Kingdom

Cheese! OP has found us out!

>How could that look like?
How could that look? Or, what could that look like?

Well, that has happened very often actually
And not without reason
Merchants tend to be a rich class, money is needed to rule
I mean historically the Jews would actually be a reasonably choice, or most Italian merchants in the beginning of the Renaissance

This. Japan had this exact situation. In fact merchants were below typical peasants religiously speaking, but they ran so much shit.

Depends on if they can compete with nobility monopolizing resource trade in the first place.
If they don't due local regulation(rice trade/stock), large merchant guilds, or simple things like Loans.
And past some size, they got enough guards to have a small army, so they can actually do something if people get pissed.

Jews isn't even a good example, because they don't get to choose where they get segregated to. While something like Hansa get to literally get a land great, build out a fantastic trade quarter, don't live segregated, may buy out the port, and then abuse the distance for massing trade into wealth.
And then station a large army of them own around, mostly for fun, in case somebody decides to not pay up.

The thing is
Farmlords is landowners, and considered "peasants". Thats basically the social class, and their horde of serfs.
And they can engage in trade, mining, making armies, being nobility, etc.
Mostly from sitting on a lot of land, and farming most of said land, poorly.

An alternative to everything already mentioned in these threads: early modern France, specifically under Louis XIV. In European history the king siding with the filthy, unwashed plebs to knock the nobility down a peg is a classic and Louis XIV played that game like a boss. The entire Versailles system was implemented to ensure that the nobles of his realm were always too busy competing for who could kiss his feet to actually do anything of worth, which in turn allowed Louis XIV to bypass them in ruling the country (absolutism). The problem is that no man can rule a country on his own and such a man always needs both money and educated administrators. When you want to keep the nobles as far away from their own estates as possible, who do you turn to? Educated, perhaps-not-so-unwashed-as-you-previously-thought peasants. Many of them would be peasants.

In short, on paper the nobles are above the merchants but in reality the king has sidelined the nobles and allows the merchants to run things for him (which is great because merchants don't have hereditary titles they can equivocate to their administrative positions).

China.

Caste system that was never properly removed but has no actual power

Isn't this how the russian mob/yakuza/other organized crime groups operate?

If you are looking for a real world example of this try Tokugawa era Japan. The whole of the caste system is built on the fact that merchants don't produce anything, they just suck up extra profits as middle men, and are therefore just parasites.

However, as the Tokugawa regime gets long in tooth, the problems with the system become more apparent. The fact that samurai rely on a stipend that never increases, despite inflation being a real thing, turns the ruling class into a bunch of poor bureaucrats that carry swords. On the other hand, merchants become more and more rich as the system goes on, mainly due to being the only people that could move goods from one domain to another.

Eventually, the merchants end up owning a lot of the wealth but are unable to do anything with it, as that would violate the order of things. The samurai are in the opposite boat, they MUST show off their wealth in order to remain within the proper order. This forces samurai to take out significant loans from merchants in order to make ends meet and show off their power. When the samurai cannot pay these loans back and the merchants try to collect the main authority of the shogun steps in and cancels the loan, not allowing the merchants to recollect their money.

You might think that this would cause the merchants to stop loaning money out to samurai but once again the shogun would step in. Merchants would be forced to give out these money loans which both sides knew they had no way of repaying.

Eventually merchants start to get wise to this in other ways and trade other things for loans. Because they know they can't get the money back or spend the money on themselves they opt to instead trade the money for favors and influence, essentially buying their way into the good graces of their lords.

FUCK this feels shitty to write in the thread getting bombed by happy merchants and /pol/ shit. It feels so shitty to write all this and know that it will probably only be seen by like 4 people.

No, it's useful user. And ultimately what happens in the Reformation is that the samurai and merchant strata fully merge into a new kind of nobility, right?

Hey user, thanks for informing me more on Japanese history, it's both interesting and helpful.

Then the next two kings suck at that game and you get a revolution and suddenly the country is a republic.

I saw your post as well, and it's quite interesting. Gives me some food for thought, and it's definitely something that could be used in worldbuilding.

Pretty kickin knowledge man

What you're describing is India.

Eventually. There was a lot of flip flopping in the french revolution, and I'm pretty sure they had kings even after Napoleon. It took a while for the republic to stick

God I love rat-folk trader people.

Maybe that's just because I have pet rats and it'd be really easy to imagine them, given human-like reasoning and whatnot, doing exactly that.

5

>>In reality, they rule over the kingdom.
But did they control Japan in this position?

>The whole of the caste system is built on the fact that merchants don't produce anything, they just suck up extra profits as middle men, and are therefore just parasites.
This idea is pretty much lifted from Confucianism, in case any anons want to expand their research in that direction.

