#great persons

Synergies, anti-synergies, and trade-offs

-10% Production in all Cities.

Autonomy with Organized Religion

Autonomy with State Property

Spiritual Civs.

-3 XP for new units.

For instance,

A unit built in a city with a Barracks (+3 XP) would begin with 0 XP.

A mounted unit built in a city with a Stable (+2 XP) would begin with 0 XP.

A mounted unit built in a city with both a Barracks and a Stable would begin with (3+2) - 3 XP, or 2 XP.

A unit built in a city with a settled Great General (+2 XP) without a Barracks would begin with 0 XP.

For these reasons, it makes sense for early-game militaristic civs to switch away from Autonomy to Slavery. This makes more storytelling sense to me:

However...

Cottages and Preserves grow at a normal rate.

In the Political Imagination Mod, Cottages and Preserves do not grow under Slavery, Serfdom, and Caste System.

To my mind, Cottages and Preserves represent landscapes that are created by free people.

The most obvious historical basis is the “freedom of the city” of medieval Europe: that town-dwellers are free to own and trade property.

But this mechanic is also meant as an in-game abstraction of other places and periods of the pre-modern world that were shaped not by rigidly hierarchical societies, nor by centralized authorities.

Are there examples of this?

Rice terraces! Oak savannah! Terra preta!

For civs whose economies are based on Cottages and Preserves, it might make sense to eventually transition to Emancipation.

+25% Great Person birth rate.

The point I wish to make here is that the Western Enlightenment is not the only conception of human freedom in human history. There are notions of freedom that arose  , and from very different traditions of thought.

Secondly, that there is an “epistemic violence” in the Western Enlightenment. An erasure of the diversity of forms of human organization, and a consequent denial of the diversity of forms that imagination can take. At the heart of both is the insistence of the Western Enlightenment on its own self-image as the only legitimate way to see human nature and human society, on the basis that it is the only way that is based on science and reason.

The other implication: in as much as there are other bases of human liberty and potential in the past, there are also other bases for human liberty and potential into the future.

Further reading and related concepts

Graeber and Wengrow on the myth of the stupid savage