Technological progress was not inevitable and did not follow any preordained schedule. Poul Anderson shows us four historical moments when progress halted and thus also shows us four potential alternative history narratives.
(i) "The Egyptians sailed to Punt, and could easily have gone further; with a little development, their ships could have reached the Indies."
(ii) "The Alexandrians built an aeolipile..." but the abundance of slaves prevented them from going on to make a steam turbine. Thus, slavery was not only oppressive but also anti-progressive.
(iii) The Romans printed maps but not books! Why not, for the love of Jupiter?
(iv) "The Arabs developed algebra and then got more interested in theological hairsplitting."
In Europe, theology was one element in The Birth Of Science. See also Historical Accidents, And Another Relevant Philosopher and Different Histories.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
We do see mention of how, during the reign of Necho II of Egypt (second pharaoh of the XXVI Dynasty), the Egyptians circumnavigated Africa. An incident mentioned in THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS. But, yes, they could and should have done more.
Yes, experiments with steam in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic was also another frustrating might have been. Problem was, slavery made labor so cheap there simply wasn't much INCENTIVE for developing the possibilities of steam power. That had to wait till the late 18th century.
I had not known the Romans PRINTED map! Given that, they could and should have printed books. As it was, we had to wait till Gutenberg invented mechanical printing around AD 1450.
Some have wondered why Islam became so intellectually stagnant around AD 1000. I would trace that to the Asharite/Mutazilite controversy. One school of Muslim scholars was open to Western Classical and Judaeo/Christian ideas--while another was hostile to such contacts and opposed it. And it was the latter which won out and became dominant within Islam.
As we see in "Delenda Est" and IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS?, Poul Anderson believed the Christian belief in a lawful God, invention of mechanical clocks, and the stress on logic and reason, were among the factors leading to a true science. There were others as well, of course.
Sean
There's a good deal of misunderstanding about Hero's aerophile. It wasn't a prototype steam engine, it was a steam -turbine-, using escaping steam to directly produce rotary action.
It couldn't possibly have been developed into an engine doing useful work because the metallurgy available was grossly inadequate; the necessary steels, bearings and machining tolerances weren't available until the 1880's.
In the 18th century, Newcomen and Watt built actual steam engines, using steam under pressure in a piston, but that pushed the metalworking technology of the time to its very limits.
This also required theoretical developments, notably in the concepts of atmospheric weight/pressure and the power of vacuum.
There's also a lot of misunderstanding of the economic impact of slave labor.
Slave labor (whether in Roman times or the American South) wasn't particularly cheap. In both instances, the price of a prime slave in his best working years was consistently equivalent to 4 years of the basic wage of a free man (call it the equivalent of $100,000-$250,000) and the maintenance cost of a slave was about 2/3 of a free man's wages for unskilled basic labor.
Roman slavery had the advantage that it often didn't have to support the "raising costs" of a human being from infancy, since Roman slaves were often imported or captured in war, but even so they were fairly pricey. American slavery didn't have that advantage, since slaves were mostly locally born from the 1740's on.
(American slavery was unusual in that the slave population had a natural surplus of births over deaths.)
The main advantage of slave labor wasn't its cost, but its controllability and flexibility.
In antiquity, free men wouldn't consistently work under supervision for an employer, usually not even at managerial tasks, though they would so so on a part-time or casual basis, because it was beneath a free man's dignity.
Slaves could be directed to work in large numbers at novel tasks and physically moved around and closely supervised in a way that was difficult to accomplish any other way.
Eg., in the American south, free men simply could not be hired for gang labor on plantations at any wage which left the planter any profit. Free labor was often used for "burst" labor, like digging drainage ditches in Louisiana. One planter there tried hiring the ditch-diggers (mostly Irish and German immigrants) to harvest sugar-cane, and it worked fine... until they went on strike right in the middle of the cane-cutting season, when the crop would spoil in the fields if not harvested right away. He paid what they demanded and never tried the experiment again.
After the Civil War, when gang labor gave way to the sharecropping system, agricultural productivity dropped by 40%, and more when the decline in the labor participation rate was factored in -- before the war women had done much the same field labor as men, whereas afterwards they withdrew and spent a lot more time on domestic tasks.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Thank you for correcting my understandings about both steam powered devices in Classical times and the practicalities of slavery. Yes, understood, the technology wasn't yet available to make steam power do useful work. Also, I had thought slavery made employing free men too costly.
It seems I need to reread L. Sprague De Camp's THE ANCIENT ENGINEERS!
Sean
Hi folks,
I summarize one interesting paragraph of a Poul Anderson sf novel and it generates this much discussion and historical information!
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Absolute agreement! I mentioned De Camp's book because he gives us a lot of fascinating information about the technologies actually available to people who lived many centuries ago. No need for silly theories about ancient aliens being the ones who built the Pyramids!
And of course science fiction fans should know that L. Sprague De Camp was a major fantasy and science fiction author in his own right.
Sean
Classical Greek authors assumed slave labor built the Pyramids because they couldn't imagine mobilizing a large labor force any other way.
In fact, ancient Egypt had a "corvee" system, a form of seasonal labor tax on the peasantry. The flood cycle in Egyptian agriculture under the basin-irrigation system used then exaggerates the usual seasonal unemployment of peasant agriculture, so that for many months (during the flood) there's a huge amount of underemployment.
Enormous numbers of peasants could be mobilized for state projects that way without withdrawing labor at the critical points of the farming year -- the system persisted right down to the 1860's when corvee labor was used on the Suez Canal. And the organization was relatively easy because similar labor-levies were made to maintain the dykes and basins of the irrigation system.
The skilled workers who did the delicate parts of building palaces and tombs and so forth in ancient Egypt were, we know from written records, free men and usually rather well treated.
The Egyptians did have slavery, but it wasn't as big a part of their economy as it was for the Greeks, or even the other Middle Eastern peoples.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
More fascinating comments from you! And I had known of the corvee labor tax system used in Egypt. Underemployed peasants could work for the Pharaoh in the flood season, with their labor being the tax paid to the king.
Sean
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