To those unfamiliar with the Revolution, it may seem odd to start the period known to contemporaries and history alike as “The Year of Ten Thousand Memos” with an account of the reformation of the bureaucracy. Because, while nobody knew it yet, the Empire was only a few years from breaking apart entirely, the system devised was never actually enacted. Only sporadically and at the very highest levels were changes seen at all, while much of the Empire remained operating as it had been. The reformation wasn’t particularly controversial either. Of all the measures debated by the Chamber, the administrative reforms were some of the least discussed.
That they were so little discussed at the time, with the broader Chamber seemingly just accepting without comment the recommendations made by the Administrative Committee, has puzzled historians. The structure and functions of a bureaucracy go to the very soul of a polity’s being. They are the veins that allow the state to function and as such should have been highly fought over. Which factions would have the most influence over the bureaucracy should have been a focal question on the minds of all delegates. At the very least it should have been on the minds of delegates like Q or General Lorkisian who were intimately familiar with the way that the structure of institutions can be used and abused.
So why didn’t any of the most ambitious delegates, most of whom had no direct input on the recommendation of the Administartive Committee, care? This can be explained in part because by the time the Administartive Committee made their recommendation to the Chamber, the Year of Ten Thousand Memos was nearly over. Events outside the Vaird were beginning to pick up steam and the attention that would have once been focused on carefully parsing a several thousand page book of administrative policy was focused elsewhere. The other part of the explanation is that the Administrative Committee legitimately did impressive work. Over the year they compiled their recommendation, every member was noted for spending long hours pouring over files and interviewing bureaucrats and working out the precise minutiae of detail. The team of the Administrative Committee was seen by the other delegates as extremely hard working, thorough, and genuine. That it took them the entire year to write their recommendation, making them the last committee to report (so long as one does not include the Esoteric and Religious Groups Committee, which never gave a final recommendation for obvious reasons).
This is the entire reason that I am choosing to start with them. While all these qualities are theoretically good and what one would want from a committee devoted to reforming the bureaucracy of the entire galaxy, I will present a novel thesis here that they are one of the major reasons the Empire collapsed to begin with. I would argue that their diligence that made the recommendation take so long to release was the reason events took such a harsh turn in the time it took to release it. The Empire functionally did not have a bureaucracy for the entire year it took to release the recommendation. Things were only carried on by a slowly weakening inertia, one that would find itself utterly incapable of responding to the unexpected events that were about to be unleashed upon it. Had a temporary bureaucracy been hastily erected in the weeks or months immediately after the opening of the Chamber, perhaps more effective governance could have been expected. As it was though, none of the bureaucrats who actually ran the planets of the Empire knew what was expected of them. The ambiguity created by the so-called thoroughness of the Administartive Committee created the ferment that would kill their cherished recommendation before it would ever be born.
The Administrative Committee, as with most other committees, was composed of 25 members. Of the delegates that the reader should already be familiar with, only Ælfthryth Karunanidhi and her advisor Ibrahim Ploomf from Liore South and North were present. That the committee was devoid of any of the major names of the Revolution is most likely the reason it got along so well in the first place. The conflicts, both personal and ideological, that first began to rear their head during the Ten Thousand Memos were absent.
When describing the daily functioning of the committee and the development of its doctrine, this makes it difficult to truly tell a narrative. There were no competing factions or leading figures through which a narrative can be conveyed. When there was any disagreement on the way to solve any particular issue, the delegates split in a way entirely lacking ideological force. It is one of the very few cases in history where it is easier to talk about the end product outright, without worrying about providing context of the discussions behind it.
Without further grandeur then, we have no reason not to do so.
The central pillar of the reforms was the overhauled classification system. In the eyes of the committee, the previous system had two significant issues: the classifications were arbitrarily applied and often arbitrarily overruled. It was simply unjust, too many planets (such as Pearl) were classified as a system that did not realistically apply to them and too many planets were technically within a classification but had exceptions to which laws did and did not apply to them.
It is notable that, by the records we have, no member of the Administrative Committee ever proposed that the system of classifications might be unjust in itself. It was too endemic to the Empire, they could not imagine the Empire without it. To them, it was not an injustice that different planets had different legal systems, it was only natural that different places would have different roles in the galaxy and their administration should reflect that. The only injustice was that they were unevenly applied.
They proposed three categories of administration: hegemonic, mercantile, and extractive. Rather than being left up to the will of the bureaucrats, a planet was given a classification based on the quality of its intragalactic trade. Planets whose exports consisted of nearly exclusively raw materials, while they imported little except the goods needed to exploit those raw materials were designated as extractive planets. The planets that imported raw materials and exported goods made from those raw materials were termed mercantile. Finally, those few planets who exclusively imported finished products and luxury goods, while their exports consisted more abstractly of human capital were under hegemonic administration.
