A question's arisen in my mind from working on TLs with substantial-sized free governments lasting continously from democracy's invention. That question is, in such a TL, how much earlier would recent and today's inventions of nuclear weapons, computers and computer networking have arisen? After all, free governments like democracy have faster research than the mostly less free governments that governed between then and now.
We can see in today's world that the free democracies mostly have the edge, tech-wise. Authoritarian oligarchies like China, Vietnam, and Singapore are in the middle, and the unconstitutional monarchies and dictatorships are the very worst and slowest. It was the same in classical days, of course, since we had about the same kind of human.
The Roman Republic, though it was inegalitarian and only somewhat democratic, was free enough to get that same edge, and it allowed alot of freedom to Greece as well to keep on wih the nonmilitary thinking. But, the Empire after Octavian Caesar was a very different thing - its constitution was purely for PR value after that, and it was, of course, as bad as the nonconstitutional monarchy it was. Hero of Alexandria had no successors to do anything with his inventions of steam power and binary state tapes, of course. The Empire did keep the miltech advantage it'd gotten from the Republic for a couple of centuries, but, freedom and innovation were in decline.
Here's much,
much, much,
much, much,
more (scroll down from each link to follow arguments), on Roman Imperial problems after Octavian Caesar hacked the Roman Republican constitution.
So, any thoughts?