The Corporate Era

Lasting from A.Y. 4107 to 4709, the Corporate Era saw the rise of several mega-coporations in some of the outer regions of The World. In total, 7,500 star systems were controlled by 18 corporate empires. While existing technically as publicly-traded companies, these empires issued their own currency, built their own fleets of warships, and enforced their own laws; controlling the lives of trillions of people. The era culminated in the Corporate Wars.

History

Mabach Micoru was the first such mega-corp to form, as defined by being the first to establish a permanent off-world colony of the type later referred to as a [total control zone'. Typically, colonization was either a government endeavor, or little more than small mining camps. Micoru's large-scale colony began with a million people, every single one of whom was an employee of the conglomerate.

Officially, the mega-corps were 'following the lead' of the Gudersnipe Foundation, which had at that point existed for over 3,000 years and was, on paper at least, a mega-corp in its own right(for legal reasons, the entire Foundation is technically an asset owned by a small haberdashery). However, while the Foundation's goal is and always has been long-term stability, the mega-corps were strictly about making money.

After Micoru, T.K Inc. was next to gain corpocracy-status. Numerous other groups followed suit, and after more than a century of mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers, some eighteen mega-corps gained eminence in the beta-quadrant of The World. This qas quite far away from regions like the Utops Cluster and the Runarin Star Empire; and while some efforts were made to follow the guidelines set forth by the Alliance Space Commission, by the 4220's the corporations had gained nearly utter dominance.

Adding further to the tensions, "corporate space" was not a defined region, but rather a series of unconnected star systems existing along side thousands of single or multi-world governments, many of whom the corporations existed to do business with. Corporate worlds were not given the status of independent governments, though many of them operated well above that level.

Despite their vast resources, none of the corpocracies were able to construct large FTL drives, which limited them primarily to build sub-dreadnought class warships. A few did experiment with chaining multiple small drives(a concept known for massive reliability problems) or fitting larger, slower freighter drives. Some old slow FTL drives(mothballed over a thousand years earlier) were fielded for mobile battle stations.

Life under corporate rule was challenging for most. On corporate worlds, the only employer was the corporation, jobs paid in company script, and wages were whatever the corporation deemed appropriate. Free trade was stifled, and corporate practices were openly hostile towards any independent operations. They claimed this was "in line with the practices of the Foundation", and used this as frequent legal precedent for keeping out government oversight. (Of note: such practices were not at all in line with those of Gudersnipe, which promoted a high standard of living that propped up small businesses. Corporate hostility towards the Foundation was driven by the Foundation's general disdain for large, abusive corporations, which it did often undermine)

This series of events took place in The World, and while many of the mega-corps had ties to off-world assets, most were functionally unusable during th

The Mabach Consortium gains voting majority in six publicly-traded mega-corporations, forming Mabach Micoru, and beginning The Corporate Era.444