AHC: How far can the Western Civilization technology advances before 1900?

So many vast overgeneralizations. Where to start:

Meanwhile, during Islam's early centuries, in our West, scholars were widely tortured or burned . . . for any reason atall, including noble amusement.

Let me guess-- You took the Spanish Inquisition and stretched it back over centuries before, after over-exaggerating what actually happened.

Of course, never mind the fact that the Spanish Inquisition was after the Renaissance.:rolleyes:

Scholars, thinkers, and engineers only got support through noble sponsorship, needing constant brownnosing to maintain.
Hint: When your economy is barely above subsistence farming, you don't have a middle-class to support those things.

But guess what the territories Islam ruled over had? Yep, something approximating a middle-class.

When Europe started to get the equivalent of a middle class, guess what happened: Science and technology began to rapidly grow:eek:;)

Yeah, but that doesn't keep every word of what I wrote from being true. Every great culture has its in the sun, and that was the Muslims'. And, during that same period, the western cultures were horror on its scholars and peasants. Even monks had to give elaborate justifications and mostly glorify Christ; and, cloister structure kept books away from the unwashed even after it was no longer needed after the Dark Ages.
Actually, what kept the "unwashed" from reading was the fact that books were very hard to reproduce. Monks only kept it because learning was one of the things they were responsible for.

Nobles in Feudal Europe didn't really have time to teach their children, as they had other pursuits. That's what monks, some who were the sons of noblemen themselves, were largely responsible for.

Of course, the above is also overgeneralized. Many parts of Europe remained wealthy enough that literacy was relatively widespread, although for the most part the Byzantine empire and Islamic states held the edge in that regard.


Importantly, as most Muslims will tell you, Iran and Saudi Arabia are poor exemplars of Muslim ways. Mohammed called for freedom. Iran supports forbidden terrorism. The Sunni Saudis should also be electing their leaders, at least ala Loya Jirga.
Please do us a favor and tell us what freedom Mohammed called for? Although progressive for his time and region, I'd say the freedom Mohammed called for is a far cry from the freedom that people called for in the 19th century.

Also, I found it funny you mentioned the Saudis. You do realize where the term Saudi came from, right? The Saud family. Would the Saud family really support electing their leaders, and the Loya Jirga exists in Afghanistan, not the Arab world.

Of course, the Arab world has had it's own legislative bodies. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan (Did it have a legistlative body? I know at one point it had a very liberal constitution) have all or are in one form or another been Republics.
 
Devolved, your objections, I feel, have little to Islamic reality. Remember, the news media are there to sell worry, not reality, so you'll keep watching, and keep worrying, and they can sell more ads. They're little righter than those beer ads that imply beautiful women will be interested in you if you drink Bud. And, most modern American conservative media are telling out and out big lies to keep people voting GOP in addition to that game. I recommend the British conservative economist.com instead and keeping in mind that real people aren't media stereotypes but individuals with individual behavior.


Max Tyrant, here's a Dark and Middle Ages Primer 101:

During the European Dark Ages, at the start of Islam, there was no security for anybody but the rich and powerful. It was like the worst bits of Afghanistan, except in most of Western Europe. Travel was impractical without big escorts and bribes for local warlords.

And then, when the Dark Ages ended:

o Later, only nobles and knights had rights. Nobles could do ANYTHING they whatever they wanted to EVERYBODY else - killing, torture, robbery, rape. The bad ones did so very regularly indeed, sometimes as often as a far-gone alcoholic drinks. The better ones just did so just when they had excuses like accusations of crimes or when annoyed.

o The educated and scholarly had a way of being irritating to the powerful, or being seen as resources to monopolize, and had a way of suffering particularly often.

o The educated had to spend 1/4ish of their thinking brownnosing to keep the above fates from befalling them. Also, they to brownnose to maximize patronage chances.

o The Inquisition wasn't needed for it to be dangerous to be seen as a heretic; the Christian theocratic states would get you even without it. Late Roman Imperial heresy law (Justinianic Code), widely copied in Western Europe: "We order all those who follow this law to assume the name of Catholic Christians, and considering others as demented and insane, We order that they shall bear the infamy of heresy; and when the Divine vengeance which they merit has been appeased, they shall afterwards be punished in accordance with Our resentment, which we have acquired from the judgment of Heaven."
 
Last edited:
Max Tyrant, here's a Dark and Middle Ages Primer 101:

During the European Dark Ages, at the start of Islam, there was no security for anybody but the rich and powerful. It was like the worst bits of Afghanistan, except in most of Western Europe. Travel was impractical without big escorts and bribes for local warlords.

