“What was the cause of the Imperial Revolution” is one of the single most debated questions in modern historiography. Most historians can agree on a list of events and structural weaknesses that made the Imperium ripe for the Revolution, but there is heavy disagreement on the weight to place on all of these factors and any attempt to find a single, underlying theme to them is controvertial and divisive at best.
In many ways, by the start of the 113th century the Imperium was antiquated and clunky. The bureaucracy strained at the weight of the vast empire, the Emperor would spend years isolated in the Vaird with little outside contact, and rebellions were sparked and crushed annually. Expansion had stopped centuries ago, while technological and cultural progress seemed to be stagnant. For the first time since the original Industrial Revolution, Imperial subjects could look back 1000 years in the past and feel that no significant changes occurred. Later writers who lived through the Imperial Revolution would look back on the decades leading up to it as ones guided entirely by malaise and ennui. Human civilization had reached its alleged pinnacle and the institutions that had driven it there were wholly incapable of doing anything more than that. The Imperial structures that had so efficiently subsumed all challenges within themselves and been the motor of human progress for millenia were running on fumes.
The only thing the Imperial structure seemed good for was increasing the inequality of the Empire. The few planets that contained luminium deposits or were well suited to act as central control points for the Empire were continuing to grow in wealth and status at a rate taht no other planet could keep up with. The dependencies fell even further behind than previously and the shared states, which for millenia had been slowly catching up to those planets under direct rule, had suddenly stagnated. The conditions of inequality that made Pearl such an oddity were going to become the norm throughout the Empire if something significant didn’t happen to make everything change course.
A large part of this stagnation and decline can be pinned on the Imperial bureaucracy. Historians cite a number of factors for why the once highly efficient Imperial bureaucracy was ground to a halt: a reduction in merit based promotions, the decline of major schools for civil service, and a struggle with the now gargantuan size of the Empire. The size of the Empire is well known, but it cannot be overstated how difficult this made governing the Empire. It would take years for news from the farthest flung parts of the Empire to reach the Vaird. While most of Imperium was much closer than that, even the more typical delay of days or weeks made efficient communication a nightmare. And added onto all that, every single planet was different. The general system of classification for planets was explained in Chapter 1, but this was a massive oversimplification. In reality, many planets had special cuts outs that complicated their relationship. Wallach, for instance, despite being a planet technically classified under “direct rule” in reality was governed “on trust” from the Emperor by one of the generals (upon election by the rest of the brass). Lynnys was officially a shared state, but under direct Imperial rule after the Second Esotericist War – which had happened in the 8500s, but the Imperial occupation simply never ended. Some historians have estimated that nearly half of planets had some exception of the “usual” form of administration. With the sheer size and complexity of the Empire, it is only a wonder that the bureaucracy did not break down sooner.
The Emperor played another important role in this. While they had been highly active and energetic in the first several millenia of Imperium, as time passed they began to isolate themself and periodically lose interest in running the Empire. Even in the days of Nhu the Divine Tongue, we are told that the Emperor would become melancholic for days, uninterested in any of the affairs of state. Those fits of melancholy began to last for longer and longer as the years passed, with the Emperor becoming unavailable and unwilling to govern for months and later years at a time. When the bureaucracy was strong, this was not too much of an issue. It could take over in the Emperor’s absence and do everything they normally would be tasked with. As the Empire stagnated though, the bureaucracy was less and less able to pick up the slack. It could only persist in what it was doing, it was fundamentally incapable of reforming itself.
All of that being said, it is a myth of popular history though that there were no attempts at reform. In fact, those attempts at reform are why many historians are hesitant to just put the decline of the governing ability of the central state to blame for the revolution. Because while numerous attempts were made at reform in the late 11100s and early 11200s, nearly all of those attempts merely increased the dysfunction of the Empire and dissatisfaction of a certain sect of elites.
