Blacktown Factory

Blacktown Factory is location in Vekllei.

Blacktown Factory, usually just Blacktown, is a factory on the north shore of Grand Caimana in the Caimanas, where foreign merchants live and trade in money. It is the second largest factory in the Commonwealth after the Dohyo Free Port in Oslola, and is run by the Blacktown Exchange Company under a charter of the Bureau of the Frontier. Most factories are a single port or market, but Blacktown takes up a whole quarter of the old town, with its own wharves, warehouses and counting houses. About 4,000 foreigners live there, most of them bankers, shipping agents and traders from the Americas.

The town takes its name from a settlement of freed slaves on the north shore after emancipation in 1834, who fished and built boats there for most of the 19th Century. The old Careenage, where their boatyards stood, is now the factory’s main wharf. Blacktown was made a factory in 2019 during unbanking, when the foreign banks and trading houses of the Caimanas were moved into it, and the Bureau of the Frontier ran it directly until it was chartered to the company in 2038.

Although its business is conducted in money, daily life in the factory is moneyless like the rest of the country. Its foreign residents are paid salaries by their own firms, as foreign workers are elsewhere in the Commonwealth. The factory also has a budget of its own, paid in by the firms that trade there, and buys housing, food, transport and other services from the Commonwealth with it, so that residents receive them on the same terms as Commonwealth people. Goods and people leaving the quarter for the rest of the island pass a frontier office at the Market Gate, as at any port. There are offices of about 200 foreign banks and trading houses in the factory, as well as the company’s own exchange, which clears a lot of the foreign trade of the western Caribbean republics. The Caimanas are also a regional banking capital, and the Commonwealth Ratings Corporation has its headquarters nearby in Tortuga.

Blacktown has a reputation as the most cosmopolitan place in the Antilles, and is also known for the company’s sovereign lending, which is arranged from the same counting houses as its ordinary trade. Because of the company’s association with the Social Working Group, the factory is generally assumed to be watched by most of the intelligence services of the Americas, and it is a popular setting for spy novels in the Commonwealth and abroad.