Caputian Haifa
- This article is about the Caputian state of Haifa, 1653 AN to 1668 AN. For the independent republic, see Free State of Haifa. For the Hammish autonomous territory, see Hammish Haifa. For the present-day region, see Haifa.
 Flag | |
 Coat of Arms | |
| Motto | "Veritas nos elegit" (Truth Chose Us) |
| Status | State of the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia, 1653 AN to 1668 AN |
| Capital | Abeis |
| Largest Cities | Abeis, Keybir-Aviv, Lewisburg, Melusinia |
| Official Languages | Common Tongue, Haifan, Alexandrian, Wechua |
| Demonym | Haifan |
| Government | The Government of the State of Haifa |
| Head of State | HM Elizabeth I |
| Head of Government | |
| Legislature | The Haifa State Assembly |
| Representation | Single-member districts in the Parliament of Caputia |
| Garrison | 2nd Manoeuvre Army (IV, V, VI and VII Combined Arms Corps) |
| Currency | Caputian laurel (₺) |
| Population | 27,045,778 (1663 AN) |
Caputian Haifa was the state of Haifa as it existed within the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia, which held it from 1653 AN until the kingdom's dissolution on 30.XV.1668 AN. The third largest of the Caputian states by population, it returned 27,045,778 inhabitants in 1663 AN. It was also the easternmost, lying in central Keltia along the Straits of Haifa. Its capital was Abeis, and it shared land borders with Morovian-Patrovia to the north and San Luis to the west.
Haifa came to Caputia with the rest of the former Commonwealth of Hamland at the settlement of the Hammish Civil War, having entered Hammish possession a generation earlier when the Free State of Haifa dissolved itself and ceded its home region under the Agreement of Dissolution. Under Caputia it governed itself through the Haifa State Assembly and a Governor at Luxor Palace in Abeis, drew its own single-member districts for the Parliament of Caputia, and kept its own electoral rolls. Queen Elizabeth I was styled Queen and Governor-General of Haifa among her titles. Its first years under the Crown were marked by the Order of Rochefort's campaign of forced conversion against the Stripping Path, which the kingdom proscribed outright by edict in 1658 AN, on the petition of the Haifan nationalist current that afterward organized as Hatnuah. Four of the sixteen Caputian combined arms corps were stationed in the state, more than in any other, and its roads, railways and hospitals were rebuilt after the war through national programs. The state's economy rested on the diamond fields south of Abeis, on banking, and on agriculture and fishing. Haifan was one of the main languages of the kingdom.
The defining question of the Caputian period was whether Haifa should remain in the union. Two referendums were held. The first, in 1663 AN, returned a narrow majority for independence on a turnout of 47 percent, which the government held to be inconclusive. The second, put to a wider franchise on a four-option ballot alongside the general election of 1665 AN, returned a plurality for remaining. Both were followed by disorder, and the second by rioting in central Abeis. The state ended with the kingdom in 1668 AN, and its territory was afterward annexed by the Haifo-Pallisican Imperial Trade Union.
Etymology and name
Two explanations of the name were current. The first derives it from the Haifan root CHFA, "to cover, to hide," which was taken to describe Lake Morovia lying concealed in the middle of the Keltian continent. The second links it to the word CHOF, "beach," or to a phrase meaning "beautiful beach." Neither can be preferred on the evidence, and Caputian usage repeated both without resolving them.
The inhabitants were called Haifans, and the same word named their language. Under Caputia the state was styled the State of Haifa in law, and its government the Government of the State of Haifa. The Crown's connection to it was carried in the sovereign's own titles: the definitive style Queen Elizabeth I fixed by proclamation in 1653 AN named her Queen and Governor-General of Haifa, a form used for no other state of the kingdom.
History
Haifa's fifteen years under the Caputian crown fall into three parts: the settlement that brought it into the kingdom and the sectarian violence that followed, the long constitutional argument over independence that ran from 1658 AN to 1665 AN, and the recession and collapse that ended both. The antecedents lie a generation earlier, in the republic's own dissolution.
Before Caputia
Haifa entered Hammish possession in 1620 AN, when the Free State of Haifa, an independent republic on the shores of Lake Morovia, dissolved itself under a ratified Agreement of Dissolution and ceded its home region to the Commonwealth of Hamland. Haifa was received as an autonomous territory of the Commonwealth, administered from Abeis, and to fund the transition the Commonwealth allocated the whole of its own currency reserve, 16,762.85 obols, to Haifa for immediate investment. The Agreement partitioned the outlying territories with it: North Antarctica passed to Passio-Corum, and Port St. Andre became the Most Serene Republic of St. Andre, named in the Agreement as Haifa's successor state. The Wallis Islands had already gone their own way three years earlier, declaring independence in 1617 AN and being annexed by Passio-Corum thereafter.