In general, the new and old classifications systems moved as one might expect. The tributaries were nearly all extractive while those under direct Imperial rule were nearly all hegemonic. The shared-states and Imperial dependencies were a bit more complex and were the categories most likely to be arbitrarily assigned, so they had the most movement. Even with that though, a majority under the two designations were considered mercantile, with a major plurality as extractive and small amount as hegemonic. One of the great oddities of the list were luminium mining planets. Despite having the political power of a hegemonic planet, most were placed as mercantile planets due to their trade balance, with a few even becoming merely extractive.
The planet classifications each carried with it a set bureaucracy structure, carefully devised by the Administrative Committee. The specifics are long and complex, but the baseline is: the extractive planets had a bureaucracy heaviest in the areas needed to ensure regular and quality natural resource exports, the mercantile planets had bureaucracies focused on keeping their factories running, while the hegemonic planets were the lightest touch meant to ensure their citizens would stay focused on their own concerns. Their heads of state reflected this. All were called “premiers,” however that position held different powers in different systems. It was a directly elected position checked by an elected legislature in hegemonic planets, while it was a much more powerful position appointed for ten year terms in the extractives. The mercantile states had a compromise of sorts. While not directly elected, the citizens of mercantile planets could vote for local representatives who in turn could vote for regional representatives, who could vote for national representatives, who would finally select the premier. And of course, there was an Imperial governor who would have no formal powers except the right to veto any law, existing or proposed.
To those with modern sensibilities, this proposal undoubtedly seems unjust and tyrannical. It’s important to remember though that by the standards of the time, it would not have read as anything like that. It was not until the Khalasite faction began to form that the idea of some planets (and populations on those planets) being seen as extractive began to be questioned, at least at the elite levels of the Empire. To the members of the committee, even some of the few from so-called “extractive” planets, this all seemed perfectly just. Raw materials had to originate from somewhere, if that were allowed to stop human civilization would collapse, which would harm the extractors as much as everybody else. Government and administration had to be put in place to ensure that could not occur.
These planetary governments, while important, were also important because of what they were not. They were not nearly as large as they had been prior to the reforms. Vast portions of them had been cut off and added to a new, reinvigorated truly pan-Imperial bureaucracy. Administration of trade laws, taxation, record keeping, defense, and more were all stripped from the planetary governments except for the bureaucrats who absolutely had to be located on site to do their work. The Imperial bureaucracy, a powerful but unwieldy beast, was pumped up with the redundancies of a thousand planets all having their own copies of what could be done better centrally.
To run this new beast, a Cabinet was placed at the top. Officially advisors to the Emperor, the Cabinet was also intended for the top bureaucrats. A single person who could be charged with knowing the ins and outs of a single subject of governance for the entire Empire. This position was probably the most influential of all the proposals in the reforms, if only because most planets today have a Cabinet today because of them. This is perhaps unsurprising when one realizes that it is also the system in the reforms easiest to abuse for political purposes, especially when one is not putting all of one's faith in an immortal Emperor (who, while they had officially announced their intention to resign, many did not believe truly would).
How did the bureaucracy feel about these massive changes, threatening the very heart of the power they once had? Shockingly positively.
It is important to recall that the bureaucrats had all been unceremoniously fired when the Necrotic Reforms were announced, even if they had de facto kept their positions. There was a considerable degree of uncertainty regarding their futures, as the administrators all suddenly became aware that it was entirely possible for them to be replaced outright. This may not have been their concern at the start of the Year of Ten Thousand Memos, but as they watched events unfold they must have had an eerie feeling that the slumbering powers of human will, unchannelled and chaotic as they were, they were watching be unleashed could very well swat them into the void if they were not careful. By the time the Administrative Reforms were proposed, the bureucrats were noticeably jittery about the direction the Empire was heading in. In this light, the Reforms, while undoubtedly weakening the power base they had constructed over thousands of years, looked like a pillar of stability they would happily cling to if it meant avoiding being crushed.
The other reason is simply that they had been contribuding to the process of writing it every step of the way. The members of the administrative committee were constantly interviewing some administrator or another and they were regularly asking for comments on some proposed issue or solution. In a monograph on the report, sympathetic historian Yenna Oerstedt claims that “over half the policies in the reforms came directly from recommendations made by active bureaucrats. Over 80% of policies were explicitly or implicitly recommended.” They did not fight, because they had little to fight.
That, then, is the true legacy of the much lauded Administrative Committee. A beautifully written, expertly crafted, totally unbiased recommendation for reform taken straight from the mouths of those the reforms are meant to apply to, that took too long to write to serve any use. Justice.