Young Writers Society

So one of my projects right now is set in a country that has been isolated for somewhere between 200 and 400 years. (Time to be solidly decided once I figure out what's realistic for their level of development.) It's based in Anglo-European culture and has ~1200s-level tech when they're first isolated. The country has magic (in fact, it's the only country in its world with ~10% magic users as opposed to ~.01%).

There's still some passage in and out of the country -- out, mostly -- but there's almost no trade and no significant communication with the outside world. The most it knows about its nearest neighbor (a collapsing empire) is that it's undergoing a violent revolution, because a handful of refugees came to them 20 years ago. Full stop. They aren't interested in anything about the outside world, and they're protected by a magical border/barrier that repels anyone and anything they don't want getting in.

I guess my question here is: What real-world cognates would there be to this kind of isolation? Is there a way to realistically estimate how far tech would have come in 200 to 400 years since isolation, without outside trade or communication?

One of the countries in the world has developed steam power, gunpowder as a weaponry tool, and advanced medicine (for the time period, like inoculation etc.) by the time the border comes down. Assuming they were slightly ahead of Country #1 when the border went up, what would be a realistic time frame for that? I was thinking ~400 years for steam power and widespread inoculation, but I know that gunpowder (and early inoculation) came much earlier than that.

Any ideas? Discussion? I'd be glad to hear anything.

I don't have much to say specifically, because I'm not very knowledgeable about that kind of stuff.

But I think an isolated country could have the potential to develop in a similar way to the countries that they are isolated from, and here's why: people have the same problems, usually, and tend to think up solutions to those problems. Sure, some of them will be a lot different than other countries (even countries on earth have different solutions for different problems that vary in morality and maybe their ability or depending on what resources they have).

Let me give an example. I work with kids (actually I have two examples). And often times I'll run into someone who also works with kids, and we'll get to talking about various things in our jobs and a common issue we had will come up and we'll both have found a way to fix it (sometimes one of us may still be in the process of finding a solution) but it will often be from a slightly different approach.

The other example I have issss if you introduce something new to a area where lots of kids frequent, you'd be surprised how one day one kid will do something with that thing (that you would have never thought of) and then the next day a kid that never saw that other kid do that will do that EXACT same thing, and it will go on and on and on- because there's almost like an unwritten rule or blueprint to the human brain that allows us to interact with objects, or leads us to certain conclusions.

So basically I do think it's realistic enough to say that the isolated country would develop and mostly equally to the outer countries. Especially if they had other things taken care of- like they didn't have to worry about getting clean water or food and shelter- as in they had a already extremely good set up that way. If their main focus was on improving their technology.

Hopefully that wasn't TOO all over the place!

Hey! So the first thing I thought of was Japan's period of isolationism, which lasted from 1633-1853. It's 220 years of isolation, but technology-wise it doesn't quite fit because they had significantly higher levels of technology at the time than 1200s technology. Still, you could probably look at how technology changed over the period and draw conclusions from that.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the period to talk at length about the implications of their isolationism. But hopefully this can be a starting point in your research.

One thing that I think could really affect your magical country's technological development is, well, the magic, as one in every ten people have it. Depending on what your magic system can do and the cost of using magic, technology could be considerably hastened in some areas where magic contributes to development and slowed in other areas where maybe magic already fulfills a need that would have otherwise been explored. Because of the magic, you could take small liberties with the time period expected for the technological development and probably make it work.

I definitely see what you're saying there.

Brainstorming here: As to why it hasn't developed similarly to the advanced country. They don't have the resources necessary for gunpowder. That's the simple one. They're also a relatively small country, and magic-assisted travel for those who can afford it replaced the need for engines or other non-horse-and-wagon forms of travel. As for inoculation, I might actually see if they'd have come up with a form of that (illness is always an issue, after all).

Magic is definitely going to fill a lot of gaps that were filled by scientific tech in our own world.

If anyone else has ideas for big forms of tech that would have come around in that time period, you can always bring them up and I'll see what makes sense c:

Thanks y'all!

Europe and by exstention the country of China experinced a massive technological advancement because of their access to resources. Which is why when they went over the the americas, the less unified natives were basicly treated like barbarians, simply not enough resources, nor were the groups in the americas particularly unified.

Same thing happened with the middle east. There were a bunch of nomadic groups with very few resources and barly any interaction between groupds.

Same thing with southern africa.

Isolation more often then not slows down technological, economic, and cultural advencement. Needs will inspire improvement, but not in the same ways as a place with a lot of resources and knowledge to work with. Even if they had the same resources, there are a lot of ways to do things, so plenty of different ways they could have solved the problem. There are about 20 different ways to solve a headache for example, depending on the area and what was avalable to people in that area.

Though unlike these examples. Your hidden away country has a resource in abundance that none of its neighbors have. Which is magic. So their techological advancement would likely mostly go in that direction.

Look for problems that were not solved in the 1200's and what was solved after. See how your magic system might have solved those, and what things they would have just figured out with local resources.

After that, think about what things might have not happened for religious, cultural, or demographic reasons.

This is super interesting.

I mean there are still isolated tribes in the Amazon who have no technology whatsoever and have never had contact with the outside world - there's literally laws protecting them from contact so that we can watch their development from a distance (and also to not completely change their way of life).

Development is interesting in that often the same thing is invented multiple times in different places by different people- I mean Alan Turing gets the credit for cracking enigma but a Polish team had done the same thing. That's the one example I can think of off the top of my head but there are others as well. War is sadly usually the catalyst for that.

But also it's interesting at how development can be so uneven. Stalin is often credited as the man who met Russia with a donkey drawn cart and left her with a nuclear reactor. Russia had about 200 years of development squashed into 20 (at unimaginable costs). Meanwhile if you look at African nations currently, most African people skipped the landline and have gone straight for smartphones, and likely Africa will skip over fossil fuels and head straight for renewable energy. Which is because widespread poverty held them back for so long in colonial and post-colonial times, but that's beginning to shift and they'll actually skip out on the stuff in between.

So your country is medieval and you want the rest of the world to be experiencing a new born Industrial Revolution. Has the Agricultural Revolution happened where you are? Take a look at farming methods and food production (Also consider whether or not the potato has been cultivated by them). Remember that without the Agricultural Revolution, your population won't have boomed and will stay pretty small.

Regarding medicine and inoculation... depends on where you are. The Arab world had very advanced medicine before, you know, Europe decided we didn't like it and destroyed everything. Remember we didn't understand what the heart did until the 1600s when Harvey cut up a dead person. Does your culture allow for cutting up dead people yet? That's going to impact on their medicine. But you can still use herbal remedies - foxglove and coffee for heart failure anybody? (It works! Sort of...) Maybe they've figured out where cholera comes from, maybe they haven't. They still wouldn't have antibiotics so everyone dies from fever anyway but you know, happy thoughts.