🐲 Dragon fire and steam engines: Why wasn't there an Industrial Revolution in Westeros?

Much like the China of a millennium ago, the world of 'Game of Thrones' and 'House of the Dragon' lacks a competition of ideas

Talk about a Great Stagnation. Watching the new Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, reminded me of the strange lack of progress in Westeros. Not much seems to change during the nearly two hundred years that pass between the two shows. Certainly not visually, but also not technologically. For example: In the just-aired fourth episode of House of the Dragon, we see the young Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen sailing the Narrow Sea. But that Westerosi ship doesn’t appear any different than the ones used two centuries later by the young Daenerys Targaryen to ferry her army from Essos across the same sea to Westeros.

But the Game of Thrones-verse isn’t one of knights and castles that’s forever medieval. More accurately, GoT exists in an era more akin to what historians call Early Modern, described in a 2019 Pacific Standard piece by Benjamin Breen as “the timespan between the voyages of Columbus and de Gama at the end of the 15th century and the French and American Revolutions at the end of the 18th.” Breen continues:

What [author George R. R. Martin] actually gives us is a fantasy version of what the historian Alfred Crosby called the Post-Columbian exchange: the globalizing epoch of the 16th and 17th centuries. A world where merchants trade exotic drugs and spices between continents, where professional standing armies can number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, where scholars study the stars via telescopes, and proto-corporations like the Iron Bank of Braavos and the Spicers of Qarth control global trade. It’s also a world of slavery on a gigantic scale, and huge wars that disrupt daily life to an unprecedented degree.

A little from Column A, a little from Column B

Still, there are some things from that Early Modern period not found in the GoT-verse — such as the printing press and castle-shattering cannons — while other technology — notably the highly effective “moon tea” abortifacient in both HotD and GoT — appears anachronistic. In the end, Martin presents a historical mashup that resonates with a modern audience in a way that a strict adherence to our history might not. The ultimate answer to any question about Martin’s worldbuilding is that whatever he feels works best, storywise, is what he chooses.

That said, one can analyze GoT and HotD through the lens of economic history. As I wrote earlier this week, the Industrial Revolution that led to the Great Acceleration in human welfare can be best explained as a multicausal phenomenon. But I think the following story has loads of explanatory power: For most of human history, change happened slowly, with any progress barely perceptible over a lifetime. “If the general system of things, and human society of course, have any gradual revolution, they are too slow to be discerned in that short period,” wrote philosopher David Hume in 1754. “Stature and force of body, length of life, even courage and genius, seem hitherto to have been in all ages pretty much the same.”

And then everything started to change …

Then during the Early Modern period, what a few people thought about the potential for progress started to change — which eventually caused what everyone thought about progress to change. There grew a transnational “Republic of Letters” among the learned elite of fractured Europe — astronomers, chemists, clergymen, doctors, engineers, mathematicians — where radical ideas about the natural world were freely exchanged via books and post. But the big and novel macro idea was this: Humanity could improve its condition by observing, studying, and testing the world around it. And if the result of that early scientific thinking happened to upset the status quo, so what? None of these European nations could afford to alienate smart people who might take their big idea to some potential competitor.

As Northwestern University economist and A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy author Joel Mokyr told me back in 2017:

Europe heavily fragmented into dozens and dozens of smaller and bigger states. And these states were all competing with each other, and all trying to one-up each other. They wanted smart people who could help their governments gain some kind of an advantage. So it is a classic sort of competitive market that economists so love, except you shouldn’t think of this as firms competing, but as nations like England, and Spain, and Sweden, and Russia, and France, all competing with each other and trying to one-up each other. They were trying to build better ships, trying to get better navigation techniques, they were trying to cast a better cannon, things like that. And that competition creates the kind of environment in which innovation turns out to thrive.

No competition of ideas in Westeros

But by the time of HotD, the great houses of Westeros had been mostly subjugated under the foreign Targaryens and their dragons for a century. By the time of GoT, for nearly three. While the lords of Westeros still competed for power and influence, it was at a far lower level of intensity than had they been independent kingdoms. The competition was more about court intrigue at King’s Landing and marriage between the houses than military force. I doubt many Westerosi lords worried about alienating their best and brightest scholars, as represented by the maesters assigned to each house. The television show treats the maesters as valued but also eminently replaceable should they run afoul of their lords. The commanding power of the Targaryens didn’t rest on the accumulated knowledge of the maesters, nor is there any evidence that their successors feared some scientific leap would undermine their power.

Finally, unlike the Republic of Letters, the knowledge of the maesters was centralized and collected in a massive library. There seemed little interest in spreading or preaching a humanistic gospel of societal self-improvement. It’s a world still waiting for an Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Indeed, one theory holds that the maesters conspired to kill the dragons and the magic that seemed to accompany them. Only in a post-magic world could the scientific method emerge and society end its stagnation.

But if we’re going to focus on the impact of a competition and diffusion of ideas, perhaps instead of fractured Europe 500 years ago, the better comparison the unified, mega-state of China of a millennium ago. As journalist Philip Cogan, author of the 2020 book More: A History of the World Economy from the Iron Age to the Information Age, told me back in 2020:

“Had a Martian come to Planet Earth one thousand years ago and asked, ‘So, where do you think we’ll see the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution?’ He would for sure not have picked Western Europe. He would probably have said, “China, under the Song Dynasty.” Because that was a culture where, even at that stage, they already navigated with a nautical compass, they read books printed with a printing press, and they fought with gunpowder. Those are the three inventions that Karl Marx, the communist thinker writing in the 1860’s, credited with having ushered in Western capitalism. They really got there first.”

Why didn’t China get there first? Again, Mokyr:

The market for ideas in Europe worked very differently than it worked in China. In China, basically, the big buyer in that market was a single entity, namely the imperial bureaucracy, the mandarins. And they set the terms at which learning took place. Which is that you had to study these particular writings, called the neo-Confucian writings by authors like Su-Shi, which were written in the late 12th century. That’s what you studied for those civil service examination, and if you wanted to educate yourself, that is what you got to know.

Again, the most relevant reason why no GoT industrialization is that Martin (and his television counterparts) doesn’t want it that way. Of course, Martin also pays more attention to economics than the typical fantasy writer. So maybe if we get a GoT sequel someday, the Song of Fire and Ice will become the Song of Steam and Steel.

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