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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8336461" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think I used the notion of a gradient. I did talk about differences. You own use of the verb to achieve shows that there are some challenges in locutions here.That said, Australia has no manufacturing capacity for mobile phones, nor any more for cars, yet both are pretty ubiquitous. The previous sentence is also true if "Kenya" is substituted for "Australia", except that Kenya has never had a manufacturing capacity for cars.Notions of core and periphery can be useful for trying to get a handle on patterns of wealth and trade, some dynamics of diffusion, etc. (Such notions are also going to have to be tentative, given that the periphery (eg Mongolia, or Britain) can feed back into the core in surprising and dramatic ways.) It seems that any "realistic" treatment of the Grippli vis-a-vis Cormyr would have to accept that they are going to be on the periphery, in the same sort of way that (in Europe) Albania has been peripheral in a way that Austria has not been, or (in the US) South Dakota is peripheral in a way that California is not. We might except Grippli manufacturing capacity and trading significance to be less than found in the core of Cormyr. But we wouldn't expect "primitiveness" in the sense of - say - a resolute determination to not use those metal knives or axes that are available. Or as far as the waterproofing of houses is concerned, we wouldn't expect any significant difference in performance between the houses built by Grippli and the houses built in the nearest Cormyrean villages. Whereas we would probably expect fewer opera houses or grand cathedrals among the Grippli than in the Cormyrean capital.I don't think notions of "primitive" or "advanced" are terribly useful. But notions of causal dependence can be useful. You gave an example: smelting iron is causally dependent on access to certain resources. Perhaps a bit more intricately, having access to vast quantities of steel is dependent on having railways to cart ore and coal, which are in term dependent on having access to vast quantities of steel - this is (one example of) the self-sustaining causal process of industrialisation that can emerge only under pretty distinct conditions.Which relates to your remarks about a "novel set of tools". This is, at its core, the rationalisation/technicalisation thesis found in (eg) Weber and Hodgson. In one sense, this social form is very durable - once it emerges, it appears that it absorbs/destroys all others that it comes into contact with. (One version of this idea is Weber's "iron cage"; another is Marx's idea of the power of liberal capitalism to dissolve all other relations of production.)  In another sense, though, there is no reason to think it is can last - Weber flagged as the limit the consumption of fossil fuels; it seems more likely now that the limit is the consumption of atmospheric capacity. In this way it is different from hunter-gatherer or pastoralist technologies which have shown themselves to be very durable on their own terms (I use that last qualification because they have also shown themselves highly liable to destruction/absoprtion by industrial modernity - see the opening sentences of this paragraph).</blockquote>

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