The Six Blocs
The Terran Ascendancy held every system humanity had reached, and it held them for less time than it took to win them. When it dissolved at Sirius in 2900 it left behind one thing every successor had to answer for: a peerage in which every rank was a debt with a number attached. A Grand Duke owed a fleet and had four hundred days to answer muster. A Marquess held a jump-gate approach and owed ninety days without reinforcement.
Six blocs inherited that ladder. Each did something different with it, and that difference is now their personality. None of them chose freely, and all of them tell the story as though they did.
One kept the crown and voided every power beneath it. One converted its patents into share classes and turned its houses into guilds. One kept the debt and made it owed to an assembly rather than a person. One kept the whole apparatus intact and had the paperwork signed before the empire was legally dead. One ended heritability by assessment and left the titles alone because nobody needed to take them away. One declined to recognize any of it, then wrote a code parodying a charter of nobility, which acquired real force by being obeyed.
The blocs
A note on the record
Everything on these pages is drawn from in-world sources, and those sources disagree. Chroniclers were paid by the houses they wrote about, records were re-engrossed by people with an interest in the outcome, and at least one bloc credits the wrong founder for its own institutions and has done so for three centuries.
Where the surviving account and the evidence part company, both are given. A state misremembering its own founding in a flattering direction is not a gap in the history. It is the history.
These pages cover established background only. They stop well short of the present day.