Chapter Text
Preface
The history of the late Paradis Kingdom is one marked in popular conscience by Titans, humans fighting Titans, Titans fighting Titans as the reclusive kingdom and the Marley Empire fight one last time. Names of the Bearers and those who fought them are said with awe or hate to this very day, their lives and struggles recorded, studied, and put in print or film. Many books, fictionalized biographies, or academic papers, have the names of some of them in their titles, such as Zeke Yaeger or Levi Ackerman. They explore the players that marked and influenced the Second Eldian-Marley War, be how their actions profoundly changed the destiny of their nations and the world at large, or the scale of their achievements and triumphs.
Is such an important and narratively rich conflict that, after being preceded by a hundred-year truce, ends up understandably soaking all the attention given to the Hermit Kingdom. This book isn't an effort to discredit or lessen their importance, but to comprehend and contextualize how the economic and social reality informed and conditioned the players on the Titan-infested island. To make sense of how an ostensibly medieval society, managed to develop and industrialize so quickly in a short span, just after losing two-thirds of their territory with the Fall of Maria. On the way, we also would be tackling the problematic mythos surrounding Michel Rückzahlung, a figure that has dominated what little economic history has been studied on the late Paradis Kingdom. Now, with the Eldian Archives finally open to historians, we hopefully can see through the fog of biased memories and incomplete primary sources to make sense of the makings of the Paradis economy.
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Chapter 1; Feudal Stasis
The popular historiography of the late Paradis, as a decadent and static society, is not just exaggerated but outright wrong. The last 50 years of Eldian isolation may superficially appear socially peaceful, but outside of the Assembly and the Ress state, the were profound changes and turmoil happening. The many contradictions on which the first King brought this kingdom into being, with the societal changes that a hundred years made were boiling under the surface, and to understand the events after the Fall of Maria, we ought to know them, for they allowed the transformative regime that came later.
The kingdom that woke up under the King's spell in 743 was a reflection of the inaccurate image that the monarch had of a pre-industrial society. Most of the people of the island believe they had lived there in a subsistence agrarian economy as their ancestors did. They were robbed of technology and advancement that the hundreds of generations before then contributed to and were left to fend for themselves on the temporal island, without the appropriate knowledge, infrastructure, or equipment. Not to minimize the psychological damage they surely endure, and to which he forces millions to pursue a delusional idea.
The nearly complete lack of surviving written or oral evidence, not only suggests a purposeful effort to remove it from the record by Paradis' authorities but possibly another mind manipulation event. Nevertheless, as archaeologists work around those limitations and study the immediate before and after of this blackout concerning the first years of Walled society we have a pretty strong case on the magnitude of the famine endured. The Empire's record of the number of inhabitants of the island before the end of the Great Titan War, a mere 100,000, mostly concentrated on its Southern Shore. The exiled Eldian population who accompanied Karl Fritz, compared to the population before and after the war is estimated up to 4 million, with a couple of hundred thousand remaining on the mainland.
As many would suspect, it went catastrophically. Due to the lack of any kind of records, we can't be sure of the number, but estimates are that of a population of approximately four million, a quarter of them perish in the first few years. By the time we had more precise population records twenty years later, the Kingdom had two million and a half inhabitants. Similarly, the crop yield in those first years is almost impossible to determine. No doubt the lack of expertise and coordination alone would severely diminish the output. (...) As with the population we need to wait twenty years until records help us make a clearer picture. In 766, the crop yield of an acre was 0.6 tons of wheat on average, with Maria on much lower and some regions of Rose breaking into the 1-ton range. We could expect that in the fateful year of 743, the yield was a lot less. Put in comparison, in 682 Paradis, a then backwater province of the larger Eldian Empire, produced 1.3 tons of wheat per acre. The yield per acre slowly grew for the next decades until it stabilized at the 0.8 range.
As we have seen, King Ress killed possibly a million of its people, not with any malice or even in a calculated move, but he overlooked a simple economic reality around whom not even the King of Titans could work. In an ironic twist of fate, the amount of Eldians killed by Marley in the aftermath of the war was less than those starved and confused, exiled to an island by their monarch who, allegedly, tried to save them.
There is little evidence to suggest that Rückzahlung or other key players by the time of the Fall of Maria did study or even know about this event. No more than to the accusation he was a Marley agent in any case. It doesn't stop us from appreciating the irony of the shared similarities of the crisis suffered by the people of Paradis. As history would have it, a hundred years after the specter of famine would loom large over the people of Paradis once more.
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How Eldian society, indeed any society, would cope with these events is something we unfortunately won't ever truly know. As mentioned, the complete blackout of information of the first decades of the Kingdom limits what we can say about it considerably. Apart from apocalyptic themes of famine in some passages in religious texts, the event was expunged from the collective memory. The economic and political reality that emerged to us is, nevertheless, very well documented, and what we will concentrate on in this chapter.
Feudal Stasis, while a very problematic term, alludes to a very real and ever-present part of the Paradis Kingdom. The guarding and staffing of knowledge and technology by the Reiss and Assembly, to enforce a medieval reality to the people of the island. The motives were as ideological as practical, the reason de etre of Paradis was to put Eldia to repentance, a punishment for the many wrongs of the old Empire. As such a poorer and painful existence was a fine choice and it also ensured that the vast population of Subject of Ymir was never advanced enough to challenge not only the ruler class but discovered what lay outside the Walls.
If it was only used to refer to the objective or ideal of what the King envisioned and its successors tried to enforce, that would be a precise term. However, generalizing beyond that to describe the history and the society that lived imprisoned for a hundred years is unhelpful to our understanding of the period. Even under the traditional view that, save anti-Titan related, there were no organic technological advances, that whatever advances they had were lost or guarded Eldian technology, the society, and economy of the island at the start and the end of the Walls periods was nearly unrecognizable.
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