October 8, 3014

Most Dread Sovereign,

I have sought to be both diplomatic as well as candid about the difficulties that I have faced seeking to honor your wishes both for peace and, if possible, a military alliance with the Bravians as well as obtaining a relationship that would not allow the Bravians to enter our country and to make drastic changes to the culture that we have. I am confident that the Bravians would have no wish to harm us, but at the same time their mere presence in a country carries with it the certainty that this country and its ways will be drastically affected. The story I have for you next indicates precisely this danger in a way that is easy for you and anyone else at the court to understand. Although diplomatic protocols forbid me to name the country directly, lest this particular message find its way to be published in a hostile fashion, this story involves a neighbor of ours that we have often had difficulties with. This neighbor, like ourselves, is a coastal nation that has pursued strength through both trade as well as naval power in the southern area of the sea where Bravia’s own southern shore is located.

Of even greater interest is that the Bravians did receive permission to settle in the land. Previously, the nation I speak of had been divided into two classes that were very different according to their ethnicity, with an aristocracy that can only be termed as lighter-skinned and a much darker-skinned people who were under a great deal of oppression. Our own problems with the nation came when they refused to treat our own people with the same respect as they treated their own elites, despite our similar appearance, but rather sought to raid our settlements and take our women to be their concubines. This was insupportable, and as a result we fought enough wars with them to fix a boundary beyond which they could not cross on pain of death. This was conducted in your father’s reign, as you no doubt have often been told of, at a great cost in blood and treasure. At any rate, this nation somehow, for reasons that we do not understand, allowed the Bravians to set up several trading posts along the coast of their country along with a free trade agreement that the nation thought would allow a great deal of wealth to flow through the country. The cities were granted extraterritoriality, meaning that they would be goverened according to Bravian law and not according to the law of the nation itself. It is likely this deal which persuaded the Bravians to allow the construction of these posts and to enter into the agreement in the first place. I am sure that the Bravians are as amenable to approving what they see as a good deal as any other nation, and indeed most peaceful trading nations would have found the deal to be equally appealing.

What ended up happening next is somewhat noteworthy, at least as far as our own diplomatic efforts here are to be considered. The trading posts did bring wealth to the nation, but the elite were so wasteful in their luxuries and so unable to provide for the basic food needs of their population that a substantial amount of land near the trading posts was admitted into the trading posts’ territory to provide for the growing of food both for the trading posts themselves, which were rapidly becoming fairly prosperous trading cities in their own right, among the most powerful and wealthy cities in the entire land, as well as for the larger population of common people who were required to work. Many of these common people found themselves working within the territory of the trading posts, where slavery was forbidden according to the law of the Bravians. The Bravians, it must be noted, do practice a form of involuntary servitude, but such servitude is strictly limited in its form and does not constitute slavery. Even where, as I have commented, a person is condemned to the living death, they are still viewed as a human being even where they have forfeited property and political rights. As a result, the common people who found themselves working within the territory of Bravia’s trading posts were freed and served as day laborers whose wages and decent living conditions as well as certain civil rights were guaranteed under Bravian law.

This, becoming known through the generally downtrodden people of the land itself through what has been described as a kind of grapevine, led to there being a great deal of demand for people of the commonfolk moving into the Bravian territories to obtain their freedom as well as decent wages and living conditions. In time, the more educated and cultured part of the ordinary folk also married into the Bravian population and became their own sort of people, casting off even the identity of slaves and oppressed people and becoming a free people that was gradually becoming elevated through their adoption of the culture and ways of the Bravians, which were highly attractive to these downtrodden people who had never seen their own ways as providing any hope for their own uplift or development or improvement. As a result, there quickly became the growth of a middle class within the nation as a whole that was made up of both the Bravians themselves, and their descendants, who served as middlemen in the trading between our unruly neighbors and other nations, allowing the elites to gain access to luxury goods that they could not produce but viewed as necessary in showing off their status, as well as the mixture between the local common people and the Bravians who served as free small farmers and traders largely focused on serving the needs of the local population in and around the trading posts themselves. Those lucky enough to enter into the trading posts found opportunities to gain residency, those even luckier who managed to intermarry with the Bravians and convert to their ways became full citizens of Bravia through their conversion and thus gained the rights of Bravians even though they belonged to the local population, which had no rights under local laws.

