I saw your answer about how long it would take for cows to go from scrawny to beefy under your economic development plans, and that raised a question I hadn’t previously thought of: how much of your economic development plans are based on hindsight/presentism? If some lord or lady were to take over any of these regions with an eye towards economic development, how well would you be able to make an argument for any of your plans based solely on what you/they know right there in Westeros?

To quote myself:

Anonymous asked: In your economic development posts how much of the analysis is based on what is known now vs what was known “back then”? How much of what was known to some could reasonably be expected to be known by your average ruler?

I try to stay within the boundaries of what could be known to an early-modern ruler. I.E, no inventing the steam engine out of nowhere.

Obviously, I can’t eliminate presentism entirely, but I try to play fair.

So in general, when I wrote the various economic development plans, I tried to avoid blatant presentism – i.e, no inventing the steam engine and turning the North into an industrial powerhouse complete with trouble t’mill, just because the North has a lot of sheep and that’s how the North of England economically developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

So in general, I rely on economic development methods that were used in the early-modern period – canal-building, changing agricultural methods, the formation of state-backed joint-stock companies as a means of encouraging international commerce, innovations in banking and finance, investing in manufacturing (especially textiles), and so forth. To my mind, this creates a certain plausibility whereby you could imagine a particularly curious, ambitious, well-traveled, -educated, and -advised ruler of one of the Seven Kingdoms paying attention to what’s going on in the Free Cities and among the merchant and artisan classes of Westeros and pursuing these kind of policies. 

There is a certain inescapable element of presentism in that I’m selecting methods of the early-modern period that were successful in their time, which somewhat assumes that economic development will follow a similar path on Planetos. (Although the Free Cities suggests that it’s not far off).