There's another route to an industrial revolution that might have happened - steel.
The British industrial revolution was built from iron, not steel. Mass production of steel didn't appear until the 1880s, with the Bessemer converter. This was half a century after the deployment of successful railroads.
Iron and steel was known to the Roman empire. The steel wasn't very good, even by the standards of antiquity, but it was good enough for short swords and some tools. They got as far as the "bloom" process, but no further. Despite this, there was a modest iron and steel industry.
A Bessemer converter is a simple thing. It's a big iron vessel lined with brick attached to a furnace and blower. Roman ironworkers could have built one. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Bessemer built the thing, but steel quality was random at first. Robert Mushet, a metallurgist, after about 10,000 experiments, figured out how to get consistent quality from the process. The basic idea, from Wikipedia, is to apply enough heat and air to burn off almost all the carbon in iron ore, leaving pure iron. Then add 'spiegel glanz' or spiegel eisen, a "double carbonate of iron and manganese found in the Rhenish mountains" which was iron, 86…25; manganese, 8…50; and carbon, 5…25. Controlled amounts of manganese and carbon are thus put back into the molten iron, and steel comes out.
A number of cultures figured out steel by accident. Thus, Japanese steel, Damascus steel, etc.
Various trace additives - vanadium, molybdenum, etc. were used. The Roman empire got as far as mediocre steel. But the process was neither understood nor reproducible at scale. Mass production required enough analytical chemistry to do quality control on the ingredients.
So an interesting speculation is what might have happened if an early culture had some people really into finding out what stuff is made of. That leads to analytical chemistry. Some Roman philosopher might have discovered that if you grind rocks to a powder, mix with water, and spray into a steady flame, colored light comes out. If you look at that colored light through a prism, you see sharp lines, in the same places for the same materials, which indicate the elemental composition of the material. If they'd happened to talk to someone in the Roman army responsible for a sword factory having yield problems, they might have gotten some samples of the minerals being used. That might have led to the beginnings of metallurgy quality control. As there is in a modern steel plant, there would be somebody in a little room not too far from the furnaces doing analysis on the raw materials.
Steel would still be somewhat expensive, but with a repeatable production process, swords and knives would get better. Then agricultural implements and other tools. If you need to plow hard or rocky ground, a steel plow is a big help.
The next big breakthrough in an an agrarian society with some steelmaking capability would be a reaper. The McCormick reaper was the first machine that really boosted agricultural production. That's what kicked the world past sustenance-level agriculture.
So that's an unlikely, but not impossible, alternative path to an industrial revolution.
The Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD) was actually close to industrialization with high steel and coal productions, but apparently never took off due to the lack of a middle class to purchase the manufactured goods.
An economics professor of mine put it as "markets are created by demand, not supply." That was nearly 20 years ago, but it's really stuck with me.
As the linked article notes, the precursors for technological innovations were present in many places, but many of those places lacked one or more components of demand flow to finance the required innovation. Only after demand for industrial innovation is present do gaps in the supply chain come into play.
Seems like a false dichotomy? It's of course both. Product-market fit is essential, but also, someone has to do the work, and supply constraints are important.
Majority of people were still subsistence farmers. The massive transfer of wealth from the colonies and trade (particularly in England and the Netherlands) was what allowed Europe to jump ahead.
In many ways pre-industrial economy was a zero sum game for someone to be rich and afford to have enough capital to invest into developing industrial production somebody had to be poor. This mean that 90%+ of all people in China and in every other relatively large country lived in extreme poverty.
European colonial powers were simply the first to outsource this dynamic into other continents. While most people in Europe did not directly benefit from native or African slaves in the Americas the transfer of wealth allowed them to import grain and other products from abroad which simultaneously freed up enough labor to develop mining and other industries and increased the purchasing power enough to create significant demand for manufactured goods.
No reforms in China or any ancient empire could have achieved this as long as 90% of their populations were confined to permanently remaining subsistence farmers. Also the Song created paper money because they did not have enough gold and silver it didn’t really offer any benefits besides that and had significant risks. Every attempt to institute paper money, not directly tied to gold or silver prior to the 20th century failed.
>>European colonial powers were simply the first to outsource this dynamic into other continents. While most people in Europe did not directly benefit from native or African slaves in the Americas the transfer of wealth allowed them to import grain and other products from abroad which simultaneously freed up enough labor to develop mining and other industries and increased the purchasing power enough to create significant demand for manufactured goods.
Is there any evidence to support this? I remember reading that exploitive practices like slavery added very little to Europe's GDP. There seems to be processes - like advancing textile production and coal mining technology and metallurgy - that began long before the age of colonialism, and thus would likely have continued even in the absence of the slave trade.
Yes, the Dutch and later the English mostly got rich off of capitalism and trade (and early industrialization) at home.
Portugal and Spain had huge colonial empires, but that did not drive any industrialization or really long term wealth explosion like the capitalism and the industrial revolution did.
English society was much less unequal than those of the Yangtze Valley or Gujarat at the same time. Laborers' wages were over five times higher in England according to recent reconstructions.
I'm going to make a rather blunt argument that the difference was the arrival of New World foods, allowing for much larger populations than was possible in China at the time. We have had too many civilizations supposedly "came close" to industrialization but never did. Something more is holding them back. And since so much of civilization was the result of having a large enough population to develop the next stage of advancement, this could easily just be another case of that. Once huge populations became possibly in the 16th century onwards, the industrial revolution suddenly became possible in a way it never could before.
I would also contend that the New World had an impact, but a different one than just the natural resources. Rather, it's one of the pieces in the puzzle of "modernity", and modernity preceded industrialization as a philosophical end to which society coordinated its actions.
Ancient Rome was not just agrarian but tributary in nature: the social roles creating slaves and citizens were predefined through conquests. The empire had trade, and trade helped it prosper, but trade was not respected as a foundational ideology as was the case later with merchantalism.
The reason why Britain felt pressure to be an exporter was because this was where the dominant ideology ultimately led: put more assets on the national balance sheet, externalize the liabilities. That emerged from the struggle between the colonial powers of Europe over the course of centuries. The Crusades brought back new ideas, and later, so did the Spanish explorations. At first the dynamic was primarily derived from tribute, and the early conquests had a focus on bullionism: getting gold and silver. But it soon became clear that sugar, cotton, etc were more fundamental to prosperity, and by the 1700's, this had been refined by the utilitarian philosophers into a mode of thought about trade, ethics and invention that remains close to what we accept today.
In the prior societies, this wasn't a topic of discussion, and therefore new ideas were suspicious by default. So even if you had the idea to explore some topic, you needed to be close to, or part of, the nobility to have an opportunity to try. And a big part of early modern Europe was that the inventors and philosophers were always upsetting some noble and running away to the next country over.
