People really overhype the Roman era. Europe became great because of the middle ages. The developments in agriculture, first universities, and plague making peasants richer laid the foundations for modern economies and early capitalism. During the Roman era huge chunks of Europe were literally just unfarmed because they did not have the plows to do it and because grain from Egypt made it unnecessary. The whole feudalism thing is seen as backwards, but thats the beginning of private property rights becoming sacred.
Regardless, I dislike the way Eu4 does technology. Really large centralized and powerful empires can fund really big houses of learning and stuff, but that is not what makes a society advanced. The Romans, Ming and scholars of the Caliphates invented alot of stuff and wrote alot of cool theory, but it never distilled down to society.
The rail is the best example of this. The romans had tracks to push around stuff like coal, but nobody was ever decided to add steam to the carts despite the steam engine existing. However, through the existence of patents, private land ownership, stock markets and widespread literacy (that happened through a culture slowly promoting literacy as a way to godliness) people started to do this in rural Britain - a country that was not particularly that rich and powerful.
Of course, you should only expect so much from a game. Having mechanics that are rewarding and challenging is far more important.
I rambled about it elsewhere, but I read a really thought provoking argument once that science doesn’t even direct technology until the Second Industrial Revolution. It’s the craftsmen fucking around with tools and techniques.
I'd almost rather see science in these games done in a similar way as my ideas on art (something grand strategy totally neglects; Victoria is the best for it): it's all prestige, all masturbation. Or, if being more charitable, it magnifies what the craftsmen achieve, but it's having markets, freedom to act within markets, and a somewhat literate and prosperous people that lets you get that experimentation with things that make states more powerful.
@Ughubughughughughughghlug
I hate to derail the thread again over that admittedly fascinating discussion, but what do you make of my own pet theory of the USA being an eternal hegemonic land empire like Rome and China....
It has the potential.
From an alt-history perspective, I have a personal pet theory that, if you could somehow reintroduce horses or keep them from going extinct, North America's closest geographical equivalent actually is China. There's a massive steppe (Great Plains) and vast but easily penetrable subtropical forests (the South). There's huge inland waterways (the Great Lakes) to become a mare nostrum leaving aside the river system, and it's a river prone to catastrophic and unreliable flooding, which makes it again like China. I've predicted that Indian civilization would have wound up evolving into at least two huge blocs (Iroquois already seemed to really want to become Red Romans) and Beijing-in-Missouri probably beats Rome-in-New York through sheer numbers.
In the modern day, everything is complicated by the way technology contracts space (or, as massive wanker Marx put it: the annihilation of space by time). I am very displeased with the country's geography. I think the basic reigons of the country all do lend themselves to natural blocs (agrarian subtropical civilization, the Great Lakes as Mare Nostrum, Appalachia as an effective barrier between the East Coast and West, Chesapeake as a barrier, trans-Rockies isolation), but once you have jet planes and supertankers... I just don't know that this matters anymore. It's like the world collapses as a stage, it becomes a lot easier to administer and to roll over countries. This just reinforces hegemonic empire.
US is piss geography for long-term national health.
but also obviously having the characteristics of Christianity, and one supposes, Britain as a direct descendant of it..
I think of human history as proceeding in these cycles that, like economic growth, go up and down but go up more than they go down, and civilizational waves. I don't think there's an End of History but I do think there's kind of a limit, like as we get more modern our understanding of ethics becomes more complete (in the grand arc) and the world approaches its ideal state, but it never hits "perfect," that's impossible with fallible man.
For me it goes sort of Greco-Roman --> Medieval Christendom --> Protestant (focus on Anglo-American). We're standing in a period of major moral degeneracy, probably civilizational collapse coming (think Camp of the Saints), but it will swing back as it always does.
