General notes, before I actually propose a solution:
A lot of proposals so far involve things like “use my education and predictive talents to achieve a high position in society”. Given how quickly smart people with amazing predictive talents walk into the White House today, combined with the political talents of LWers, I doubt that has any hope of working.
A lot of proposals involve introducing technologies like mills, cannon, etc which would be massive capital outlays by the standards of the time. You’d need to already have an empire’s worth of resources on hand, and early-modern tech probably still wouldn’t be enough to make the economy more efficient right away.
In terms of real economic value, probably the largest chunk of potential is corn and potatoes—both are New World plants, corn has caloric yield an order of magnitude higher than wheat (in terms of both land and labor requirements), and potatoes don’t get burned when an army comes by. If I could manage a round trip to the New World, bringing back those crops would be huge—although that still leaves the question of how to capture the value. Conversely, it would be hard for any ancient economy to accumulate capital—and thus begin the trek to automation—without higher-yield crops. Unfortunately, a New World round-trip would itself take a massive capital outlay.
Thinking about low-capital-investment tech which could be implemented without advanced manufacturing...
18th-century design of chimneys and stoves (before which they were impractical for heating)
demonstration-scale telegraph (two magnets and some copper wire would suffice for material)
maybe very rudimentary radio (magnets, copper wire and copper foil suffice in principle)
aniline dyes—relatively easy once you know to look for them, and would be worth a fortune in ancient Rome
incremental metallurgical improvements
… I’m sure there’s more to think of here, but that should be enough for a viable solution.
Proposal
Tech is the big edge, obviously. Moderns don’t have a major edge in politics or war (absent the tech needed for modern military doctrine). Economically, most tech involves large capital outlays, and value capture is difficult when you’re not already emperor. Given all that, general shape of solution I want is:
1. accumulate some initial resources using a low-barrier technological advantage
2. bring together a relatively small group of people (company-sized), in a remote location, for rapid vertical development of higher tech—not necessarily all the way to modernity, but enough to decisively swing the balance in a war
3. Go shopping for allies who don’t like the Romans
Most of the effort is in step 2 - our relative advantage is tech, so our strategy puts most of the work in tech.
Let’s flesh all that out.
Aniline dyes are the hot item for step 1 - they don’t require advanced manufacturing or materials, capital investment required is relatively low, and given that ancient Rome was already hemorrhaging gold to buy Chinese silk, they’d definitely sell like hotcakes. Care must be taken to make sure we paid for the dyes rather than arrested or enslaved somehow, but that’s probably tractable.
Round trip to the Americas is the next big step—we can’t support people off the trade grid without high-yield crops, and fertilizer alone won’t get us there. Outfitting a long-range ship should be viable for a dye-lord, and modern knowledge of sailing and the trade winds should help out. Ancient seafarers did not like leaving sight of land, but that’s the kind of problem which can be solved by throwing money at it—and we’d want to train them in modern sailing anyway. Pack to trade in both directions, the voyage should be quite profitable, and we come back with all-important corn and potatoes.
At this point, it’s viable to hire a couple hundred people with varying specialties and move to a remote patch of land somewhere on the edge of the empire where nobody will pay much attention, with running water and wood. Coastal would be useful, but not if it increases visibility too much. Get the corn and potatoes growing, and it should be viable to support the whole crowd with a fairly small agricultural base.
Now we have the base to make some capital investments while safely capturing their value, without fear of seizure. Let’s say we have half of our two hundred people farming (comparable ratio to early modern England); most of the remaining hundred are artisans—smiths, carpenters, etc. They’ll build most of our capital assets. We’ll import most raw materials, like wool and metal ore, plus some processed material like sailcloth (until we can produce it ourselves), necessaries like salt, and whatever luxuries our team can enjoy without attracting undue attention.
Early capital assets are mainly ships and water mills—the former for trade, the latter for automation. Note that overland trade is not a high value prop—ships in any era have capacity multiple orders of magnitude higher than wagons/trucks, and premodern roads were pretty bad anyhow. The ships will sail the trade routes, and should provide ample profit for anything we need to buy. (We won’t be able to keep our navigation secrets under wraps forever, but they should last long enough—ancient sailors’ fear of the open sea works in our favor here.)