So, while Britain got there first, continued emphasis on trade - both with the Americas and the East - would have eventually created the conditions for industry somewhere in Europe.
> the early conquests had a focus on bullionism: getting gold and silver. But it soon became clear that sugar, cotton, etc were more fundamental to prosperity
Maybe less clear to Spain, which did perhaps too well with the silver? Which may have been a contributing reason to the rise of the British (and Dutch) colonial empire(s), because not getting that huge influx of silver and gold, their merchants had more incentive to keep their eyes open for other ways to make money. (Just a WAG, not a historian.)
> I'm going to make a rather blunt argument that the difference was the arrival of New World foods, allowing for much larger populations than was possible in China at the time.
Potatoes and rice are roughly equivalent in terms of how many people they can feed. Potatoes was revolutionary to Europe because they didn't have rice, but would be nothing special to China.
Potatoes are a lot more nutritious than rice though. Plus being easier to grow and in far more places. You also have to include things like maize, sweet potato, squash, etc.
Interestingly the new world foods made it to China rather quickly, too.
Chinese people took to peanuts (and chilis) rather eagerly. I think it took only 50 years between peanuts arriving in Eurasia for the first time, and them becoming a staple food in parts of China.
> In 1600, Taiwan was a wild land, inhabited by headhunters and visited mainly by pirates and fishermen. A hundred years later it was a prefecture of the Chinese Empire, home to a hundred thousand Chinese colonists. What accounted for this transition? How did Taiwan become Chinese?
I wonder to what extent any of these ancient industrial revolutions would have been similar to the modern one. Mass produced crucible steel certainly would have given Rome even more military and trade might, but it's hard to see what else it leads to.
Same for the flying shuttle or steam engine. Water wheels and such were used by Romans. Romans liked useful engineering. But, I don't think they were a keystone technology. Rome could have still been Rome without water wheels, perhaps. What would they have powered with engines, and how much of it? Would they have learned to to mine coal?
The flying shuttle is even more interesting to me, because it's more independant. Like steel, textile is a trade good. Automated weaving probably would have become widespread in rome, and changed the economy.
I agree with you though. There are multiple routes to industrialisation. Metallurgical techniques could have been invented much earlier. Historical happenstance. Some important metallurgical techniques may have been invented, kept secret, and eventually forgotten. There are lots of curious, ancient steel artifacts in museums and even more in lore.
Metallurgy may have been retarded by millenia, because secrecy.
I wonder about what, a thousand years from now, people will look back on us and say 'if they just did this, they could have discovered that thing centuries earlier'.
Room temperature & pressure super-conductors, if they exist, might be so rare that you have to accidentally find them and that could happen any time after we have electricity if they are simple enough compounds.
We might also be the pinnacle of civilisation. It is not outside the realm of possibility a perfect storm of nuclear war, climate change, fossil fuel depletion and the resulting collapse in civilisation replaced by warlords and distrust of the technology that cause the calamity pushes us to a pre industrial society. Sure some books will survive but good luck recovering data from ancient computers when there’s no electricity.
Perhaps in many thousands of years civilisation would somewhat recover but by then nearly everything would have to be rediscovered.
This in fact is one of the possible answers to the Fermi paradox. Intelligent life besides us does exist but has regressed to a pre technological state and is unable to get back due to depleted resources. Thus it is unable to make its self known.
While a completely valid theory (and thank you for sharing it here), that is super dark.
There just seems to be so much we know we don't know, that to theorize we're the pinnacle of what civilization can be is...gauche? Insanely short sighted and Sol-centric?
I dunno, I'm obviously not a theoretical physicist or conducting well thought out experiments testing those theories - but it just seems defeatist and lame.
We have a visible Universe that has rules and guardrails - that's bonkers and needs to be hacked more.
“It was said that in the Age of Legends, there had been horseless carriages that drank the black blood of the earth, long since drained dry. But then, it was said that in the Age of Legends, men had flown to the moon on a pillar of fire. Who took such stories seriously?”
About the end of the Chinese civilization technological advantage in the 16th century:
> War had ravaged the lands, laying waste whole cities. Plague had struck, killing millions, men, women and children buried in mass graves...
> (but) the force that put an end to the Chinese arc of progress was deadlier by far than all of these together, yet seemingly intangible as metaphysics. By the 16th century, the fleets had vanished, the proximate cause political; to this day there is no consensus on the underlying factors.
Also:
> The saving grace has always been the outside: when one nation, one civilization, faltered, another picked up the torch and carried on; but with the march of globalization, there may soon be no more outside.
Perhaps the direction the world is going in the last couple of years, with less unity, is not that bad.
It's a double-edged sword... if we want to have multiple competing civilizations, it's unavoidable they will conflict with each other (I'm pretty sure you'll always view the "other" guys as angry and evil no matter what they do, just as "they" see you the same way).
That may be a necessary evil though in the really long term.
Personally, I both agree and disagree. I think with more intelligent humans, harder for want-to-be dictators to manipulate, we could have different cultures and countries, and everyone friends, just enjoying the differences, as tourists and exchange students, no conflicts.
But with the humans of today, then yes I agree that conflict is unavoidable
But you could apply your theory to today: what is it that triggers most conflicts today? It seems to be it's most ideology. The West is highly ideological (like everyone else, it must be said) while not acknowledging it.
Could you "be friends" with authoritarian countries led by dictators? If not, why?
Many countries' populations appear to see authoritarian regimes as the preferred way to govern, from China to Iran, Russia to parts of Southern and Eastern Europe. You can claim most people would prefer something else but are silenced, but I don't agree with that, as countries "forced" to be democratic, like Afghanistan and Iraq, unequivocably go back to being authoritarian as soon as the "oppressors" leave.
If you're the ruler of a non-democratic country, you would take this kind of behaviour as kindly as the USA would take any other country trying to spread authoritarianism, wouldn't you?
Whether one ideological belief system is more correct than another, or more just, is kind of beyond the point (and very difficult to prove objectively anyway)... my point is that if you're willing to accept a variety of cultures, ideologies and so on, you must not lay judgement at all on others, and specially you must not attempt to crusade around the world trying to impart your own believes on others. Accepting that would go a long way towards "everyone being friends enjoying the differences".
You believe the people, the women, in Afghanistan want to be slaves under the Talibans? I guess your never met anyone from Afghanistan.
That's the same as believing the African Americans wanted to get captured by slave traders and shipped by boat to work as slaves in the US.
You have, or pretend to have, big holes in your understand of people and the world.
