Caldari-Gallente War timeline? (+General timeline discussion)

Fiction Portal EVE Lore Discussion
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I have made an Excel cheat sheet for important events and general YC/RL year conversion, sourcing stuff mainly from the empire timelines in the community Backstory > Races > Timeline pages but also from in-game sources and World News articles.

Looking stuff up I recently noticed that the Caldari-Gallente war outlasted the creation of CONCORD and Yoiul Conference both by over a decade - is my observation based on faulty knowledge or is this supposed to be common knowledge I have somehow missed all these years? I think this of particular importance as I always thought that CONCORD signatories were at least in nominal peace between eachother when it was formed - seeing as CONCORD ships were a result of technology sharing, best technology of all the nations and it is hard to fathom warring states sharing their technology so freely.

Timeline this observation is based on, sourced from CCP’s own sources:

AD 23154 (YC -82) Caldari-Gallente War Begins (201 years ago, also when State declares itself independent from the Federation according to State Protectorate rank flavour texts)

AD 23233 (YC -3) CONCORD is founded by the four empires and Jove

AD 23236 Yoiul Conference, “Year Zero”

AD 23248 (YC 12) Caldari-Gallente War Ends (94 years ago, incidentally also how long it lasted)

This thread is open for all other timeline related stuff you want to discuss, and one other question pops in to my mind I couldn’t find an aswer to anywhere - when was the Minmatar Republic founded? The Rebellion happened in AD 23216 and the Republic joins CONCORD apparently as an independent entity 17 years later - sometime between these events the Republic is formed, but no exact year is readily available, unless the Republic is to be considered to have formed immediately after the Rebellion, in 23216. As far as I know Republic is the only empire of which exact formation year is not known, at least to us players, but do correct me if you know better.

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Quoting from the relevant chronicle

The matter was finally settled when CONCORD, at that point a relatively new entity that had yet to truly establish itself, decided that the war, posing as it did a threat to New Eden’s diplomatic and economic stability, had gone on long enough. Sensing tiredness on both sides after the Iyen-Oursta battle, they used the opportunity to open peace talks between the two obstinate adversaries and were, within six months, able to broker a ceasefire agreement acceptable to both sides.

So basically the Battle of Iyen-Oursta was the climax of the Gallente-Caldari War. After that battle the momentum carried on a little further but neither side really wanted to keep on fighting. One could even argue that the war was one of the motivations behind CONCORD’s establishment.

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Huh, so this was something I’ve been ignorant of all these years. Thanks for the clearup.

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If you do find any discrepancies, it’s likely due to a retcon. As I recall, the dates for the war were changed after the Day of Darkness 2 chronicle was written. Can’t remember if it was made more recent pushed further back in the past.

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AD 22588 - The Gallente and the Caldari build their first stargate out of VH-451, sparking a period of expansion which mostly benefits the Gallente.

AD 23121 - The Gallente Federation is founded. Caldari are forced by circumstance to join.

AD 23155 - The Gallente-Caldari War begins.

A lot of people seem to think the core disagreements between the State and Federation was purely ideological which doesn’t really seem to explain how conflict did not occur between them for 533 years prior to the Federation being formed.

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IIRC Wasn’t it also ironically the Gallente who induced the megacorporation culture to the Caldari? Before Gallente influence (and during that) the Caldari were pretty much industrial-age savages who cut off peoples heads for not taking shoes off in temples. And then Gallente uplifted their technology by over 200 years in an universal timescale pretty much overnight, which in retrospect might not have been a good idea.

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Source? (Not challenging, just curious)

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http://wiki.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?title=Nascent_Era_of_the_Gallente_Federation

"The CDS also introduced corporate capitalism to the Caldari to a more extensive degree, with the first Caldari megacorporation being founded in 1173AR (22684AD), known as Isuuaya."

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The Caldari were in an industrial age when the first Gallente probes landed, sure. They were also in a nation-state era where the dominant governments were absolutist monarchies and bureaucratic authoritarian regimes – not democracies. So sure, the Gallente introduced finance capitalism and advanced technological concepts into a culture that had already strong cultural strains of absolutism, bureaucracy, authoritarianism and militarism.

While the Gallente Cultural Deliverance Society did manage to successfully democratize and liberalize some Caldari States, the traditionalists within the Caldari culture created the Megacorporations which combined the economic and industrial potential of finance capitalism with their attitudes of bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and militarism led by an almost absolute leader in a Chief Executive:

"These Caldari democracies differed from the Gallente ones, however. They were much more centralized, favoring a strong executive over a divided legislature. Nonetheless, the Caldari traditionalists found these changes outright sacrilegious, even an abomination, believing the new stability to the homeworld was not worth the price of cultural change.

These elites began to associate themselves with the Caldari megacorporations, who slowly grew in power and stature as a result. The influence of these megacorporations began to permeate the Caldari democracies, with many states simply becoming puppets of the corporate CEOs once the novelty of regime change had dwindled. The presence of lobbying within these democratic systems made it easier for the corporations to encroach their influence, to the point that they were able to do so even in Gallente states, though to a far more limited degree. "

– Nascent Era of the Gallente Federation.

So yes, the Gallente were never fully successful in eradicating Caldari authoritarianism, and the Caldari Megacorporation was a successful vehicle in which the more conservative and traditionalist Caldari maintained their tendencies of absolutism and authoritarianism defined in terms of a specific nationalist identity.

The Gallente-Caldari war and the formation of the Caldari State is a direct result of the Caldari as represented in their Megacorporations rejecting Gallentean democracy and political norms which came to a head with the formation of the Federation which was viewed as a threat to their until then, independence of operations.

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