Editing Medieval Stasis (section)

===A note on Development Traps===
Imagine your a Japanese guy in 1900 who's going around the world. Over your lifetime you've seen a fair deal of modernization from the railways and a proliferation of factories, many of them now using Japanese machines. Your nation was late to the game, but progress is being made. You sail across the Pacific and spend time in the US and see the automobiles puttering around LA, mechanized farms on the Great Plains and the Skyscrapers of New York. Once you cross the Atlantic England is still a beating heart of the Industrial World with shipyards that maintain an Empire on which the sun never sets. Paris has its grand boulevards illuminated by electric lights, theatres where you can see moving pictures and the steel frame of the Eiffel Tower. In Germany scientists and engineers have created mechanical marvels. Then your party goes through Russia, but along the way the train breaks down and it takes some time to get it going. You walk outside and you see a bunch of haggard peasants in well-worn rough clothes with hand tools living in crude timber houses. In a nearby village there are some basic tradespeople working with hand tools. There's the railway, but beyond that people live at basically like it's the middle ages.

Now why is this the case? It's not that the Russians were stupid or ignorant of the modern era. Russia had produced it's share of scientists and engineers like Mendelev, who was one of the fathers of modern Chemistry. The issue was that it was caught in a ''Development Trap''. In Western Europe in the 18th century there was an increasingly wealthy and prominent Bourgeoisie: merchants, shop owners and so forth who were well off if not wealthy who'd be a market for mass produced goods and investors in the means to make said goods. In Imperial Russia that was generally not a thing. You had a small wealthy nobility (who, if they wanted something like a phonograph, would import it from France or England cost be damned) and a lot of dirt poor peasants living hand-to-mouth. There was some industry and railways, but a lot of that was set up by the Tsars specifically to produce guns, uniforms and battleships or to support said industries. Raising the standard of living of Ivan Average was at best a side-benefit which the Tsars were often apathetic about and the nobles were often actively opposed. Peasants that could move about easily might get ideas about not wanting to be peasants. You would think like in any other nation, the nobility would be happy about the peasants getting ideas, lol. In this case, it mostly has nothing to do with that. The real issue is crappy climate and fuck hueg distances. European nobles or rich merchants could easily fund a railroad to obvious economic benefit. In russia, however, the same thing between two similar cities would cost substantially more. People were uncertain of the rewards for the risk such an investment would require. This results in a productivity bottleneck. In general the incentives were not there to get people to develop their nation. Not that Imperial Russia was unique nor even particularity severe as far as Development Traps go. The Ottoman Empire and Qing dynasty China were in similar waters but far more acute and there are similar development traps are currently a thing in much of Africa.

There are also other development traps than just the ones mentioned above, which had primarily ''societal'' reasons for existing; the Aztecs, depsite being an outrageously wealthy and successful civilization even when compared to China and Europe could not resist the Spanish advances and fell in a span of years because their native homelands simply didn't have the conditions in which European mercantile economies could grow. Them being based in a swampland with next to no natural resources in the form of metals or even cattle and horses to use as beasts of burden meant that they could never develop the kinds of technology used against them. Surviving Aztec records of the time talk at length about how the concept of riding a horse or taming a cow was fundamentally alien to them. The weapons they used were primarily wooden clubs spiked with sharpened obsidian that simply shattered when hitting steel and the only metal they ever learned to work with was Gold. All this combined with their diplomatic isolation among their tribal neighbors meant that they were very easy pickings for the Spanish Conquistadors eventually lead to their inevitable downfall, even if they gave Cortez one hell of a fight going out.