Putin was never chosen by the people, he doesn't represent them. He assassinates opposition politicians or put then in prison if they grow too strong, and fakes election results otherwise he would lose.
I wonder if you're a paid Chinese Communist Party 50 cent person, otherwise, the lack of knowledge you show would be baffling. If indeed you are, then, no hard feelings, I understand you might need a job and pay the rent and maybe you have family and kids what do I know. Probably I won't reply, have a nice day anyway.
Book tips: The Dictators Handbok. Those people don't ... Don't represent the people.
All the best chord progressions are known, all the best formulas for movie scripts are rehashed again and again, it does feel like we are now on borrowed time whenever I hear a bad song or see a bad movie and this is extending to video games now, when most things appear bad these days compared to what came before and they like they should not have been created it means we should not be around doing it. We're done. We did our bit. Its time for our civilization to wind down.
I bet there were people saying the same thing about the music hundreds of years ago. Or about theater. Shakespeare, who needs something else? Well, personally I will take a good movie from the past 25 years over Shakespeare any day. A lot of them borrow from Shakespeare or similar of course but I like the rehashes from 15 years ago better than the originals.
We could also just have a lucky sun. It hasn’t flared on us in a hundred years or so. Maybe other systems aren’t so lucky and they can’t use electricity like we can. Hell, the next time it does flare up, we will probably go back to a preindustrial society for a decade or so.
If they exist but are very rare that has some reason. Perhaps because it's fine tuned crystal structure which requires very high purity reagents. Or very specific unnatural angles like the recent experiments with multilayer graphene.
It could be cheap underground drilling. That gives you affordable ground source heat pumps. It makes it cheaper to run underground cables to renewable energy. It makes it easier to build on piled foundations. And could even be a source of material for construction.
Battery technology seems like a good candidate given its long period of stagnation. Our current progression was informed by the hiatus like the microcontroller required lithium ion.
Which time period are you talking about? I couldn't find a grand unifying graph of eg cost-per-kWh of electricity storage since 1900 or so, but what I could find points to steady declines in price.
Both in single use batteries and in rechargeables.
What you might see as stagnation is that rechargeable batteries haven only rather recently become good enough for many exciting applications (like practical electric cars). But just because we've only recently crossed these thresholds, doesn't mean there was stagnation earlier.
Italy lacks coal and Rome had already deforested the peninsula. Iron takes phenomenal amounts of fuel.
The smelting could have occurred elsewhere --- the coal fields of norther Spain, France, or possibly Germany (I believe the Ruhr region corresponds to Roman conquest regions), or of course, Brittania. But then you'd need to have a far-removed high-tech industry and long-haul shipping of finished goods back to Rome or for trade elsewhere.
Common elements of industrial revolutions seem to be:
- A weak nobility and religious sector, relative to merchants and artisans.
- Extensive commerce, preferably by water.
- A stable political scene. It's interesting that island states adjacent to large continental regions feature in the rise of England / UK and Japan. Arguably the US was an "island state" relative to Europe. Madagascar, Sri Lanka, and New Zealand would be exceptions, though these lacked a well-developed neighbouring region at the appropriate time, and NZ is a long haul from the corresponding continent. Indonesia too, I suppose.
- Indigenous resource, especially of industrial inputs: coal and iron. Japan is betrayed by its volcanic geography here. Lots of mountains, relatively few minerals. (Though neighbouring China and Korea had extensive resources, generating strong interest and tumultuous history.)
Another factor for Rome was that it didn't need steel to defeat any of its enemies. Low-quality iron and bronze sufficed, along with logistics and empirical organisation, for the most part. (Until of course it didn't.)
Japan figured out steel, but was so iron-poor that its construction and carpentry are almost wholly based on wood-on-wood joinery to minimise the need for nails or screws. (Not that the latter were standardised until the 19th and 20th centuries.)
The industrial revolution was more about motorized equipment than about materials.
Once you have a steam engine you can spin cotton, you can have trains, steamboats and later, turbines connected to generators in power plants.
It's a big upgrade from windmills, horses and mules.
And you cannot have a steam engine without knowing about the gas laws, laws of motion, etc. So advances in math, physics and chemistry to extends that were unknown to the romans were necessary to get to a steam engine.
The ability to efficiently create energy anywhere and the maximum level of power that can be output seem critical.
Creating energy, but only in specific locations, doesn't have the broader social impact.
And similarly, many applications require a minimum level of power (say, 2x horse) before they're fundamentally transformed.
The industrial revolution was, from my perspective, an ouroboros of the means to produce power increasing our means to produce those means, and out of novel raw materials.
I would like to add the reference to Wootz steel, which Wikipedia article indicates played a big role in steel development in Europe in the 17-18th century
I enjoyed that comment very much. It reminded me of good old Civilization where you could take paths through inventions in order to get more and more advanced over time.
Did Rome have the glassware technology for the kind of chemistry research that even renaissance-era alchemists were doing, much less Victorian scientists like Dalton?
Maybe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_glass. I don't have enough chemistry context to say that the things they could produce would be helfpul/hurtful/neutral to any kind of chemical analysis.
The Romans were remarkably good at glassware. This was one of the things that caught me off-guard when visting museums dedicated to ancient Rome vs ancient Greece. You go from no glass at all to lots of glass. Of course, I would say "suddenly", but in reality that's something like 7 centuries.
In addition, there's no real limit to the development of glass technology. Silica and wood are abundant. Trial and error will get you a very long way. And pretty things generally sell for nice money so there is lots of incentive.
In general no, I doubt it. Even though there have been breaks and setbacks caused by the fall of empires and rise of religions, in general our technological and scientific progress has been a steady constant from ancient times until today.
The basic argument is that without a clear use case to overcome the version 1.0 troubles of (steam) engines, there was no incentive to work out the kinks and pumping water out of coal mines was the big "killer application" of such motors. That is, pumping water out of coal mines was the "early adopter" market for engine technology:
> As we’ll see, this was a use-case that didn’t really exist in the ancient world and indeed existed almost nowhere but Britain even in the period where it worked.
I remember reading a blog post by TechnicsHistory [0] (which was on the front page of HN at one point) that makes the same argument.
The acoup.blog article goes on to give a reason why coal wasn't needed earlier as the need for heating fuel became scarce when wood became scarce:
> Consequently wood as a heat fuel was scarce and so beginning in the 16th century we see a marked shift over to coal as a heating fuel for things like cooking and home heating.
I'm still skeptical of why it took so long. Were there no other places in Europe, Asia or the Middle East that didn't have the same deforestation issues? Was it the combination of deforestation and population density?
