Star nation centered in the Manticore system - central warehousing and commercial node for hundreds of worlds.
The StarKingdom of Manticore is governed by a two-house Parliament, a Royal Council, and a Crown Judiciary.
StarKingdom of Manticore is widely respected as one of the wealthiest star nations in existence (probably the wealthiest, on a per capita basis), and its carrying trade dominated the interstellar freight lines.
The Empire lies to the "west" of the StarKingdom, has an excellent navy, and is the StarKingdom's primary competitor for trade and influence in the Silesian Confederacy.
A Manticoran political party united around the concept that the StarKingdom requires a strong monarchy, largely as a counter balance to the power of the conservative element in the aristocracy.
It was the PRH which began the current war by attacking the StarKingdom of Manticore and the Manticoran Alliance.
The Constitution of the StarKingdom specifically guarantees the right of the citizens to be armed, and where small arms are concerned, the entire StarKingdom is under a "shall-issue" system.
The StarKingdom does not mandate a Kingdom-wide weapons training curriculum, but the policy of the Crown has always been to strongly encourage local school boards to make such courses part of the required curriculum at what we would consider the middle school and high school levels.
Although the StarKingdom's Constitution enshrines the right of the citizen to be armed, and specifically prohibits the government from infringing that right (except, as noted above, in the case of energy weapons), there are a great many ways in which an individual citizen may lose that right.
This they invested in a company on Old Earth which was to both invest that money for them and use it to safeguard their interests from claim-jumpers, a luxury which could not be afforded by the downtrodden masses of ordinary colonists.
Manticore needed to recruit more colonists and the Warshawski Sail and their great riches enabled them to do this.
Those who could pay part of their passage received a reduced land grant while, in keeping with the original colonists class system, those rich enough to bring wealth with them were allowed to become minor nobles themselves, although naturally not as powerful as the original colonists.
These are fitting parallels in that during much of Harrington's career her native StarKingdom of Manticore is at war with the neighboring People's Republic of Haven, a conflict that bears more than passing resemblance to the antagonism between the British Empire and France during the Napoleonic Wars.
Honor was born on October 1, 3961 AD on Sphinx, the third inhabited planet of the StarKingdom of Manticore.
In the course of her career, Honor Harrington has become a Duchess of the StarKingdom of Manticore, a Grayson Steadholder, and an Admiral in both the Grayson Space Navy and the Royal Manticoran Navy.
Technological advances in the Honorverse have come slow and far between for most of the 500 years of the StarKingdom of Manticore's existence, and as the series opens, the stagnation in technology leads to a similar stagnation in both strategy and military tactics.
The grav-wave propulsion systems require "gun ports" and captains strive to position their ships to maximize their fire power by using a broadside akin to the unturreted days dominated by the warships and battleships of the Age of Sail, and like Horatio Hornblower, Honor Stephanie Harrington is a superb ship handler bordering on genius.
The most important space empires in the series are StarKingdom of Manticore, (People's) Republic of Haven, Solarian League, Andermani Empire, Mesa, Erewhon and the Silesian Confederacy.
The StarKingdom's Constitution had been drafted by people determined to restrict the power of the state by restricting the power to tax, and the Founders had crafted a fiscal system in which the government's income was intended to depend primarily on import and export duties and property and sales taxes.
But their duty to ensure the StarKingdom's security would not allow them in good conscience to reduce taxes until they could be positive the military theat had been ended once and for all in a formal treaty.
She truly believed that the "poor" of the StarKingdom were destitute . . . despite the fact that the poorest of them enjoyed an effective income at least four times that of the average citizen of their Grayson allies, and somewhere around seven or eight times that of the average Havenite living in the financially ravaged Republic.
For eight bloody years, the StarKingdom of Manticore and its allies have taken the war to the vastly more powerful People's Republic of Haven, and Commodore Honor Harrington has been in the forefront of that war.
The StarKingdom's ally Erewhon is growing increasingly restive in the alliance because the new High Ridge regime ignores its needs.
The StarKingdom of Manticore is once again at war with the Republic of Haven after a stunning sneak attack.
I sincerely doubt that Manticore has shared any of their higher tech with Beowulf, unless the Beowulfians were invovled with it's development… which pretty much limits it to medical advances (we've never heard of Beowulf being a big military designer, unlike TIY).
Personally, assuming good relations with Beowulf, I suspect that Manticore would sell them enough tech info that their military technology would be at least as advanced as Haven's.
No full member system has ever attempted to do so, and the possible consequences of such an attempt might be interesting, but the legal right exists and is recognized by all constitutional scholars.
The StarKingdom's main enemies are the Peeps, the People's Republic of Haven.
Haven is a failing socialist republic, with something like 90% of the population on the dole because Haven has a school system inadequate to the task of educating them to do anything useful, and an economy inadequate to the task of finding them anything useful to do.
But Honor survives all her travails at Grayson, and is a hero, and decorated and ennobled by a grateful Grayson, thus forcing the StarKingdom to do the same.
Baryon 101 Review(Site not responding. Last check: )
The deadly war between the StarKingdom of Manticore and the People's Republic of Haven has heated up after a short lived cease fire with the Havenites firing the first shots in the new hostilities because of a belief that their enemies altered key documents.
She has the fetus removed to mature in the safety of a tube, but worries that her enemies might use her child as a pawn against her.
The latest Honor Harrington tale has the twist that the heroine (at least to the Manticore side — the devil to the Havenites) is pregnant, but has a war to fight.
The StarKingdom of Manticore is once again at war with the Republic of Haven after a stunning sneak attack.
The most they can look forward to is the capture of the occasional pirate cruiser and the boring duty of supporting the Cluster's peaceful integration with the StarKingdom at the freely expressed will of eighty percent of the Cluster's citizens.
Pirates, terrorists, genetic slavers, smuggled weapons, long-standing personal hatreds, and a vicious alliance of corporate greed, bureaucratic arrogance, and a corrupt local star nation with a powerful fleet, are all coming together, and only Hexapuma, her war-weary captain, and Honor Harrington's students stand in the path.
