I’m curious about where the idea for a system of canals in your Westerosi economic development plans came from. The only IRL historical example of such a system that I can think of was in China, and that one kinda broke down in government corruption and general infrastructure decay after a thousand years or so. I guess I’m curious about how you would manage the upkeep of these canals, and also how you would counteract corruption in trading ports and port cities in general.

Great question!

You’re not the first person to bring this up, but no, the Grand Canal of China is not the only example of premodern canal-building as an economic development strategy, only the biggest and most extravagant example.

Indeed, the reason why I put canals at the center of my Economic Development plans is that canal-building was a quite common part of Early Modern European economic development, as the Commercial Revolution offered enormous advantages to European states that could move goods faster than their competitors:

In France, canal-building was a major part of the economic policy of more than a few monarchs and finance ministers: you had the Briare Canal (35 miles long) built to link the Loire to the Seine, and most impressively you had the Canal des Deux Mers which connected the Atlantic to the Medittarnean (270 miles long).
In Germany, the Prussians were absolutely mad for canals, so you had a series of canals built by zarious Hohenzollerns to link the Elbe to the Oder to the Weser.
Due to the nature of their geography, the Dutch and the Belgians were huge innovators in canals going back to the 13th century, building canals to protect their cities from armies and floods but also to encourage water-based commerce, and to connect Amsterdam to Haarlem, Haarlem to Leiden, and so on and so forth.
While most English canals were built during the “canal mania” of the 18th and early 19th centuries, there are quite a few canals built during the Early Modern period (the Exeter Canal in 1566, the Oxford-Burcot improvements to the Thames between 1605-1635, the River Wey improvements in 1653, the Stamford Canal in 1670, etc.)

In general, I opted for canals because you can build them with existing technology (they mostly involve a lot of manual labor, and various forms of simple locks were well within the technological capacity of Medieval Europeans) which means that the plan doesn’t rely on the discovery of new technology, they have a broad economic impact across a wide area by reducing transportation costs and lowering the price of bulk goods, and because Westeros has a lot of major river systems that almost, but don’t quite, connect so that relatively short canals can have an outsized impact on travel.

In your Westeros economic development series you often say that you would, if in charge of Westeros, build lots of canals to bolster trade. I’m wondering how common or feasible this was during the actual middle ages. I mean, I know it’s possible; the Chinese built the Grand Canal during the early middle ages, but, as I understand it, that was an undertaking comparable to, if not exceeding, the construction of the Great Wall. Would medieval lords and kings actually build a lot of river canals?

The Grand Canal is something of an outlier, both because of its immense length (1,115 miles) and because because it involved the construction of summit-level canals (i.e, canals that rise and then fall, in order to connect two separate river valleys) rather than simple lateral canals (which have a continual fall).

But it’s not like there weren’t canals built in the Middle Ages outside of China. You have the Fossa Carolina, which Charlesmagne had built to link the Rhine to the Danube: the Glastonbury Canal which dates back to the 11th century, the Navigilio Grande which was built to connect Milan to the Ticino river in the late 12-13th centuries, and the Stecknitz Canal build in the 14th century.

So in terms of whether canal building is feasible in Westeros, it depends on how long and/or complicated the canals are built.

Same anon that asked about Land Reform. I noted you also mentioned guild charters, as part of Industrial Policy. Couldn’t that also be counter productive, as you hand the reins of power in towns to monopolistic, rent seeking and close minded groups. Guilds were insular by nature, to protect their secrets and often stifled trade with price fixing, limited production and narrow membership. Entrenching them seems the best way to stifle the capitalists that would be created by the other reforms.

In your economic development plans, you mention multiple infrastructural, technical and financial reforms to farming. However a issue that seems to have gone largely unmentioned is the process of Land Reform. Unreformed land practices mean you can’t easily or quickly implement new innovations, due to the land being fragmented or held in common. So it seems a Enclosure or something similar should be a major part of any plan. But of course they come with some nasty social issues to address.

As for the question of land reform:

To start with, we don’t really know how land is distributed in Westeros. There doesn’t seem to be any textual evidence for common land being a thing, but that doesn’t mean it does or doesn’t exist. Likewise, there isn’t a very clear description of hierarchies of land tenure among the peasantry.
I would take exception to the argument that land being evenly distributed or held in common would necessarily prevent innovations in agriculture. Rather, it would simply require different forms of social coordination – a lot of medieval agriculture was coordinated through manorial courts, for example.

As for the guilds:

That certainly is the picture of guilds that we get from Adam Smith et al., but whether that’s the whole story is another question. The guilds, as I have written, primarily existed to ensure a balance between labor supply and labor demand that would allow for their members to earn a living wage. Whether that’s viewed as stifling trade depends on one’s position vis-a-vis labor supply and labor demand: it’s certainly to the advantage of the merchant that there be as many weavers as possible, but that’s not to the advantage of the weavers, if they’re underemployed and poorly paid as a result.
Indeed, when it comes to the long-run of economic development, I don’t think you get the critical mass of skilled workers, especially skilled workers with capital, one needs to kick off a commercial and later industrial revolution without a guild system to train and protect them, especially in the fledging phases of development. This last part becomes particularly clear when you see how often guild masters become merchants and industrialists themselves, once again in the early phases of economic development.
Finally, economic development and the development of capitalists are not the same objective.

Regarding Riverrun-2, would a Lord Paramount actually have the power to just take a chunk of land like that from an existing lord? And would he need permission (from the King?) to build a castle and start charging a toll?

