Restitution

Restitution was the system of slavery in the Edifice, in grand theoretical terms a form of penal labor by which a restitute compensated for some wrongful deed or characteristic through works directed according to Arta. There were many causes that bondage would be restitution for, further varying across legal systems. The status could be inherited in its own right or be assessed on a basis that made restitutes as a demographic difficult to escape from. Access to personal possessions and freedoms were even more variable, differing by the exact legal status as much as the restitute's work. The employers of restitutive labor were mainly official bureaucrats and academies, who were privileged by their direct role in rational social projects that Edificial civilization identified as its form of state. However, the laity could also be issued usufructs and permits to employ restitutes on behalf of the state or a more general sense of Arta, and such privileges were often distributed as political favors.

The institution developed from older practices of penal and debt slavery adapted to cliobic privileges and sanctions, and was given grander theoretical justifications in terms of cosmic law after a revival of Pastism in the Jangearean Missions. Instructionism's focus on rational governance further argued that deficiencies could be assessed systematically a priori, and be employed in whatever way rational and Artic authorities demanded out of utilitarianism. Nevertheless, it was controversial even among the most ruthlessly economistic of Instructionists and Edificial administrators, who doubted the effectiveness of coercion, the compliance of slavery with Instruction itself, or restriction of a logic that could apply to the entirety of the non-academic population. During the Reign of Gears restitutes primarily provided vocational skilled labor, and worked as a way for industrial firms to exercise paternalism, but even in this role it was not particularly different from legally free workers facing similar employment conditions; the economic importance of restitution itself was often disputed. What is certain is that a large restitute class became a party to the cultural and political tensions of the 15th and 16th centuries, acting as a hotbed of unrest as in the Exhamian Sublation. Denigrated as archaic and inefficient in the 16th century, it rapidly collapsed in the 16th-century crisis, and fell alongside the academies in the period's turmoil.