Challenge: Mongol Scientific/Industrial Revolution

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@eliphas: I explained why it would help the Yuan. There’s no other way to get a small number of people producing a lot.

Think about it, guys: there’s not many other ways to do this. It’s rather silly for one to imagine Mongolia becoming industrial: Mongolia isn’t right for that sort of economy. It’s rather silly for, say, an industrial Mongol Russia or Persia to happen, because that’s not really Mongols being industrial.

You do realize that this would set them back right? I mean a better idea is just to have the Yuan not destroy the Infrastructure and proto-industrial developments and preside over a scientific revolution as the elite in China. On a different level too this is stupid because the Mongols wouldnt settle down and farm in this situation, they would continue their way of life only in a more prosperous region with more grazing land which provides no impetus to settle down and farm.
 
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@Immortal Impi:

The decision as to whether to exterminate China was made after China was conquered.

@eliphas: I explained why it would help the Yuan. There’s no other way to get a small number of people producing a lot.

Think about it, guys: there’s not many other ways to do this. It’s rather silly for one to imagine Mongolia becoming industrial: Mongolia isn’t right for that sort of economy. It’s rather silly for, say, an industrial Mongol Russia or Persia to happen, because that’s not really Mongols being industrial.

@WhatIsaUsername:

The Song were already beaten, so just after the war, a lot of the men were dead. Afterwards, you just have to massacre them.

Now this is stretching plausibility. By the time the Song were defeated, the Mongols were dependent on Chinese troops and administrators. The Mongols would be too beset by rebellions to carry out this plan even close to fruition. And the decision to conquer all of China was based on wanting to control the riches of China, so it makes no sense for the Mongols to reverse policy after sixty years of hard war.
 
Fewer people means that they need to innovate to be able to survive and replace what had been lost.

Low Population, not Low Population Density.

No it is low population density, in this situation they have all of the lands they ever conquered but the population of the steppe is still there. Now you have a few tens of thousands of people who inhabit an area large enough that they could effectively survive with their lifestyle forever.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Fewer people means that they need to innovate to be able to survive and replace what had been lost.
Ok, so this really makes no sense, by your logic nomadic tribes should have being the most innovative population on earth since they had by far lower population than sedementary people.
 

Winnabago

Banned
@RosseauX: Because it’s China, and it’s hugely successful to do something like that with China. To do China right, however, you need a lot of labor getting done.

@eliphas: People make babies. Agricultural people make even more babies. So the moment there’s agriculturable land available, people will start making babies all over it. Whether through immigration and slavery or through natural Mongol population growth, it would become necessary for agriculture to occur, because there’s no better way to operate in China.

@WhatIsaUsername: As some advisor put it: You can kill all the Chinese, and take two million bushels of silk all at once. Or, you can tax the Chinese, and get one million bushels of silk every year. As conquerers, and especially as hunter-gatherers/herders (who tend not to be big on the whole “invest for later gain” deal) it’s plausible they go for the former.

Fewer people means that in order to build and maintain the stuff that make China productive, you need tech due to little available labor.
 
@WhatIsaUsername: As some advisor put it: You can kill all the Chinese, and take two million bushels of silk all at once. Or, you can tax the Chinese, and get one million bushels of silk every year. As conquerers, and especially as hunter-gatherers/herders (who tend not to be big on the whole “invest for later gain” deal) it’s plausible they go for the former.

Fewer people means that in order to build and maintain the stuff that make China productive, you need tech due to little available labor.

My point is, they couldn't kill all the Chinese if they wanted to, and they had no reason to do so. And, as a matter of fact, pastoral nomads are just as big on "later gain" as anybody else. The idea that the Mongols were less intelligence of a people is downright patronizing.

You seem to have a misunderstanding of the Mongol conquest of China. It's not as if Genghis Khan decided one day he would water his horses on the Yangzi, and then proceeded to capture China. It was a campaign that lasted over seventy years, and by the time Genghis Khan's grandson had finished the task, the Mongols had already decided they would become the ruling minority over a vast Chinese empire.
 
This whole "kill all the Chinese" thing is a dead end.

What are some other possibilities?

Maybe the Mongol establishment of the Ilkhanate is still brutal, but for whatever reason Baghdad is taken intact. This provides an additional knowledge base for the Ilkhanate (and perhaps the Mongol empires as a group) that could spark industrial development.

Perhaps the Mongols, to maximize their tribute, decide to reconstruct the irrigation works they destroyed, only to find it harder work due to the deaths of so many conquered people and the amount of damage done. This leads to attempts to fix the situation--maybe with, say, steam-powered pumps?
 

RousseauX

Donor
Perhaps the Mongols, to maximize their tribute, decide to reconstruct the irrigation works they destroyed, only to find it harder work due to the deaths of so many conquered people and the amount of damage done. This leads to attempts to fix the situation--maybe with, say, steam-powered pumps?
But massive irrigation projects and such only really make sense in the context of there being a pretty high population density in the first place. And in either case you have to pre-suppose a longevity for Mongol rule (and we are talking about a century or more here) for this work because the actual industrial and scientific revolution took many decades to reach industrialized society.
 
The impression I had is that Chinese advisor who was greatly valued by the Mongols (whose name escapes me at the moment) convinced them not to wipe out the northern Chinese kingdom they'd conquered, instead telling them that cities could pay taxes that would be more valuable than additional grazing land.

I don't know his name right now, only the nickname the Mongols gave him: "Long beard". Looking him up on WP, it's Yelü Chucai.

I wonder what he'd do in TTL. Or the Chaos TL.
 
Well, one way to do it might be to somehow get the Mongol Empire to last long-term. They could then preside over an industrial revolution hundreds of years later, when conditions have become more favorable for it. Don't know how plausible that is though.
 
Ok, so this really makes no sense, by your logic nomadic tribes should have being the most innovative population on earth since they had by far lower population than sedementary people.

Nomadic Tribes already have there stuff together, they don`t have an.

Civilizations that have been decimated by Plague need advancements in technology to replace the lost people(Dramatic Decrease in Population versus Small Population).
 
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