That was in this update just passed, The Empire of Sesh had "the cities rose, with walls thick and high, and temples to the Ancestors towering over them all." The Empire only collapsed about a hundred years ago so i doubt my religion spontaneously died out... the Exiled States are Seshweay and lived the whole time even if it died in the Empire its still in the Exiled States
EDIT: Government wouldn’t have to, trade practices are normally made up by merchants the state tends to just go in after the fact and codify the practice. Besides my system is Common Law based, it adopts precedent every individual ruling would add to the body of law in general so every individual act of trade would build up in the system. For a real world example look at Chancellery Law and Common Law both had radically different sources, the first was brought over the William the Conquer and was recognizably French in every sense of the word, Common Law was natively English (or whatever English was back then
) from 1066 onwards they steadily converged and eventually we now end up with at least in common law states Equity and Common Law decisions in the same system. It was an inherently ridiculous system before they converged, the King and Parliament had duels over which was superior, the King naturally claimed that his Chancellery Law was and the Parliament claimed that Common Law was... a heck of a lot of problems for England developed because the two separate entities with significant power just had different legal systems and traditions to uphold.
Think of it carefully if you had two radically different systems I’ll use a specific example. Assume that Arkage property passes through the son (which I’m pretty sure it does) and compare that to the Seshweay system of having land pass to whoever the hell the parents want of the siblings. How does one deal with a situation where an Arkage man married a Seshweay women (don’t say its impossible, because the Emperor’s had both bloods, I doubt they allowed either group to persecute those who made the same choices the Emperors must have had a habit of doing it to mollify the two different groups being to Arkage or Seshweay would be a recipe for civil war.). Which system gains precedence? Since neither system can have legal authority over the other, for the simple fact that if it did you guarantee the other group would be pissed beyond belief. You have a quandary which body of law do you use in this case? You could flip a coin but bring chance like that into a legal dispute and you can guarantee the opposing parties will kill each other, family disputes can get rather nasty. You can just arbitrarily decide to make the Seshweay women obey the Arkage system, because Seshweay law affords equal rights under family law (don’t know about the Arkage system but having to give up rights to marry would seem to me to a fundamentally flawed outcome). Extrapolate the result of having two radically different system that were irreconcilable for just the marriage example, and you would see that there had to have been a way of reconciling the differences between the two, or a Federal system of law which was a mix, otherwise inter-racial dealings would lead to absolute anarchy every time someone cheated the other, having a situation where both parties can break the rules and get away with it makes trade and enterprise between the two impossible.
Culture would have had to mix, if the Arkage and Seshweay had two radically different senses of what ownership constituted at a fundamental level then in a practical sense trade would be difficult, the selling of property difficult, even concepts of lending something to someone might be different. Culturally both would borrow the best practices of the other, from an economic perspective with regards to ownership its inevitable that they would merge to facilitate enterprise and trade, the worst practices that hampered trade would only need to be abandoned by a small portion of traders or the general populace before everyone else would have to do the same to compete. Over a process of 500 years its completely reasonable culturally a great deal of divergence has happened, if it didn’t then the Empire would not have had any common ground to stand on… it would also appear that partially adopting the Seshweay religion and the Seshweay including Arkage ancestors in the Pantheon would be a good indication of cultural interchange… (Hint NK
)
Call me a cynic but no National Government in this case the Imperial one is going to stand by and have a trade system which is to complex and doesn’t work very well at all, the amount of money it would cost them to supervise it would be prohibitively expensive, and lets not forget that the Imperial Government would have derived a substantial sum of money from taxing trade... Its in the governments best interests to smooth out any hiccups and consequently reap the taxation windfall benefits…
And its 500 years, you don’t spend 500 years in the same nation and not have to deal with each other a fair bit… try living next door to a someone of a different culture you pick things up rather quick if you want to deal or interact with them or vice versa.
Note: Regardless i dont really care if we have remained completely seperate, but the issue stands that if we have the Seshweay still hate you with a passion and the imposition of a dictator by the Arkage to destroy Seshweay Republicanism is going to be terribly popular anything changed during the 600 years of Empire stands the risk of being called Arkage manipulation - propaganda is fun