you got fucking kings, Torygg, Helseth, living gods of the Tribunal.... under an "Emperor"? who puts some garrisons around but does.... what exactly?
theres an "East Empire Trading Company"? whats that do?
it kinda seems like a holy roman empire, kinda seems like a regular roman empire. they've got knights, dukes, but a Legion...
yes i know the answer is technically "these jackoffs just made it up as they went" and don't care a lick about political theory but this is exactly the kind of excercise that makes fun speculative historiography
roman empire looking organization that is unaccountably the abolitionist faction in morrowind :scared:
although im way more generous in that i think the toothlessness of critique makes it a bit more like Chinese dynasties (complete with multiple iterations). like noone denies the Ming were an empire but they weren't terribly extractionist because there wasn't much periphery to exploit. besides the Orismer and Reachmen i cant think of imperial periphery, though argonia was peripheral to morrowind and morrowind to skyrim in skyrim's timeframe.
its very strange that the setting has 1 political center so any kind of compelling political threat has to come from within it? and undermine the concept of a united state. actual China had the steppe peoples to destabilize them, and was like a fourth, at best, of the Old World
It does have the tenuous justification in that the Empire's civic cult was literally founded by an abolitionist revolutionary movement, although in practical terms one would imagine that would have been weakened into tolerating first serfdom, then indentured servitude, and then full-fledged chattel slavery again. Though thinking about it, I believe it's gone back and forth on the issue over the millennia so it's probably more just the abolitionist bloc being on top at that time.
That sort of fits the closest, doesn't it? A distant central bureaucratic hierarchy on top of otherwise autarkic regions that have only a tenuous connection to it apart from taxes and the provision of soldiers. That's more or less how I've seen Chinese marxists describe the state of things under the various imperial Chinese dynasties, at least (also literally where I first saw the word "autarky" ever was in a description of historical China from Chinese marxists).
Black Marsh, Elweyr, and Valenwood fit the bill the best, I think. I get a definite sense that they're being subjugated and extracted from, although Valenwood is arguable there.
I mean there are regional capitals and the regions themselves are pretty autarkic and more or less autonomous. The Imperial City is important for geographical and symbolic reasons, but in practical terms is distant and unimportant.
yeah the lore is consistent on the Empire being antislavery but its a mismatch when that's paired with real-world roman iconography-aesthetics. and empire is not antithetical to chattel slavery, they can figure out other ways of exploitation
im not certain i can endorse your peripheries though, like argonians and khajiit got enslaved by dunmer but that was illegal so its difficult to fold into the continent-wide economy? not that the word of law renders reality impotent but we dont know the extent of slavery in other province at that time. be very easy for Elswyr or Black Marsh to be perifery if imperials/other empire aligned people were running plantations there but we dont know if they actually were