Combined Honest Oversight Committee to Advance Mercantilism (CHOCTAM)

The Combined Honest Oversight Committee to Advance Mercantilism is usually thought of as an economic entity, and so it was. But the degree to which it was created by political and military forces, sustained by them, and in turn maintained those powers, is a far more important side of CHOCTAM. CHOCTAM was a creation of the empire, brought about as a reaction to the formation of the Navis Noblite. CHOCTAM's creation marked the true beginning of the Imperium, and became one of its chief elements. CHOCTAM and the Imperium were inseparable.

Prior to the Great Crusade, in the absence of a single ruling power among the inhabited worlds, mere was no single economic organization. Indeed, such an organization would not have been possible. As virtually every state had access to interplanetary trade and interstellar travel, none could be excluded from trade at any level. Trade between the planets, systems and the stars was essentially anarchic and space piracy was common.

After the Horus Heresy, trade was almost unknown at interstellar or intersystem levels. Without machines to guide ships through hyperspace, trade from system to system or star to star became very slow and extremely expensive. The economic forces governing trade of this sort resembled the ancient great caravan routes which had sprung up on various planets with rich, widely separated cultures.

While many of these routes dealt with different commodities, they had certain aspects in common. They dealt only in the most expensive and least bulky items available. Thus almost all the trade was in luxury goods. Such was also the case with what trade survived the Great Crusade. Spices, jewelry (the jewelry planet, Hagal, whose deposits were legendary ten millennia later, was worked out in three and one half centuries, and fifty of those years were before the development of CHOCTAM, luxury clothing materials (ancient silk, modern schlag skin) — these became the stuff of the caravan trading which was all that connected many worlds between the Great Crusade and the coming of the Navis Noblite.

The Noblite brought itself to the attention of the Imperium and newly-enthroned Emperor in 012M30. Swiftly realizing that the only feasible way to deal with the Noblite was on a basis of mutual advantage, the Emperor called for a Financial Synod to convene on Aerarium IV in 14M30, and include representatives of the Noblite, Landsraad and the Imperial House. Depending on what arrangements could be agreed upon, each participant had much to gain and/or lose from the existence of the Noblite and the advent of swift, easy interstellar travel and trade.

Through a masterstroke of purposeful misdirection, the Noblite was able to keep secret their dependence on the navi-trance for their navigational abilities. By leaking the wonder of mélange’s geriatric properties, they ensured that their co-participants in the Synod would look no more deeply into the spice's workings.

The news of the age-controlling properties of the spice served only to enhance the feelings of the feudal states of the Landsraad toward the Noblite and the return of extensive trade. They were aware of their vulnerability to the effects of trade; now they had an added reason to wish to control the Noblite. It gradually became apparent that the Noblite and the feudal houses had interests that ran in tandem. Both wanted the return of trade, but only in a fashion which would permit each institution to survive. As long as the Noblite itself remained a secret, closed group, in control of the lanes of commerce, they cared little what political systems survived on the worlds they served. The feudal houses, on the other hand, cared about the economic benefits of trade, and just as deeply about the possible sociopolitical effects of cultural interaction. They wished to enjoy the former, without suffering from the latter. For years neither the Noblite nor the feudal powers could find a way to accomplish all their aims.

One of the problems was the ambitions of the most powerful of the Great Houses. Most of these houses pre-dated the rise of the Imperium, and regarded the success of the barbarians from Earth as a freak of history which could and should be rectified. Rectification, it was understood, would be accomplished by the rise to the throne of whatever house was speaking. Those houses that still harbored such ambitions saw in the Noblite an opportunity to elevate themselves if they could seize control of this new means of trade. Thus threatened, the Noblite refused to deal with many of the

Great Houses, and compromise between the feudal powers in general and the Noblite proved impossible for years. But both the Noblite and the Emperor proved themselves skilled negotiators. While the Synod remained unable to resolve its problems, matters were never permitted to deteriorate so that the gathering broke up. The Noblite was especially concerned that this not happen, for they knew that the outcome of the Synod would determine whether or not they survived.

