The Duck of Minerva

Lego Antikythera Machine and musings prompted thereby

by Dan Nexon

10 December 2010, 0501 EST

Massively cool.


And here’s the earlier Lego Difference Engine:

Anyway, the juxtaposition of these two computers intersects (oddly enough) with one of the themes in the Steampunk debates I alluded to earlier. Steampunk extrapolates from the real (and imaginary) technology of the Victorian era. Cosma Shalizi identifies that period (i.e., the Industrial Revolution) as the true “singularity,” prompting Patrick Nielson Hayden to remark:

I hope Shalizi will forgive my quoting his entire post, but it seems to me to have resonance with certain recent arguments over steampunk. It might even hint at why SF (and fantasy!) keep returning to the “long nineteenth century” like a dog to its bone.

I’m also reminded of this, from one of Nietzsche’s books of aphorisms: “The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.”*

I’m led to wonder why more isn’t done with extrapolations of Roman technology. As Bryan Ward-Perkins reminds us in his excellent book,productivity in the Roman Empire was pretty robust–and likely significantly higher than what Europe would see for the centuries following its decline and fall. Findings such as the Antithykera Machine demonstrate rather advanced technical and scientific skills. I suspect that the later Roman Empire, let alone various periods of Chinese history, might be worth mining for an alternative technological imaginary.**

*I should note that one of the best discussions consistent with Shalzi’s argument remains that found in Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918.

**Beyond the issue of SF potential, the lack of a Roman-era “industrial revolution” is a chronically under-theorized issue in comparative-historical sociology.

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

2 Comments

  1. Anebo
    Anebo on 10 December 2010 at 15.15 EST

    The thing preventing the Romans form innovating was entirely conceptual: the Mos Maiorum. They had a steam engine, but they used it (and they may not have had more than one) but they used it to automatically open temple doors, to overawe peasants into beleiveing they were witnessing a miracle. 

    Let us suppose that Tiberius put Thrasyllus in charge of the grain supply of Rome. Instead of inventing Mithraism, he uses his familiarity as an astrologer with something similar to the Antikythera mechanism, and perhaps having seen the steam engine in Egypt, and decided to replace the water powered mill that supplied Rome with flour with a steam powered mill. Leaving aside where he would have gotten the fine-machined parts he would need for the engine. I doubt anyone would have noticed. Landed aristocrats would have had no more interest in industry than their 18th century English counter-parts. Can one imagine Trimalchio investing in a factory? And still less anyone with the mindset of CIcero who vilifies commerce and merchants. And there wasn't an army of Dissenters running about, rabid with the idea that they way they got into heaven was by getting rich on earth.

  2. Vikash Yadav
    Vikash Yadav on 16 December 2010 at 15.04 EST

    As a Weberian, I think the issue of why the Roman empire did not have an industrial revolution has been somewhat theorized.  Industrial technology required a wide range of supporting institutions, most notably a particular form of law and a modern rational bureaucratic state both of which created a high level of predictability for merchants and investors. Weber argued that “all legal institutions specific to modern capitalism are alien to Roman law and are medieval in origin,” (Economy and Society, vol. 2, p. 977).