S Es Tre L
The Sino-East Slavic Treaty League was a major political body on old Earth before the First Decline. It comprised most of the area of the largest continent on Terra. My own researchs on Terra have failed to reveal a formation date for the League, but some sources seemed to indicate that the League formed over several generations, and thus, perhaps, was not viewed as having a single formation date. While the SESTL did rule a large area it should be noted that most of the area was wilderness, in particular desert and wasteland. While the sources I discovered did not directly mention it, they appeared to view environmental neglect as a historical feature of the SESTL and its “member states”. Indeed, much of the source material we have for the SESTL seems to indicate that by the time of the First Expanse, it was already in grave trouble, with dense populations concentrated on its Eastern coast and its Western border.
The SESTL is deserving of mention here, because a great deal of evidence seem to indicate that it was the source of a large portion, if not the majority, of the colonization movement. In particular, they appear to have spent a great deal of their energy building a vast “slowboat” colonization fleet using ramscoop technology and boosted out of the Solar System by the first primitive drive laser installations. Thus, the culture(s) of this body are the source for many of the similarities of cultures, languages, and government that occur throughout the Jiao Banner Sphere. Indeed, I suspect that they were the source culture for many of the Genetically Enhanced Peoples. The extent to which this is true is not clearly evident at this time, and so this remains an intriguing theory.