Attempts for reform came primarily from two places: the top and the bottom. Starting with the top, the Emperor themself was the single most consistent engine attempting to reform the Imperium. This is odd, because the Emperor was one of the major forces of the Emipre’s decline as well, but reflects the inherent oddity of the Emperor that no other figure in human history has ever matched. While at times they were taken by fits of melancholy for years, unable to govern, there were times they were struck with a reforming zeal, castigating the “bureacratic centipede that has wrapped itself around the arms of the Imperium, extracting the human soul at its center and puppeting it without a brain.”
Historians have identified three major waves of reform instigated by the Emperor. The third and final will be discussed in the next chapter as it is the proximate cause of the revolution, which leaves the first two here. The first and weaker of the two was an anti-corruption drive that started at the turn of the 113th century. From across the Imperium, disgruntled subjects were encouraged to write in their complaints and critiques of the bureaucracy to the Imperial Anti-Corruption Taskforce (IAT). Ironically, and unfortunately for the Empire, the IAT would become one of the most corrupt branches of the Imperial government. The exact level of corruption was highly variable on location and there were worlds that had particularly zealous and committed anti-corruption officials, cracking down and publicly punishing bureaucrats found in the wrong. Those worlds were in the minority though, as on most planets the IAT officials were perfectly willing to accept payment to overlook wrongdoings – and to find wrongdoings where they had not previously been any in a rival. The infamous images of the Eonissi Avis show trials stand for themselves here and the IAT was officially disbanded in 11212, having successfully made the Empire more corrupt than when it started a decade earlier.
Far more structured and with a much greater potential was the Emperor’s personal attempt to totally reconstitute the basis of the Empire that they attempted to enact in 11229. Officially titled the “Reawakening of the Soul of Humanity, and Reinstilling Within it the Virtues and Values of the Imperium of Mankind, for Which We All have Devoted Our Celestial Energies,” the program was more popularly referred to as the Great Shift. The proposals the Emperor attempted to enact are too complex and minute to go into detail on, but in short the Great Shift would reorganize the entire Imperial apparatus. Gone would be the complex network of planets under which no planet seemed to follow exactly the same rules and gone would be much of the Imperial bureaucracy that administered it. The Great Shift would have the Imperium split in 4 districts, and then those districts split in 4, and then that subdivision split in 4, and so on until each planet was in a single subdivision with 3 other planets. Each of these planets would be considered under the “direct rule” of the Imperium, although that rule would be weaker than before. Each subdivision would have an Imperial governor, selected by the Emperor themself or the small remaining federal bureaucracy, and a planetary representative, selected by the planetary governments of the subdivision. This Imperial governor and planetary representative would work together to make sure the Imperial will was carried out in a way effective. Functionally, it was a plan to devolve the Empire.
The plan was simultaneously lauded and opposed by every major faction in Imperial politics.
The bureaucracy praised it because it restored a sense of order the Empire had been lacking but opposed it because it destroyed their base of power, the corporations praised it because it would have slashed many of the regulations holding them back but opposed it because it would have similarly slashed many of the laws and subsidies they relied on to do business, the intellectuals praised it as an important step in restoring the dignity of mankind but opposed it because it for attempting to define what that dignity was, the planetary nationalists praised it for giving more local power but opposed it as the Imperium still retained its share of the power. It can reasonably be said that every group (except perhaps the planetary nationalists) felt it was a step in the right direction, but similarly felt that it would be too risky to implement. And so, they all immediately jumped into action to oppose it in one of the bizarrest alliances in history.
The first line of attack was to question its authorship and authenticity. The plan was highly detailed, over ten thousand pages in length for a proposition that was supposedly written by the Emperor while they were in the middle of one of their melancholic spells. It contained multiple details so specific they would have required directly asking an single, obscure bureaucrat to learn of. Even today, there is a small but significant number of historians who question whether the Emperor really authored the entire proposal on their own as they claimed. While officially, the questions about its authenticity couldn’t get the proposal revoked, they served to undermine the legitimacy of the articles. A large amount of the population who never bothered to look at the plan themselves simply assumed that the rumors it was fake were true. Any attempt to impose the Great Shift on these people would have required an extensive and costly propaganda campaign – not impossible by any means, but not trivial either.
