I am currently trying to look into what Shalassian culture is like during the 10k bubble between the War of the Ancients and now, and I’m coming up somewhat short.
From what I can tell:
Shalassian culture is extremely aristocratic and highly divided by social class. Noble families are powerful and wealthy, but outnumbered by the Suramarian middle-class and working-class who act as tradesmen, merchants and servants.
There is not much evidence of slavery before the Legion began to influence Elisande.
There’s not much on their religious beliefs but considering that Suramar used to be the HUB of Elune worship in the Kaldorei Empire it seems odd that they would have all become suddenly agnostic.
Not much happened to distort the status quo of Elisande and the arcanists being in charge.
Noble infighting was and is present however, with Tala’shar duels and the presence of house politics in the Suramar storyline implying a fairly GoT-y relationship with one another, vying for power and influence and answering slights pointedly.
Does anyone have any better sources or more knowledge than this? I am trying to write a backstory for a Nightborne RP character and it’s rather difficult without knowing what he’s been doing for the past few thousand years.
Both logical deduction and the implications of the existing lore seems to imply that Suramar has remained extremely stagnant - like the Nightborne female joke about a Night Elf saying her fashion was “10.000 years out of date” - since before the bubble.
It is possible that, as an urban center, Suramar had a larger percentage of “Highborne” than the rest of the Kaldorei Empire, hence why it leans so heavily on Arcane magic and the nobility - my personal theory is also that the Shalassian language is, like Thalassian, derived from the original Highborne dialect, while Darnassian is based on the commoner tongue of the Empire, hence the difference in spelling things like ‘Shal’dorei’ and ‘Sin’dorei’ vs. ‘Kaldorei’ - but this is all definitely more headcanon for enhancing RP than actual concrete factual lore.
From the perspective of logical deduction, though, the entirety of Suramar within the bubble was an urban city… which means high population, low food production. I imagine that one of the reasons for stagnation/cultural stasis is the need to husband resources, the fact that any expansion was impossible likely put strict limits on birth rates and allowed the state to tightly control the population with both enforcers and, perhaps more importantly, access to mana wine, as was shown in the original questlines.
With the state having such strong top-down control over movement, breeding, and the most essential food/drink, it does seem like Suramar was probably a sorta benign fascist state, with people kept under control directly, but also indirectly not having much to achieve by opposing the state (since there’s nowhere to go).
Enemies of the state seem to have been exiled quite freely, though, given the sheer numbers of Withered you find across Azsuna and Suramar. Obviously, after the bubble falls, Elisande takes the step from ‘sorta benign fascism’ to something we much more readily recognize as fascism today, by giving the people an external (and largely artificial) enemy and applying ever-more heavy-handed methods of control.