Nisarg said:
You don't have to wait so late to see social pressures. The very beginning of industrialization led to massive social, cultural and political changes. The way people viewed things as basic as work, land, the family, education, god, progress, etc etc. all changed massively with the advent of the industrial age.
Certainly. All of those things changed. Eberron displays a fair amount of change in those regards as well, though it perhaps wrongly attributes them more to the devastation of the Last War than to its magical industrialization. I'd also say that the technological industrial revolution was much more widespread than the magical one Eberron postulates - as Staffan noted, the lightning rail is at present open only to the wealthy or those they sponsor.
Besides, the people of Eberron don't act terribly 'medieval' on a cultural level.
Nisarg said:
You have intentionally chosen the most backward country in Europe as your historical "example", and badly given that it was a country that was also in the throws of most of the above since the beginning of the industrial revolution (at least the beginning of industrialization in Russia), it just took a long while to dump absolutist monarchism along with a few other things (it was the last country in Europe to get rid of serfs, too). None of which means it was a society that wasn't going through massive turmoil before those events.
It was indeed going through massive turmoil, but, like its immediate western neighbors and Britain, it seemed to be on the process of self-correcting into a stable constitutional monarchy prior to the outbreak of World War I.
Nisarg said:
You are grossly overestimating the importance of the United States in the progress and aftermath of the 1st World War.
Do you think France, Britain and the rapidly spiralling Russia (and their smaller allies) would have defeated Germany and Austria? It seems to me that the germanic states were grinding down their western foes and taking advantage of internal dissent in Russia to achieve complete military victory.
Considering that the governments of Germany and especially Austria were monarchial and that they were forcibly dissassembled by foreign powers after they lost the war, I'd say that the US (the factor that turned the tide of said war) was a rather significant factor in the dissolution of monarchy.
Nisarg said:
But anyways, the dragonmarked houses do not seem like 20th century corporations, they seem far more like trading houses of early renaissance italy.
They remain nonetheless extragovernmental bodies with international reach and great economic power. Their organization is strongly driven by magical effects (the dragonmarks themselves). Their economic influence and political independence across national lines are hallmarks not just of 20th century corporations but of cyberpunk visions of 21st century corporations.
Nisarg said:
And none of this explains why people are still going around with plate mail and longswords, and dressing and acting like medieval peasants in a world with railroads.
People go around with plate mail and longswords as long as those are the best available armaments at a reasonable price.
Wands require special training and don't offer huge benefits, to say nothing of their expense. To wield a wand of magic missile (1d4+1 damage), a soldier has to take a level in either a PC class, Adept or Magewright. By contrast, if he has a Strength of 14, he can do 2d6+3 with a greatsword and his meager Warrior level. On the other hand, a d20 MODERN rifle typically does 2d6 damage and requires Weapon Proficiency (Firearms), which a Warrior can get at first level. Thanks to its range and not requiring a good Strength, it's a better weapon than the greatsword - just like its real-life equivalent, and for the same reason. The wand of magic missile probably isn't as good.
For the same price as a wand, you can get a +1 sword that's significantly more useful to a typical soldier.
Eberron experienced a magical industrial revolution, but it doesn't exactly mimic Earth's industrial revolution. At a purely material level, its effects are quite different because what it did for Khorvaire is quite different from what the industrial revolution did for Europe.
Ignore the absence of a distinct and purely socio-political movement toward egalatarianism, one which both predates the Earthly industrial revolution and came to prominence in a country initially more agrarian than not - even though that absence in and of itself explains why economic determinism wouldn't drive Eberron from monarchies.
Rather than producing cheap, plentiful necessities, Eberron's industrial revolution produced less expensive, more common luxuries. It didn't produce items that were strictly better than those that came before; it reduced the very best items from before to an affordable level.
A wand of magic missile is still a luxury item. In Earthly terms, its more equivalent in cost to a small piece of field artillery than a repeater rifle - but it offers significantly less power than a repeater rifle. On a massed battlefield, the fact that the wand won't miss at least once in twenty shots on average may be worthwhile, but an adventurer is still better off with a sword.
Likewise, Eberron simply doesn't possess the advanced agriculture needed to abandon feudalism. The city of Sharn, wonky demographics aside, could not support itself entirely on create food and water spells; the agricultural base of Breland supports Sharn, just as the (non-industrialized) agricultural base of Russia supported Moscow and St. Petersburg - and could not support them during WW1. People live like peasants in Khorvaire because Khorvaire's industrial revolution hasn't eliminated the need for massed agriculture.