The deadlock was broken only after two and a half years by the brilliant stroke of Emperor and his chief financial officer, the Dioicetes Asetirides. During the latter half of the third year on Aerarium when it began to appear that the deadlock might destroy the Synod, the emperor called the delegates into full session and presented to them the plan for the formation of CHOCTAM.

Neither the surviving records of CHOCTAM, nor what has now been discovered and translated of the Imperial histories, permit a full understanding of the structure of CHOCTAM. But some outline is possible. It seems certain that the plan the Emperor proposed to the delegates envisioned the creation of a development corporation which would have a monopoly on interstellar and intersystem trade. One percent of the gross profits from this trade would be collected each year and placed in a fund to be distributed to the members of CHOCTAM on the basis of the shares they held in the corporation. Such distributions would occur only after deductions from the fund for any projects for the advancement of existing trade or the development of new markets. Membership in CHOCTAM was limited to the feudal governments. The question of the distribution of shares naturally became one of great moment. It was in this connection that the Emperor had reason to feel himself most fortunate in the abilities of his finance minister, for it was he who devised the distribution of shares which, with minor revisions, became the foundation of the corporation.

Perhaps the master stroke in this arrangement was assigning the Emperor only 20% of the shares. In granting the Emperor only one-fifth of the shares of CHOCTAM, he placed the Imperial House in a position where it would have to depend on many other of the feudal powers if it were to control the corporation. It was also clear to all that this percentage was far less man the Emperor had every right to. His military power was the equal of the combined forces of the Landsraad in some respects, particularly atomics, and the benefits which flowed to him from levy funds and other taxes made him an economic power more than equal to half of the Landsraad's states.

All corporations need directors, and CHOCTAM was no exception. Originally, they were the members of the Landsraad High Council. After the first few decades of operation, however, the composition of the board was changed to reflect the distribution of economic power among the Great Houses. Sometime toward the end of the first century after the Noblite monopoly, membership on the board of directors of CHOCTAM was offered to any house which did more than 500 million solari's worth of trade through the Noblite in a Standard year. Directors naturally voted their own shares in the meetings of the board, and also those of any house that wished to grant them a proxy.

The plan seemed more than fair with respect to the participation of the Emperor. Moreover it also had the great advantage of cementing the power of the feudal powers vis-à-vis the remaining non-feudal states in the empire. In closing intersystem and interstellar trade to non-feudal states, the emperor offered an unequaled opportunity to the feudal powers to remove their most persistent worry.

Not only did such an agreement offer the chance of restriction of these governments to their own worlds, it also, as the emperor's plan was organized, strengthened the very states that were most threatened by non-feudal powers. The weakest feudal states were generally those that were closest geographically to non-feudal governments, those that had to compete on an almost daily basis with differing societies. But brilliant as the structure of the proposal was, it would have failed if the participants had not been able to convince themselves that their shares in the corporation were fair. The shares were based on their trade without their systems over the past ten years. Such a sharing arrangement had some obvious advantages, one of the most compelling being the stipulation that once a government achieved membership, it could never fall below one share in the corporation. Thus, though shares in CHOCTAM were to be redistributed, on the basis of trade done, once every 100 years, participants would enjoy some benefit from off-planet trade even if they could no longer participate. The governments were all aware that natural resources were not permanent. It was in this connection that the Imperial financial intelligence system proved its worth to the emperor and demonstrated its abilities to the governments. The fiscal information for each of the participants was so accurate and so complete that it was clear to many of the states that the emperor had been aware for many years of extensive tax fraud on their part. Others discovered to their surprise that internal corruption or inefficiency had been robbing them of a proper return on their own resources. The figures shocked some more than others, some pleasantly and others unpleasantly, but few escaped unscathed. When the time came for debate on the disposition of shares, many negative arguments were instantly ended.

