Grant

A grant was an endowment or investment made by or through academies and later the more general governmental apparatuses characteristic of the Edifice, which provided for a vague type of business known as the grant venture in Edificial economies. Ideally, the grant supported causes ostensibly dedicated to Arta, Instructionism, or other forms of higher pursuits as conceived under the Edifice, distinguishing the ventures made by them with that quality. The issuing of grants by academies and other Edificial bodies acting as foundations or banks was the main way of funding industrial ventures, research projects, and at times military adventures; it formed part of the system of liberal enterprise. Depending on regional and legal specifics the grant could pledge property and equipment, including restitutes.

The public and rational 'grant sector' of the Edificial economy was polycentric and competitive in nature, defined primarily by the formal justifications and ideologies driving ventures within them; it was contrasted with businesses that did not demand the attention of a grant and its grandiose cause, and which had more ordinary concerns, typically organized as labelships. Towards the end of the Edifice, the pressures of the 16th-century crisis caused a general concentration of resources, turning the grant sector into the area of central control under combinates, but the scope for grant concerns was also drastically narrowed due to the economic crisis.

Grant ventures were not necessarily bound to the disburser (beyond surveiling the integrity of their use, which was an academy or other Edificial authority simply exercising its regular governmental duties in rational regulation), but in the Instructionist world they naturally added to the portfolio of an academy's influence, and distinguished a section of society bound more generally to academies. Informal business networks and alliances, if not conglomerates, centred on an academy or another grant-disbursing body were common in Vasarean and Ausarean economies during the Reign of Gears.