> Consequently wood as a heat fuel was scarce and so beginning in the 16th century we see a marked shift over to coal as a heating fuel for things like cooking and home heating
I believe this is a common misconception. The author seems vaguely aware of it because just before this he says that the forests were cleared in antiquity, which is the usual response to point out this as being a wrong theory that doesn't add up.
They cleared most of the forests for agriculture and kept and 'farmed' the ones they coppiced for fuel for a long time after clearing the rest. When they no longer felt they needed wood as fuel, they cut down more rather than managing them as they had for hundreds of years.
This is like saying people started eating beyond burgers because they ran out of cows. No, we'll stop having herds of cows because we have a replacement that makes them less necessary.
I see, so you're saying the author of the post got the order wrong.
In other words, Britain discovered coal, to some extent, then started using it earnest and neglected the forest-as-fuel-source infrastructure that was needed to keep repopulating the forests.
So you're arguing that deforestation was a consequence of using more coal, not a driver of using more coal.
So the question still remains, why was coal only discovered then? What prevented people from using coal earlier?
> In other words, Britain discovered coal, to some extent, then started using it earnest
Coal was known and used in antiquity. It has the same problem as oil: extraction was difficult and expensive except where it was on the surface or just below it.
People used more coal where good quality coal was easily accessible. They turned to more extensive mining and extraction as population growth and deforestation made wood more expensive - prior to that it was cheaper and easier to cut down trees that would regrow themselves if managed even half-heartedly. Once a steady supply of cheap coal was established it accelerated deforestation in a feedback loop.
* The sophistication of forest management varied a lot across civilizations and time within the same civilization, but very few took a "clear-cut everything" attitude. Clear-cutting was usually done to make farmland to grow more food, not for the lumber itself per-se.
It is an established fact that deforestation was the consecuence of coal mining. Britain consumed way more wood as tunnel/mining frame than as firewood.
It was known and used, just that there wasn't enough incentive for massive extraction so it wasn't searched. It's population growth and in conjonction with it urbanisation, electrification and railroads that lead to the search of more efficient energy source.
Nothing really prevented people from using coal earlier and they did but keep in mind that town where smaller and people scattered about in lots of smal villages. It was easier to collect wood.
Remember that by the end of 18h century, only a handful of cities barely reach a million inhabitant.
The first steam locomotive was built by a cornishman. He was interested in pumping out mines, but not coal mines, as they didn't have coal. The resultant need for efficient use of the imported Welsh coal may have been the driver of the next evolutionary step and then allowed the miniaturisation which led to locomotives.
(The Cornish steam engines also come up a lot due to them doing a lot of improvements that Watt held back with patent shenanigans, and a collaborative approach to their improvements)
Before electricity was a thing the steam engines were also used to pump water which then ran machinery hydraulicly, like cranes. Which piggybacked on improvements in civic water supplies.
Look, we use wood at home now, and given the chimneys in this house everyone else here has always done that too (or the house wouldn't have made it).
My point is that this sort of transition isn't immediate and universal. Some people had the motivation and opportunity to use coal, there were lots of advantages and it spread... slowly... at the same time the infrastructure to extract and distribute it developed.
People did use coal earlier, I'd say the increased mining activity came before the deforestation, but it's a slow ramp up over centuries so gets a bit chicken and egg.
Wikipedia has an interesting history that includes Roman usage. Note the final cite, which has the traditional "we ran out of wood" story is cited to a 19th century source.
> After the Romans left Britain, in AD 410, there are few records of coal being used in the country until the end of the 12th century. One that does occur is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 852 when a rent including 12 loads of coal is mentioned.[8] In 1183 a smith was given land for his work, and was required to "raise his own coal"[9]: 171–2 Shortly after the granting of the Magna Carta, in 1215, coal began to be traded in areas of Scotland and the north-east England, where the carboniferous strata were exposed on the sea shore, and thus became known as "sea coal". This commodity, however, was not suitable for use in the type of domestic hearths then in use, and was mainly used by artisans for lime burning, metal working and smelting. As early as 1228, sea coal from the north-east was being taken to London.[10]: 5 During the 13th century, the trading of coal increased across Britain and by the end of the century most of the coalfields in England, Scotland and Wales were being worked on a small scale.[10]: 8 As the use of coal amongst the artisans became more widespread, it became clear that coal smoke was detrimental to health and the increasing pollution in London led to much unrest and agitation. As a result of this, a Royal proclamation was issued in 1306 prohibiting artificers of London from using sea coal in their furnaces and commanding them to return to the traditional fuels of wood and charcoal.[10]: 10 During the first half of the 14th century coal began to be used for domestic heating in coal producing areas of Britain, as improvements were made in the design of domestic hearths.[10]: 13 Edward III was the first king to take an interest in the coal trade of the north east, issuing a number of writs to regulate the trade and allowing the export of coal to Calais.[10]: 15 The demand for coal steadily increased in Britain during the 15th century, but it was still mainly being used in the mining districts, in coastal towns or being exported to continental Europe.[10]: 19 However, by the middle of the 16th century supplies of wood were beginning to fail in Britain and the use of coal as a domestic fuel rapidly expanded.[10]: 22
Seems relevant that the coal mining areas worked out the way to use coal more cleanly in home furnaces a couple of centuries before the 'running out of wood' shift was supposed to have happened.
You might be able to trace whether the trees disappeared first in the areas where they had coal mines.
> In 1611, the agricultural writer Arthur Standish warned, ‘No wood, no kingdom.’ Deforestation, he claimed, threatened to undermine English agriculture, impoverish the poor, and provoke rebellions. In contrast, his contemporary Dudley Digges – a politician and investor in commercial and colonial ventures – took the opposite position. He argued that fears of wood scarcity were unfounded; a ploy by ‘beggars’ dwelling in forests and the greedy, feckless landlords who profited from these desperate tenants, both of whom wished to protect forests from conversion to more profitable uses. A third perspective was offered by the London merchant and deputy treasurer of the Virginia Company, Robert Johnson. Wood scarcity was real and incurable, and the only solution was to exploit abundant woods in the new English colony of Virginia.
There is one way around the chicken-and-egg problem. Surface coal is mined. Coal production goes up. Mines are made a little deeper. Coal production goes up more. Land is deforested for more agriculture now that there is an alternative fuel for heating and cooking.
Mines get deeper and start flooding more, pumping is more difficult and you have an "energy crisis" as coal mines struggle to keep up production and land has already been deforested.
So, to me, this provides the beginnings of an answer to "how else could the industrial revolution have happened?"
Choose a place that has slowly ramping up energy consumption so that they start supplanting it with coal until there's a threshold of it being profitable to mine coal in deeper wells.
