One of the things that threw me off when watching forging YouTube videos like Alec Steele was that he would take on these historical projects like Renaissance weaponry but using super-modern power hammers and such. But they actually had power hammers in the Renaissance, Wikipedia calls them trip hammers. They didn't appear in Europe until the Middle Ages, but similar devices were used in China 2000 (!) years ago.

The things you can do with just water, wind, and wood are incredible.

Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle has about 35 enjoyable pages on this process, if anyone's interested.

There's a highly entertaining account of the uses and properties of Wootz steel in Neal Stephenson's The Confusion, part of his Baroque Cycle.

(edit - beaten to it - see below)

Hour documentary on wootz:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OP8PCkcBZU4

The illustrative picture on that article is absolutely useless without a scale of some sort. The feature look small, like maybe on the order of a weld bead but it might be on the order of mill scale but under massive magnification and I have no way to tell.

Here's Niels Provos (author of bcrypt) attempting to make Wootz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9j9vUGi0QA

Nitpick: it's Wootz steel, not Wootz's steel. It wasn't named after someone called Wootz.

India prior to the Brits, should be a case study in how to integrate places like the Rust Belt in US, Afghanistan into global trade.

Each village was an autonomous unit of production that traded directly with nearby villages, silk road and through merchant ships with the world. ( In some cases they had their own local currency ! )

A single village could be directly linked to markets in Europe and China, or form part of a supply chain of villages to larger markets. Shenzen is similar being a SEZ, allowing it to trade directly with any unit across the globe.

It is kinda ironic that we went from a more libertarian trade system to a more restrictive one, as technology helped the state exert more control.

Places like the Rust belt can't directly trade with Kenya, they have to go through hordes of middle men.

Same thing happens in inner India, even though its filled with excess cheap labor in close proximity.

It seems like a link to a random Wikipedia page should be accompanied by an explanatory comment...

I have no idea what you're on about but this lept out at me as being very obviously wrong:

> Places like the Rust belt can't directly trade with Kenya, they have to go through hordes of middle men.

"The Rust Belt" can pretty easily trade with Kenya, thanks to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. I'm sitting in my office in the "rust belt," looking out at a shipping channel that accommodates ships from Europe pretty routinely.

If we're using "middlemen," e.g. relying on rail to bring Kenyan products across Africa to one of its western ports, or relying on rail to bring those products from an Eastern US port, it's because that is inherently more economical. There aren't "hordes" of middlemen involved.

The only technology needed for this to happen was a common understanding of language. The only people you can't trade with are those you can't communicate with. And cities can issue their own currency; they just can't convince anybody to use it.

I would argue that the trade system is far less restrictive because you can easily trade globally rather than only locally. You also can't get away with pillaging/defrauding your neighbors and calling it 'trade' anymore.

It sounds like what you're really wanting is a freer economic environment - the idea of small autonomous regions having the ability to issue their own currencies, for instance.

That said, though I strongly suspect that we're very close to each other w/r/t sociopolitical views, I don't think your overall assertion here makes sense. As others have said, someone in the Rust Belt can in fact trade directly with someone in Kenya today.

> It is kinda ironic that we went from a more libertarian trade system to a more restrictive one, as technology helped the state exert more control.

I don't think technology has had much to do with this, certainly not until the last handful of decades. My intuition is that tech didn't start having a huge impact on the scale of governments until mechanization in the early 20th Century, and didn't really take off until the advent of databases for managing entire populations' worth of data in the 1930s. Even now, with the seemingly exponential increase in surveillance power driven by advances in tech, I'm not so sure that a century from now that technology will be seen as a force driving the growth of state power. In fact, I believe the opposite will be true.

Look me up on social media somewhere. I almost always use my real name as a username, and it's very nearly unique. I'd love to have a longer-term conversation about how technology has increased the relative power of the individual - from prehistory (when a faction's military power was measured directly in how many fighters it could field) to today (when a single individual can occupy a populated region's police and military forces nearly indefinitely).