The Solar Groups
In the time period covered here, there have been two organisations which took the name of the Solar Group.
The first Solar Group, was established in 2350 as a political forum for the Resource Management World Government and the new colonies of Earth to discuss their relationship and to make mutually beneficial deals. It was a way to agree trading arrangements and to determine the subsidies and levels and types of support which Earth could offer to each of the members. To begin with, it had a near total monopoly and its interest in military capabilities was confined to a paranoid concern with the defence of humanity against some feared alien threat which probably never existed.
The S'arys Contract in 2455 represented the first independent attempt to set up some kind of limited opposition to the dictates of the Solar Group but a more serious challenge came in 2540 when the Republic successfully declared independence. This marks the start of the fragmentation of the Bubble, a process which continued until the Solar Group broke apart in mutual distrust in 2888. Open warfare was avoided but clandestine hostilities continued at a low level until the Focus movement oversaw the reformation of a much smaller second Solar Group in 3478, nearly six hundred years after the first one collapsed. This second grouping was more of a partnership of equals, since the original colonies had advanced their economic development considerably following the collapse of the first Solar Group. Earth remained the dominant force in the new alliance but not to the same extent. Its leaders deliberately tried to adopt the mantle of the earlier organisation, however, whose name they had taken in a conscious effort to suggest that they were the heirs to a power structure that in reality no longer existed.
Although historians are careful to label these different groups as the first and second solar groups, bear in mind that contemporary documents never make this distinction. Obviously at the time of the first solar group, it was simply called the solar group with no need for clarification. Equally, though, by the time of the second solar group, the first one had passed into history and there was no confusion in everyday speech and writing when the old name was used to refer to the current alliance without bothering to append the prefix "second". When reading about the solar group, in the unqualified manner in which it is usually refered to, then, it is necessary to be aware of the time period of the source material to be clear about which incarnation is relevant.
Type
Alliance, Generic
Related Species
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