Comment by miki_tyler
7 hours ago
I know and love the Acoup Blog, and the premise of the story does not contradict what Acoup says. In fact, if you look carefully, there is an Easter egg hidden somewhere in the story about the Acoup Blog.
7 hours ago
I know and love the Acoup Blog, and the premise of the story does not contradict what Acoup says. In fact, if you look carefully, there is an Easter egg hidden somewhere in the story about the Acoup Blog.
I'm not sure that's really the case. The fundamental issue with the idea of a Roman Industrial Revolution isn't that Rome didn't have the technical antecedents (although that's still a big issue), but rather that the Industrial Revolution only solves problems that Rome didn't have.
One of the big, if easy, mistakes to make about history is to assume that a historical society is just like modern society at a lower tech level. Bret Devereaux is fond of dunking on George R. R. Martin's question "but what was Aragon's tax policy like?" as malformed because Gondor is a polity that doesn't really have the capacity to have a tax policy in the first place (it's pretty clearly modeled off of something like the Byzantine state). Not that Tolkien is immune from this either--the Shire suffers from being a Victorian-era English countryside being transplanted to a ~15th century tech level.