Interesting stuff: but I’m going to throw in a few disappointments on technological triumphs, and propose a peaceful takeover by affordable glazed pottery.
Firstly, the printing press: movable type is a great idea but you also need paper. And you’ll need the ‘killer app’ - or rather, the book with a massive pre-existing demand. In 1 AD, that’s not the Bible! If you got the authorities interested in the promulgation of official edicts and shool texts, you might be able to scale up the business to kickstart a commercial printing economy—but scaling-up is not the same as starting up, and you’d need a lot of capital just to demonstrate the technology to skeptical officials.
Without official patronage, getting the paper-and-printing economy started will need more capital than you’ve been given: you’d need a runaway success in some other small startup business or the patronage of someone with a medium-to-large country estate.
Maybe the ‘mysterious healing’ of some aristocrat’s favourite slave and a religious conversion isn’t such a bad starting point, after all. It’s no less plausible as a way of gaining access to resources to start building a technological power-base.
A guns-and-steel route to power is even harder: handmade guns that offer a significant advantage over a disciplined formation of legionaries supported by archers will be prohibitively expensive in the quantities required to equip a company of musketeers. And that’s a dead end: there’s only so much money available to you, and a huge entrenched power-base of landowners and spear-wielding legions.
Better, cheaper guns will need very good steel and that, in turn, will need investment in lime kilns, the first successful blast furnace, good-quality coal, coking ovens, and trained workers.
And once you’ve got the steel, you need to mark out the standard millimetre and weigh out the standard kilogram, and start building the first precision-casting production line; presses, milling machines, lathes, screw-cutting, bench drills…
It took a seventy-five years to move from good blacksmiths and the reverberating furnace (an adapted lime kiln) to a machine shop that could build precision tools, valve-gear for steam-engines, rifle barrels, or machine tools to equip a factory for the volume production of firearms.
Given the knowledge, you could cut that period of not-quite-from-boots ‘bootstrapping’ to twenty years; but it might take twice that long to bootstrap demand alongside the supply and create a functioning market for the products—and interim products at that! - and that market would be necessary (and, necessarily, damn’ lucrative) in order to support the vast investment for a technological expansion that utilises all these shiny (but unfamiliar and unreliable) new tools profitably in order to support continued growth.
No aristocrat will keep pouring money into that forever: you have to achieve profitability and an upward trajectory of organic growth before you exhaust the limited resources of your patron’s latifundi.
One thing that is in your favour is that the Romans in 1AD are ready for mass production: urbanised, with good regional and local trade, and already centralising some of their economy into large production facilities (for grain and—with less evidence -for arrows).
So your new world ruler might not need to be Abraham Darby, Joseph Whitworth and Samual Colt, all rolled into one near-superhuman genius of invention, development, process management, and leadership: he or she might become the wealthiest of all Romans with the more prosaic skills of Josiah Wedgewood.
However, I would note that Wedgewood kickstarted the industrial production of consumer durables with a substantial injection of capital from a distant relative. Nevertheless, industrialising artisanal pottery is an easier route to the economic power of a factory economy than emulating Richard Arkwright—he had a lot more to do, to scale up and power-up the existing barn-size ‘manufactuaries’ of spinners and weavers into the modern cotton mill.
I note that printers did not become amazingly wealthy in Europe: they changed the intellectual ‘economy’ but they did not start an industrial revolution.
However you do it—printing, pottery, or cloth—you’ll need to expand to the scale of a factory-driven county or city-state economy as a prerequisite to equipping militarily meaningful formations with firearms.
But here’s the joker: with the wealth to to so equip an invincible legion, you’d be the emperor anyway. That kind of money—Josiah Wedgewood’s fortune turbocharged by first-mover advantage and rational training—would buy the patrician families, the senate, the generals and (probably) the incorruptible tribunes.
Which would, in turn, put you in a position to enact the reforms that will—you hope—prevent the later collapse of Rome; establish rational schools, technological colleges, and scientific universities; impose Rationalism as the State Religion (!) and send forth the legions, with firearms, on steam railways to conquer all of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Interesting stuff: but I’m going to throw in a few disappointments on technological triumphs, and propose a peaceful takeover by affordable glazed pottery.
