Lengthening Low-Tech History

[Polydamas]

One of the problems with the GURPS Tech Level model is that it assumes that societies steadily progress up a single path of wealth and technological sophistication. This is fine in a game, but the real world saw multiple technology paths and a cycle between high and low development. Flavian Italy, Song China, Mughal India, and 17th century Austria are all TL 4 but each had very different capabilities. Societies repeatedly reached high population, high per-capita wealth, and high urbanization then stagnated, declined, or collapsed.

World historians have a very hard time explaining how the machine science movement which made the industrial revolution possible in the 19th century appeared when and where it did. There seems to have been a likely candidate in Eurasia on the order of once in a millenium (the Hellenistic Mediterranean, Song China, 18th century western Europe) and it only happened once, so adding a few thousand years to history between the invention of ironsmelting and the invention of an effective steam engine is plausible. A history of tens of thousands of years is harder to explain, because eventually the mines will run out or someone will invent the right things. But fantasy can affect that as well, if eg. the gods smite any society which gets too rich and successful, or if steam engines attract swarms of amorous fire elementals.

[Bruno]

The reason why much fiction that was written after the 1900s-ish and before 1940s-ish seems to have long long long history (Conan, and Cthulhu, I'm looking at you two very hard) is that the idea that the world was older than 6000 years was really beginning to take hold in western culture - but there wasn't the science to try and estimate how old it actually was.

It's like having the bottom fall out of your history books - suddenly instead of a nicely bounded existence there's a vast unknown gulf. So a lot of writers just went hog-wild and made up fun-sounding numbers. Or stole numbers from the Theosophists, who'd gone hog-wild etc. :)

And of course once people started growing up reading those books, they started writing more settings with long long histories, and a trope is born.

[Flyndaran]

Because it's epic.
My people have lived here for 5 generations when we took it from this other people that lived here for only 4 generations that conquered the indigenous people that floated here on boats 10 generations before that....
doesn't sound nearly as majestic as...
My people first settled here 10,000 years ago when the world was young.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Seneschal

A potentially good plot-tool and reason for remaining at a given TL is a lack of understanding of underlying principles. If there was no gradual accumulation of knowledge leading to certain discoveries - if they were just dumped in somebody's lap with a brief instruction manual - there would be no means to reverse-engineer the technology. We could use it, but we couldn't build on it without knowing what drives it, especially if it's easy to use, difficult to understand, and requires trained scientific methodology (which we might not have yet developed) to study. An example of that would be the Covenant from Halo, that starts out more advanced than its human enemies, but regards its scavenged Precursor technology as divine, and considers studying it to be heresy. The humans surpass them in some areas very quickly.

This would work quite well in many fantasy settings. Many mythologies hold that some deity or other was the first one to teach humans technology x (Agriculture, metalworking, etc). In a world where that's literally what happened, the humans just know that the God of Smiths says this is how you smelt ore and forge metal, and that's it. Why does it work that way? Because the gods said so, that's why. David Weber's Safehold books explore a sci fi variant of this, where the founders of a colony world used mindwipe and other technologies to set themselves up as 'Archangels' and deliberately set out to build a permanently technologically stagnant society.

[Flyndaran]

Even today, most laymen know of dinosaurs, but don't understand just how long the history of life is before them.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Sindri

My question is: before taking into account technology crashes, deliberate suppression or situations leading to lack of incentives for specific innovations and similar methods used to mess with technological development how slowly can technology advance while still making progress (From TL 1ish to TL 4ish say.)

Infinitely?

Seriously, "progress" may be more unusual than not. Many technology packages changed very little over quite long spans of time. Once you are far enough into TL1 to be generating city supporting surpluses you may be doomed to some progress - cities generate new problems needing solutions regularly, the surplus that keeps them alive also allows diversion of resources to try out new stuff, and having a lot of people in one place greatly enhances the chance a hyperspecialist will be able to find a market for his craft and an apprentice to teach it to before he dies. But even then, pretty much all the world's ancient urban centers ran through a couple millenia and two or three replacements of dominant cultures without leaving TL1.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

When owning slaves was economically rational, it was popular. When it wasn't, it became less popular.
Racism could keep people slaves and force the market to find a use for them even if a more economically feasible option was available.