This, of course, created a great problem. With at least some members of the ordinary people rising far above their station of birth, acquiring education, self-respect, as well as a full suite of religious, civil, political, and property rights to go along with their increased status, there was a rising demand within our neighbors for all members of the common people to be able to enjoy the same degree of uplift. This was, as one might imagine, entirely unacceptable to our neighbors, who sought without a great deal of success to claw back the rights that had been given to the Bravian merchants as well as their supporters. Despite having achieved a certain degree of tactical surprise in assaults on the Bravian territories, our neighbors found themselves to be foiled by the powerful defenses of the trading posts themselves and were forced to ask for a ceasefire to avoid suffering great loss themselves. We initially celebrated this defeat as it meant that the nation was no longer in a position to threaten us, being in a state of considerable internal disorder. While their previous ruling house fell in the face of conflict within the elites as to whether it was better to pursue a hard line against the expanse of Bravian ways and those who saw much to approve of in both the wealth as well as the high degree of culture and civilization that could be found in Bravia and in its entrepots, the situation within those posts became more difficult because so many of the farms and unwalled smaller towns that had been within Bravian territory were ruined or heavily damaged in the course of the fighting.

Recently, this situation was addressed by the sending of a delegation from this mixed-Bravian people to Bravia itself. I had the chance to witness at least some of these negotiations, to the extent that they occurred within the Bravian court, and as they are of direct interest to us concerning their neighbor, they provide the opportunity to better understand certain aspects of Bravian culture and diplomacy that are worth understanding as we seek to work our way within the complex currents of this nation. In being a silent witness to the goings on relating to the relationship between these hitherto unknown children of Bravia and their fatherland, I seek to provide you with insight as to Bravia’s dealings with other countries that may be of great relevance to us in terms of what sort of relationship we will want, and how we can frame the terms of that relationship in order to best protect the well-being of our own culture and regime in a way that our neighbors have so far failed to accomplish because of their greed, their cruelty, and their stupidity.

While I do not believe that we will make the same mistakes, not least because you are considerably wiser and more humane in your dealings than our nation’s former (and current rulers), I feel that it is necessary to demonstrate how narrow of a path we seek to trod and also the complexity of Bravia’s relationships with other nations. Indeed, one of the lessons of the story I have to convey is that Bravia has an immensely flexible approach to dealing with neighbors in ways that seek to do justice to them while also providing a means for Bravia to avoid entangling itself with those whose ways it does not approve of. Yet while the Bravians are not an aggressive people, their prickly nature and their tendency to spread in any empty niche or territory that they find themselves in tend to make them a far more difficult people to manage than they might seem at first appearance.

When one witnesses the mildness and easy-going aspects of Bravian diplomats, it is hard to imagine that such savvy rests beneath their benign appearance, such that a nation may invite them to set up a few small trading posts thinking to profit off of the Bravians’ skill at business and their universal reputation for fair dealing with others, only to find the Bravians growing in size and population and power enough to threaten the very survival of a nation’s regime within the course of a generation or two. This sort of ability to grow rapidly out of control and to take advantage of divisions within a society without any sort of false dealings or treachery is a highly dangerous skill and one that has to be closely watched. Any nation that wishes to preserve its elite dominance will find themselves threatened by the presence of Bravians in large numbers and in organized populations, especially if such people are governed by their own laws. It bears repeating, as I will have the chance to tell in other ways later on, that it is the very egalitarian nature of Bravians, without being hostile to either honor or profit, that serves as a permanent example of the good life to people who interact with them, and as most people are not elites, the sight of a nation that lives without elite oppression and with a focus on serving the well-being and interests of ordinary people is a lamp in a world of darkness that cannot help but inspire sedition and rebellion among those who long to enjoy such a state themselves.

With that, I do not wish to belabor the point but believe I have provided enough context that you and the other members of the court who are able to provide me with instructions on how I am to proceed and what sort of treaty you wish for me to negotiate can do so with as accurate a knowledge of possible as to the diplomatic approach that Bravia maintains. In many ways, it is definitely to our advantage to pursue a friendly relationship with Bravia, to profit from free trade with the Free Port of Bravia, and to obtain military assurances that they will not attack us and will come to our defense if we are attacked by a third party. That said, allowing Bravians themselves to settle in our country is dangerous, as they will settle without demanding their own laws be accepted only with those nations that have the same legal order as they do, which tends to lead Bravians to seek for closer unions, which only makes them larger and more powerful than they already are. This too is something I have seen with my own eyes, and what which has been seen cannot be unseen.