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The Roman Rpeublic faced a problem regarding the expansion of citizenship among their Italian allies - actually, they faced several - in that many prominent Romans who had no objection to the idea on principle could no abide poliical rivals reaping the rewards of having entire swaths of the...

Kind of in the title, does anyone have any good and thorough sources on the Roman Collegia, preferably from academic institutions?

Once Spain had its mountain of gold in their newly conquered territories, what would their best course of action be? Their actual policies left much to be desired, obviously. Ideally, we should look at this from the point of view of what was within the economic worldviews of 16th century...

The Saturn C-5N was basically a Saturn 5 with a NERVA upper stage. It got cancelled in ‘72 due to both NASA scaling down its ambitions ( it was designed as a key component of a Mars mission) and concern about nuclear anything. So, lets assume that, at some point before that, at least one C-5N...

Suppose the following: Caesar does not die in 44 BC, and lives to, lets say, at least 40 BC. Lets us also suppose this additional detail: Caesar does not want anyone after him to emulate him, and wants to prevent anyone from having such autocratic power within the Republic. He is in the...

I'm not saying it has to be the Roman Empire, but its the Roman Empire. Seriously though, whether its the Romans, or Macedonians, or the Ottomans, or the Arabs, or a really successful Carolingian Empire, or the Spanish-HRE, whatever the case may be. A unified government has the entire...

Lets take care of the easy part: what would happen. I think that, if the Romans had a central bank, you'd see a massive development of the Empire, spread out across a wide range of areas and industries. Great fun for us to imagine. With a Central Bank facilitating the flow of capital, there's...

I was musing on something the other day, and, while I haven't fully fleshed out my ideas to my satisfaction, it keeps on sticking in the back of my mind, so here's a thread on a topic that won't die, no matter how many dead horses you beat it with - I may have messed that metaphor up. Anyway...

On the path to 'proper' industrialization, as exemplified by the increased mechanization from water and then steam power, there were many improvements in the concept of the division of labor. Take Adam Smith's classic example of the pin workshop, where 10 workers could produce 48,000 pins daily...

So, before we get started, lets all accept one premise: That the Suez Canal (a proper one, connecting the Red and Med directly) is technologically feasible in earlier eras. I've run numbers on it, and its not outside the realm of possibility. There's obviously plenty of reasons it wasn't built...

Inspired by my thread of medieval universities, this is a similar question, but in a different direction: Assume thay the Roman Empire never loses any serious territory to the Arabs unified under Islam, though the Caliphate still takes out the Sassanids, and does its thing in Asia. In this...

Since Dutch is part of the Germanic culture group in EU4, its conceivable to form Germany as the Netherlands. So, inspired by that, your challenge, with a POD after November 11, AD 1444, is to have a plausible (this is the part where EU4 and every other video game falls down a little) scenario...

Assume that the Roman Empire never falls (something like the West never loses Africa, allowing it to gradually recover and re-unify), and maintains borders comparable to its classic borders. Basically, as long as they control the entire Mediterranean coastline, we're cool. Could the...

As we know, the Renaissance was celebrated as a rebirth of European art, culture, and learning, as the works of antiquity were brought into wider circulation. However, in this process, much of the learning of the Medieval Era was discarded for a variety of reasons. In some sense, there's some...

Eyeglasses were invented in AD 1290. Telescopes were invented by AD 1608. Thats basically three centuries before someone put these pieces together. Fundamentally, there's nothing stopping someone from inventing the telescope at any point after AD 1290 (we can be even more assertive and...

Assume that NASA never pursues the Shuttle as a space launch system. What alternatives might we see? I’ve see plenty of proposals for various heavy lift options to get back to the Moon or go to Mars, but much less for more regular LEO operations. Put another way: Could we see an evolution of...

Warning: This is a ‘high concept’ proposition. So, please accept the basic premise I present here, and work within that, rather than delving into the particulars of how we would get to this point or how likely it would be. My question is how would an analogue of NATO function if the US were...

What if some Roman invented the spinning wheel, say around the first century AD? There are many consequnces of a spinning wheel: - Productivity of spinning can be increased by tenfold. - Demand for wool increases correspondingly, stimulating sheep farming - Supply of yarn correspondingly drops...

I’m buffing up on my (compartively sparse) knowledge of Kissinger, and I was quite struck by the possibility that it was Soviet fear of a US-China alliance against the USSR that ultimately led to the recognition of China by the Nixon administration. So, what if the opposite had happened? What...

- Assume the Taiping rebellion succeeds militarily, and they totally usurp the Qing. - Assume also that, after succeeding, they look around and realize “whelp, we gotta calm down a bit and figure out how to govern China in a reasonable fashion.” What might their rule look like?