The title was Emperor as I recall. The French had gotten rid of their kings quite definitely. There was also no going back to a non-parliamentary system once that cat was out of the bag,

Like Japan.

You're pretty much describing 2017 America, dude.

>That filename
I'll fight you

>Theoretically, the merchants are the lowest social class
What about manual labourers and the homeless?

Manual labourers actually do something of worth, unlike those greedy money worshippers.

Homeless is not a class, it consists of people from other classes who have for one reason or other been disgraced

Except the king IS a merchant

No. If it were about (((merchants))) he'd be saying userors or bankers

Yes, and he is considered scum.

>Manual labourers actually do something of worth
They're still considered lower class while merchants are firmly middle class

You don't mean them? You Don't mean

>((((((((Athenians))))))))))

Ancient china?

Was it XIV or XV who outlived all his reasonable successors?

>jews

I'd been wondering exactly how that panned out for a long time. Because of the way things are in L5R, which in and of itself is a valid answer to , I assumed some equivalent of merchants being human refuse that everyone is ludicrously beholden to must have been the case in Japan.

I believe this is why L5R has a thing about merchants not actually having the right to free travel in the Emerald Empire, they need a writ from a noble sponsor that basically extends that noble's reception and freedom of movement throughout the lands to said merchant. That in turn prevents the merchants being especially uppity and taking control over shit because they are still slaves to the whims of the highest ranking noble they can manage to parasitise off. And a lot of the time they will need to constantly bail their lord out of debt because social mores demand that samurai in the emerald empire pretend that they have no idea how much money they have or how much money anything is worth.

>How could that look like?
America?

...

Absolutely floored that I not only saw this thread again the next day but that my comment had gotten so much love. Much thanks. I have to admit I only briefly touched on the merchant class system in university as my main focus was on the Meiji era.

One thing to note here is that when I specify that samurai were poor I am talking about the lesser samurai. Samurai were essentially locked into the pension system, only their pension system went down through the generations from one heir to the next. It would be like if your grandfather retired on a $1,000 a year pension in the early 1900's. Back then thats a lot of money and I'm sure he could live comfortably for the rest of his life. However, if that pension was locked at $1,000 a year all the way to 2017 you would not be able to live a month without some sort of assistance. Richer samurai were often those that were either very close to the ruling Tokugawa OR their extreme enemies. When Tokugawa took over the country he did so in a pretty dickish move (by killing the infant son of Hideyoshi, who he had promised to protect) and winning a civil war. In the end, Tokugawa was unable to completely dominate the country and essentially sued for peace against the major lords that still opposed him. These domains were the largest and often most profitable and Tokugawa could not really do much against them because if they went to war the country would fall into another civil war.

Napoleonic Emperors stole the whole Roman gimmick of "republic but with a totally-not-king who's elected". The monarchy did return in 1814/1815, but it's very important to realize that this was FORCED on the French people, and imposed with conditions, namely the Charter of 1814. That Charter guaranteed most of the gains of the Revolution, retained the Code Civil as France's civil code, left some of the Napoleonic elites in charge et cetera. The problem was that this Charter (not constitution!) was deemed a "gift" of the monarch, a "gift" that could be repealed at any given moment. Charles X tried to repeal it in 1830, guess how well that ended for him. Then Louis-Phillippe became king (a member of the cadet branch Orléans, one of the few nobles that actually supported the revolution) and styled himself Citizen-King, trying and utterly failing to reconcile the monarchy and the republic. Then he was overthrown in 1848 (the so-called afterbirth of the French Revolution) and another Roman style emperor was installed (an once again, the heir was the nephew of the former one). He was pretty popular (but Hugo hated him so modern France hates him) and lost the throne during the Franco-Prussian war.

tl;dr:
>You finna say we wuz ROMANZ 'n shiet?
>The monarchy was ended by the people three times
>The emperors were dethroned by foreign powers, not their own people

The kings came back not because the French were flipflopping, but because literally everyone else in Europe was trying to delay the inevitable.

Most civilizations in human history. Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to eradicate the merchant entirely at this point.

Your post was pretty nice, I liked it.

L5R, as a setting, is/was emphatically against making sense... Wick got mad when people called bullshit on his misinterpretation of what life was like back in the day in Japan and tried to make outlandish social constructions in-setting to make that work. He also tried to make the game as unfun as possible... he hated player agency.

If nobody's mentioned it yet, this is literally what happened in Japan and led to the end of the shogunate

Wasn't that Sengoku era Japan?

>Everything is /pol/
Come on guys, that's some extremely fucking thin skin. "Money = Power, so what if merchants are the most powerful despite not having raw social standing?" is not a fucking inherently racist concept, you're being pussies.

Look at the rest of the thread, there are fucktons of countries and social classes where it happened. It's a pretty common and normal thing. Even ideas like "Mayor is in the local mafia boss's pocket" fits.