What is the engine for historical change?

A question that's been rattling around my head lately

I want to throw something out and see where the community takes it.

We tend to study history through the lens of power - empires, wars, leaders, revolutions. Great Man theory, geopolitics, economics. That's the default.

But there's a growing argument that the real engine of historical change is something far less dramatic: infrastructure. Roads. Aqueducts. Undersea cables. Sewage systems. Shipping containers.

The Roman Empire didn't fall because of barbarians or decadence - it fell when the roads couldn't be maintained. The British Empire wasn't built on military genius - it was built on naval logistics and telegraph cables. The modern global order arguably owes more to the standardised shipping container than to any treaty or ideology.

So here's the challenge:

Pick any major historical event or shift. Now explain it purely through infrastructure rather than through people or politics.

I'll start: The French Revolution. The standard narrative is Enlightenment ideas and an out-of-touch monarchy. Infrastructure lens? France's road network centralised everything through Paris, meaning grain shortages in the provinces hit the capital harder than anywhere else. Paris starved while other regions coped. The concentration of hungry, angry people in one place, with direct access to the seat of power, made revolution almost inevitable. The roads did it.

Your turn. Break something open for us.

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