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How far would the world be today in terms of technological progress, if at some point the Romans and Chinese had undergone an extensive Industrial Revolution that revolutionized their society just as extensively as the Industrial Revolution revolutionized our world in otl?
Forget about culture, I've heard it all before that neither cultures were likely to accept industrial progress, negating that,
What if for some reason the Romans had found practical military usage for Hero's steam engine and they adopted it to first power their ships and other practical uses gradually developed from there like a railway network connecting their frontier forts for faster legionary travel? For that to happen they would need steel. And this is where China comes in. China also came very close to undergoing an extensive Industrial Revolution. China, where steel was first made in the Wu State preceded the Europeans by over 1,000 years in steel production, and the Song saw intensive industry in steel production, and coal mining. And during the Han period the government established ironworking as a state monopoly and built a series of large blast furnaces, each capable of producing several tons of iron per day. What if the Industrial Revolution that took place in 18th c England and the 19th century US had taken place instead in China and Rome and the two eventually exchange technologies, allowing Romans to import Chinese steel to build their railways? Contact between the two would have been inevitable if the Industrial Revolution had occured. So if this had happened, how far would the world be today in terms of technological and scientific progress?
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