realistically, if faction A is much more technologically advanced than its neighboring faction B, then, in a short time period, either A conquers B or B catches up to A via reverse-engineering and diffusion of knowledge.
If faction B is given some other advantage to compensate (like superhuman strength and fecundity), then faction B should have been able to steamroll faction A before faction A coul research its way into having a massive technological edge.
With this in mind, how do you justify a long-lasting difference in techological advancement between factions that have contact with each other?
>realistically
Stopped reading there. Not relevant, frick off moron.
If the difference in technology is that massive, wouldn't the backwards nation lack the resources to produce the new tech, or even the means to reverse-engineer it to begin with? What if the production of said advanced tech has other tech or resource requirements that the backwards nation can't work around, like lacking machine parts, iron or whatever? They could be kept in a state of artificial scarcity basically forever if the neighbours will it.
As for other reasons, there could be religious/ideological problems that preclude the mass use of the new tech.
In that case, the primitive faction probably gets steamrolled
>With this in mind, how do you justify a long-lasting difference in techological advancement between factions that have contact with each other?
Faction B are insular. They have religious or social reasons for having contact with Faction A, but do not want to mimic their ways. They're a "no converts, but also no purging" type religion. Say, they're the Yazidis of their continent. You can't join, you can leave but can't re-enter.
Meanwhile, Faction A don't give a frick, because Faction B are not a threat.
Look at Scotland and Ireland vs the Roman Empire and England, combination of rough terrain and the country being too much of a shithole to be worth conquering
>Look at Scotland and Ireland vs the Roman Empire and England
Scotland did not exist in the roman era, moron
it wasn't called scotland, but the picts north of hadrian's wall inhabited the area
No, Scotland didn't exist.
Define technologically advanced
If your technology is a white elephant you aren’t conquering shit
Shouldn't people, at this point, have aknowledged that wars are only won in two ways - one side either decides to surrender or is reduced to less than 10% of the total number of humans present in the region?
Geography is the decider of 90% of national relations.
>realistically
Egypt didn't crawl the Nile upstream until it stopped being navigable despite blowing the residents of said area out of the water (occasionally literally) for millennia. Coastal African kingdoms never expanded much inland, even when making bank as the world's premier slave suppliers. The history of the Eurasian Steppe is readily summed up as "generally backwards, but had a weirdly efficient military niche as a way of life".
Geographical and climactic barriers have historically created exactly such a case for centuries on end, because it's only relatively recently that technology came to support the logistical train across large stretches of marginal to outright hostile land without a navigable waterway.
When you don't have such barriers, this disparity leads to conquest, vassalizing, or catching up, but with them we've gotten stone age spear chuckers wiping themselves out charging machine guns.
>realistically, if faction A is much more technologically advanced than its neighboring faction B
How would that even occur "realistically?" Realistically, barbarians who were in close contact to civilized people tended to adopt some of their ways and become "semi-civilized barbarians" rather than outright primitive ones. The Celts that lived closest to Romans and Carthiginians were more advanced than those that weren't. The steppe tribes that were closest to China and Russia were more advanced than those who weren't. The American Indians and Sub-Saharans that were closest to the European colonists were more advanced than those who weren't.
The only way such a technological gap could emerge would be if faction B lived in actual isolation from the borderlands of faction A. There's no way they would be their neighbors and be so far behind.
Technologically, the Romans weren't just downstreams from the Greeks, but also from the Celts as well. The Romans very much were the turtle in Europe's ancient race to Empire.
>pic
USUTHU
>if faction A is much more technologically advanced than its neighboring faction B, then, in a short time period, either A conquers B or B catches up to A via reverse-engineering and diffusion of knowledge.
counterargument: look at Somalia's location on a map
>faction B should have been able to steamroll faction A before faction A coul research its way into having a massive technological edge.
This never happens, especially not to humans.
>how do you justify a long-lasting difference in techological advancement between factions that have contact with each other?
I think movies have rotted your brain.
As in real life, pre-industrial travel takes a long ass time. Even industrialized societies often have difficulty moving large armies and navies, which can be seen in the Russo Japanese War in which the Russians had to sail their entire fleet to essentially the other side of the world. So those Tribals acting up? You now have to send an armed force to deal with them and depending on the how large and powerful your empire is, may take weeks or even months to reach. Which is apart of the reason why the interiors of Africa and Australia took so long to colonize.
In fact, it's a miracle the Russians were able to retain their Siberian holdings due to the vast distance between them and the Russian heartland.
Yeah that’s why after ten years the Afghans had F-15s and Javelins.
Faction B has systemic hereditary moronation that limits their ability to develop industry and infrastructure to proliferate rapid advances in military technology.
Also B smells bad.
Depends on the specifics of technology developed. If faction A's technology requires a high degree of upkeep then faction B might choose to avoid adopting faction A's techniques if it can keep up by some other means.
Remember: tech does not exist in a vacuum, it requires a context of production and practice.
Faction A becomes affluent due to technological prowess, offshores shitty jobs to B. A doesn't want to take over B because they would need to find a new source of cheap labor.
A wants to conquer B but that would give a casus belli for equal power C to arm and protect B. Even if A wins the war they would be tied up by B loyalist resistance supplied by C.
B has religious significance and anyone laying a hand to them would be crusaded immediately. Technology would interfere with their pious life.
B produces a valuable resource that needs manual labor to extract. If their people got access to luxuries they wouldn't want to work the mines, hence B elite keeps the country backwards and A lets them be independent in exchange to resource and to keep their hands clean.