With plenty of wood and artisans, the mills can provide power for whatever light industry we want, but that industry itself will probably not be profitable—labor is very cheap relative to capital in the premodern world. The point of the mills is to power anything we want to keep away from prying eyes, in our remote corner of the world. Metallurgy will be the first and biggest priority—we can import ore, but the secrets of steel need to stay local.
The precision manufacturing feedback loop: build more precise tools, and those let us build even more precise tools. High-quality materials are a limiting factor for that loop, thus the importance of metallurgy.
Building a dynamo shouldn’t be too hard, once we’ve imported magnets. We’ll want to produce crap-tons of copper wire for anything electric—that shouldn’t present any difficulties. Electricity would mainly be useful for chemical processes, e.g. splitting water—communication wouldn’t matter much in our tiny remote town, and we don’t want any secrets getting out. We’d need a dam to get useful power production, but dam-building isn’t too hard.
Hand-cranked radios are still a maybe, but they’d be pretty cool and a huge military advantage.
Haber-Bosch process is the next big jump: with a source of ammonia, both chemical fertilizer and explosives become viable. (We could go the old-fashioned route for explosives, but Rule of Cool.) Against the famed legion phalanxes, we’re looking at tight-packed targets—ideal for things that go boom.
At this point, we’d probably have the pieces to move on Rome. A decent-size trade fleet provides both support infrastructure and mobility for any troops we ally with, and a trade business provides connections throughout the empire and surrounding areas. Explosives would, honestly, be as much about marketing ourselves to potential allies as about actually winning fights, but they’d be awesome marketing. Encryption and (maybe) primitive radios would be a less flashy but more practical military advantage, if it actually came to a fight. All that’s left is to find someone with a reasonably-sized military who’s more interested in beating the Romans than in taking their stuff, and strike a deal.
General notes, before I actually propose a solution:
A lot of proposals so far involve things like “use my education and predictive talents to achieve a high position in society”. Given how quickly smart people with amazing predictive talents walk into the White House today, combined with the political talents of LWers, I doubt that has any hope of working.
A lot of proposals involve introducing technologies like mills, cannon, etc which would be massive capital outlays by the standards of the time. You’d need to already have an empire’s worth of resources on hand, and early-modern tech probably still wouldn’t be enough to make the economy more efficient right away.
In terms of real economic value, probably the largest chunk of potential is corn and potatoes—both are New World plants, corn has caloric yield an order of magnitude higher than wheat (in terms of both land and labor requirements), and potatoes don’t get burned when an army comes by. If I could manage a round trip to the New World, bringing back those crops would be huge—although that still leaves the question of how to capture the value. Conversely, it would be hard for any ancient economy to accumulate capital—and thus begin the trek to automation—without higher-yield crops. Unfortunately, a New World round-trip would itself take a massive capital outlay.
Thinking about low-capital-investment tech which could be implemented without advanced manufacturing...
RSA encryption & signing
logarithms & the slide rule
sextant & compass & associated navigation techniques
18th-century design of chimneys and stoves (before which they were impractical for heating)
demonstration-scale telegraph (two magnets and some copper wire would suffice for material)
maybe very rudimentary radio (magnets, copper wire and copper foil suffice in principle)
aniline dyes—relatively easy once you know to look for them, and would be worth a fortune in ancient Rome
incremental metallurgical improvements
… I’m sure there’s more to think of here, but that should be enough for a viable solution.
Proposal
Tech is the big edge, obviously. Moderns don’t have a major edge in politics or war (absent the tech needed for modern military doctrine). Economically, most tech involves large capital outlays, and value capture is difficult when you’re not already emperor. Given all that, general shape of solution I want is:
1. accumulate some initial resources using a low-barrier technological advantage
2. bring together a relatively small group of people (company-sized), in a remote location, for rapid vertical development of higher tech—not necessarily all the way to modernity, but enough to decisively swing the balance in a war
3. Go shopping for allies who don’t like the Romans
Most of the effort is in step 2 - our relative advantage is tech, so our strategy puts most of the work in tech.
