as discussed here and elsewhere, the "winkie" stereotype of a west ozian derives from the stereotype of a physically crabbed, blinking miner emerging from a mine--and that stereotype is ultimately rooted in the western economy's basis in jewels and metals. rich deposits of ore and gems lie underneath the western mountains, and have been the engine of the local economy since time immemorial. work by historical linguists studying western miner's chant has demonstrated the deeply ancient roots of these songs, showing how far back the mining tradition itself goes.
three central guilds control this economic system: the miners guild, the artisans guild, and the merchants guild. these are large organizations with local chapters in all western nomes. traditionally, the system was heavily weighted in favor of the miners and artisans, but power has slowly but steadily shifted to the merchant class, which has stronger ties to the emerald city and more physical as well as social mobility. while miners and artisans tend to come from families who have always worked in their particular industry, merchants are socially fluid, draw from all classes, and are not necessarily westerners by birth.
between the three guilds, wholesale prices on every level of this economy are fixed (from the raw materials to the artisan products). this used to be an excellent racket for the miners and artisans, who could throttle the flow of finished goods to the emerald city if they chose. several significant changes impacted their relative power, beginning, first, with a massive boom of demand for western materials and worked goods at the beginning of the wizard's reign. there was a whole new court society that demanded the finest, not to mention new work being done on the emerald city requiring new, workable gems. to serve this new demand, a new crop arose from the mercantile class. where before it was a healthily mixed group of westerners and non, this generation of merchants was primarily from the emerald city.
after the first years of oscar's rule, his relationship with letheia began to degrade, while his ties to glinda and locasta strengthened. he found that it benefited him to play on the north and south's hostilities toward the east and west and began the process of depriving and impoverishing the latter two quadrants. he was helped along by a series of natural disasters on the far western border with the deadly desert.
oscar utilized his partnership with locasta to access and then culturally hype several types of gem and styles of jewelry available only from the north, causing demand to drop for western craftsmanship and materials.
the migration of intelligentsia and artists from the east to the emerald city allowed him to begin propagandizing against the west, painting it as a conservative backwater. western jewelry went from being the height of style to being something your conservative granny would wear.
the farming foothills in the far west experienced a series of collapses into the deadly desert, wiping out a vital food source for the mountain communities of miners and artisans. oscar organized, with glinda, to deeply gouge the west on prices for food from the agriculturally powerful south, causing serious instability.
oscar prevented letheia from easily bringing in food and other resources from the east by forcing nosyne to utilize the state-controlled railway system for exports, placing high tariffs on products passing from east to west.
at the time of dorothy's arrival, the west has only just begun to claw back some stability. they are still fully at the mercy of the alliance between the emerald city and the merchants guild and the determined political work done by oscar and his cronies. the economic unrest of recent years contributes heavily to letheia's negative image and provides incentive for the acts of rebellion, on dorothy's behalf, committed by everyday westerners.
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