The Region of Haifa was administered from Abeis for the next generation. Unrest reached it as the Hammish government collapsed in 1644 AN. The disturbances in Israat and Neo Patrova were settled by mediation under the interim premiership of Donat Ravaillac; the Haifan unrest was not, and the Hammish military was sent to secure the territory. Its conduct there divided the National Provisional Authority that Ravaillac headed, and his own ministers objected openly to the army's methods. At a military review held at New Kirrie to mark what the army called the pacification of Haifa, Ravaillac was shot dead by a sniper. His assassination began the Hammish Civil War.
The war ran on for nine years more, and what reached Haifa next came out of General Eliphas's own weapons program. The Alexandrian Flu, loosed in transit to the eastern front, spread through the territory between 1650 AN and 1652 AN. Estimates put mortality across the eastern regions of the Commonwealth at thirty to sixty percent, and local authorities resorted to mass graves. Among the dead were the members of a nascent Haifan Nationalist Army, which the epidemic destroyed before it had fought.
Accession to Caputia
The civil war was settled in 1653 AN by the Geneva Peace Agreement, concluded under Alexandrian mediation, and Haifa passed with the remainder of the Commonwealth into the new Kingdom of the Union of Caputia. Queen Elizabeth I acceded on 25.XII.1653 AN and was invested on 25.XV of the same year, taking among her titles a style that named her Governor-General of Haifa, a relation to the Crown no other state held.
One body did not join the settlement. The Order of Rochefort, a militant religious order that had fought through the war, declined to merge into the new armed forces and withdrew instead to its home country in northern San Luis and Haifa. Its independence during the war had been paid for in part by Augustus Eliphas, who had covertly financed its revolts against Ravaillac. It emerged from the settlement armed, organized and outside the chain of command.
The Rochefort campaign and the Edict
From its bases in Haifa and San Luis the Order pursued a campaign of forced conversion against the Stripping Path, known afterward as Melusianization for the creed it imposed. The Church of Caputia had been established by statute in 1654 AN, the year after the accession, and the Order held to a doctrine of Melusinian supremacy that the church itself did not preach. Under its Grand Master, Lee Grantham, it worked by torture and imprisonment, first in Tonar and Keybir-Aviv and then through the outskirts of both cities. The campaign ended when the killing of a policeman during one such conversion set off a general uprising, the Yell of Tonar. The government answered with Operation Cobalt: twenty thousand troops, letters of marque, and the bombing of Rudolfh from the air. Grantham was captured and killed.
The Order had not paid for itself. The Greater Pallisican Trade Association was the principal source of funds for it through the sectarian violence that followed the founding of the kingdom, so that the campaign in Keybir-Aviv was underwritten from outside Caputia altogether.
The kingdom's answer was directed outward, and Haifan nationalists helped bring it about. On 25 Liebluary (25.II) 1658 AN Queen Elizabeth I issued the Edict of Pallisican Expulsion and Repudiation, only the second edict in the kingdom's history, expelling the nationals of the Haifo-Pallisican Imperial Trade Union and all practitioners of the Stripping Path from Caputia and its possessions and confiscating their assets. It was issued on the petition of the National Salvation Front and of Hatnuah, the Haifan nationalist party, on the grounds of the movement's record in Keltia and Apollonia. Caputia thereafter recognized no relations with the Association and prohibited travel to and from its territory. The government later reported the Stripping Path eradicated from the kingdom.
The independence question
Hatnuah had sat in the Caputian Parliament since its first, appointed session, where it held ten of two hundred and fifty seats. Leia Clemens took its leadership in 1658 AN. At the general election of 13 to 15.II.1660 AN the party returned fifteen members on 1,767,637 votes. During the same campaign three of Haifa's independent deputies combined to found Yesh Atid, a unionist party under Noam Reiner that contested Haifa alone. Turnout in the state was 3,503,894. Allen Greenstreet, leader of the Liberal League, noted afterward that 69.22 percent of the Haifan electorate had voted for the unionist parties and for independent candidates. Clemens answered with the slogan that carried the nationalist campaign for the next five years, "Hands Off Haifa Now!"