What I still don't understand is why it took so long. Is it the critical mass of population and urban vs. rural population? Could it have happend in Asia, the Middle East or other parts of Europe? How long would we have had to wait if it hadn't happened in Great Britain?
While critical mass of population seems to be an important part, I feel like there are a fair number of other things that have to be in place to make it more economical to mine deeply.
Then there's the next step Bret discusses: the Newcomen engine apparently worked well enough for mining purposes that the next big improvement took 50 years and then it was James Watt that got involved.
"It is particularly remarkable here how much of these conditions are unique to Britain: it has to be coal, coal has to have massive economic demand (to create the demand for pumping water out of coal mines) and then there needs to be massive demand for spinning (so you need a huge textile export industry fueled both by domestic wool production and the cotton spoils of empire) and a device to manage the conversion of rotational energy into spun thread. I’ve left this bit out for space, but you also need a major incentive for the design of pressure-cylinders (which, in the event, was the demand for better siege cannon) because of how that dovetails with developing better cylinders for steam engines."
However, by the middle of the 16th century supplies of wood were beginning to fail in Britain and the use of coal as a domestic fuel rapidly expanded.[10]: 22
>They cleared most of the forests for agriculture and kept and 'farmed' the ones they coppiced for fuel for a long time after clearing the rest. When they no longer felt they needed wood as fuel, they cut down more rather than managing them as they had for hundreds of years.
It's not a simple story. There were distinctly regional transitions and pressures from things like the expansion of urban centers that created demand for food which could not be mined unlike fuel that could be both mined and grown. Other factors like the spread of horses for ploughing (displacing oxen) and improvements in agricultural machinery were also important. The growth of distribution networks (canals) was also very important. Still copicing was practiced commercially right into the 20th century, and some copices were not cut back - they were just abandoned. You can see these weird old trees out in the English countryside today.
So it's accurate to say "wood as a heat fuel was scare for some people in some places". Conversely it is fair to say that coal displaced some other fuels including wood gradually, and that the use of land for crops other than wood became gradually more attractive.
Tl;dr: 7:1 raw wood to charcoal conversion. And a lot of charcoal needed for each iron batch. Or "To put that in some perspective, a Roman legion (roughly 5,000 men) in the Late Republic might have carried into battle around 44,000kg (c. 48.5 tons) of iron – not counting pots, fittings, picks, shovels and other tools we know they used. That iron equipment in turn might represent the mining of around 541,200kg (c. 600 tons) of ore, smelted with 642,400kg (c. 710 tons) of charcoal, made from 4,620,000kg (c. 5,100 tons) of wood."
His sources seem to mostly focus on timber for makong things, but he does link to coppacing and pollarding, which would have been used for traditional charcoal.
You have an extremely simplistic view of civilizations that lasted longer than almost all the ones currently existing. Imagine someone in year 4000 dismissing the French peoples as a whole as “violent and bitter enemies of scientific truth” who “decayed into superstition” because of something Charlemagne done, and some other cherry picked events from a millennium+ long history. This is so simplistic to border on satire.
An ancient Roman urban legend (a story Romans told about themselves) says that a Roman inventor once created a method of producing unbreakable glass. He showed this to the emperor by dropping a glass chalice on the ground, where it bent instead of breaking, then he hammered it back into shape. According to this legend, the Roman emperor asked if anybody else knew how to make it. The inventor said no, he was the only one. So the emperor had him killed on the spot, to prevent the disruption of the Roman glass industry.
I think it never actually happened, but this sort of story reveals a Roman perspective on technological innovation in Roman society.
Here I go making an irrelevant sidetracked comment, but Charlemagne is an interesting example to pick considering the main domestic policies he's associated with are educational reforms and making it available to more people.
> Unlike the Greeks, they did not leave the world a better place at the end of their power than they found it at the start.
Roman law fuels most of the world's modern legal codes. Roman languages are among the most widely spoken today, and is closer to universal if you look at written language (even now, we're writing using the Roman alphabet). The largest world religion is Roman religion. Roman infrastructure forms the backbone of European infrastructure in much of the world.
I think not. Roman law is not a scientific study by any means, and the reputation of the destructive Roman impact upon general scientific knowledge is felt in many fields.
Our careers would not be possible if it was not for the mathematical and scientific contributions of the ancient Greeks. Not only did they greatly contribute to the foundations of math, but the way they formalized logical thinking enabled further discoveries.
None of this shit comes out of a magic hat, we're all ostensibly observing the same phenomena - that is to say there's hardly any reason whatsoever to attribute the gleaning of some fact derivative of the shared reality to a people. And I think this can be duly evidenced by the fact many people come to nearly simultaneous independent conclusions.
This can be reduced to something like Newton didn't discover gravity, Newton formally described it in mathematics, and anyone dedicated enough to pursue the formal description could have done much the same. Much in the same way, the Eurocentric view is wrong to attribute things and with the way cultural interaction spheres tend to work it's even more difficult to attribute developments to a given culture or individual. E.g. not only are we "standing on the shoulders of giants" but the scientific domain is pruning viable explanatory paths with each passing moment, narrowing the scope of positive knowledge and increasing the sharpness of the borders of negative knowledge. For instance China had what was effectively fiat currency well before it became widespread in European nations; they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution?
But why did China discard movable type, while it was transformative to Western culture?
One reason is that Greece invented proto-empiricism. Other cultures invented math, but because of Plato only Greece elevated research and abstraction into a process of formal discovery rather than just a set of neat tricks for a limited set of problems.
China was a bureaucratic empire and didn't see the need. Rome was a fascist militarist slave owning culture which soon turned into a dictatorship. Both developed philosophies which were more oriented towards ethics and morality than empiricism.
So there was no formal culture of curiosity and invention. Inventions appeared and then they disappeared again. There was no momentum driving the process forward.
The West did develop an empirical culture. This was partly because it inherited the principle of formal abstraction from the Greeks, and partly because a tradition of physical exploration, with accompanying developments in ship technology and weapons.
China and Japan both turned back in on themselves. Rome was more interested in conquest than exploration.
The West explored - physically in search of gold and trade, but also philosophically and practically.
So IMO the real reason the industrial revolution happened is because the West had a culture that incubated technology and invention in a way that other cultures didn't. Not only were there associations for the advancement of knowledge like the Royal Society, and informal networks of researchers and mathematicians, there was also a practical tradition of engineering in wood, iron, stone, glass, fire, and water, on land and on the sea.
And also an economic reward system - abstracted from imperialism - which made practical engineering individually profitable.
> But why did China discard movable type, while it was transformative to Western culture?
