“look at how England shifted from a relatively poor nation into the economic and financial powerhouse of Europe due to the commercial and industrial revolutions”. That’s what I was getting at. England prospered due to policies and technologies that gave it an advantage over the rest of Europe. I’m not asking “what if we gave every country the steam engine at the same time” (although it sounds interesting), but rather “was there way for Russia or another country to get where England got first”?

Oh, I see what you mean. Well, sure, the Dutch and the French had a lot of the necessary components, and if a few 17th-19th century wars had gone the other way and England/Britain wasn’t able to grab the lion’s share of world markets, they might have been able to pull it off. If Germany had developed political features – the Zollverein, tariffs, state support for infrastructure, and the German model of higher education – earlier than it did, then it probably would have overtaken the UK rather quickly.

But isn’t the basic fact about the superhero comics that they are power-fantasies put out by corporations who screwed its creators, or that they originated as a front company for Depression gangsters (as per Gerard Jones’ MEN OF TOMORROW)? How does the pro-Union man in you square that union-busting exploitative history?

Name an industry that doesn’t screw over its workers and I’ll show you an industry that doesn’t exist.

So unless you want to live in a cave and solely enjoy shadow-puppets, you’re going to have to engage with cultural industries that are varying levels of exploitative.

But there are more or less socially conscious ways of consuming – supporting the legal rights of creators is one way, supporting unionization rights is another, boycotts or collective purchasing actions, engaging in criticism, and so on and so forth. So consume, but consume consciously.

Someone may have already asked this, but who would come out ahead if every kingdom tried to implement your Economic Development Plans more or less at the same time? Is it just a case of the-rich-get-richer where the Reach and the Westerlands ride their advantages to economic supremacy, or do the poorer kingdoms (the North, Dorne, the Stormlands) have some hope of catching up?

Discussed somewhat here and here.

It’s not just the case that the rich-get-richer; economic development can rapidly shift who’s rich and who’s not both inter- and intra-regionally: look at how England shifted from a relatively poor nation into the economic and financial powerhouse of Europe due to the commercial and industrial revolutions, or how the economic balance of power within the U.S has shifted over time (the Industrial Belt becomes the Rust Belt, the South moves from the “Nation’s #1 economic problem” to the Sunbelt, the factory towns of New England that have become hollowed out when the factories moved away).

My thinking is that the winners and losers have a lot to do with two main factors: timing and advantage:

When it comes to commercial infrastructure, getting there first gives a given region a huge head-start over their rivals, as was seen historically with the Erie Canal putting New York ahead of Pennsylvania and Virginia when it came to capturing the new east-west trade with the Midwest.
It also matters, on an industry-by-industry basis, whether a given region has an absolute or comparative advantage in that industry. So for example, the North is going to be very difficult to beat in the wool and woolen garment trade once it captures the higher valued-added segments of the industry, because it has such a large amount of land that’s suited to pasturage. Yes, the Reach is large, but you’d be giving up a lot of agricultural productivity by shifting over from cereal crops, fruits and veg, and dairy farming to sheep, so that raises the opportunity cost of investing in that industry. (On the other hand, the Reach might have lower opportunity costs when it came to linens or cotton.) Likewise, the Westerlands are probably going to be hard to beat when it comes to finance or metallurgy.

Why do superhero comics and movies appeal to you, in particular? Some historian friends of mine aren’t fond of them because of the savior idea that’s inherently present in them.

Well, partly I was a fan of superhero comics and movies before I became a historian. And partly because I’m a historian who studies the 1930s when superheroes were invented, I’m interested in the historical context, the way that superhero media respond to certain sociocultural anxieties – whether it’s urban crime and corruption, fascism, and war in the 1930s and 1940s, or the moral panics of the 1950s, or the counter-culture, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate in the 1960s and 1970s, Reaganism, the war on drugs, and urban decay in the 1980s, and of course 9/11.

Now, yes, there have always been arguments that superheroes tend towards a Great Man view of history or sometimes even a quasi-fascist worldview where superior beings remake the world through violence (the thesis of Watchmen). However, these takes are rather reductive – superheroes play many different roles that don’t fit into that niche.

Superheroes are often portrayed as inspiring and motivating ordinary people to take action as opposed to hero worship, whether we’re talking about Cap exhorting SHIELD agents to fight HYDRA in Winter Soldier or the people of New York helping Spidey fight the Green Goblin. And superheroes can also inspire non-dominant groups in a world in which they see few role models in dominant culture – hence why Wonder Woman became such an iconic figure, especially during the 1970s when the women’s liberation movement was at its peak, or how the X-Men have been used to discuss a myriad of outsider groups fighting against discrimination.

