Commissaries

The Commissaries are one of the major constituent organisations of the Commercial Guilds which operate in the Eleven Cities. One of the more recent organisations set up by the Guilds, the Commissaries rather ambitiously seek to exert control over the food supply to the cities.    

History

  The Commissaries have little in the way of an institutional history, as the Commercial Guilds are still in the process of setting up the organisation. Their objective is to extend the control they possess over the wine trade into the city of Chogyos to the general trade in foods coming into the Eleven Cities. Given the obvious captive market they would possess, this would provide the Guilds with a massive and unprecedentedly reliable income stream, essentially granting them the power of life and death over the cities of the Sea of Jars.  

Operations

  Although the Commercial Guilds have made no particular secret of setting up a division dedicated to expanding their involvement in the production of food, news of how they plan to do it has only begun to filter into the cities in the last few years. In that time Copper-ranked guild officers have been fanning out systematically across the Alluvial plain, meeting with the leaders of rural communities and discussing the possibility of buying the produce of such villages at higher prices than the smaller independent merchants can offer. They have encountered some success in the southern reaches of the plain, where mercantile attitudes towards food production are entrenched features of the local economy (since the distances involved make it difficult for farmers to take their produce to market themselves). In northern areas however, particularly those within viable travelling distances of the cities of Pholyos and Loros most farmers have yet to be convinced that the proposed scheme is actually a better deal than simply conveying their produce to market themselves.   The establishment of the Commissaries has led to a considerable hew and cry from both institutions and the general populace of the eastern cities. Centralised control of the flow of foods to these communities is generally seen as a step too far for an institution already deeply connected with the well-being of urban communities. Given the deep links that the Commercial Guilds have with the city of Chogyos, furthermore, eastern cities in particular see this as a worrying power grab. The institutional memories of organisations such as the Keepers of Light and the governors of Pholyos are deeply marked by the history of conflicts between the Chogyan Hegemony and the eastern cities and these groups have vociferously spoken out against the initiative.   In terms of the downstream results of the establishment of the Commissaries, this response seems to have been disproportionate. As noted above the Guilds have met only scattered success in actually establishing their control over the production of foodstuffs, and to date have not established anything like the sort of control the Vintner's Guild has over wine production. Certainly the notion of them deliberately engineering a famine in order to exert control over broader society - a possibility seriously mooted by Keepers of Light in Pholyos and Tyros - seems as yet unlikely. Indeed it could be argued that the Commissaries will make food production and distribution more efficient via a transport network which can get food produced in the deep south to urban mouths before it spoils (an argument that, interestingly, no Guild officer has been heard to make). What the establishment of the Commissaries has really exposed so far is the deep-seated cultural fault lines between eastern and western cities.