Texas at 1,000

Phases of Postdiluvian Texan History

2001-2101: The Anarchy
First came the Collapse. Then came the famine, between urbanites fanning out into the countryside and farm yields falling massively on account of the loss of the global supply chains that supplied fertilizer and pesticides, plus the legacy of a century of pollution and rusting infrastructure and silting-up dams and drained aquifers. At first, any organized state was overrun by ten times its number in the starving and desperate. Then the bandits died off, and what arable land didn't blow away in the wind became the unorganized territory of subsistence farmers or, in the dry west, the desperate safeguard of hydraulic states fighting drought as less and less snow fell on the Rockies.

2101-2351: The Era of Petty Kingdoms
The slow remediation of Texan soil meant many things to many people. In East Texas, it meant that farmers began to have surplus worth protecting and storing, something worth building states to protect or having states built to steal. On the coast, it meant that fishing villages could take to the water for their bounty, trading rice and fish and other such things up and down the Gulf Coast. In the west, it meant that the water came swiftly again, and hydraulic empires lost a major reason for their existence but were able to grow more and more food. In the north, as grasses returned to the prairie, it meant that the first great pastoralist bands could range across the plains.
It is in this period that Late American gave way to the first Texan languages - creoles of English and Spanish that began to form in Greater South Texas, particularly along the coast as linguas francas for trade.

2351-2442: The Era of Greater Kingdoms
It is in this period that trade networks began to link the state back together. The people of the East, even then federating as the pastoralists encroached on their territory, traded with their coastal neighbors and by way of them the west. Even as the Rio Grandense united the parts of their watershed north of the river itself, the East remained a panoply of mildly antagonistic principalities held in check by trade and the cowboy menace. The coast, meanwhile, saw a rise in inequality aided by greater land tenure systems divide a class of serfs from a class of aristocrats and traders more closely tied to their inland neighbors or to elites up in the Bay of Mississippi. This era was ended by the Red Plague of 2438, although elements of it continued for some time.

2442-2566: The First Texan Empire
The Red Plague was fickle - it left some nations much better off than others, as different strains percolated into different populations. The disease itself was gone as quickly as it came, but its legacy - newly empowered peasant farmers, a capital-poor coastal region, and a west desperately in need of markets - culminated in the First Texan Empire, a hodgepodge of jurisdictions and networks stretching from the bayou country of the east to the deserts of the west. It undertook an ambitious project of reclaiming the prairies for sedentary agriculture acre by acre, but was torn apart by centrifugal forces of political economy before making real headway.

2566-2602: The Warring Princes Period
The First Texan Empire may not have built lasting political institutions, but it did leave behind an inextricably linked together economy and a number of feuds which culminated in an anarchic international system. The generation which grew up after the fall of the empire, meanwhile, saw it as the end of a golden age, something that could and should be built again, and supported efforts to do so.

2602-2665: The Second Texan Empire
After a few desultory efforts, a general from the northeastern frontier actually did build another empire, this one substantially more centralized. This time, the effort to reclaim the prairies succeeded, as did similar struggles in the Old Midwest. Unfortunately, his empire, built as it was largely on his own charisma and obsession, did not run as well after his death.

2665-2689: The Invasion
Another general - really, the last of a string of dominos, as the increasingly small area suitable for pastoralism shrunk with a recovering climate and a pendulum swinging towards settled states - decided something had to give. The Okie invasion smashed the Texan Empire.

2689-: The Third Texan Empire
Once the cowboy marshals decided that it was worthwhile to keep the Texan institutions around - the better to collect tribute and trade goods with - it was over for the Okie invasion as a distinctive entity, rather than a Texan empire with an Okie ruling class.