A simpler explanation: That Chinese characters number in the 10,000s, while the characters in the Western alphabet number 26. This means that the latter is much easier than to former to turn into a profitable business, because the early movable types themselves are costly in time and capital to make, and easy to break or so I'd imagine. With 10,000 replicas of 26 characters you can print 24/7. However, with 26 replicas of 10,000 characters, your business will be halted every type the movable type of characters you need are inevitably broken and wait for an artisan to make new ones.
Cursory google shows that you need about 2500 characters, of a total of approximately 50,000 in the Cantonese branch alone. I don't know how many characters Gutenberg was working with, but having experienced modern German, English, French, and Spanish writing - I'm sure it wasn't 2500. Alongside the formatting. I suspect that is why it faltered.
I think your postulations on the Greeks are interesting. I do have to wonder at the level of accessibility of the Greek thinkers into the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment - from my understanding Archimedes, for example, a very late Greek thinker, was only rediscovered as a product of translations from the Arabic world - a product I suspect of the Church, which was itself an institution of incomparable power since before the fall of Rome. If this is correct that's a thousand-year period without the Classical thinkers, and yet Europe was still, in my opinion (and many others), highly functional.
I believe Toynbee came up with the Goldilocks hypothesis for civilization; not too challenging, but not too easy. If you'll allow me, I would posit this exists at the intersection and overlap of cultures as well. My history is fast and loose, you'll have to forgive me: but the Axial age coincides with lots of warring in just about every major old-world society - thus "we" derived challenge - readily modulated by various developments, resource limitations, and etc... It's my impression that "Europe" was particularly violent, thus a constancy of the "challenge" was thematic of the West. I see this as something that created a persistent arms race which escalated with the passage of time. I would suggest this has little to do with empiricism and more to do with the necessity of maintaining the balance of power - right up to MAD.
Finally, with the Age of Discovery, and the discovery of the New World with it, a vast and untapped land which was available with little contest thanks to contagious disease, virgin soil, and a people who may have even been susceptible beyond that... The tradition was allowed continuity, and all of the philosophy active in that era was allowed to persist uncontested a la your reward system, which may have actually been copped from the Arabic market traditions albeit in a seriously perverted fashion.
The West "explored" but also in a fairly aggressive way and only after a history of violent conflict post-Rome. I read Metropolis by Ben Wilson, which focused on histories of cities, and the Middle East was experience a trade-driven era of prosperity before being "discovered" by religious explorers/conquerors from Portugal. The Portuguese didn't initially have much valuable to those societies to trade - but they did have much better weapons to use against them from that history of conflict instead of a history of trade, and an aggressive religious mindset.
I think it's a very open question if the warring, violent nature of those Western cultures actually led to overall faster/better technological advancement than if they'd interacted with the other cultures they came across in a peaceful, trade-oriented way.
The west was not a more violent culture than others. There was as much war everywhere. And the idea that Middle-East people were peaceful trader and European aggressive warriors is not bases on reality : Just one example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
I'd actually be interested to see you quantify that, but I'm reviewing the timelines of Wars on Wikipedia at the moment, and from what I'm seeing, the "West", kind of a nebulous term - depending on where you draw the lines, was culprit to more wars. I'm a little lazy so I'm just keeping mental account.
I expect you're speaking in terms of qualitative violence?
You are reading a list that is eurocentric. Anyone with an interest in non-European history knows how sparse Wikipedia can be for their subject.
A great example is the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. According to your list only a single war took place for nearly 80 years in china, until the Song dynasty, which formed and unified (most of) china without a single war, attacks Vietnan, whereas in China it's known as a period of endemic warfare until the Song reunified china through conquest. Compare that to a Viking raid on Lisbon that does get its own place on the list.
> they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution?
Gutenberg gets the attribution because, not only does he appear to be the first person to use a press for printing, but also he developed a new way of producing metal type for printing and invented a new alloy for type. This is a rather dramatic leap forward in the history of printing in much the same way as HMS Dreadnought was for naval warships or especially Stephenson's Rocket was for locomotives.
> we're all ostensibly observing the same phenomena
Then why was there no Industrial Revolution when many other civilizations for thousands of years observed these same phenomena? I don't know the answer but it is curious. I do believe when you look back you can see connections - it might be trite at times but James Burke's series 'Connections' tries to tease out the road to a current day technology going back through the past and all the seemingly unrelated things that needed to happen to finally arrive at the solution. Solutions always seem obvious in the present but usually they aren't quite so obvious in the past.
I'd like to think it's about cultural priorities. While in the perspective of the Western frame it would seem "irrational" to eschew modern advancements - it's just that, a perspective of the Western Frame and not objective. Even elements within the WF such as Marx and cohort identified generally negative elements like alienation. As an aside, there are people like the Sentinelese - a people contemporaneous with us still living in the stone age evidence that we don't need modernity, industry, and so on in order to continue as a species.
Toynbee on the Genesis of Civilization via Wikipedia [0]:
He argues that for civilizations to be born, the challenge must be a golden mean; that excessive challenge will crush the civilization, and too little challenge will cause it to stagnate.
One of the big history book authors has an oft-repeated joke, one permutation of it:
Most of the “Greek” scholars of the later part of the “Hellenistic” era of science were Roman citizens, came from all over the Empire (not just the Greek speaking parts), and natively spoke a variety of languages. Some of them moved to Alexandria or Athens, but others remained in Rome or elsewhere.
It is (at best) oversimplified to put this as “Romans” in opposition to “Greeks”. What is fair to say is that the Greek language remained the common "language of science", just as Arabic was the common language of science throughout the Islamic world (even for e.g. Persians), Latin was the common language of science in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, or English is the common language of science today.
You wouldn’t say that “the English were opposed to science unlike the Latins Edmund Gunter, Thomas Harriot, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, et al.”.
If I understand your argument right, this is essentially saying that the dark ages were dark.
First off, I'm not even sure that narrative is true.
Second off, even if it were, there's still the Middle East and Asia. I, unfortunately, don't know a lot about the Middle East during the European dark ages period but, from what I understand, they went through a type of renaissance themselves.
The question still is, why didn't people need or use coal at the levels they did until the 1600s?
> Second off, even if it were, there's still the Middle East and Asia
Don't write off Mesoamerica and South America either. I know many people that strongly argue "The Mayan Empire never fell it was crushed." There especially was no direct equivalent to the European Dark Ages in the Mayan Empire. It remained a productive agricultural empire right up until post-Industrial Spanish Conquest (and right down until contemporary periods of not just the Roman Empire, but even as far back as various Mesopotamian empires as well).