Racism and slavery have very little to do with each other. We Americans have a skewed perspective on this because we had a highly abnormal form of slavery. In the ancient world, where it was more thoroughly institutionalized, a Greek might own imported Thracians, but he might also own Greeks, brought into slavery as war captives or through unpaid debts.

And if slaves are really unproductive, market forces will work against keeping them.

I think the biggest single payoff of slavery is that captive slaves were raised in a different society, where their parents bore the cost of raising them, and then are taken prisoner and put to work as adults. That spares you much of the overhead of raising slave children. The same pattern occurred in modern history with Caribbean slaves; they largely worked on sugar plantations at jobs so lethal that they had to be replaced every few years.

Bill Stoddard

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Racism and slavery have very little to do with each other. We Americans have a skewed perspective on this because we had a highly abnormal form of slavery. In the ancient world, where it was more thoroughly institutionalized, a Greek might own imported Thracians, but he might also own Greeks, brought into slavery as war captives or through unpaid debts.

And if slaves are really unproductive, market forces will work against keeping them.

I think the biggest single payoff of slavery is that captive slaves were raised in a different society, where their parents bore the cost of raising them, and then are taken prisoner and put to work as adults. That spares you much of the overhead of raising slave children. The same pattern occurred in modern history with Caribbean slaves; they largely worked on sugar plantations at jobs so lethal that they had to be replaced every few years.

Bill Stoddard

Yep, what Bill said.



Racism as an ideology pretty much didn't exist until Europeans invented it in the later 1600s, and it didn't really take on it's 'modern' form until the early 19th Century. It's a product of the Enlightenment, European imperialism and colonialism, and moving away from the medieval Christian world view. IMHO.

Note that I'm not talking about ethnocentrism, which is common all over the world and through pretty much all of history.

Medieval Christians didn't care a fig if a man was black, white, brown, or whatever. They didn't even have the concept of 'race' as it is routinely used in our society. What mattered were things like religion, fealty, rank, region/ethnic group of origin, etc. But essentially no one back then thought that black skin made anybody inferior, and there was no systematic effort to divide humanity into 'races'-- as opposed to simply making note of tribal and national differences.

One does see a little bit of 'the black Africans might be destined for slavery' in handful of medieval Arabian and Islamic sources, but these are contradicted by the many free 'black' Muslims and by the nature of slavery in the Islamic sphere.

Race-based slavery really didn't exist until the later 17th Century. I think it was in large part brought about by conditions in which sub-Saharan Africa, a rather low tech region divided into many warring tribes and kingdoms, becomes the go-to place to buy slaves. The elite's need to divide and control servile and poor populations on some basis other than religion (once the Afrcian slaves ahd converted) was part of the development in North America.

Cromwell, BTW, was quite happy to enslave white-skinned Irish people and ship their poor devils to Barbados as slaves. Not indentured servants, mind you-- slaves. Chained, beaten with whips, worked like mules on plantations.
Being Catholic and royalist meant they weren't good people. They were Others. No problem with enslaving them, then.


Barbary pirates enslaved Christians from Europe—but that was based on religion and war-spoils, not ‘race.’ If you converted, you might end up as one of the pirates!

[gjc8]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

David Weber's Safehold books explore a sci fi variant of this, where the founders of a colony world used mindwipe and other technologies to set themselves up as 'Archangels' and deliberately set out to build a permanently technologically stagnant society.

Of course, part of the point of those books is that it doesn't work. It held for a millennium or so without major advancement (though there's definitely been some advancement; it's explicitly noted that they've reinvented gunpowder and matchlocks). But it wouldn't work for six or eight thousand years. The plan is already starting to break down before Nimue/Merlin starts interfering (and the fact that the plan isn't working is part of the reason Nimue decides to interfere after all).

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Note that I'm not talking about ethnocentrism, which is common all over the world and through pretty much all of history.

Just so. Enough ethnocentricism makes racism rather superfluous. As long as people don't accept anyone who didn't grow up alongside them as human, it doesn't really matter whether they are predisposed to classifying strangers according to skin colour. If everyone except fairly close relations* is considered a dangerous potential mutant, prone to cannibalism and random acts of gruesome terrorism, it doesn't really matter whether you're trying to make common cause with distant relations or with exotic tribes. It's always going to be hard to view others as reasoning beings.

*The norm during most of human history.