Let’s flesh all that out.
Aniline dyes are the hot item for step 1 - they don’t require advanced manufacturing or materials, capital investment required is relatively low, and given that ancient Rome was already hemorrhaging gold to buy Chinese silk, they’d definitely sell like hotcakes. Care must be taken to make sure we paid for the dyes rather than arrested or enslaved somehow, but that’s probably tractable.
Round trip to the Americas is the next big step—we can’t support people off the trade grid without high-yield crops, and fertilizer alone won’t get us there. Outfitting a long-range ship should be viable for a dye-lord, and modern knowledge of sailing and the trade winds should help out. Ancient seafarers did not like leaving sight of land, but that’s the kind of problem which can be solved by throwing money at it—and we’d want to train them in modern sailing anyway. Pack to trade in both directions, the voyage should be quite profitable, and we come back with all-important corn and potatoes.
At this point, it’s viable to hire a couple hundred people with varying specialties and move to a remote patch of land somewhere on the edge of the empire where nobody will pay much attention, with running water and wood. Coastal would be useful, but not if it increases visibility too much. Get the corn and potatoes growing, and it should be viable to support the whole crowd with a fairly small agricultural base.
Now we have the base to make some capital investments while safely capturing their value, without fear of seizure. Let’s say we have half of our two hundred people farming (comparable ratio to early modern England); most of the remaining hundred are artisans—smiths, carpenters, etc. They’ll build most of our capital assets. We’ll import most raw materials, like wool and metal ore, plus some processed material like sailcloth (until we can produce it ourselves), necessaries like salt, and whatever luxuries our team can enjoy without attracting undue attention.
Early capital assets are mainly ships and water mills—the former for trade, the latter for automation. Note that overland trade is not a high value prop—ships in any era have capacity multiple orders of magnitude higher than wagons/trucks, and premodern roads were pretty bad anyhow. The ships will sail the trade routes, and should provide ample profit for anything we need to buy. (We won’t be able to keep our navigation secrets under wraps forever, but they should last long enough—ancient sailors’ fear of the open sea works in our favor here.)
With plenty of wood and artisans, the mills can provide power for whatever light industry we want, but that industry itself will probably not be profitable—labor is very cheap relative to capital in the premodern world. The point of the mills is to power anything we want to keep away from prying eyes, in our remote corner of the world. Metallurgy will be the first and biggest priority—we can import ore, but the secrets of steel need to stay local.
The precision manufacturing feedback loop: build more precise tools, and those let us build even more precise tools. High-quality materials are a limiting factor for that loop, thus the importance of metallurgy.
Building a dynamo shouldn’t be too hard, once we’ve imported magnets. We’ll want to produce crap-tons of copper wire for anything electric—that shouldn’t present any difficulties. Electricity would mainly be useful for chemical processes, e.g. splitting water—communication wouldn’t matter much in our tiny remote town, and we don’t want any secrets getting out. We’d need a dam to get useful power production, but dam-building isn’t too hard.
Hand-cranked radios are still a maybe, but they’d be pretty cool and a huge military advantage.
Haber-Bosch process is the next big jump: with a source of ammonia, both chemical fertilizer and explosives become viable. (We could go the old-fashioned route for explosives, but Rule of Cool.) Against the famed legion phalanxes, we’re looking at tight-packed targets—ideal for things that go boom.
At this point, we’d probably have the pieces to move on Rome. A decent-size trade fleet provides both support infrastructure and mobility for any troops we ally with, and a trade business provides connections throughout the empire and surrounding areas. Explosives would, honestly, be as much about marketing ourselves to potential allies as about actually winning fights, but they’d be awesome marketing. Encryption and (maybe) primitive radios would be a less flashy but more practical military advantage, if it actually came to a fight. All that’s left is to find someone with a reasonably-sized military who’s more interested in beating the Romans than in taking their stuff, and strike a deal.