The question went to a vote by statute. The Haifa Referendum Act, 1661 was introduced by George Blakeslee, passed the Parliament by 419 votes to 3, and received Royal Assent on 25.XV.1661 AN. It fixed the question in its second article, "Should Haifa be an independent country?", and the franchise in its third: any legal resident of Haifa registered at least five days before the poll could vote, and the roll was to be maintained by the government of the state of Haifa. The poll was postponed once, by an Order-in-Council of 22 Dankember (22.XIV) 1662 AN citing serious security threats, and fixed instead for 10 to 12 Liebluary (10.II to 12.II) 1663 AN.
Two campaigns contested it. Free Haifa argued for independence with Hatnuah behind it; This Is Our Union brought together the National Salvation Party, the National Unity Party and the Liberal League. The Institute of Public Opinion found in its exit polling that those voting yes were moved above all by the wish to keep the proceeds of the state's natural resources, and by dissatisfaction with politics at Zalae, the kingdom's capital district, while those voting no divided between the Caputian laurel and the monarchy.
Independence carried the poll. Of 2,996,250 votes cast, 1,541,870 were for yes and 1,439,997 for no, giving 51.46 percent against 48.06 percent, with 14,383 ballots rejected. Turnout was 47 percent. The result was certified by the election authorities of the state of Haifa and by the Royal Election Commission together. Prime Minister Royston Merrick and the state's own Unionist government both argued that a turnout that low undermined an already narrow margin, and treated the outcome as inconclusive. Clemens held that the referendum bound the kingdom and that the figures accurately represented Haifan aspirations. On the night of certification, confrontations between the police and independence supporters left seventy dead in Abeis, Keybir-Aviv and Diamandis.
The second referendum
Rather than let the question rest, the government put it again on wider terms. The Second Haifa Referendum Act, 1664 AN, passed the Parliament by 359 votes to 15 with 48 abstentions, Hatnuah supplying the whole of the minority and the National Unity Party dividing 96 to 48. The Act replaced the binary question with four options: remaining a Caputian state on the existing terms, devolution with increased autonomy, independence under a shared monarchy and common institutions, and full independence with free trade and mutual defense. The franchise was widened to Caputian citizens aged eighteen and over resident in Haifa, taken together with the local government register. The parties contesting the state received a supplementary campaign allocation of ₺800,000. The poll was set to run alongside the general election.
The campaign was the largest the state had seen. Clemens brought 850,000 people into Abeis by the count of the Caputian Broadcasting Corporation, and closer to a million by the estimate of the police, the largest demonstration ever staged in the city. Four hundred thousand rally shirts raised some ₺6.4 million for the nationalist cause. The separatist camp divided over what it was asking for. Clemens wanted independence under a shared Crown; her deputy, Samuel Goyers, wanted a unilateral declaration and a Republic of Haifa. The unionist parties campaigned across the state, and the National Salvation Party held its second convention at Lewisburg, seating 547 voting and 219 non-voting delegates.
The poll was held from 1 to 3 Natopuary (01.VIII to 03.VIII) 1665 AN. On an electorate of 16,750,000 and a turnout of 59.20 percent, 9,916,000 valid votes were cast. Remaining a Caputian state took 4,739,848 votes, or 47.80 percent; full independence took 2,161,688, or 21.80 percent; independence under a shared monarchy took 2,409,588, or 24.30 percent; and devolution took 604,876, or 6.10 percent. Remaining thus won a plurality rather than a majority, but support for the two independence options together had fallen to 46.10 percent from the 51.46 percent recorded two years earlier. At the general election held with it, Hatnuah returned fourteen members and Yesh Atid ten.
Clemens resigned the leadership of Hatnuah on the night of the result and declared the referendum illegitimate. Iram Buchler took the party provisionally, and from that point Hatnuah abstained on every recorded division of the Third Parliament. In Abeis, masked protesters camped before Luxor Palace, the Governor's residence. They set cars and barricades alight until the center of the city was burning. More than four hundred were arrested and more than eighty injured, and one demonstrator died without regaining consciousness. The government met the leaders of the protest movement and Hatnuah, and declined to rule out a state of emergency. When Gerhardt Eugen Seydlitz was proclaimed Prime Minister on 12 Tasneber (12.XIII) 1665 AN, the ten members of Yesh Atid voted for him, in acknowledgment of what the National Unity Party had invested in the referendum, and the fourteen of Hatnuah abstained.
Recession and dissolution
The referendum settled nothing for long. Growth across the kingdom fell from 6.8 percent to 2.2 percent between 1665 AN and 1666 AN, unemployment rose from 9.7 to 10.2 percent, and the laurel lost 1.2 percent against the Crait, the currency of the Benacian union; the kingdom's statistical office, CapuStat, declared a recession. In Haifa it fell on a state whose largest employers were the diamond fields and the banks, and whose fourteen nationalist members had withdrawn from the business of the Parliament altogether. The Assembly sat out its term without a further general election being called anywhere in the kingdom.