What really killed the Great Shift though was the barrage of elite criticism of it. The Emperor was unable to leave the Vaird without constant questions from high ranking bureaucrats, CEOs, activists, planetary leaders, and members of civil society about the Great Shift. Nearly every single one of those questions was critical. While direct criticism in the presence of the Emperor was forbidden, the method of asking questions obviously intended as a complaint about the policy but with just enough plausible deniability that the Emperor was unable to call it out was highly effective. Of course, it helped that neither the military nor the Queen was supportive of the Great Shift either. With that much pressure, and the fact that that pressure would turn to hostility to implementation, the Emperor was forced to back down. The following year, the Emperor would officially announce that the Great Shift, which everyone agreed was a step in the right direction, was dead. They entered a melancholic, despondant state that they would not leave until they announced the third, and by far more consequential, pack of reforms 15 years later.
Attempts to reform the social order were not only initiated by the top of the Imperial power structure though. Numerous efforts were made from below to present an alternative vision for the reality. Political radicals, separatists, esotericists, and every other manner of dissident made some effort over the last half century of Imperial rule to found a new order. Of these movements, three found enough popular backing to even start posing a threat: the Coronation Strike, the Federative League, and the Morroth Rebellion (also known as the Third Esotericist War, although there is too little continuity between the rebellion and the previous two wars to justify using that name).
The Coronation Strike of 11199 was what seemed like the last gasp of the radical labor movement. For millenia, the radicals of the labor movement who rejected the class collaborationist approach that was expected within the Empire had been trying, grasping for some foothold onto power. Some permanent foothold with which they could build a base. One century they would attempt to organize in the rich factories of Toffendor, the next they’d be agitating among the gas collectors of Yussifimian. Typically they’d find a degree of early success, but could never get it to stick for more than a century. Once every thousand years they’d stage a strike that really seemed capable of threatening power, twice even a rebellion able to throw the Imperials off the planet, but inevitably the forces of order would come crashing down on them. And every time the radicals were crushed again, their dream of reconstructing the world seemed farther away. They went back to their debates and struggles and reinterpretations of their theories, ready to try again, and with all of their effort would fail again. Every time this happened, the movement got a little weaker. Even as the Imperium had clearly entered what we can recognize looking back as terminal decline, the radicals were unable to see what was coming. Every attempt they made seemed more futile than the last and in many ways their attempts were more futile. It is not unrealistic to assume that had the radical movement been as strong in 11199 as it had been in 5000 that the Coronation Strike could have succeeded. But it was not to be.
The Coronation Strike was a massive strike wave across the Imperium that stopped all interplanetary traffic for 7 days. The movement started small on Mawr, unintended to be anything more than a capacitor factory wages strike instigated by the local radicals. As the factory owners resisted the strikers’ demands though, sympathy strikes popped up among connected industries that quickly paralyzed the planet. From there, word spread like wildfire across the galaxy. Transporters refused to carry goods marked for Mawr, similar strikes were planned across the Empire to start Coronation Day, which was only a couple of weeks from when the rest of the Empire learned of the Mawr strikes. By all accounts, the Coronation Strikes shouldn’t have worked; most unions learned of the intended general strike date only a couple days before Coronation Day itself. But the workers of the Empire were restless. Labor organizing had, like the rest of the Imperium, been stagnating. None of them and none of their grandparents could remember a time when radical labor had attempted anything like this. Compounding that, on several planets the Empire attempted to ship Queen agents to Mawr. There, transporters refused to work ships known to be carrying Queen agents and word quickly spread of the attempted repression. On Coronation Day, the strikes were the largest recorded in Imperial history. Industry became impossible. The Empire was at a standstill.