The death of civilizations is ultimately good and part of their natural God-ordained life cycle. It always sucks to live in the collapse, not the upswing, but if the United States went down in flames it wouldn't be the end of the American Experiment. It would get folded into our culture like the legacy of Rome was: something that America's successor states all draw from, and the successor states come out leaner, sleaker, younger and more vigorous. I imagine the race being improved. Rome falling lets us have wonderful places like France, Britain and Italy. America falling could have whatever creolized people emerge out of it fighting for the world again; Texases, Californias, Floridas etc. At this point it becomes pure wishful thinking - vision as fantasy of what I want - but I've come to view there as being a new Golden Circle forming as the Sunbelt South has swelled with population, industry, scientific achievement and cultural influence (music, Southern culture diffusing into broader national culture). It goes largely unnoticed, but it is remarkable when you start to recognize it. Dallas' metropolitan area is absolutely massive, like up there with Chicago and NYC. Atlanta has the world's largest airport. I picture this merging with Latin America culturally, something I call Texanization; the new civilization I call Florida, after what the Spaniards called the entire region and I think is a striking and accurate name (feast of flowers). The Northeast may remain Atlantic; the American Gulf will go native, emerge from it stronger and healthier. The Heartland will mostly follow the Gulf's lead. California will whither and die unless it becomes aggressive again (which, again, Progressivism is more than capable of being).
Edit: I found some words to summarize that wank: Sunbelt Exceptionalism + Castizo Futurism.
The closest writing I've ever found to how I think about these sorts of things is Gary North (Calvinist Austrian School economist) in Marx's Religion of Revolution. It's mostly a boring polemical diatribe about how much he fucking hates Marx REEEEEEE, but he has a moving bit near the end about Empire being Satan's way of ordering the world and spontaneous order being the way of God, and that God never allows Empire to last forever, often not even allow it to last for long. North was writing, in the 1960s, about the collapse of the Soviet Union (that came 30 years later). Of course, Samuelson and other jackasses were putting out textbooks at the time predicting that any day now the USSR would overtake the US (this was like the original global warming), while Mises had predicted not even five years after the Russian Revolution that the Soviet economy would have to collapse.
But there are some empires that do just stay shitty forever, I think of China was a worst-case scenario where the Empire is SO hegemonic that even the forces that would normally destabilize get sucked into it.
or perhaps more like France exporting its system (American-style democracy and culture) but no longer settling/colonizing areas outside its borders?
Well, pretty much all hegemons export. Britain through its people and conquering the Global South, Fr*nchmen through conquering Europeans (unsuccessfully), both through soft power. China did softpower: Korea, Japan and Vietnam all voluntarily modeled their societies on China. Rome had something akin to a mision civilisatrice.
America has an instinct towards doing this even more. Jeffersonians wanted to openly align with France (a retarded idea), early America supported (at least morally) the Latin American wars of independence, and unfortunately by the Progressive Era you get people interpreting this as armed military intervention, and I don't think it's something you can really count on getting rid of now, especially since WW2 became a huge part of America's self-image. (And it is progressivism that does it; not just Wilson and FDR but even Truman in Korea, JFK in Cuba, Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, the neoconservatives were a late phenomenon.)
Also arguably federalism as a potential unique social safety valve against despotism (effective or not).
I think it's better than nothing but it's not as effective as people think.
From a typical political economy standpoint, federalism is great because you again get decentralization (which, as Computer God Autism noted, feudalism is decentralization, tribesmen chucking spears at each other is decentralization, decentralization alone isn't good) and a natural laboratory where people can vote with their feet and you can compare across very similar cultures how policies work out.
Theoretically, it puts limits on tyranny.
In practice, it's the same as having Constitutions. It's only as good as people's willingness to buy into and cooperate with the original ideology. We've seen, time and time again, that the Constitution does not protect itself from bullshit, insincere reinterpretation, and people never are willing to dig in and fight it out. What it does is it just throws up obstacles to slow the pace of change.
I think the big killers that have ruined American federalism (it's a sham of its former self) are:
1) The use of interstate commerce as an excuse to tamper with literally everything
2) The Federal Govt using money to make states dance like whores
3) The States being emasculated: the Feds cut off their bawls in 1865
If I was building the country from scratch I'd make the Constitution way more explicit and extensive, actually make it easier to amend so that people are more likely to use the appropriate channels (less likely to flip the table), and include a straight-up constitutional prohibition on standing federal armies, ban nationalization except in time of literal declared war, as well as a guarantee, for the modern day, of the right of states to own and share among themselves state-level nuclear arsenals. People can quibble about if any of this is realistic in other countries, but the only time American soil was invaded in the past 200 years was when America invaded America to burn down America's farms in the name of America, and the only reason the anti-government forces were able to resist effectively, as long as they did, was that the war basically started as a total war between state-level militaries (the State Militias) that were under a joint command.
IE, how does 'murrica fit into your theory here.