The White Plague reached the kingdom in its last years. The disease, a mildew that attacked living and dead flesh, could not cross open salt water but traveled readily in wood, soil, paper and produce. That left a densely settled inland state on a lake and a river route among the worst placed in Caputia. It spread quickly through the populous districts of Haifa, though the record of its arrival there is later than the state itself: the first reports at the Sternberg estate at Beit Shalom outside Abeis are dated to early 1669 AN, some months after the kingdom had ceased to exist. The general accounts of the collapse reckon the plague among its causes.
The Kingdom of the Union of Caputia ended on 30 Geburtsber (30.XV) 1668 AN, without a dissolution, a prorogation or a final division; the Parliament simply stopped, and the state governments stopped with it. Seydlitz vacated office in the same year and took asylum in Constancia in 1669 AN, and what remained of Crown authority passed to the Royal Caputian Government in Exile under Merrick. Neither the last sitting of the Haifa State Assembly nor the end of Rachel Dresner's tenure was written down.
The territory did not stay vacant. The Haifo-Pallisican Imperial Trade Union annexed Haifa after the dissolution, and fighting between rival factions at Tel-Amin and Lewisburg opened the Haifan Civil War.
The people scattered. Caputians went out into the Keltian Green and on to Constancia, Alduria and Natopia, the three states then able to receive them; Constancia's Synkletos voted entry, resettlement and asylum to Caputian and Wechuan refugees, and Palesmenian peacekeepers reached Tonar. Among those who left were Haifan families of long standing, the Sternbergs of Beit Shalom among them, who traveled by way of Judah and reached Punta Santiago in 1670 AN. Later generations of the diaspora settled in Ransenar and in Nouvelle Alexandrie, neither of which had been founded when the kingdom fell.
Government and politics
Haifa was one of the states of Caputia, and the states were the principal administrative districts of the kingdom, each divided into municipalities and independent cities. Caputian law distinguished them sharply from the Royal District of Zalae and from the two Crown dependencies. A state governed itself and returned its own members to the Parliament; a dependency was administered on the Crown's behalf by an officer the Crown appointed, and looked to the Caputian Government for its defense and for its voice abroad. Haifa fell on the first side of that line throughout the Caputian period. It legislated for itself, ran its own elections, and drew its own parliamentary districts. The kingdom also kept one of the three offices of the Council for Internal Affairs at Abeis, alongside those at Port Tablot and San Francisco; the Council was an executive commission of the Queen-in-Council whose deliberations were sealed from the public record.
The Crown and the Governor
The head of state was the sovereign. Queen Elizabeth I held the title Queen and Governor-General of Haifa as part of the definitive style she proclaimed in 1653 AN, and the state's courts, commissions and public offices ran in her name. The title was a dignified one. It did not carry the administration of the state, which belonged to the Governor.
The Governor was the head of government of Haifa. The office was not a viceroyalty and its holder was not appointed at the Crown's discretion; the Governor was commissioned by the sovereign on the confidence of the Haifa State Assembly and held office as leader of the majority there. Through the Caputian period that majority was the Unionist Coalition of the National Salvation Party, the National Unity Party and the Liberal League, and the Governor was Rachel Dresner of the National Salvation Party. The Lieutenant Governor, Rafael Sharett, sat for the National Unity Party, holding the second office as the deputy of the coalition rather than as a deputy of the Crown.
The Governor's responsibilities were those the kingdom left to the states. State election authorities answered to the office, and they maintained the referendum roll under the Haifa Referendum Act, 1661 and certified the 1663 AN result jointly with the Royal Election Commission. It also drew the parliamentary and Assembly districts, supervised the state's municipalities and independent cities, and administered its revenue. Abeis was an independent city, standing outside any municipality; Keybir-Aviv, Lewisburg, Melusinia and Diamandis were the seats of the larger municipalities, and it was over these units that both sets of districts were drawn. Luxor Palace in Abeis was the seat and official residence, a building of the pre-Caputian Haifan state that the government took over at the accession; it was before its gates that the protesters of 1665 AN pitched their camp.
Haifa State Assembly
The legislature of the state was the Haifa State Assembly, which sat at Abeis. Each Caputian state named its legislature in its own way: the Isles of Caputia returned members to The Cortes of the Isles, Morovian-Patrovia to a Representative Council. Haifa kept a name inherited from the assemblies of the independent republic.
