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Comment by ajoski9 | Hacker News Reader

Why didnt the people who mastered iron just conquer and continue civilization? Like we see with every other case where there is a tech advantage.

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The claim is that bronze enabled complex, highly centralized states because it was rare (due to a dearth of tin). So only the connected/rich could afford it, and they used it to build empires/kingdoms/etc.

Iron wasn't superior to bronze (in the fact the article claims it was worse), but it was good enough and widespread. All you needed was a furnace with bellows, charcoal, and an iron source (which were everywhere). Since everyone had access to iron, no one person/group had an edge over the others and this prevented highly centralized polities from being established.

so economically speaking it was cheaper to mass produce iron weapons.. I would have assumed a first mover advantage. It would be surprising if iron tech sprung up everywhere at the same time. And sure smaller groups could do it, but some groups would do it better,faster, cheaper (paretto principle). They should have had a material advantage me thinks. Since its cheaper you could arm more people perhaps. Lastly, the current powers could have also adopted iron and armed larger armies.

The problem is if I learn how you make iron weapons and then escape (or any other spy scenario) I can make iron weapons anywhere and teach my friends. Even a second mover can get an advantage.

Bronze it wouldn't matter because I can't get the raw materials anywhere, and so I can't create an army to oppose you.

Because other people learned to make iron weapons and fought back.

Bronze weapon technology had a moat because it required scarce, imported resources. Even if they learned the techniques, most people couldn't make them.

The resources for iron weaponry were readily available; they just needed to learn the techniques.

Sure but wouldn't and organized kingdom have the resources to scale up iron weapons production faster? They certainly had larger armies I would imagine.

If only someone had written a whole article about this very angle, and posted it atop this thread...

The article didn't explain how a well organized civilization couldn't reap the benefits of a new technology faster. Guns were fairly decentralized tech. Civilization didn't collapse.

Did you read the article? The argument was that tin doesn't occur in many places, so only the powerful even had access to bronze, which was a far superior material, which made it easy to subjugate the vast majority with no access to any material which could rival bronze. Whereas iron is abundant, so everyone has access to it, making it difficult to subjugate other people, because they could fight back.

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