Here's a question: what would have taken to have a Roman industrial revolution? Or just an industrial revolution prior to the actual industrial revolution. And

Here's a question: what would have taken to have a Roman industrial revolution? Or just an industrial revolution prior to the actual industrial revolution. And here's a possible answer: I think there's a good chance that if Hannibal won the battle of Zama, we would have had a Roman industrial revolution. Why? Because competition is the mother of invention, and military competition doubly so. The industrial revolution was the outcome of a few hundred years of cutthroat military competition between Britain, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Sweden, the Ottomans, and maybe 10 or 20 other military powers in the theater. Sure, it was the coal and the steam engine that we associate with the industrial revolution, but there were thousands of innovations that preceded that, and many, if not most, were the product of the immense survival-of-the-fittest pressure generated by the perpetual tensions of living in such a bellicose area. After the Roman victory at the battle of Zama, Rome was left without any significant military competition. They defeated and sometimes conquered almost anyone they encountered. The ones that they couldn't just outright defeat (the Germans and the Parthians) were only able to withstand the Roman onslaught, but not to pose any threat to Rome themselves. But in an alternative history where Hannibal wins at Zama, we might have Carthage as a counterweight to Rome, maybe for a century or more. That would have kept the Greeks in the game too. And the Greeks were actually 3 powers (Macedonia proper, the Seleucid empire, and Ptolemaic Egypt). So at least 5 strong and quite evenly matched military actors around the Mediterranean. It is not inconceivable that a few hundred years of competition between these 5 actors could have resulted in an industrial revolution one millennium prior to the one we had.