Go back to the ancient world and they don't care about your magic steam engine because it uses too much resources? Make one gun and they'll want to get better a

Go back to the ancient world and they don't care about your magic steam engine because it uses too much resources? Make one gun and they'll want to get better at extracting resources quickly. James C Scott chronicles in his various books about how most people do what they can to avoid top-down control. Before such weapons of coercion, it would have been much more difficult to enforce the hierarchies suggested by industrialization.