Well, it’s not entirely clear who the land at the confluence of the RedFork and the Blue Fork belongs to. There aren’t a lot of noble houses listed in that area – there’s the Mallisters up on the coast, but Oldstones does not have a ruling house (hence the whole business with Jenny), there’s no known ruling house of Fairmarket, and the only other named house from that region are the Blackwoods, and they seem to be center more to the west (directly north of Riverrun). If the land is not currently occupied by a ruling house, than the law of escheat says it reverts back to the liege lord.

As to whether you need permission to build a castle and start charging a toll, there isn’t explicit text either way. However, if King Daeron II had the authority to give Daemon Blackfyre the right to build a castle in the Crownlands, my guess would be that the Lord Paramount of the Riverlands has the authority to grant a license to build a castle on its own lands. And the same logic would likely hold for tolls, given that it wouldn’t be interfering with a royal highway and if a lesser Houses like the Freys can charge tolls for bridges I would imagine the same would apply for their liege lords.

How long would it take to build a castle like Riverrun 2 and what would you call it?

Years if not decades, based on historical examples. As for a name, @goodqueenaly suggests “The Tines,” since the tine is the sharp point of the Trident and this castle would be a strongpoint on the Trident. Also, it’s a nice echoing of “The Twins,” another bridge-castle of the Riverlands.

Youve said that you’d like to build riverrun2 at the mouth of the trident before but isnt lht right /there/ already?

Not exactly. I want to build Riverrun 2 here:

That’s a good bit west and north of Lord Harroway’s Town. This location would allow a castle to have rivers on three flanks and a moat on its western flank would give it the same capability to withstand sieges as Riverrun.

Moreover, two drawbridges anchored on that center spit of land could allow land traffic to cross from the south bank of the Red Fork to the north bank, and then from the north bank of the Red Fork to the northern bank of the Green Fork, at the castle’s discretion. At the same time, lowering the drawbridges would allow the castle to intercept river traffic on all three forks of the Trident.

Canal Talk

should a trident-gods eye canal start from the trident or the god’s eye?

The Godseye.

When you’re building a canal, one of the trickier bits of engineering is that, until you’ve dug out the channel connecting the two ends and gotten the slopes, depth, and lining right, you need to keep out the water on either end, which usually involves building a temporary dam/levee on either end. This is especially the case if you’re building locks and gates which need to be put in place beforehand.

It’s a lot easier to do that with a relatively still body of water like the Godseye lake than it is with a river which has a current behind it.

about the economic development plans, was diverting half of rippledown rill to trident and deepening it enough to form a canal from trident to god’s eye included? if not, that might be a nice feat to be able to navigate all the way from neck to KL inlands.

I don’t think the geography of that quite works out.

From my reading of the text, the Rippledown Rill would have to be to the west of Harrenhal (on a rough northwest to southeast loop), which would substantially extend the length of a Trident-Godseye canal compared to just building north from Harrenhal (where the Godseye is about 50 miles closer to to the Trident compared to the eastern or western sides) to the nearest point on the Trident.

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).

Maester Steven, may I please ask if your Economic Development Plans would be subject to alteration were they applied to now defunct polities like the Kingdom of the Storm (in its “Sea to Shining Sea” phase) or the Ironborn domains during those years of darkness when the Islanders writ ran from the Arbor to Bear Islands?

Oh definitely they would change. As with Jaehaerys and his roads, economic and infrastructure development is usually driven by the interests of the center over the periphery.

So to take your example, I would imagine the Durrandons would discourage a Blue Fork canal in favor of a canal linking the Godseye to the Trident, as that would facilitate traffic in a southerly direction closer to the “home territories.”

As for the Ironborn at their coastal peak, well, they were rather notoriously uninterested in infrastructure that didn’t have to do with longships. Indeed, I would imagine they would ban bridge-building as a potential check on their power. But in the Hoare era of rulership over the Riverlands, I could see them favoring a Blue Fork canal to give the Iron Islands direct access to the Narrow Sea.

About 8 months ago, SLAL mentioned you had an idea of ‘link schools’ throughout Westeros, where the sciences are taught to a larger public. Can you elaborate on that? Like, where would you get the funds? Who’s your target for this increased education? Where would these schools be built?

Well, they weren’t purely for the sciences, but the idea I had as part of my economic development series was that, rather than having a system in which graduates of higher education were required to be polymaths (i.e, you need enough links on your chain to go around your neck and become a maester), you have schools set up where the objective is to train someone to competence in only one or two areas, and essentially create a new category of half-maester as credentialed specialists.

So for example, if you need more doctors, it makes sense to have schools where students go only to train to get silver links; or if you want to expand the communication network of the ravens out further, have people who only study to get black iron links; or if you need more accountants, have people who only study to get yellow gold links, and so on.

In terms of financing and location, my original idea was that a Lord Paramount would essentially subsidize the construction and operation of these schools by way of a payment to the Citadel, with schools located in cities/towns/major castles, in return for having their people educated at a reasonable price. And the target is essentially to build up the human capital of a given region, so that I have more literate people, more specialists in needed areas (not just doctors, but also lawyers, accountants, metallurgists, communications experts, teachers, etc.), and thus a more productive economy, although I imagine these halfmaester positions would probably be more attractive to the merchant, artisan, and wealthy peasant classes as a way to get their children a respected trade than to the nobility per se.