And then, when the Dark Ages ended:

o Later, only nobles and knights had rights. Nobles could do ANYTHING they whatever they wanted to EVERYBODY else - killing, torture, robbery, rape. The bad ones did so very regularly indeed, sometimes as often as a far-gone alcoholic drinks. The better ones just did so just when they had excuses like accusations of crimes or when annoyed.

o The educated and scholarly had a way of being irritating to the powerful, or being seen as resources to monopolize, and had a way of suffering particularly often.

o The educated had to spend 1/4ish of their thinking brownnosing to keep the above fates from befalling them. Also, they to brownnose to maximize patronage chances.

o The Inquisition wasn't needed for it to be dangerous to be seen as a heretic; the Christian theocratic states would get you even without it. Late Roman Imperial heresy law (Justinianic Code), widely copied in Western Europe: "We order all those who follow this law to assume the name of Catholic Christians, and considering others as demented and insane, We order that they shall bear the infamy of heresy; and when the Divine vengeance which they merit has been appeased, they shall afterwards be punished in accordance with Our resentment, which we have acquired from the judgment of Heaven."

Oh, dear...

No, I really don't have the time to write all of that. But you need to look at a few points. Firstly, the question of medival law codes, commnunal enforcement, and the difference between a violent society and a lawless one. Or the problems the church had extending its quest to eradicate heresy to the broader populace. Or the way traditional societies manage travel and dealing with strangers. Pirenne (PBUH) was smart, but he was also wrong.
 
First: Middle Ages were bad under many respects, but actually not SO bad.
It was not like a sadist random nobleman could kill, rape and torture whoever he wanted to just for fun.
Some did, and contemporaries were horrified by that.
Scholars had tho be careful in not challenging religous core beliefs directly. Things were a little bit lighter in Muslim lands before the Mongols came at least, but there were limits there too.
Apart that, scholars tended to be respected. They were rare and their education was a cost, and an investment, to some extent.
The most creative period in the Muslim core lands was not immediately following the conquests. It was simultaneous to broader Islamization of the masses. The apex was between 10th and 12th centuries AD, even if many breakthroughs had been done earlier (algebra for example). The, you have the Mongols. They put a lot of destruction over the Asian part of the Dar al-Islam, while still patroning science and literature. Their impact, however, strongly contributed to relative loss of creativity, for the simple reason that they hampered urban life there. OTOH, the mediterranean lands who escaped the Mongol invasion were under increasing Western pressure, and al-Andalus, the most developed area with Egypt, was under the worst pressure of all. This helps explaining what "went wrong" (Lewis) with Muslim lands after the Middle Ages. And yes, religion was increasingly calcified in some ways. Still the Ottoman empire was religiously more tolerant than most European states during the Renaissance. Europe had Inquisition, Islam hadn't. It was somewhat burdened by a very strong tradition, and the economic power had shifted towards Europe since the 15th century or so.
 

One, I don't see how your response to Devolved belongs outside of Chat. Actually, it really doesn't belong outside of Chat.

Two, although Europe isn't my strong-point, I don't need a primer on the Dark and Medieval ages. Nor do I need a lesson about Islam, especially not about Islam.

I'd argue this in more depth, but unfortunately I don't have the time to have a response up in the next day or two. Maybe I'll compose one over the next few days.
 
Last edited:
recreating Europe 1500-1900 in the classical world

Romans were not innovative- they did one thing and stuck to it, which was why the empire ultimately fell apart.

While I agree that Rome is a culprit in stemming classical inventiveness. But Carthage is hardly the solution.

A good thing to do, will be to have Classical Europe resemble Europe of the 15th - 19th century politically -- Have mutiple states with enough cultural similarity to have intellectual exchanges but at constant competition to best each other in warfare and "culture". The Hellenistic states would be a good model, seeing that they conversed with each other, but competed all the same. Maybe all of the Med could be turned into a bunch of Hellenistic states, with a religion invented by Alexander to serve as a Christianity Analogue?

Another thing to do will be to have these altenate classicals think abstractly and systematically at the same time-- Algebra and Calculus made it possible to express complex relations elegantly, and provided structure to what had hitherto been endless philosophical meandarings wrapped around a small kernel of observation. So we will have to give them better mathematics.

Thirdly, innovation really took off after the Age of Discovery when Europeans sailed around the world and saw the ways and cultures of others. If we can wank sailing vessels and seamanship in the Classical World, then a lot of other things can be wanked as well.
 
A good thing to do, will be to have Classical Europe resemble Europe of the 15th - 19th century politically -- Have mutiple states with enough cultural similarity to have intellectual exchanges but at constant competition to best each other in warfare and "culture". The Hellenistic states would be a good model, seeing that they conversed with each other, but competed all the same. Maybe all of the Med could be turned into a bunch of Hellenistic states, with a religion invented by Alexander to serve as a Christianity Analogue?

Alexanderism?

There was an essay by Arnold Toynbee speculating what would have happened if someone had thought to combine the aeolopile with the principles of the Diolkos (essentially the first railroad, built ~600 BC). He imagined a Greek empire based on a fast railway, Athenian democracy and Buddhist-like philosophy/religion based on the teachings of Pythagoreas.

Likely? No, but perhaps a good inspiration for such a timeline. And Pythagoreas is as good a founder for a religion as any other Greek. Certainly it's somewhat more novel than Socrates or Plato.

