industialized nomads

It may be too obvious an answer, but why can't they trade for raw metals with settled people?

Also, metalworking isn't necessary for "industry", you could have industrialized manufacturing that simply makes timber products.
 
It may be too obvious an answer, but why can't they trade for raw metals with settled people?

Also, metalworking isn't necessary for "industry", you could have industrialized manufacturing that simply makes timber products.

Yes, trading is definitely an option, but I was looking also to possible source of self-sustaining industrial cycles.
you're right asying metalworking is not the only industrial branch, but I do not see all these trees in the steppe to make a timber industries.
I was thinking to chemical, glasswork and textile
 
dried cattle dung.
I was forgetting it.
it burn easily somewhere is nicknamed "steppe coal" (or it was camel dung being nicknamed "desert coal"?).

dried cow dung patties were (are?) often used in India as a heating and cooking fuel source. Dung patties have a major drawback: burning dung smokes heavily. I don't see dried dung making a huge impact in an industrialized nomadic culture.

The industralized nomads of the Mideast and the Americas might have found oil. Perhaps crude refineries might have produced a kerosene-like fuel to run primitive metal forges.
 

Typo

Banned
could a nomadic culture develop industry while at the same time remaining nomadic?

let's start simple: could a forge be put on a yurt?
now let's scale it up: what about a furnace?

cultural aspect: would chain work mechanisms function in a less irregimented society such a nomadic one?

supply problem: you cannot travel loading coal and iron mines on your cart. how to work around that? (please do not answer "by settling").
yes and no

yes as in it's theoretically possible

no as in it will never even approach the scale that of a sedimentary society
 

Hendryk

Banned
Also, metalworking isn't necessary for "industry", you could have industrialized manufacturing that simply makes timber products.
Show me how to make a boiler out of wood.

In any case, the kind of nomadic cultures we're talking about live in timber-poor environments. Not many trees on the steppe, that's why it's a steppe and not a forest.
 
This made me think of the Dothraki, from the Song of Ice and Fire series (great books, by the way :D), a nomadic people who manage to keep a city, the Vaes Dothrak, using slaves and such.

Maybe a nomadic society has such a city, and incorporate it with industry, something similar to what Flocculencio was talking about?
 
I'd say no.
The biggest problem would be the amount of extra equipment that the nomads would have to carry about with them: blast furnaces, glass making furnaces, boilers and distillation columns can easily weigh several tonnes. Trying to lug that around the steepe is no easy task and would require vast numbers of pack animals. It just isn't feasible from a pratical stand point.
You could have small 'yurt industries', such as blacksmithing, but that is not industrialization any more than saying that cottages with a spinning wheel were the same as the textile factories of the industrial revolution.

I agree with others in saying that the only real hope for this idea is to have the nomads somehow overrunning a civilisation that is going through the early stages of industrialization (this will not be easy). They then set up a two tier system of government where the nomads become a ruling warrior class who are constantly on the move while the industrial cities supply them with manufactured goods in return for their safety.
 

Hendryk

Banned
I agree with others in saying that the only real hope for this idea is to have the nomads somehow overrunning a civilisation that is going through the early stages of industrialization (this will not be easy). They then set up a two tier system of government where the nomads become a ruling warrior class who are constantly on the move while the industrial cities supply them with manufactured goods in return for their safety.
And this would last, at best, a few generations. When nomads rule sedentary peoples, one of two things eventually happens: either they abandon nomadism or they get overthrown. As the famous aphorism goes, you may conquer an empire on horseback, but in order to rule it you need to go by foot.
 
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