>>20032575The average level now is "Victorian" and people freely discuss 1830's technology as if it was commonplace. With the punk history addition, you can go beyond that, its effects will just effectively be scaled back (so a musket infantry will be as effective as an early modern rifleman, or the other nations will just have more musketmen to compensate, etc.)
As I said, this wouldn't really touch the society. Still a Watchman-state where Devs only intervene when laws of the Stock Exchange are broken. Power is concentrated in the hands of the rich, wealth gives prestige, society as a whole is extremely individualistic.
This would be more in line with how NASFAQ operates, since the stock trading itself would be done much faster, people rushing in when the exchange opened rather than waiting for weeks to hear about the investment's/company's fate. Information, numbers crunching, the floor's dynamic and bustling, those are things that I imagine when it comes to those periods, especially since shares were something that was still a physical document.