That's just the Mayan Empire. We also have an impression that Aztec Empire and even the looser "Confederations" of North American Indian tribes at various times all had economies comparable to European agricultural sense of "Empire" at least, but all also lost a lot history/institutions during American conquests.
It seems reasonable to wonder if that deforestation of England truly was a strange precursor in the face of what we know of non-European empires at the time. (Which we don't know enough given how many of them Europe managed to burn to the ground in the American conquests.)
The Greeks were as violent and imperialistic as the Romans. They would have eventually went west if the Romans hadn’t conquered them. They would have lost, too, because the Roman maniple based legions were superior to the Macedonian phalanx
>Unlike the Greeks, they did not leave the world a better place at the end of their power than they found it at the start.
>
>Many see them as violent and bitter enemies of scientific truth, and there is some foundation for this view.
Yes, but not because of his science. In fact, his science was the reason the Roman commander gave specific instructions that he was to be spared. He wasn't spared because of his inability to follow instructions from an invading soldier while he was trying to work out a problem.
> Were there no other places in Europe, Asia or the Middle East that didn't have the same deforestation issues?
There certainly were, I remember reading that most of what is now France (Gaul, back then) had already lost most of its forests in the present Île-de-France region, i.e. Paris and its surroundings.
Steam engines and other technologies simply had no hope of happening on a large scale until materials science, including metallurgy and chemistry, had caught up, and that wasn't going to happen for a very long time regardless.
Newcomen steam engines did not depend on any metallurgy, chemistry or material science the Romans didn't have. These are low pressure steam engines; the work is done by atmospheric pressure when the steam is condensed. They can be built with a copper boiler and a hand-finished cast brass cylinder with leather piston seals.
The Romans could do all of this, but nobody had the idea. And it's the sort of idea that doesn't just spring into somebody's head out of the blue, Newcomen was applying principles and ideas other people came up with first (story of the entire industrial revolution.)
Maybe an industrial revolution could not have happened in the times of the Romans, but I think maybe, just maybe, it could have happened 1000 years before them.
The bronze age was followed by the iron age not because iron is a better metal (initially it was not), but because bronze requires trade routes (copper comes from some mines, tin from some other mines), and those disappeared after the Bronze Age collapse.
Now, imagine that the Bronze Age had lasted a few hundred years longer. Just one hundred years before the Bronze Age collapse there was the battle of Kadesh [1], where tens of thousands of soldiers squared off. There were 5000 to 6000 chariots altogether.
Which means the late Bronze Age empires needed huge quantities of weapons, therefore of bronze. Egypt does not have a lot of trees, and trees are quite scarce in other places in the Middle East. Just like Britain ran out of trees and needed to resort to coal, a few hundred years more of bronze age would have forced Egypt to look for a substitute for charcoal. It would not have been coal, because there are no easily accessible veins of coal in the Middle East.
It would have been petroleum. Petroleum was known during those times [2]:
More than 4000 years ago, according to Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, asphalt was used in the construction of the walls and towers of Babylon; there were oil pits near Ardericca (near Babylon), and a pitch spring on Zacynthus. Great quantities of it were found on the banks of the river Issus, one of the tributaries of the Euphrates.
Scientific revolution played surprisingly little role in the early days of industrial revolution, which was mostly a result of north British engineers tinkering on and improving their production processes. Scientific advancements only became important during the second industrial revolution, starting from late 19th century, and especially in 20th.
And the scientific revolution first required the protestant reformation. The catholic church's stranghold on europe first had to be broken before the freedom that ushured in the scientific revolution could come about.
And the protestant revolution probably could not have happened with Gutenberg's printing press.
Gutenberg's Printing Press > Martin Luther and the Protestant Revolution > The Scientific Revolution > The Industrial Revolution > Teletubbies.
Not at all. The disruption and reintroduction of superstition caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of "witches") held back science by probably a century.
And the Gutenberg press was far less important than the invention of cheap paper.
> The disruption and reintroduction of superstition caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of "witches") held back science by probably a century.
Witchhunts were bad, but this is really not correct.
For the specific case of the steam engine, Torricelli had made some of the most important basic discoveries in Italy[0], but these came to nothing in Catholic Europe because his discoveries disproved an unimportant minor point of Catholic dogma, so it was unsafe to continue work with them. (The existence of a vacuum was for some insane reason held to be heretical, so no actual research into devices that worked using vacuum, such as atmospheric steam engines, could be done.)
There was plenty of insane fundamentalism in Protestant Europe, but crucially, it was fragmented. The part that doomed science under Catholicism was not that Catholics were less learned or more supersticious than Protestants (because they really weren't), it was that in Catholicism there was a single person who ultimately decided what it was okay to think, and this person was just as dumb and fallible as the rest of us. In contrast, in Northern, Protestant Europe the baseline of education and knowledge was much lower, but every King or Princeling managed the rules of thought and discourse for their own domain, so there was always some place somewhere that was willing to accommodate new ideas.
[0]: Starting with one of the most important viewpoint shifts in science history: "We live submerged under an ocean of air."
I mean that several of the largest witch trials in human history were Catholic, particularly in southern Germany. Witch trials were a regional phenomena, not a catholic or protestant one. There were many witch trials in protestant Scotland, but few in the protestant Netherlands. There were many witch trials in catholic Germany, but few in Spain. Attributing the witch trials to the protestant revolution itself is bad history.
> I'm not a Catholic, you can't goad me into taking a side. I'm observing from outside.
So if the Protestant revolution never happened and the Catholic Church still had political control over much of the world, you still think the scientific revolution would have happened? I have my doubts.
Also the Islamic Renaissance played a significant role in the evolution of the scientific method which gave European scholars a foundation to build on. Newton's quote about standing on the shoulders of giants is apt here. :)
Doesn't make sense, Roman engineers discovered steam power but it was cheaper and easier to use slaves. It's more of a problem of demand. Why would I need a loud clunky steam engine when I can hire a dozen slaves who will not only row my boat but clean, and perform whole bunch of auxillary tasks?
Roman "steam power" worked nothing like a condensing engine and was nowhere near adequate to power a ship.
Ironically, rowing vessels was one of the tasks Romans preferred to use freemen where possible. And even the best galleys with the most motivated, coordinated and healthy rowers were vastly inferior in speed and endurance to steamships (or indeed sail powered tea-clippers). But you needed a lot of intermediate inventions to get from a lightweight device that rotated by blowing out hot air to a steamship that could cross oceans. Or from a trireme to a tea clipper that would travel faster relying on just the wind, for that matter
I wonder what the Romans could have done with designs for "modern" sailing ships? Though I also wonder how relatively useful they would be as warships absent cannons.