Different anon. On the subject of Dorne, how exactly were they able to hold put while the Targaryens were burning their infrastructure and their arable land? Didn’t their troops hiding in the desert ever run out of supplies? And why was their loyalty to the Martells so strong that no one considered betraying them to save themselves and their families?

1. Through one of the fundamental rules of guerrilla warfare: being willing to accept more casualties than your opponents.

2. Yes, they probably did.

3. It wasn’t their loyalty to the Martells, it was their loyalty to Dorne.

What was the purpose of Theon’s reaving along the Stony Shore?

Balon’s plan was that Theon’s reaving would provoke the North into deploying their forces away from the main thrust: “It may be that you will draw some of the northern lords out from behind their stone walls.”

Ironically, the only forces that responded were the Wild Rabbits, whereas when Theon diverged from the plan and had Dagmer attack Torrhen’s Square he actually did get the North to divert its military forces.

Hi! So again with the Dornish. If the Targaryens reduced Dorne’s number of men they could field by half, then how significantly did the Dragon’s Wroth cripple Dorne’s production capabilities? And how did they do it? I mean, what you’re saying is that the Dornish were economically crippled and developmentally stunted for the better half of 300 years because of a war that lasted a fraction of that time. I know it’s possible, but what exactly did they destroy to cause that much irreparable damage?

Discussed here.

The thing to understand about agricultural societies is that you can get into a negative population cycle where a big loss of labor force means production drops and then population drops because of the decreased production and on and on.

So I would guess that the major impact of the Targaryens is that A. they killed a lot of people both in conventional warfare and by raining fire from the skies down on every major center of population over and over for nine years, and B. they caused a lot of damage to the productive infrastructure that the population centers were sitting on top of and depended upon.

To give a real world example: Genghis Khan’s destruction of the Khwarezmid Empire and the Abbassid Caliphate involved millions of deaths (both due to war, the Khan’s reprisals for his murdered messengers, and famine and disease caused by large-scale destruction of crops), but the real long-term damage was the destruction of the irrigation canals, which permanently reduced the agricultural productivity of the region.

what does it actually mean when you say that Dorne only has 25,000 men who can be called to fight? if there’s a major war, could they not just find another few thousand men to arm anyway, and just eat the consequences in diminished manpower/labor later on after the crisis is over?

It means that Dorne doesn’t have the resources to arm, armor, feed, and supply more than that, because they are a thinly-peopled medieval state without the state capacity in finance, bureaucracy, communications, and logistics that early modern nation-states developed.

How did Dorne went from being the only Realm capable of withstanding the might of the Targaryens and keep independent for over a century to the second weakest region in Westeros?

Because they withstood the might of the Targaryens. That’s not something you do without cost:

“Queen Rhaenys led the first assault on Dorne, moving swiftly to seize Dornish seats as she approached Sunspear and burning the Planky Town on Meraxes…

The war against the Dornish entered a different phase after the release of Orys One-hand and the other handless lords, for King Aegon was by that time intent on revenge. The Targaryens unleashed their dragons, burning the defiant castles again and again…So again the Targaryens turned to their dragons, unleashing their fury upon Starfall and Skyreach and Hellholt.

…The two years that followed were later called the years of the Dragon’s Wroth. Grief-stricken at the death of their beloved sister, King Aegon and Queen Visenya set ablaze every castle, keep, and holdfast in Dorne at least once…Dorne was a blighted, burning ruin by this time, and still the Dornish hid and fought from the shadows, refusing to surrender. Even the smallfolk refused to yield, and the toll in lives was uncountable

…Lord Tyrell, whom Daeron had left in charge of Dorne, valiantly attempted to quell the fires of rebellion, traveling from castle to castle with each turn of the moon—punishing any supporters of the rebels with the noose, burning down the villages that harbored the outlaws, and so on…”

As I’ve said before, I think it’s quite possible that Dorne once had 50,000 men in its armies, but can today only muster 25,000.

“GRRM has very carefully established that the Dothraki have a quasi-religious fear and awe of dragons” – For an AU I’m working on – In a post Doom Planetos, what effect would a dragon lord (family with dragons) taking over Essaria (similar to the Targaryens taking control of Dragonstone) have on the Century of Blood, especially with regards to the Sarnori Kingdoms and their interactions with Essaria after the Dothraki raids had already started to escalate? – Thank You, RSAFan.

Depending on whether the dragonlord in question decided to rescue the Sarnori from the Dothraki, it could have averted the fall of the Kingdom of Sarnor and the establishment of the Dothraki Sea.

But even if they had decided not to intervene, it definitely would have stopped the Dothraki from threatening the Free Cities.