The so-called week the Empire was paralyzed is probably a bit of revolutionary flourish, aided by those later who wanted to channel the memories of the strike for their own political purposes. In reality, the strike had no organizational base. The spontaneity gave it power, but without any galactic organization to harness the radical tendencies in it, it faded away. The wave that had grown so quickly over the previous three weeks harmlessly crashed against the wall of the Imperial state. Many of the planets lasted less than two days before the energy had died down and the Imperium was able to reinstate order. A few others lasted longer, but with the Imperium regaining its footing, the repressive apparatus of the state was able to be activated. The military quickly took the more rebellious of the planetary capitals while Queen agents neutralized any of the local demagogues who could prolong the uprisings. By the end of the week, only Mawr was holding out. Trade had functionally returned to normal by the fourth day. For the rest of the Imperium, business as usual was restored. In Mawr though, the hammer of state repression fell down the hardest. While some of the other hotspots were only given a few months of military rule, the civil government of Mawr was totally overturned. The union leaders and radicals who had instigated the strike, as well as the officials who had failed to stop the strike, were hung in cages in the middle of the largest plaza on the planet where they were starved to death for all to watch. The cages holding their decaying flesh and bones were kept hanging until the revolution, of which Mawr would be one of the early centers of.
Less immediately influential than the Coronation Strike but more directly involved in the events of the Imperial Revolution, the Federative League was founded in Jundo in 11230 in response to the Great Shift by a disparate group of planetary nationalists. While there were delegations from across the galaxy, both Oxalis and Khala had representatives for instance, the largest delegations were predominantly from the middle strata of the empire, the shared states. Ironically, this middle strata would end up being the swing vote and least decisive bloc during the revolution, a fact that has been argued about for centuries and will be the subject of much discussion in later chapters.
The goal of the Federative League was to provide an organizing committee and platform for the separatists to coordinate their activities. In order to keep the League legal, the public face of the group nearly exclusively referred to itself as an organization in favor of “bureaucratic reform and restructuring.” Nearly everyone who knew of the League was aware of its true purpose, including the Imperial authorities who allowed it to persist while infiltrating it to neutarlize any threat it could pose to the Imperium. How deep this infiltration went is difficult to say. Some reports claim that nearly half the governing board were Queen agents or informants, although this seems unlikely. That being said, even with alleged records explicitly calling certain League members informants, by the time those records were publicly released the Imperium had already broken apart. All named in the documents claimed they were falsified, which may have been true or it may simply have been that the course of events had made former agents shed their old status or fully convert to their new beliefs (the conspiratorial claims that the Queen stayed intact following Imperial collapse and exerted so much control through its agents that a pseudo-Imperium was maintained are so ridiculous that they don’t need to be refuted). In any case, the Federative League had very little direct influence prior to the revolution. It was an important force in very late Imperial politics as the Imperium often reacted to it as it slowly grew in numbers and almost unconsciously gained strength, but it exerted no significant action beside the occasional single day protest. The true heyday of the Federative League would have to wait for a break with the established order.
The most immediate event prior to the cascade of events leading to revolution though, and the one on everyone’s minds who participated in those very early stages, was the Morroth Rebellion. Following the Peace of Pten, the Esotericist Wars had mostly calmed to a low simmer in a couple of outlying colonies. While Lynnys remained under military government, the esoteric beliefs were allowed to flourish throughout the Empire. In 11239 in Morroth, an unusually violent strand of esoteric thought took hold of the planetary population. Led by a charismatic leader known simply as “MMM,” this leader claimed to have personally spoken with God, who instructed them the Imperial Age was at an end and Morroth would be the birth of a new holy order. The hidden truth of the stars would be revealed following the expulsion of secularist political power. A dozen cults of this sort were probably founded in the Imperium each year, most of which fizzled into nothing or were quickly repressed. By a one in a million chance though, this MMM was able to avoid state repression and grow their esoteric strain (known by followers as MMMyxic Thought).
