Thread:Charles Murray/@comment-4960835-20180311120744/@comment-25309944-20180312094858

French Algia is a private colonial venture chartered with the French state. It's a corporate entity publicly listed and governed by strict rules of organization, transparency, representation, and disclosure, whose primary purpose is to provide a return for financiers in the Milky Way and Andromeda who invested in it. It's probably sluggish, dysfunctional, and poorly managed as a venture, though. The price of raw resources has been very low since the crash of 2816, so the colony probably isn't doing very well. The colony, in theory, is charged with its own defense and it manages with private contractors, company troops, and union militias as best it can. If you were to accuse these men of being the tip of the spear of French expansionism, they'd laugh and say that nobody had told them; they had been led to believe they were the rear line.

French Algia does lease land to the French navy for on one of their planets, and the rudiments of a naval base have been erected there. By the looks of things, the French aren't really in a hurry to finish it, or to invest much money in it.

The other territory to the south are the Mirus Colonies of the Imperial Siranian Directorate. The Directorate underwent a civil war recently and France kind of favored the rebelling colonies, who were pro-democracy (and not anti-French). France's most overt action in the conflict came when it dispatched a fleet to the Directorate's struggling Mirusian colonies and forced its pro-Directorate government to capitulate. Under a French occupation governor, the colony abolished its mercantilist trade practices, was tied into the French Empire's markets, and saw a lot of investment. This was at the height of France's economic boom, so the colony saw prosperity it never had before. In the midst of all of this, a referendum was put to the people of the colony asking if they'd like to become an independent nation, join the French Empire, or join the rebellion, and they voted to join the French Empire. The economic crash hit days later, draining the colony of all of its wealth and casting it back into abject poverty. Oops.