...I remember reading, back in the early 1990s,

a book where the author proposed an alternative history in which the South managed to retain power after the Civil War (I don't think it was an outright victory, insomuch as they forced the North to concede considerably) and allied with the Kaiser during WW1.

 

Anyone by chance recall the title?

I never did finish it.

sounds like one of harry turtledoves alternate histories.  if memory serves there was a trilogy about the civil war then another about ww1 with the confeds siding with britain and france and the north siding with the kaiser.  think there is a trilogy about ww2 but i'm not sure.

Armchair Private,
Good points. A rather intelligent man once opined that the four most important human inventions were language, writing, movable type, and computers, in that order. I think he was right, but I happen to think that you're more right; without agriculture we'd still be stuck with cavorting Druids and dung for dinner, as Edmund Blackadder would say.

It seems to come down to what you're trying to accomplish with your continuum-meddling. If your goal is personal power, weapons are generally the key- although I could probably make a fortune in the trade by introducing better ships around 500 B.C. If, on the other hand, you want to preserve or improve a society, information technology is the way to go. In my case I view pre-Imperial Rome as a good thing worth preserving, and certainly better than the mass of bickering fiefdoms which would take its place for so many years.

Then again, when I ran the original question by a coworker, he answered that he'd give Damascus steel to the Scots, just because.

You just can't argue with disease : all that the conquistadors had to do was walk through an area and sneeze on people and within a few years 95% of the population was gone. Poof.

Cocaine requires not just growing but sophisticated processing to concentrate the extracts.

If the central American tribes worked gold (albeit limited smeltering) and had crude forms of glass, then teaching them the chemistry and distillations to extract cocaine shouldn't have been too much an issue.
Maintaining purity and potency, without advanced chemistry and more modern scientific instruments, may prove the difficult part.

 

...but after all, if I'm going back in time and taking things with me (knowledge, machines, tools, etc)...

 

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How about this one: introduce black powder and firearms (including cannon) manufacture to a pre-1000 AD Europe, and see just how long the "novelty" of  castles and other walled fortifications lasts.

I'm not so sure that going back in time with anything short of modern technology gives you enough of an edge to just walk in and act like you own the place. Until you get to repeating rifles, firearms aren't actually all that powerful in and of themselves. A longbow had better range and accuracy than early muskets, and a better rate of fire as well. The penetration of a musket ball wasn't all that much better than an armor-piercing arrow either, and many suits of armor both in Europe and Japan were shot by a musket, the charachteristic circular indentation in the breastplate was proof of their quality. But training a bowman takes years, and crafting bows is often time consuming as well. The power of early firearms was that they made relatively untrained conscripts in huge groups quite powerful. However to produce such a mass of armed conscripts you need industrialization. The two go hand in hand. The pyrotechnic effects of potassium nitrate had been known for centuries, possibly a millenium or more before gunpowder become a common weapon. Part of the reason was the need for the formula to mature, but a lot of it was simply that manufacturing a gun barrel is not an easy task, even on a small scale basis. Industrial manufacturing of such devices would be possible only with a lot of investement of time and effort. Not impossible, but definitely difficult and very time consuming. Possibly too much for a single human lifetime.

 

 

the refining cocaine thing isnt so hard..

just an acid- base extraction

 

might even be possible to skip gunpowder and go straight to HE

 

give the romans big ballista bolts with a guncotton warhead?

I agree that it would be difficult to import some technologies back in time. All the stuff we have needs too much specialized support. If I could travel back with a machine gun, my advantage in a fight would last only as long as I had bullets to fire. I still like the idea of bringing back some type of concept, one that could jump start technological innovation before it actually ocurred.

Treadgar