Gunpowder Empire

[wkwillis]

I'm thinking more about Turtledove's Rome with gunpowder YA interdimensional travel series. I am assuming that Rome would have continued as a slave based agricultural empire and not built steam engines and railroads and such.
Gunpowder reduces the cost of mining, then mining requires that you pump water, and that gets you steam power and then railroads and steamboats on the rivers sooner or later.
How to prevent industrialisation?

 

[Ivan Druzhkov]

This is just thinking out loud, but maybe trade in this world is easy enough that the Romans don't really need to mine for precious metals as much, as they can easily acquire them from sources in the East.

 

[B_Munro]

I'm thinking more about Turtledove's Rome with gunpowder YA interdimensional travel series. I am assuming that Rome would have continued as a slave based agricultural empire and not built steam engines and railroads and such.
Gunpowder reduces the cost of mining, then mining requires that you pump water, and that gets you steam power and then railroads and steamboats on the rivers sooner or later.
How to prevent industrialisation?

The Chinese had gunpowder for quite a few centries without industrialization...just because something would be useful is no guarantee that it will be invented.

Bruce

 

[DuQuense]

if you are willing to spend the slaves, The mines can be pumped with manpower.

 

[joatsimeon@aol.com]

Reasons

The Romans didn't 'fail' to develop the scientific method because they had slaves. It's rather more complex than that.

They just weren't very interested in technical innovations that didn't have an immediate payoff in certain narrow areas (military, mostly). And their philosophical tradition was, on the whole, anti-empirical.

This isn't a judgment on the Romans. Nobody else had a scientific/industrial revolution either, except us -- and it was a near-run thing with us.

Newton spent most of his life wallowing in the grossest superstition, and sort of invented calculus and celestial mechanics on the side.

 

[joatsimeon@aol.com]

Slave labor:

To understand the role of slave labor in Classical society (and in post-Renaissance Western society) you have to understand that the most attractive thing about slave labor isn't necessarily that it's cheap.

It's that it is _controllable_.

Slave labor typically becomes important in situations where new economic opportunities are opening up and a large mobile labor force is needed.

We use pricing signals operating on a labor force of free employees in situations like that, but that's a recent development and it just wasn't available in antiquity, and not very available in the 16th century either.

Slaves (unlike villagers, even serfs) could be sent to distant places, and made to labor in large numbers under direct supervision at unfamiliar or uncongenial tasks.

 

[Faeelin]

They just weren't very interested in technical innovations that didn't have an immediate payoff in certain narrow areas (military, mostly). And their philosophical tradition was, on the whole, anti-empirical..

Hmm. It's amazing how technologies like glass making managed to defuse through an empire that wasn't really interested in technical innovation.

 

[The Gunslinger]

Gunpowder Empire was actually one of the few Turtledove I could enjoy. I quick easy read without the tediousness of the inevitable six follow up books.