B is nationalistic. Even if A occupied them the occupiers would have their throats cut in alleyways or live in constant fear inside fortified houses. If they genocided B everyone from C to Z would consider them barbaric scum that should be removed from face of the world.
>realistically, if faction A is much more technologically advanced than its neighboring faction B, then, in a short time period, either A conquers B or B catches up to A via reverse-engineering and diffusion of knowledge.
Access to specific resources, cultural and religious background and impacful transformations were factors that created a huge technological gap in history.
The process of industrialization itself is a long-lasting difference in techological advancement. It makes profound changes in society.
Also, look for why christians and pantheists went far in progress in comparision to animists, for example. Separating religion from state is a modern conception of a secular nation. There was no distinction during the Roman empire, Macedonia, feudal Japan, and many others.
>In a short period of time
History disagrees with you. Central Asians were still primarily using bows into the 19th century, the majority of soldiers during the Boxer Rebellion had no guns, Ethiopia likewise lacked much Western technology during the first Italo-Abyssinian War. Change takes time, you need people to want change and often time people are opposed to change because even if it helps the whole it harms them. Generally speaking the changes in technology require harsh reforms (Meiji restoration or Peter the Great’s taming and replacement of the old Boyars) or direct trade at a time where personal impetus is more useful (Sengoku Japan).
It required harsh reforms because what made Europe conquer the world was only party technological, it was also structural. They developed a science of warfare, and a prerequisite for using that is destroying the old systems of military organization and replacing them. Guess who has a vested interest in not doing that? People who have all the money and power in those countries.
>They developed a science of warfare, and a prerequisite for using that is destroying the old systems of military organization and replacing them.
First or second most successful military of the era was also the most structurally backwards with France having largely abandoned the standing army of the Ordonnance by the 16th century in favour of gendarmes supported by mercenaries and shitty levies only developing a more modern military structure in the mid-late 17th century, this is despite France having the most modern and developed political structure until the late 18th or early 19th century.
The issue with new technology is that it isn’t like a paradox game where you research the new tech and suddenly you can just click a button to upgrade your divisions, you need to either import the new technology (which has a highly limited scale) or create your own infrastructure (which takes time, money, and political capital as you destroy traditional industries). Take Sengoku Japan vs Meiji Japan for an example. The former was a much smaller scale, warlords equipping their (nonetheless substantial) armies vs Meiji Japan fielding an entire modern conscript and standing army. So Sengoku Japan could just buy guns from the Dutch but Meiji Japan needed its own factories, it needed to build factories, bring in engineers and machinists to train Japanese to use new technology to develop modern firearms and artillery.
If Westerners collectively refused to ever support Meiji Japan than it would have taken them decades longer to reach the same level of technology as they could only reverse engineer weapons and technology with their local engineers.
So if the more advanced culture isn’t willing to help the less advanced culture use technology than the less advanced culture simply can’t use that new technology.
I'm talking about the late 17th century on, the era of European dominance. Europe didn't conquer the civilized world (Arab World, East Asia, India) until the 18th and 19th century.
Europe didn't even have a technological advantage in the 16th century in most fields. Their main advantage being the Man O' War, which no one else had or could compete with. The Ottomans regularly defeated European armies more often than not, and attempts to invade North Africa all ultimately failed.
They were dominant over Japan and China. Even the Ottomans relied far more on bows than guns, with personal firearms being much more common in Europe than the Ottoman much less Safavid and Mughal empires. There was even an incident where a force of French soldiers fighting alongside the Emperor against the Ottomans defected and the sultan was so impressed by their gear he paraded them around and let them keep their arms even in peace time (they later fought the Safavids and suffered like 50% losses before falling out of the history books but I digress). The point however stands that you can’t just one day decide “we’ll use guns.” You either need to train the people to build them and build the equipment for them to build guns themselves or you need to train them and each case requires the tacit support of the more advanced civilization. Africans traded slaves for guns because they didn’t have the personnel and infrastructure to make guns in large numbers.
The point is that lets say Europe banded together and said “don’t sell guns to non-whites and don’t teach non-whites how to make guns” than guns would have never entered widespread service outside of Europe as the only source of weapons would have been loot and reverse engineering. While this makes no sense for Europe many fantasy settings have the advanced place as a single monolithic empire who can do that and has incentive to do that because they’re highly expansionist.
It actually takes a really long time for regions to develop industries necessary to maintain the higher technological level on their own, and you need a system of governance that allows people to develop their location over that long period of time.
Being decentralized, having cultural hangups about certain technologies, or being too caught up in your own regional conflicts to focus on adopting foreign techs all contribute to technological stalling.
However, what is not realistic is to say that a nation near the undeveloped primitives don't just sell the advanced technology to the neighbors, who never end out developing a gun factory because buying guns from your neighbors is much easier.
So is it reasonable to say that there are advanced places settled next to primitive places? Yes, though only really because the advanced place is limited by things like population, conflicting with other advanced powers, or just having no desire to spend resources either integrating or colonizing new territories. Even worse if the advanced power directly profits on making sure the primitives keep buying weapons, food, drugs, etc from them forever. This can even be compounded by the primitives living on low quality land with little value in the first place.
The desire to conquer land just because you can is not actually inherent to every nation, in fact, it's inherit to almost none of them. Conquest is usually an act of profiteering, and if it doesn't appear that engaging in that conquest will give big returns on investments, it just doesn't happen.