Without getting lost in the many details of the Morroth Rebellion, the insurgent power of the MMMyxics led to a confrontation between a band of armed MMMyxics and the planetary garrison. A shot was fired, a dozen or so MMMyxics were killed, and rebellion was being raised in the streets. Quickly, a much larger crowd of MMMyxics was formed and the garrison was put on the defensive. It took only 14 hours after the incident for the garrison to retreat offworld.
With the garrison in retreat, MMM set about creating the conditions to receive the Divine wisdom they expected to get, as well as creating military plans to defend and expand the spiritual revolution they had started. It’s difficult to get records of what happened on Morroth after the Imperials retreated and much of what is known comes from hostile sources making it hard to verify the truth of them. At the very least though, there was considerable discrimination by the MMMyxics against the remaining secular members of Morroth who hadn’t fled with the Imperium. Clearly, at least some of the MMMyxics were beginning to wonder whether the prophecy against the secularists didn’t also include the ones without formal political power. Whether or not the allegations of mass trials and executions for those accused of secularism happened or not (and admittedly, those allegations certainly provide a lot of moral cover for the Imperium’s subsequent actions), it is clear that the Principle of Equality laid out in the Peace of Pten was being violated.
At this point in the crisis, the galactic opinion was on the side of the Empire. Even most esotericists rejected the teachings of MMM, feeling that any esoteric beliefs advocating violence to the degree the MMMyxics had committed must be the result of a misinterpretation. It was broadly understood by all that a strong hand was going to be required to bring the Morroth Rebellion to a conclusion. With all that being said, what absolutely did not have popular legitimacy was the use of a black hole formulator.
In the centuries that have passed since the Imperial Revolution, the use of black hole formulators has become an unfortunate fact of warfare. While highly expensive and rare to use, in any major planetary war they can be expected to see use at least once or twice. Contrasting that to the Imperial era shows a world of difference. Until the Morroth Rebellion, the very existence of black hole formulators was unconfirmed. They had been developed millenia ago and while rumors had long since gotten out of their existence, the Imperium had goen out of its way to avoid ever confirming their existence. And because of that, the fear that we all live with today of them was largely non-existent outside of a few conspiracists. The Imperial military’s decision that the crisis on Morroth warranted their use, their very first military use, was such a massive break with the past that it’s a wonder whether General Radde even knew what a massive step she was taking (and indeed, at her trial she would claim she did not).
The total destruction of Morroth, along with every living creature on it, marked an end to the Morroth Rebellion. The Imperium attempted to cover up precisely what happened, but it only took a week until a disgruntled officer leaked the use of the black hole formulator. Totally unprepared for the reaction it would provoke, the military was now being publicly and harshly criticized by every sector of civil society – and significant elements of the Imperial bureaucracy. It is shocking just how much the Imperial military did not understand what a critical break with previous policy it was making. While there’s no evidence for it, it is unsurprising that so many have taken to theorizing that something else must have been happening on Morroth to warrant the use of the black hole formulator, although guessing exactly as to what is beyond the scope of this book. The esotericists who had so recently been in favor of Imperial intervention soon found themselves reading the smuggled (or forged) works of MMM to find any hidden truths that could be extracted from it. The Federative League watched in horror at the sight of what a half done rebellion could result in, while the Imperial bureaucracy tore at itself to try and reconcile the reality of using a weapon never intended for use.
There are many historians who consider the Morroth Rebellion the opening of the Imperial revolution. I don’t, as the themes of the revolution are much more obvious in the crisis invoked by the Necrotic Reforms, but it is undeniable that without the Morroth Rebellion there would have been no revolution. Everyone in opposition to the Necrotic Reforms had watched the Morroth Rebellion horrified and none of them wanted to see a repeat of it. When they revolted against the Imperium, there would be no half measures.