The Assembly was constituted in its Caputian form under the Local Government Act, 1658 AN, the general statute providing for the government of localities within the kingdom. It seated one hundred and sixty-five members returned from single-member districts, three such districts lying within each of the state's parliamentary districts. Its term ran five years and was concurrent with that of the Parliament, so that the state went to the polls for both bodies together; this held in every state, with elections to the state legislatures and to local offices falling on the days of the Caputian general elections. The Assembly was redistricted at the census of 1663 AN alongside the Parliament, and sat for two full terms, returned in 1660 AN and in 1665 AN. No separate record of either state result survives. Of its legislation one measure is attested by name: by the end of 1662 AN Haifa was among the four states, with San Luis, Hamland and Northpass, that adopted and implemented their own versions of the iHonest scheme at state level, building the financial credit registries that were afterward combined into the National Credit System.
Representation in Parliament
Parliamentary districts were apportioned among the states after each population census, by the Jefferson method, and each state then drew single-member districts within its own allocation to match. The Elections Act, 1657 had set the Parliament at 440 seats with a floor of four for every state; the Elections Amendment Act, 1659 removed the floor and left apportionment to population alone, reducing the chamber to 422.
Haifa held between a ninth and a seventh of the kingdom's population through the period, and returned about fifty-five of the 422 seats. Its allocation rose sharply at the census of 1663 AN, when the settlement of displaced persons across Caputia entered the count for the first time. Because seats were allocated within states and the districts drawn by the state itself, a party contesting Haifa alone competed only for Haifa's seats. When the 1665 AN election added a state-wide list tier above the districts, subject to a national threshold, regional parties were exempted from that threshold for the same reason.
Political parties
Two parties were particular to the Haifan question, and they took opposite sides of it.
Hatnuah was the nationalist party. Founded on a platform of Haifan nationalism, secularism and environmentalism, it stood on the center left and kept its headquarters at Keybir-Aviv. Leia Clemens led it from 1658 AN, with Samuel Goyers as her deputy and Shelly Montefiore as secretary. It contested seats beyond the state as well as within it: its national vote of 1,767,637 in 1660 AN exceeded the nationalist share of the Haifan poll by several hundred thousand, the balance coming from the Haifan diaspora elsewhere in the kingdom. Its declared object was a new Holy Haifan Empire, and its registered platform called for relations with the Bassarids of the Haifo-Pallisican Imperial Trade Union to be severed altogether.
Yesh Atid was the unionist party, and the only one to contest Haifa alone. It was formed during the 1660 AN campaign by three of the state's independent deputies and led by Noam Reiner. It never registered a constitution. At the 1665 AN election it returned ten members on 3,194,760 votes.
The national parties held the state between them for the whole of the period. The National Salvation Party, the National Unity Party and the Liberal League governed Haifa in coalition, took 69.22 percent of the Haifan vote in 1660 AN together with the independents, and campaigned jointly as This Is Our Union in 1663 AN.
Military
Haifa carried more of the Caputian army than any other state. Under the operational structure the Crown codified by Royal Proclamation on 16.XI.1654 AN, the Caputian Armed Forces were organized into sixteen combined arms corps grouped under field armies, and four of those corps stood in the state as the 2nd Manoeuvre Army: the IV, V, VI and VII Combined Arms Corps. Only the naval corps of the Isles of Caputia matched that number in one grouping; no other state held more than two. The Corps of Infantry of the Royal Caputian Army likewise maintained a Haifa Division, one of seven named for territories of the kingdom alongside one raised for the overseas garrisons. Operational and administrative control ran to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at Zalae, under civilian oversight. The total Caputian establishment stood at 815,140 personnel in 1661 AN, excluding territorials, reservists, border and coast guards.
The army in Haifa spent the early 1660s on the water and on the frontier. On 18.II.1661 AN Prime Minister Merrick announced to the Parliament that the kingdom would secure an exclusive economic zone and territorial waters on Lake Morovia. Helicopter gunships of the Riverine Army, attached to VI Combined Arms Corps, ran harassment operations against the vessels of the Lake Morovia Blockade Fund and against Haifan pirate groups that had been preying on communities in the ungoverned country bordering the lake. The government followed with further strikes on lake shipping. On 14.VII.1661 AN Captain Augustus Strong was ordered to assemble an independent squadron at Keybir-Aviv to await the Prime Minister's instructions, and the reconnaissance he afterward led into the Morovian rift valley ran until 08.X.1662 AN. VII Combined Arms Corps was afterward deployed north into the new territory of Morovian-Patrovia to secure and fortify the frontier, and the Border Fence Project was extended by four years, to 1665 AN, to enclose the lands Caputia had added.
