Talk:Oyster War

Early Pacifism in Paba

SeeBabakiam#Culture.

The Pabap people had been roughly a 90-95% majority in Paba for most of its history, with the largest minority consisting of Tarpabaps, a political ally tribe consisting of people who averaged about three times the body weight of Pabaps and were physically even stronger than their body proportions would indicate. Since they were so tall and strong, and the Pabaps so small and delicate, both groups agreed that Tarpabaps should live mostly inland and focus on farming and the military while Pabaps would live along the coast and focus on fishing and trade. Paba needed a large military to defend itself from its neighbors, so for a long time, even the land army was mostly Pabaps.

However, this began to change around the 1700s when the Tarpabaps decided that they wanted a nation of their own rather than (or in addition to) being a minority in Paba. Many thousands of Tarpabaps immigrated from Laba to Paba, straining Paba's perpetually scarce food supply. Even though most of these were only intending to stay in Paba for a generation at most, and then move on to one of the other new nations that was being formed, those who stayed caused the Tarpabap population to increase from a 10% minority to a 60% majority, with Pabaps being only about 15%. Thus nearly 90% of the food produced in Paba was going to feed the Tarpabaps, and even though the Tarpabaps themselves were largely farmers, the population surge had exceeded the entire carrying capacity of the land and now Paba was forced to send boats ever further out to sea just to feed itself.

Pabaps had full control of the sea around them now, and could have simply refused to seat these people, but for the most part they considered the Tarpabaps a valuable ally, even if they were a very intimidating one. In fact, almost all of the ships that were bringing Tarpabaps to Paba were actually Pabap ships, as the navy of the Tarpabaps' original homeland on Laba had drastically declined as rising seas flooded most of their best harbors, and most Tarpabaps went through their lives without ever learning how to build a boat. (Flooding was also happening in Paba, but here the land was much flatter and more gentle, so settlements tended to slowly creep upslope instead of just suddenly disappearing entirely. On the other hand, because the land was flatter, each sea rise reduced the amount of habitable land much more drastically than on Laba.)

Though the Tarpabaps living in Paba mostly still claimed loyalty to Paba, they felt uncomfortable being a majority and yet not controlling the government. Leadership was mostly hereditary, and Paba had been ruled by the same royal family for nearly its entire history. Paba instituted some reforms in its government which still denied the Tarpabaps access to the ruling class, but attempted to pacify them by giving them more money to help improve economic conditions in majority-Tar areas of the nation, and allowed them to own ships and penetrate the Pabap naval blockade around rival nations in order to carry on independent trade missions with those other nations. (Paba's navy had now become the strongest in the world, as their previous rival's navy had been destroyed in the war immediately preceding the Vegetable War.)

Nevertheless the Pabap leaders were worried. Since Paba's army was almost entirely composed of ethnically Tarpabap soldiers, they realized they were about to risk the lives of almost the entire adult male Tarpabap popilatuon without the Pabaps having to suffer at all. The army had known for hundreds of years that any war that Paba engaged in would likely be fgought mostly on land, and therefore many more Tarpabaps than Pabaps would die, but none of them had expected a war of this degree.

Worried about revolt, Pabap leaders promised the Tarpabaps that since all of Paba was at risk in this war, all of Paba would fight, including the navy and the large civilian population. They also annexed Subumpam, declaring the whole of the huge wrecked empire to now be Pabap territory, and promised the soldiers that they could have it all to themselves if they wished. At the same time, though, they were cautious not to imply that they were deliberately trying to get rid of the Tarpabaps by granting them more land to move into. Even the most suspicious Tarpabap soldiers could not think of a reason why Paba would deliberately risk losing its army in a foreign nation knowing Paba itself would be immedaitely consumed aft6erwards. Moreover, they noted that the large Pabap minority in Subumpam had fared no better than the rest of the Subumpamese, and had ended their lives as food in the bellies in the crabs.