Best way of archiving a century or more of technological progression ahead of OTL?

[Fox-Fire]

I am in the process of writing a short TL in which, in general lines, the PoD is a few years before the Third Crusade. Now, I’m not asking for a PoD this time, but about a development and how that should be handled so I archive the result I’m looking for. In this case, this development is the advancement of technology a century or two ahead of OTL by the XIX century.

From what I know, technology progresses according to the balance of two principles that, at first glance, are on somewhat different planes:

- The needs of the peoples and governments or whatever polity they belong to.

- A snowballing effect in which a small leap in tech produces a much larger impact the farther behind from our present it is.

According to this I am asking myself the question: Which would be the best way of archiving technological superiority a century or two ahead of OTL?

The TL I’m working on has a divergence on Western Europe that causes a divergence in the Third Crusade, which has repercussions in the Middle East and those could go one way or the other. I have far less knowledge on the area that I would like but basically, I’m wondering if more successful Crusader States would have any impact on this together with a different fate of the Byzantine Empire. Concretely, I’m wondering if more permanent Christian presence in the area could avoid the bottleneck of technology that occurred in between the Middle East and Europe, giving a tremendous boost to European technology from the Arab Golden Age and to Middle-Eastern one with an earlier Renaissance that could form a continuous process. A sort of feedback cycle through the Mediterranean basin and if that could be enough to boost tech worldwide by a large enough margin.

I have thought that, to archive this, one would need to diminish greatly the power of the Pope and increase dramatically the degree to which Muslim were tolerated by Christians.

Also the fate and history of the Mongol Empire and its expansion should be different, not devastating Baghdad for example.

What are the thoughts of this wonderful community on the matter?

 

[The Undead Martyr]

As a Marxist I will tell you unironically to develop capitalism earlier and thus reap the rewards.

"Technology" as we think of it encompasses a broad swathe of things, but the key developments are: empirical worldview (and everything springing therefrom), globalized trade, capitalist production (as opposed to feudal autarchy or cottage industries), and especially in regards to agriculture a system quite different from that which dominated until the Agricultural Revolution. There's a lot as to how this happened but the key revolution was as a result of 1) the enclosures of the commons (which resulted in incentivizing innovative, capital/material intensive production, rather than labor intensive production by consolidating various agricultural lands under freeholding farmers, wool merchants, and lesser nobles with the means and motive to, well, innovate and invest), 2) a strong, stable bureaucratic government (ie the English state) conducive to these interests and able to override "traditional" concerns of labor and landowners- basically, creating a "free market" in land, labor and money rather than maintaining existing relations of those three (but especially the first two), and 3) a literate, urban and mercantile society which by its nature saw the world in terms of materialist concerns, ie Machiavellian Realism as opposed to medieval scholasticism, that which denied human reason and overarching rationality in favor of empirical and "worldly" politics and concerns; see also the divide between ie Hume and Locke and Continental philosophers/idealists like Kant. Add to this industrialization and mining technology, owing in large part to metallurgical advances driven especially by gunpowder weaponry, and the need for mining- railroads as such had ample precedent in mines, but with wooden rails and horse-drawn carts, and the first practical steam engines were pumps used to drain mines in England.

So: a society like medieval Italy or Flanders, which manages to avert their OTL fate of being the pawns of the French and Austrian interests (and thus harness the social resources behind a strong and bureaucratic state), and also ideally involved in a region, like England, Wallonia, Silesia, or the Rhine (or, I suppose, Iberia, which was a major mining center from Roman times onward) with ample coal and iron reserves. I would suggest looking to Italy and Lotharingia, specifically, and the HRE generally, but especially the Low Countries and Rhineland as having all of the potential pieces; England also has many of the seeds as OTL showed decisively.

 

[Fox-Fire]

Wonderful answer! I thought the kickstarter would be in the exterior exchange of technology, but you say it’s inside. Nice. Still I wonder if there is a need for an external fuse or all of this can be done by a wonderfully centralized state well enough.

 

[The Undead Martyr]

Look first to the Burgundians. I suspect the Low Countries- had they avoided becoming "the battleground of Europe" and having to spend 80 years tossing out the Spanish- could have kicked things off much sooner, to say nothing of possibly poaching Lorraine and/or the Rhineland.

 

[Fox-Fire]

Look first to the Burgundians. I suspect the Low Countries- had they avoided becoming "the battleground of Europe" and having to spend 80 years tossing out the Spanish- could have kicked things off much sooner, to say nothing of possibly poaching Lorraine and/or the Rhineland.

