Is the Semi-Permanent “Gunpowder Empire” Historical Scenario Plausible?

Its also interesting to think about how the Eastern Empire plays into this. Certainly it was the richer half.

Tainter talks a lot about the Eastern Roman Empire and why it survived. He talks about how they were able to radically simplify their civilization to save it.

For example: they got rid of the entire centralized military bureaucracy and replaced it with the Theme system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(Byzantine_district)#Org... ) which was basically a sort of farmer's military club franchise where farmers where also in the military and bought their own weapons and also conducted civil affairs. This held off invading muslim hordes for hundreds of years. They also replaced the massive central administration with a very minimalist king and court. They basically did a massive corporate re-org and decentralization to save the empire. It's a pattern that not many civilizations have pulled off.

Someone once defined history as "Argument from the past." I think it is worth noting that all perspectives are incomplete. Tainter does talk about why the Eastern Empire survived longer but another interesting perspective on that (and one more relevant to the article) was put forth by Herwig Wolfram in his book "The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples."

Wolfram points out that before the Migration Age began in earnest, the Eastern Empire was spending more in the military (and that was only 30% of the budget) than the Western Empire was collecting in taxes, and the issue was, in the West, that the Senatorial families had achieved such a monopoly on wealth and power that they both couldn't be effectively taxed and controlled the economy. Some families had a budget that was as high as a third of the whole Western Empire's budget (suggesting it is likely that some families had businesses which were consuming more than the Western Roman military). According to Wolfram, this was not the same in the East.

Nonetheless, the East found its military too expensive during the Arab wars and that's where the Theme System came from.

The perspectives of Tainter and Wolfram are not unrelated. Complexity usually does concentrate power and resources in coordinator roles, and that concentration itself cannot be maintained without complexity -- remember that the fall of Rome effectively meant the transition of the role of slave into a role of peasant simply because central enforcement of slavery could no longer really occur. But at the same time the Ostrogoths could not challenge the powerful families enough to hold Italy for more than a couple of centuries before the Eastern Empire invaded and the Goths fell for the same reasons (according to Wolfram) that the Romans did.

Regarding the article, one of the problems not discussed is the issue of economic concentration. These breakthroughs usually demand that. The industrial revolution wasn't caused by population, but by concentration of economic power in a few hands and the quite intentional efforts to evict peasants from their lands and make them destitute factory workers.

I wonder if future historians looking back with a much longer timescale will end up lumping this era in as part of the same civilization as the Roman empire.

English has become lingua franca beyond the colonies only after WW2.

The trick isn't necessarily singular. Tainter's argument is actually that what happens is complexity (roughly: technology, though it's a bit more involved than that -- enumerable parts with distinct structures is a good first approximation) increases because it solves problems. The second order problem is that that complexity itself has a cost, and perhaps an accruing technical debt. When you reach the point of not being able to pay those, not only do you lose the complexity incurred but its capabilities -- you're in a worse hole than you started from.

On the question of whether there's a singular trick that's exploited, I'm not aware of anything in Tainter's writing that suggests this at all. There is the concept of Leibig's Law of the Minimum -- the idea that for any system (Leibig is speaking of ecosystems or populations) there's some one factor which imposes a constraint on the system. In that regard, you could could likely look at a single technology which is the operative constraint. But if you're looking at a complex system with multiple modes of failure, you'd be arguing precisely the opposite: that there are multiple technological tricks which aren't presently binding constraints but which, if any one of them failed, would rapidly become one.

There's no basis that the trick need be unique. I'd argue that they're anything but. Basic modalities include agriculture, construction, fire, transport, arms or weapons, and control over hygiene factors.

The United States' trick was in large part massive overwhelming self-sufficiency in resources, most especially energy.

See Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History, Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power: How energy forges human history, or Robert Ayres, The Economic Growth Engine: How energy and work drive material prosperity.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/3...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/sources-of-power-how-energy-fo...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/economic-growth-engine-how-ene...

That's fair. I suppose genius is anybody with a unique insight that takes action - but that last part may require pre existing societal frameworks. Furthermore, my definition may be so broad as to render it meaningless.

He or she is probably conflating the Catholic inquisitors who convicted Galileo for a heliocentric heresy and the popular myth that the experts who dissuaded King Ferdinand from supporting Columbus thought the earth flat, rather than too wide to cross with contemporary technology. It's just a rhetorical device intended to diminish the otherwise learned. <edit for wording>