simply means that there is > another, smaller segment of the population that has been freed from > farming by better farming methods. Mercantilism does not preclude that > a society is agrarian. Didn't say that it did; said that it couldn't be a *simple* agrarian society. We actually don't know what percentage of Teckla are farmers; there are plenty of them serving in the cities and towns, after all. But since it is a question of economic activity, you can't really judge >from the percentages exactly in any case. Ours for example, is still an industrial society, though very large sections of it are devoted to services & non-commercial activities. We *do* know, through Vlad & Paarfi, that the Empire is concerned with much more than the movement of food from one place to another. To re-cap: deducing that a society that is agrarian must necessarily be quite limited in population doesn't fit with historical examples. If the Dragaeran population is limited, nothing we have seen of it suggests that agricultural production is the limiting factor. Snarkhunter