[miki_tyler]

One of the fun things about writing fiction is that I don’t have to stick to the natural flow of events the way history actually unfolded.

Kind of like how some countries in Africa skipped landlines and went straight to mobile phones, I can let the Romans stumble onto just the right ink recipe a bit early.

[ahazred8ta]

In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge had a post-singularity think tank using FTL comms to talk to a group on a medieval-tech planet, teaching them how to speedrun through developing an industrial-era tech tree. There was an entire academic discipline that studied the fastest ways to uplift a pretechnological society.

'Recruit a bunch of people to study rocks. Use acid and scratch tests to figure out which ones can be smelted for valuable elements. Recruit a bunch of people to study making alloys. Form an R&D team to develop precision lathes. Invent index cards and file catalogs.'

[marcus_holmes]

Yeah, but the Africans involved didn't invent the phones.

I've always found it fascinating with the history of the Industrial Revolution that it wasn't so much about technology, as about the exact right circumstances arising so that the technology could be used and improved. There had to be industrialists, an industry that needed the invention badly enough and people rich enough to be able to gamble on the unproven inventions. The technology itself (as others have said) rests on the shoulders of multiple layers of giants. The society had to be willing to change, and cope with the new inventions and their social consequences (Britain nearly wasn't, as the Luddites showed, and both China and Japan sealed themselves off from foreign inventions to preserve their societies unchanged).

From what I know of late Roman society, it was stratified and fixed, an oligarchy. Any threat to the patrician class would not have been accepted, and the patrician class had no reason to change. This is different from 18th Century Britain where the rising merchant class were challenging the remnants of the feudal peerage, who didn't have enough power to stop them.

I think your premise is interesting, but only as fiction.

[miki_tyler]

Agreed, this is a work of fiction, after all. But what if I put a few traders or patricians on the brink of bankruptcy? That would create the right incentives. Then I give them just enough tools to dig themselves out. Things might start to shift from there.