The eastern border brought the state into contact with the Alperkin, a population of indigenous Haifans and Kralians long settled on the northwestern shores of the lake, whom no foreign power had formally documented before 1661 AN. In 1665 AN the Parliament recognized them as a nation on the eastern borders of Haifa and Morovian-Patrovia, established a National Alperkin Nature Preserve, and directed that treaty negotiations be opened. It appointed Thomas Caedmon Quinn as its adviser on the question, through a special office under the Foreign Ministry.
Geography
Haifa was the easternmost state of the kingdom, lying in central Keltia along the Straits of Haifa. It bordered Morovian-Patrovia to the north and San Luis to the west; the remainder of its frontier faced either the Keltian Green or the water. The Maccabi River ran through it, and the state lay on the eastern side of Lake Morovia, the freshwater basin at the center of the rift system that the Micronational Cartographic Society named the Strait of Haifa, after the country lying at the middle of its course. Caputia voted for the recognition of the name. Though it had no ocean coast, Haifa was reckoned a seafaring country throughout its history, and its lake and river ports carried the traffic that an ocean would have carried elsewhere.
The land was generally flat, with hills scattered across the countryside. Its terrain was divided between coastal plains and high plains, without highlands or mountains of consequence and without ground at sea level. Its climates ranged accordingly across the subpolar oceanic, the humid continental in its warm and cold summer forms, and the subarctic, so that humid summers and severe winters inland gave way to milder conditions on the plains along the water.
Economy
Four industries had shaped the Haifan economy since the days of the republic: diamond mining, agriculture, banking and finance, and fishing. Technology joined them under Caputia, and the state came to lead the kingdom in several lines of manufacture, among them jewelry, computers and electronics, aerospace, and biomedical products.
The diamond fields lay south of Abeis and remained the state's best known asset. They were also a political one, and the motive the 1663 AN exit polling put first among voters for independence. The Parliament passed the Haifan Diamonds Corporation Act in the year that followed the vote. The stones went out through Keybir-Aviv, where the Wallis-Haifan Diamond Company had long carried them, and the trade fed the cutting and jewelry houses of the capital. The rubies in the Queen's engagement ring were Haifan, and her wedding rings were made by an Abeis jeweler she favored.
Abeis was one of four banking centers in Caputia and one of only three doing international business, alongside Zalae and Gotfriedplatz. Haifan houses worked within a Caputian banking tradition that held client secrecy closely and maintained private bunkers for the deposit of gold, silver and diamonds. The currency was the Caputian laurel. The state's banks were touched by the laundering later uncovered as the Blue Rinse Scandal, which moved more than ₺2 billion through hairdressers and dry cleaners in Freedom City, Abeis and Zalae by 1663 AN. Part of it was earmarked for National Salvation Party campaigns at state level in Haifa.
In public finance the states were taxed, unlike the Crown dependencies, and they drew on the kingdom in return. Under the National Social Grant Act of 1665 AN the states received the National Social Transfer, a block grant for social security, welfare and health worth ₺10 billion in 1665 AN and ₺20 billion in 1666 AN. It rose by a factor of 1.03 a year and was due to lapse on 3.VI.1667 AN. The rebuilding of the state's roads and hospitals ran through national programs rather than Haifan ones.
Infrastructure and society
Haifa entered the kingdom with its public works wrecked and its professions thinned. The republic had left behind a serviceable network: four numbered trunk roads, H1 to H4, running between the cities; the Haifan Rail linking them; and airports at Abeis and Keybir-Aviv, Haifan International Airport and Keybir-Aviv International. Nine years of civil war and the passage of the Alexandrian Flu left the roads cut, the rail running in sections where it ran at all, and whole districts without a physician.
Reconstruction was directed from the center. Gerhardt Eugen Seydlitz was appointed Minister of Reconstruction and Infrastructure on 12.VI.1655 AN by Prime Minister Christophe Landry, and by an Order-in-Council of 26.II.1658 AN he took the presidency of the Royal Railways Corporation, the Caputian Construction Corporation and the Caputian Cement Corporation as well, holding all of them until 13.XIII.1665 AN. The road-building program of 1658 AN restored the trunk routes and carried them out to the municipalities, and an Order-in-Council of 1661 AN settled the terms on which the West-Trinity Keltian Railway ran across Caputian soil, tying the state into a continental line it did not own. Water mattered more than either. Abeis moved the grain and the freight of the interior, Keybir-Aviv the diamond consignments and, from 1661 AN, the squadron mounted for the reconnaissance of Lake Morovia; Haifan International at Abeis was the larger of the two airports and flew to the rest of the kingdom.
