Jane Psmith reviews The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell, despite it not being quite what she was hoping it would be:
This is not the book I wanted to read.
The book I wanted to read was a detailed guide to bootstrapping your way to industrial civilization (or at least antibiotics) if you should happen to be dumped back in, say, the late Bronze Age.1 After all, there are plenty of technologies that didn’t make it big for centuries or millennia after their material preconditions were met, and with our 20/20 hindsight we could skip a lot of the dead ends that accompanied real-world technological progress.
Off the top of my head, for example, there’s no reason you couldn’t do double-entry bookkeeping with Arabic numerals as soon as you have something to write on, and it would probably have been useful at any point in history — just not useful enough that anyone got really motivated to invent it. Or, here, another one: the wheelbarrow is just two simple machines stuck together, is substantially more efficient than carrying things yourself, and yet somehow didn’t make it to Europe until the twelfth or thirteenth century AD. Or switching to women’s work, I’ve always taken comfort in the fact that with my arcane knowledge of purling I could revolutionize any medieval market.2 And while the full Green Revolution package depends on tremendous quantities of fertilizer to fuel the grains’ high yields, you could get some way along that path with just knowledge of plant genetics, painstaking record-keeping, and a lot of hand pollination. In fact, with a couple latifundia at your disposal in 100 BC, you could probably do it faster than Norman Borlaug did. But speaking of fertilizer, the Italian peninsula is full of niter deposits, and while your revolutio viridis is running through those you could be figuring out whether it’s faster to spin up a chemical industry to the point you could do the Haber-Bosch process at scale or to get to the Peruvian guano islands. (After about thirty seconds of consideration my money’s on Peru, though it’s a shame we’re trying to do this with the Romans since they were never a notably nautical bunch and 100 BC was a low point even for them; you’ll have to wipe out the Mediterranean pirates early and find Greek or Egyptian shipwrights.) And another question: can you go straight from the Antikythera mechanism to the Jacquard machine, and if not what do you need in between? Inquiring minds want to know.3
But I’ll forgive Dartnell for not writing “Lest Darkness Fall” For Dummies, which I’ll admit is a pretty niche pitch, because The Knowledge is doing something almost as cool.4 Like my imaginary book, it employs a familiar fictional conceit to explain how practical things work. Instead of time travel, though, Dartnell takes as his premise the sudden disappearance (probably plague, definitely not zombies) of almost all of humanity, leaving behind a few survivors but all the incredible complexity of our technological civilization. How would you survive? And more importantly, how would you rebuild?
1. I read the Nantucket Trilogy at an impressionable age.
2. Knitting came to Europe in the thirteenth century, but the complementary purl stitch, which is necessary to create stretchy ribbing, didn’t. If you’ve ever wondered why medieval hosen were made of woven fabric and fit the leg relatively poorly, that’s why. When purling came to England, Elizabeth I paid an exorbitant amount of money for her first pair of silk stockings and refused to go back to cloth.
3. Obviously you would also need to motivate people to actually do any of these things, which is its own set of complications — Jason Crawford at Roots of Progress has a great review of Robert Allen’s classic The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective that gets much deeper into why no one actually cared about automation and mechanization — but please allow me to imagine here.
4. Please do not recommend How To Invent Everything, which purports to do something like this. It doesn’t go nearly deep enough to be interesting, let alone useful. You know, in the hypothetical that I’m sent back in time.
The main issue you will run into, related to Point 3, is mentalities. In our current world, we hold technological advancement as essentially an unmitigated good. Even those who oppose certain aspects of technology, like internal combustion engines, typically frame their arguments as replacing old tech with new.
This isn’t how people of the past thought. It’s not that they were necessarily hostile to new ideas; rather, they were ambivalent to them. Remember, 90% or so of all of humanity until VERY recently was dirt-poor peasant farmers, and change tended to be bad. Besides, what incentives did they have for changing? If their local lord didn’t take it, the neighboring one would–in agrarian societies raiding and conquest were realistically the only ways to improve anyone’s lot, and the only people who really benefited were the nobility (outside of the worst or best, one lord’s the same as another to a peasant farmer). Improvements to one’s lot in life made one a target.
If we ignore that, the improvements I’d want to see are sanitation (specifically doctors washing their hands) and improvements to water delivery. A truly staggering number of infants died in the past–I’ve read it was slightly over 50% in the Roman Empire–and reducing infant mortality would have been a tremendous boon to society. Similarly, a staggering number of women died gathering water. The only sources of water for most people were local rivers, and remember, you (and more importantly the animals) need water every day.
Second, food preservation. Basic canning alone would have revolutionized war, both in terms of allowing armies to remain in the field for longer, and in terms of improving the lives of those living in the areas where the army was marching. Armies had to forage for food or starve, and they could destroy the local farmland for miles around purely by accident. Canning would allow greater longevity for a variety of foods, which would have allowed the armies to go longer between foraging parties. The practical upshot of this would be that they’d be able to gather food in large cities, rather than destroying small towns and farms.
A system to deposit seeds at the proper depth would also be good. Farmers as late as the Victorian Era assumed that 3/4 of the seed they planted would be lost (“One for the Raven/One for the Crow/One to let Rot/And one to Grow”). Proper planting, as opposed to broadcast seeding, would have dramatically improved the productivity of even the most marginal land.
Comment by Dinwar — June 28, 2023 @ 17:41
I remember being optimistic enough to think that any technological advancement was a good thing. I was so much younger then…
As you point out, the benefits from new ideas tended not to filter down very much (if at all), so change was — at best — neutral, but tended to be negative from their point of view.
Water was equally essential and dangerous, but I haven’t seen any estimates on gathering water being particularly lethal for women. Drinking the water, yes, but not the act of bringing it from the source. The further down you were from the source, the more likely the water in your vicinity would be contaminated from upstream settlements, so unboiled/unfermented sources of moisture could be more of a risk, especially for the very young and the very old.
In the same way that merchantmen in wartime from 1914 onwards didn’t dare consider any submarine to be “friendly”, farmers and villagers throughout history don’t dare consider any army to be “friendly”. Prof. Devereaux has documented many examples of “friendly” armies being just as destructive as an enemy army could be merely by marching through. The problem for armies before the modern era was transportation of food to keep the army moving because the amount necessary to carry drastically limited the combat range of the army — and much more so for cavalry-heavy armies … fodder for the horses maxxed-out the supply system of pre-railroad and pre-motorized armies to an incredible degree.
Comment by Nicholas — June 29, 2023 @ 21:44