Toynbee also made passing reference in the essay to a failed prophet that lived at 4, Ralyways Cuttings, Nazareth.
 
Some technologies that could probably have come earlier -

Steam power: No, you're probably not going to get high-pressure steam engines driving railroads in ancient Rome, but if low-pressure steam machines had been used more extensively, even as novelties in temples and palaces, they might have become a well-established if highly specialised technology by the middle ages (kind of like organs or water-clocks), and might have been revived in the 11th or 12th century. They would have been used in the larger churches, monasteries, and palaces, driving clocks, ringing bells, moving statues and other objects around. Metalworking might have advanced a little faster and allowed higher pressures to gradually become common. Eventually, someone would be likely to come up with the idea of putting them to a more practical use, like pumping water out of flooded mines. This might have happened in the fifteenth or sixteenth century instead of the eighteenth.

Computers: I've read that scientists in the late 19th century came close to discovering the properties of semiconductors that make transistors possible, but missed the significance. If they had, transistors might have been invented by WWI, and electronics probably would have skipped the vacuum tube phase entirely, with all-transistor computers built by the 1930s or even the 1920s.

The telegraph: There were prototypes as early as around 1820 - if one of them had been developed into something more practical, with a code like OTL Morse Code, communications technology could have advanced by a generation.
 
Some technologies that could probably have come earlier -

Steam power: No, you're probably not going to get high-pressure steam engines driving railroads in ancient Rome, but if low-pressure steam machines had been used more extensively, even as novelties in temples and palaces, they might have become a well-established if highly specialised technology by the middle ages (kind of like organs or water-clocks), and might have been revived in the 11th or 12th century. They would have been used in the larger churches, monasteries, and palaces, driving clocks, ringing bells, moving statues and other objects around. Metalworking might have advanced a little faster and allowed higher pressures to gradually become common. Eventually, someone would be likely to come up with the idea of putting them to a more practical use, like pumping water out of flooded mines. This might have happened in the fifteenth or sixteenth century instead of the eighteenth.

Computers: I've read that scientists in the late 19th century came close to discovering the properties of semiconductors that make transistors possible, but missed the significance. If they had, transistors might have been invented by WWI, and electronics probably would have skipped the vacuum tube phase entirely, with all-transistor computers built by the 1930s or even the 1920s.

The telegraph: There were prototypes as early as around 1820 - if one of them had been developed into something more practical, with a code like OTL Morse Code, communications technology could have advanced by a generation.

Agreed.
Also, some inventions might diffuse earlier with a variety of PoD. Paradoxically, i think an earlier fall (better, a permanent splintering) of the Roman Empire (like in the 3rd century) could work well.
 
Devolved, your objections, I feel, have little to Islamic reality. Remember, the news media are there to sell worry, not reality, so you'll keep watching, and keep worrying, and they can sell more ads. They're little righter than those beer ads that imply beautiful women will be interested in you if you drink Bud. And, most modern American conservative media are telling out and out big lies to keep people voting GOP in addition to that game. I recommend the British conservative economist.com instead and keeping in mind that real people aren't media stereotypes but individuals with individual behavior.
."

What are you babbling on about?

Patronizing and insulting. I am sorry that you have nothing better to say than Budweiser ads and American conservative media. You are just saying the first prejudiced things that came into your head.
 
What are you babbling on about?

Patronizing and insulting. I am sorry that you have nothing better to say than Budweiser ads and American conservative media. You are just saying the first prejudiced things that came into your head.

He's not entirely wrong (Though it does look like babbling), but that statement just simply seems OT.
 
Sorry this reply took so long - I've had miserable luck this past week.

Falecius wrote:
It was not like a sadist random nobleman could kill, rape and torture whoever he wanted to just for fun. Some did, and contemporaries were horrified by that.
Thanks for conceding my point. Yes, their contemporaries were horrified - but that didn't stop the evil ones. Check out Richard I's brothers, especially John I.


Elidor wrote:
A good thing to do, will be to have Classical Europe resemble Europe of the 15th - 19th century politically
The Med was exactly like that before Rome.

And, I think a democratic imperial Greece would extinguish less of its competition, because the Roman Republic was a strictly military specialist and more into conquering than most Greek democracies.


Devolved, your comments in this thread have, I felt, generally had little to do with Muslim reality and struck me as the exactly the kind of prejudice you accuse me of. I brought up the media as a charitable explanation for that prejudice, because the media are full of easy stereotyping that's easy for its consumers to pick up. I guess I should've mentioned that when talking about the media, before.

And, please - I didn't just insult conservative media - please get it straight ;-). I also insulted leftie media as well, albeit less thoroughly. And, I did say good things about the conservative Economist.


TyranicusMaximus, I'm sorry for being patronizing; AH is a rapidly expanding place, and often the need to continually educate new members gets to us older members and makes many of us cranky.
 
Top