Since the emperor was indeed as brilliant and cunning as he was now suspected of being, he had not depended on the unprepared reaction of the Synod to his proposal; He has tilled the soil of the Synod as the most assiduous of husbandmen. For months before the proposal was made to the whole Synod, a series of meetings had made clear to various of the feudal powers the advantages accruing to them. The most powerful of the Great

Houses had been approached, first individually, and then in concert. The weaker of the feudal powers, which would become agents for the non-feudal states, had been dealt with in regional groups. After several months of arguments concerning matters of detail, the charter was accepted. Once the approval of the Synod had been secured for the charter, the vote of the Landsraad was a foregone conclusion, since the membership in the two bodies so overlapped. A meeting of tile Landsraad was necessary for the formality of a vote, however; this was accomplished in a matter of months after the Synod disbanded.

The creation of CHOCTAM, which limited membership to feudal states which controlled at least a planet, created the connection between Great Houses and control of off-world trade. Heretofore there had been several possible ways in which one might have defined a Great House; now one constant factor could be used. This new factor not only served to define the Great Houses, it also vastly strengthened them. The resources now available to a Great House through its shares in CHOCTAM produced, within a decade, such a substantial increase in the income of most of the participating houses that the possibility of a successful revolt all but disappeared. More than this, the entire economy of the empire entered a period of rapid growth that lasted more than five centuries. This commercial expansion was accompanied by conquest; the empire expanded until it controlled all the habitable planets available to the current navigation abilities of the Noblite.

The nature of the trade of these early centuries is not easy for us to grasp. Living as we do in a universe from which so many of the commodities in which our ancestors dealt daily have vanished, the normal commerce of this period seems the wildest extravagance. Even millennia after the formation of CHOCTAM, the residence of the Imperial governor of Tallarn was built with heavy wooden beams many meters in length. The largest of these beams discovered by archaeological excavations to date is 15.5 meters in length, and it is not complete. It is clear that these beams came from Tanith, and it would have involved a very long journey to transport them such a great distance.

Such trade was supported with ease by the expanding economy of the empire after the formation of CHOCTAM. The rapacity of the exploitative economic practices of the time could be overlooked since the steady acquisition of new worlds not only replaced the losses but added to the available resources of the system. But as trade began to penetrate to the limits of travel, and the expansion of the economy began to slow, the commercially weaker members of the empire began to suffer. Naturally, the first difficulties came in the financial aspects of their societies, but in the end this spread to the political sphere as well. Thus, some seven millennia after the formation of CHOCTAM, and two centuries after the economy's rate of expansion began to slow; we can discern the first substantial changes in the membership of the participating partners of CHOCTAM. The planet Ecaz now appears in the records of the meetings of CHOCTAM as an independent voter, as do the worlds of Harmonthep and Grumman. At least one of these worlds, Harmonthep, does not last long as an independent, and when it disappears from the records of the meetings of CHOCTAM it vanishes from the historical record altogether.

But a far more important indication of internal unrest in the political systems of the members of CHOCTAM can be inferred from the percentages of the vote exercised by the emperor. Having begun with only 20% of the votes of the corporation, within the proceeding five millennia the emperor had increased his share to 25%, and with the votes of those members whom he controlled, the emperor commanded in fact closer to 35% of the partners' votes, While still short of an outright majority, the Great Houses could not fail to see the meaning of the trend. Since the emperor could almost always persuade at least 15% more of the partners to his arguments, in almost all instances the partners affirmed the position of the Imperial House.
 

In general, though, what we have of the records of the meetings of CHOCTAM are a testimony to the stability of the worlds of the empire.

While it is true there is a Steady growth in the power of the emperor in the meetings of the Directorate, the emperor and his supporters never controlled more man 60% of the vote, and the emperor himself never more than 40%. In addition, while there was a continuing turnover in the membership from century to century, the change was never more than 10%, a rate of change which the political and economic balance of the empire could easily support. Such a rate of change proved that some entrepreneurs had succeeded in raising the status of their minor house to the exalted level of the Great Houses. The certainty of the chance of social mobility made the restrictions of the faufreluches (class system) tolerable. Once established, only minor changes occurred within the workings of CHOCTAM have occurred over the millennia.

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