Humanity

It is the 27th century, and humanity has spread throughout the local arm of the Milky Way. Most of the human population lives off of Earth, though Earth is still one of the largest, and politically the most important world. Britannia is perhaps the most populous world, and nearly as important politically as Earth.

The main political organization is United Earth, which is a United-Nations type structure that encompasses most of the smaller political units. United Earth is a much more robust organization than the modern day UN, and is more like a giant United States than a UN. North America (the successor to the USA), South America (a United States-type nation), Europe, India, The Chinese Intersolar Democratic Republic, The Russian Confederation—these are all smaller political units within UE. The RC has its own military, as does the CIDR, but the “western” nations do not, and are much more incorporated into UE.

There are at least 55 colonized worlds. There are a handful of major worlds like Earth, Britannia, Mao Prime, Novo Janeiro, New Petersburg, each with billions of people, and a large number of smaller worlds such as Cadiz, New Dublin, York, each with millions to tens of millions. There are also a few dozen smaller colonies with perhaps thousands to hundreds of thousands, but these have not been mentioned in any detail.

Some of them might be worlds founded by splinter groups, or smaller cultural groups (Maori, Mormons, Sikh, Inuit, Kurds, for example) The Swarm refer to humanity as “the Adanasi”, and in book 3 it is revealed that the Adanasi (at least the Russian part of it) is a member race of the “Concordat of Seven”—the family of races controlled by the Swarm.