In this episode of The Agora, Graf von Marstall and Lukas Eidolon discuss the alternate History dystopian Novels of "The Domination Series" by S.M. Stirling.
Imagine the defeated remnants of every war and revolution in Western history from the eighteenth century onward. These remnants, who fought to maintain their slave-owning lifestyle or their position of nobility, have now been spirited away to a far off place where they manage to set up a colony in some remote part of the world, at the time untouched by civilization, surrounded on all sides by savage tribes.
This is the world in which S.M. Stirling’s Domination series begins. In 1782, British Loyalists fled the American revolution with their slaves and families and set sail for the warm and sunny shores of South Africa. Thereupon, they arrived in the British Crown Colony of Drakia (named for Sir Francis Drake) which had been captured from the Dutch some years earlier where they settle down and found a new home.
Over time, this fledgling colony is reinforced by Icelandic refugees escaping a devastating series of volcanic eruptions, French slave owners from the Caribbean, Huguenots as well as Royalists escaping the tyranny of the ongoing French Revolution. Drakia also becomes home for Confederate families seeking to maintain their slave-owning lifestyle after the South’s defeat in the American Civil War as well as a steady stream of reactionaries, political dissidents, and other victims of the Enlightenment including figures such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles de Gobineau and Freidrich Nietzsche.
The Dominion of Drakia goes on, through a series of wars, to conquer and subjugate all of the African continents. The Drakians are merciless in their conquests; each tribe that falls to them is quickly enslaved and put to work on their ever-expanding plantations, mining operations, and railway systems. In the 1830’s, the British parliament formally outlaws slavery. However, this did not deter the Drakian’s whose Legislative Assembly goes on to pass the “Indentured Labor” and “Master and Servant Acts”, establishing a system of debt-peonage for the conquered nonwhite population. Eventually “Drakia” becomes shortened to “Draka” in popular usage and slaves come to be referred to as “serfs,” mostly as a way to avoid scrutiny of the British Empire’s anti-slavery legislation.
The continent of Africa is seen as nothing more than a Draka preserve under the auspice of the British Empire. However, with the outbreak of the Great War and Germany’s subsequent defeat in 1919, the Draka refuse to concede any of the conquests they had taken during the war which includes the entirety of the former Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, Central Asia, and Western China. As a result, the Dominion of Drakia effectively cuts its ties with Great Britain becoming the “Domination of the Draka”.