I remember they had a tremendous textile market, I was planning on getting them much closer to England and I believe that thanks to your reasoning, that’s a step in the right path as they both seemed to had the ability to kickstart things much sooner in terms of technology.

Now, let me be clear, while I like the answer you provided me very much, I would also like to continue this discussion in regards to starting to change things even earlier. I was wondering what would be necessary for the change to be noticeable, even if just slightly, around 1350. I’m mostly concerned, in that time period, with furthering improvements in naval tech to reach the new world as soon as reasonable.

 

[The Undead Martyr]

I remember they had a tremendous textile market, I was planning on getting them much closer to England and I believe that thanks to your reasoning, that’s a step in the right path as they both seemed to had the ability to kickstart things much sooner in terms of technology.

Now, let me be clear, while I like the answer you provided me very much, I would also like to continue this discussion in regards to starting to change things even earlier. I was wondering what would be necessary for the change to be noticeable, even if just slightly, around 1350. I’m mostly concerned, in that time period, with furthering improvements in naval tech to reach the new world as soon as reasonable.

My "expertise" as such is the late middle ages and onward so a pre-1350 divergence is a bit beyond me.

Reaching the New World earlier... would require a few things, much like the steam engine or Napoleonic weaponry depends on much more than simply "discovering" things, but "hidden" revolutions in organization and various cumulative improvements (the steam engine for instance, even in its earliest, non-motive form, basically required 1700s level technology in terms of machining pistons and such; it is possible to see an earlier form using say a turbine or the like, but fundamentally I have trouble seeing it emerge more than a century, at the utmost, before OTL, at least assuming a world at all recognizable to ours). Mainly it requires advances in shipbuilding... now OTL there are antecedents, looking especially at Venice- a surviving Lombard League, incorporating Venice, and reaching into the Atlantic via Iberia (or, alternately, the Indian Ocean via Arabia and Egypt), could see similar innovations.

In my own Italian timeline I took as a conceit a (mostly) unified 1400 era Italy driving Venice (limited largely to the Veneto and Adriatic Littoral) to push onward through the Mamluks into the Red Sea and the traditional Indian Ocean trade which even OTL they were rather well connected to, conversely a Genoese (as subsidized by super-Milan) interest repurposed from the OTL investments in Portugal to pursue its own imperialist endeavors in ie Madeira and the Canaries, hijacking the OTL Portuguese developments in trade, naval and mercantile technology. Do note that Italians were heavily involved in the effort OTL- Columbus was Genoese, Pigafetta Venetian, America itself comes from an Italian cartographer, etc. Look to the Portuguese and Spanish islands in the Atlantic- Madeira, Canaries, Azores- and how they were known (if sporadically) to Europeans earlier than their OTL colonization; think about the economic, political, and technological drives (in this case, the desire to break Venetian sugar monopoly by "rediscovering" these islands which were vaguely known to Italians from the 13th century or so, driving as well efforts into North Africa via a proto-Transatlantic Slave Trade), and then realize that such an effort would be more likely to discover Brazil by accident or design rather than repeat Columbus' voyage and work from there.

The New World also is rather more than its OTL counterpart, which while a fascinating story, is something that should not be mindlessly copied in any ATL, especially one taking as its premise an altered Europe. All things considered I am not certain how far back you could push such an enterprise- part of technology is incidental certainly- Venice, after all, had a proto-assembly line, and highly "modern" government and society, but never really made the jump to "modern" industry, in large part due to her ruling elites' conservatism- but do not overstate the case and have social developments lead technological advances, the two are on many levels connected (albeit, we are limited by our own history- I have considered a Majorian focused TL but I hesitate because very quickly you encounter the problem of "what becomes of a Europe still largely united under the Roman Banner, without retreading the old cliches of Eternal Rome or early Roman Steam engine etfc?" question, one which moreover is uncomfortable as a narrative device as you have to sail into uncharted waters). In my present timeline I've already reached that problem with both the Reformation- heavily butterflied by a Concilarist Catholic Church- and to a lesser extent the New World, where I am caught between wanting to simply redo, in whole or in part, the OTL Spanish conquests (therefore freeing myself to move on back to my main passion, an alternate "Concert of Europe"/Stately Quadrile), or having to create something wholly and utterly different than OTL with all of the headaches and improvisation entailed therein.