Health services were rebuilt around what the flu had destroyed. The eastern regions had buried their dead in mass graves, and the state's hospitals spent the 1650s recovering staff rather than adding capacity. The National Health Insurance Act, 1661 AN extended cover across the kingdom, and from 1665 AN the National Social Transfer carried health spending alongside social security and welfare until it was due to lapse in 1667 AN. None of it outlived the kingdom.
Education was the one service the republic had passed on largely intact. Schooling was compulsory between the ages of five and eighteen, and the university at Abeis, known both as Haifa National University and as the University of Abeis, was the leading school in the state and drew students from across the kingdom. Benjamin Meir had taken his degree there under the republic and served as its last Prime Minister; he spent the Caputian period in Natopia, where he was Chancellor from 1661 AN until the year the kingdom fell. Literacy was reckoned at ninety-six percent, a figure the Caputian administration inherited rather than achieved.
Demographics
The census of 1657 AN returned 8,360,351 inhabitants for Haifa. That of 1663 AN returned 27,045,778, and the state stood third in the kingdom by population, behind Anglia & Israat and San Luis and ahead of Morovian-Patrovia and Hamland.
The increase was a matter of policy rather than natural growth. Caputia had been depopulated by war and by pestilence through the 1640s and 1650s, and in 1659 AN the kingdom agreed to accept seven million displaced persons from Krasnarus to restore its numbers and its productivity during the Reconstruction Period. The Royal Decree of Graces of 1656 AN had already opened settlement in Caputia to Alexandrian nationals and to the Hammish and Caputian diaspora. Haifa took a large share of both movements, though it grew somewhat more slowly than the kingdom as a whole. The scale of the change can be read in the politics: the National Salvation Party's raw vote doubled between 1660 AN and 1665 AN while its share of the poll fell from 45 to 37 percent.
Abeis was the most populous city in the state and among the largest in Caputia, returning 1,230,193 inhabitants in 1663 AN. Keybir-Aviv was second, with Lewisburg and Melusinia the other cities of consequence. Diamandis was large enough to be named among the centers of the disorder of 1663 AN. The official languages were the Common Tongue, Haifan, Alexandrian and Wechua, and Haifan was reckoned one of the main languages of the kingdom in its own right, spoken widely enough to be an official language of Morovian-Patrovia and of the Isles of Caputia as well. No breakdown of the Haifan population by religion or by ethnic origin was recorded for the Caputian period.
Media
The Caputian Broadcasting Corporation ran more than sixty local radio stations across the kingdom, carrying local services in three languages: Haifan, Alexandrian and Wechua. The regional stations Wechua Networks and CenturyNet reached the main parts of the state, as they did Elizabeth Isle, Monovia, San Luis and the Wechua Nation. Caputian broadcasting recognized a distinct Haifan dimension alongside the Caputian, Wechua and Alexandrian. The corporation covered the state's politics closely, and its count of the Abeis rally of 1665 AN, at 850,000, became the figure the campaign was argued over.
Commercial television reached the state as well. Meir Networks, a Blakestown studio, produced the serial Dazed Instances in Abeis, set among teenagers in the Haifan capital. It was the largest private operator of radio stations in the kingdom, one of four licensed commercial television broadcasters, and one of five providers of internet service.
Culture
The Stripping Path had a following in the state and was a proscribed movement under Caputia. Adherents across the whole kingdom numbered between 48,000 and 61,000, with the Haifan share centered on Keybir-Aviv. It was the target of the Order of Rochefort's conversion campaign in Keybir-Aviv and Tonar in the 1650s. The Edict of Pallisican Expulsion and Repudiation of 1658 AN, which the Haifan nationalist party had petitioned for, banned it outright, and the government later reported it eradicated from the kingdom. The established church was the Melusinian Faith, to which about seventy-three percent of Caputians adhered, and the Church of Caputia held the state's parishes. Older Haifan observances survived in private hands: the Sternbergs, a family of minor Caputian nobility holding an estate at Beit Shalom outside Abeis, kept the Haifan customs for honoring the dead, and carried them into exile after the kingdom fell.
Haifan was a language of literature and broadcasting as well as of the street, and the Haifan Language Society was among the pressure groups registered in the kingdom. It declared for independence during the campaign of 1665 AN. In music, Abeis stood among the best known scenes in Caputia, beside Judah, San Luis and Zalae. Hammish, Israati and Haifan musicians working in the state had developed genres of their own. The first film made by Meir Networks, a romance called The Lands We Met, was shot in 1653 AN using Benjamin Meir's house in Abeis as its set.
