Technological Innovations OTL vs ATL (Abrittus)

'- - - This section is part of a planned reformulation of the timeline. Timeline spans beginning with 600-699 will be revised accordingly. - - -' In 263-375, quicker technological development in the Roman Empire is caused by the absence of barbarian raids from the North, but more importantly by the disappearance of extremely cheap labour caused by the abolition of slavery. Caught in a profit squeeze between a new land tax and new wage demands, the wealthy families of the empire, who owned most of the land and resources, had to innovate - and most innovations were aimed at using mechanical powers that could replace the slave`s powers.

After Roman/Celtic/Sassanid victory over the Huns, a continuous development of the skilled professions which had emerged in the Mediterranean and the triumph of an empiricist epistemology over Neoplatonism, which led to an early formation of biology, chemistry, physics and medicine as scientific disciplines valued higher than grammar, rhetoric or theology, leads to advances in the 5th-7th century which could occur in OTL no earlier than the 10th-13th century.

Contact with China, where several technological innovations re-invented in Europe in the 15th-19th centuries were already invented in the 8th-11th century, facilitates an economic and technological level of development in these centuries which is comparable to OTL 14th-18th century.

From the 12th century on, economic progress is slower than OTL due to the absence of colonial exploitation and rapid early-capitalist accumulation. A level comparable to the real-world present is reached in the 17th century.

List of inventions
Salvador79 (talk) 12:28, May 19, 2014 (UTC)

Abrittus