BloodHenge wrote:
Boss Out of Town wrote:
[...]bound labor (white and black sharecroppers) still worked southern fields into the 1960s.
True enough. All eight of my great grandparents were (white) sharecroppers in Edgecombe County, North Carolina. My mother used to go to her grandparents' farm and help loop tobacco during the harvest.
On the flipside of this our neighbor's great grandfather bought a 1904 Case Steam Tractor as soon as they arrived in the area, within a few years they had replaced every pieces of manual driven equipment with mechanized equivalents by about 1915.
But we have such a limited population up here that we traded the horse and the work crew for full mechanization as soon as we could because it cost a good deal of money to keep on full work crews and horses (especially once the winds scoured everything).
So depending on their population situation they could be using large scale mechanized industry or they could be relying on a massive workforce of largely unskilled labor. Of course the ruling government would also have a hand in this. They could be using manual labor for a lot simply because it is quite cheap to keep them around while establishing heavy industry can be taxing on a countries coffers. But we have to assume that they at least have the technical means to establish machine and foundry works to produce relatively modern firearms. Guns of the type shown so far didn't really come into widespread use till the mid 1800's in the United States.