Rugby league and association football were the leading spectator sports. The Haifan Rugby League, an eight-team competition running fourteen games a season and seeded into the Grand Prix of Rugby, had been founded under the republic, and its clubs included the Abeis City Wolves, the Abeis All-Golds and the Keybir Devils. Haifan clubs also entered the Caputian league, where Abeis Lightning was the highest ranked side from the Straits. Abeis FS represented the state in continental football. Haifan sporting bodies had kept their separate international membership under Hammish rule, and the state retained its own football and rugby competitions after the accession.
Timeline
- 1653 AN: The Geneva Peace Agreement ends the Hammish Civil War; Haifa passes into the Kingdom of the Union of Caputia.
- 25.XII.1653 AN: The reign of Queen Elizabeth I is dated from this day; her proclaimed style names her Queen and Governor-General of Haifa, a form used for no other state.
- 25.XV.1653 AN: Elizabeth I is invested.
- 16.XI.1654 AN: A Royal Proclamation codifies the tri-service structure of the Caputian Armed Forces; four of sixteen corps stand in Haifa as the 2nd Manoeuvre Army.
- 1656 AN: The Royal Decree of Graces opens settlement to Alexandrian nationals and to the Hammish and Caputian diaspora.
- 1657 AN: The census returns 8,360,351 inhabitants for Haifa.
- 25.II.1658 AN: Queen Elizabeth I issues the Edict of Pallisican Expulsion and Repudiation, petitioned for by Hatnuah.
- 1658 AN: The Haifa State Assembly is constituted in its Caputian form under the Local Government Act.
- 1658 AN: Leia Clemens takes the leadership of Hatnuah.
- 1659 AN: The kingdom agrees to accept seven million displaced persons from Krasnarus.
- 13.II to 15.II.1660 AN: At the general election Hatnuah returns fifteen members on 1,767,637 votes; Yesh Atid is founded during the campaign.
- 18.II.1661 AN: Prime Minister Royston Merrick announces an exclusive economic zone and territorial waters on Lake Morovia.
- 14.VII.1661 AN: Captain Augustus Strong is ordered to assemble an independent squadron at Keybir-Aviv.
- 25.XV.1661 AN: The Haifa Referendum Act, 1661 receives Royal Assent, passed by 419 votes to 3.
- 22.XIV.1662 AN: An Order-in-Council postpones the referendum, citing serious security threats.
- 08.X.1662 AN: The reconnaissance into the Morovian rift valley concludes.
- 1662 AN: Haifa is among four states implementing the iHonest scheme, building the registries later combined into the National Credit System.
- 10.II to 12.II.1663 AN: The first independence referendum returns a narrow majority for independence on 47 percent turnout; the government holds it inconclusive.
- 1663 AN: The census returns 27,045,778 inhabitants, third in the kingdom, with 1,230,193 in Abeis.
- 1663 AN: Laundering later uncovered as the Blue Rinse Scandal passes ₺2 billion.
- 1664 AN: The Second Haifa Referendum Act passes by 359 votes to 15 with 48 abstentions.
- 01.VIII to 03.VIII.1665 AN: The general election and second referendum are held together; remaining a Caputian state takes a plurality on a turnout of 59.20 percent.
- 12.XIII.1665 AN: Gerhardt Eugen Seydlitz is proclaimed Prime Minister; Yesh Atid votes for him and Hatnuah abstains.
- 1665 AN: Parliament recognizes the Alperkin as a nation and establishes a National Alperkin Nature Preserve.
- 1665 AN: Protesters camp before Luxor Palace in Abeis.
- 1665 AN: The National Social Grant Act gives the states the National Social Transfer, worth ₺10 billion in its first year.
- 1665 AN to 1666 AN: Growth falls and unemployment rises; CapuStat declares a recession.
- 30.XV.1668 AN: The Kingdom of the Union of Caputia ends without a dissolution or a prorogation, and the state governments stop with it.
Events not placed on the calendar
- The Order of Rochefort's forced-conversion campaign at Tonar and Keybir-Aviv, the Yell of Tonar it provoked, and Operation Cobalt are all attested without dates.
- No Haifan state-election result is recorded in any source, though the Assembly sat for two terms returned in 1660 AN and 1665 AN.
- The White Plague reached the Sternberg estate at Beit Shalom in early 1669 AN, months after the kingdom had ceased to exist, and so falls outside this list.
- Events from the annexation by the Haifo-Pallisican Imperial Trade Union onward are recorded in the Pallisican reckoning; no conversion to the Norton calendar is attempted here.
See also
- Caputia
- Haifa
- Free State of Haifa
- Haifan independence referendum, 1663
- Haifan independence referendum, 1665
- Subdivisions of Caputia
- Queen Elizabeth I
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