Editing Бpoнeпeхoтa/A Brief History of Humanity (section)

===Dominion Dark Age===
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Most colonies have stopped communicating and traveling to other planets, and, as it is known, isolation always leads to regress.

Almost the entire fourth millennium (about 3050-3990) is considered to be Dominion-wide Dark Ages of sorts, with thousands of planets retreating to quasi-medieval ways of life, swords and horse- or local fauna-drawn plowshares existing alongside hypercomms and plasma weaponry. With the beacons dilapidated, interstellar trade was a risky endeavour - with ships, like during the old times again, disappearing with no trace. The most civilized planets, buying rare metals and other resources for "barbarians" in exchange for ready-made high-tech, were the first to feel the impact of the issue.

On year 3998, twenty-four most advanced planets of the Dominion decided to form the Trade League, aiming to support and possibly restore what was left of the interstellar travel. The League created a standing repair fleet, so that every willing planet in its sphere of influence (about a million cubic parsecs) could ask to repair its beacons.

Of course, the services provided by the League were not free. The League members got double benefit from such deals - by restoring access to resource planets for their own merchants, and by charging these very planets for that! Many planets asking the League to help soon found themselves in what amounted to bondage, resulting in armed conflicts.<br />
Nonetheless, such "cooperation" was fruitful to an extent; the League stopped the inhabited space from fracturing once again and reminded its inhabitants that they were not, in fact, alone in this galaxy.

In 70 years after the League was formed, representatives of developed planets met once again to revise the treaties - it now was more than a hundred worlds as full-fledged League members, with more than a third of the entire Dominion interconnected with the League-restored beacons. There was, however, a side effect to the booming trade - piracy; it was not unknown for self-styled "isolated" planets to keep an unregistered beacon and sustain themselves with plunder; small yet well-armed ships ambushing League caravans.

A reasonable response to the threat of piracy was to create a united fleet, tasked with peacekeeping duties within League space - including finding and neutralizing pirate beacons, if not the pirate havens themselves. The renewed agreement incorporated clauses for cooperation in case of external treats; the alliance was no longer purely trade-focused anymore, and on year 4102, the League was renamed into the Trade Protectorate Treaty, with the last word omitted in common parlance.

Two hundred years of rule made the positions of a hundred planets - the full members of the Treaty - much stronger, yet the relationships of that hundred and the unnamed thousands were still strained. Many underdeveloped worlds found themselves to be mere suppliers of raw materials for the Golden Hundred, the beacon tariffs grew higher and higher, and the fact that the Protectorate makes the backwards planets to pay for trade lines serving the Protectorate's own enrichment was a secret to none.<br />
The planets started to refuse the services, thirsting for independence even at the cost of isolation - especially that the centuries of the Protectorate's rule meant that most planets could now support the beacons on their own. More so, they started organizing their own trade fleets, threating the monopoly of the Golden Hundred.