Firstly, the printing press: movable type is a great idea but you also need paper. And you’ll need the ‘killer app’ - or rather, the book with a massive pre-existing demand. In 1 AD, that’s not the Bible! If you got the authorities interested in the promulgation of official edicts and shool texts, you might be able to scale up the business to kickstart a commercial printing economy—but scaling-up is not the same as starting up, and you’d need a lot of capital just to demonstrate the technology to skeptical officials.
Without official patronage, getting the paper-and-printing economy started will need more capital than you’ve been given: you’d need a runaway success in some other small startup business or the patronage of someone with a medium-to-large country estate.
Maybe the ‘mysterious healing’ of some aristocrat’s favourite slave and a religious conversion isn’t such a bad starting point, after all. It’s no less plausible as a way of gaining access to resources to start building a technological power-base.
A guns-and-steel route to power is even harder: handmade guns that offer a significant advantage over a disciplined formation of legionaries supported by archers will be prohibitively expensive in the quantities required to equip a company of musketeers. And that’s a dead end: there’s only so much money available to you, and a huge entrenched power-base of landowners and spear-wielding legions.
Better, cheaper guns will need very good steel and that, in turn, will need investment in lime kilns, the first successful blast furnace, good-quality coal, coking ovens, and trained workers.
And once you’ve got the steel, you need to mark out the standard millimetre and weigh out the standard kilogram, and start building the first precision-casting production line; presses, milling machines, lathes, screw-cutting, bench drills…
It took a seventy-five years to move from good blacksmiths and the reverberating furnace (an adapted lime kiln) to a machine shop that could build precision tools, valve-gear for steam-engines, rifle barrels, or machine tools to equip a factory for the volume production of firearms.
Given the knowledge, you could cut that period of not-quite-from-boots ‘bootstrapping’ to twenty years; but it might take twice that long to bootstrap demand alongside the supply and create a functioning market for the products—and interim products at that! - and that market would be necessary (and, necessarily, damn’ lucrative) in order to support the vast investment for a technological expansion that utilises all these shiny (but unfamiliar and unreliable) new tools profitably in order to support continued growth.
No aristocrat will keep pouring money into that forever: you have to achieve profitability and an upward trajectory of organic growth before you exhaust the limited resources of your patron’s latifundi.
One thing that is in your favour is that the Romans in 1AD are ready for mass production: urbanised, with good regional and local trade, and already centralising some of their economy into large production facilities (for grain and—with less evidence -for arrows).
So your new world ruler might not need to be Abraham Darby, Joseph Whitworth and Samual Colt, all rolled into one near-superhuman genius of invention, development, process management, and leadership: he or she might become the wealthiest of all Romans with the more prosaic skills of Josiah Wedgewood.
However, I would note that Wedgewood kickstarted the industrial production of consumer durables with a substantial injection of capital from a distant relative. Nevertheless, industrialising artisanal pottery is an easier route to the economic power of a factory economy than emulating Richard Arkwright—he had a lot more to do, to scale up and power-up the existing barn-size ‘manufactuaries’ of spinners and weavers into the modern cotton mill.
I note that printers did not become amazingly wealthy in Europe: they changed the intellectual ‘economy’ but they did not start an industrial revolution.
However you do it—printing, pottery, or cloth—you’ll need to expand to the scale of a factory-driven county or city-state economy as a prerequisite to equipping militarily meaningful formations with firearms.
But here’s the joker: with the wealth to to so equip an invincible legion, you’d be the emperor anyway. That kind of money—Josiah Wedgewood’s fortune turbocharged by first-mover advantage and rational training—would buy the patrician families, the senate, the generals and (probably) the incorruptible tribunes.
Which would, in turn, put you in a position to enact the reforms that will—you hope—prevent the later collapse of Rome; establish rational schools, technological colleges, and scientific universities; impose Rationalism as the State Religion (!) and send forth the legions, with firearms, on steam railways to conquer all of Europe, Asia, and Africa.