Here's a question back at you: how well do modern sailing ships handle the Mediterranean in winter?
As far as I know, the winds haven't significantly changed: mostly from the northwest for most of the year, with a period in the spring and summer where they swing to the from the northeast. Also, ferocious storms in the winter.
Going clockwise along the Med's coast from France to Italy, Greece, the Levant, and to Egypt is "downhill"; going the other direction will take roughly twice as long. Sailing along the north coast of Africa is kind of dangerous because a storm or navigation mistake plus the prevailing winds can put you aground hard and unexpectedly.
Modern sailing ships are much better at sailing closer to the wind, are much less limited by supplies (it's hard to get more than a few days endurance from a rowed galley) and are more seaworthy, because they could extend the sailing season and take more direct routes.
How much better is that? I don't know, but I suspect a fair bit. Galleys still have advantages in some circumstances.
Now, if you throw in some even remotely modern navigation equipment, that would be stupidly advantageous.
Source: John Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War.
> Though I also wonder how relatively useful they would be as warships absent cannons.
Without cannons, maneuvering becomes a lot more important because you rely on either ramming the enemy, or pulling up alongside them and boarding them (or both.) These tactics favor rowed galleys, which can sprint quick for short distances and don't depend on the wind.
Even after the invention and proliferation of cannon, navies and pirates in the Med continued to use rowed galleys, direct descendants of ancient triremes, through the middle ages into the 18th century.
if the Romans were the only empire with relatively modern sailing vessels, I'm not sure lack of cannon would have hampered them.
And the inhabitants of most of the areas they'd be able to reach beyond the Mediterranean and Red Sea weren't going to sail out to meet them.
I guess a Roman conquest of the Americas would be pretty boring for archaeologists and architecture students. No Macchu Picchu or Teotihuacan, not even a Chan Chan, but the crumbling 2000 year old columns of Washington DC instead ;)
Of course, if you already have the technology to build boats, it's not going to take you long to copy the other guy's design.
Later sail warships mostly didn't use triangular sails either. I assume this is related to volume in some manner. Clipper ships were very fast but they had relatively little capacity so were used for high value goods.
Robotics has the same problem today: Human labor is cheaper and more flexible.
In the future we might see this as having been as stupid and inhumane as we today see slavery in the Roman times.
> Roman engineers discovered steam power but it was cheaper and easier to use slaves.
I think the key reason why is not because the Roman Greeks did some type of cost benefit analysis, it's the fact that the idea of applying automation of labor using the Aeolipile(which was regarded as a novelty rather than a tool) never even occurred to them. The concept of industrial production did not really exist yet, even when there was some forms of it in existence, the very idea of applying it to everything is not something anyone even thought about.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that steam engines were the first crossing between science and industry, and that the industrial development and use of steam engines preceded their take-up as a subject of interest by scientists (or the approximations of the time).
What? For sure a lot of engineering happened as a result of scientists and practioners discussing possible advancements. I have completely different understanding of history. Was not Archimedes a scientist that was presented with a task that required a lot of scientific reasoning.
This is why I tend to think that the industrial revolution and technology is "the great filter" for the Fermi Paradox. Life, intelligence, agriculture, society can all occur with relatively high probability, but each planet has, at best, one shot at a technological society and a brief window solve the problems that it creates before everything collapses.
Also note that global warming is determined by the ratio of CO2 produced to the amount that was in the atmosphere before the industrial revolution. Planets with lower CO2 are actually worse off because the temperature will rise faster for the same amount of CO2. Also, Earth is helped by having a lot of oceans that absorb CO2.
This assumes a lot of things about alien physiology, structure, and tolerances are the same as humans. It's not hard to imagine the possibility of a species arising that either is less affected by a greenhouse effect or at maybe exists in an environment where it doesn't happen.
That's not even getting into the possibility of different paths to energy production.
This is always a problem with any Fermi paradox thought experiment. We're extrapolating so much from a sample of 1 and we understand so little about even that one case.
The details don't really matter. What matters is that 1) a new source of energy is discovered which 2) disrupts an existing equilibrium which in turn 3) brings about ecosystem collapse faster than even intelligence can adapt. The exact mechanism by which this series of events plays out is irrelevant.
I agree the details don't matter, which is precisely why there's no reason to believe (2) or (3) is universal other than that it's our own experience.
You are taking our details and extrapolating them to a universal filter.
Most people die of old age. A very small number of people die of being hit by rocks falling from the sky. Only one of these is a broad filter for who survives into the next century that everyone has to go through, but if you only knew the life of one person you could not say with certainty which one it was.
That's true, except that it is plausible that any major new source of energy is going to disrupt the previously prevailing equilibrium somehow, and it will do so very rapidly on evolutionary time scales. So yes, I'm extrapolating from one data point. But I think it's a plausible extrapolation based on a plausible model of evolution and ecosystems in general. Call it a hypothesis. Nothing would please me more than to have it disproved by evidence.
> it is plausible that any major new source of energy is going to disrupt the previously prevailing equilibrium somehow
Why?
Anyways even if I grant that, we then get to ask why a change in equilibrium universally results in catastrophe? Certainly the weeds in my unkempt garden would disagree that the lack of equilibrium there is a bad thing.
To be honest even the hypothesis that where we are now was inevitable for us seems sketchy and unsupportable. What if we'd had a nuclear race instead of a space race? We actually found alternatives to fossil fuel long before we reached a crisis point.
Because releasing energy is invariably accompanied by change of some sort. If that energy is released as part of an intentional effort by a technological civilization, then that change is also going to be intentional. The entities releasing the energy are doing it in order to produce change. That's the whole point.
Note that the situation we are facing here on earth is actually not what you would expect from that dynamic. Our current climate change is not directly related to the changes we've unleashed with the industrial revolution. It's an ancillary side-effect, and a particularly annoying one. But even if we didn't have CO2 to worry about, sooner or later we would cause some other change that would disrupt the previously prevailing equilibrium. In fact, we've already done that in numerous smaller ways. Lots of species and non-technological civilizations have already gone extinct here on earth.
The fundamental problem is that industrial revolutions produce exponential growth, which is not sustainable. Sooner or later that growth has to stop. (Even an arbitrarily advanced civilization is constrained by the speed of light to grow at a maximum rate of N^2 in the long run.) So either we have to decide to stop it or the laws of physics will do it for us, and the former seems unlikely.
> why a change in equilibrium universally results in catastrophe?
It doesn't necessarily, though it is very likely to be a catastrophe for someone. In any major upheaval there will be winners and losers.
The reason I think it's likely is that there will always be a period where new technologies cause living standards to improve dramatically, and that induces techno-optimism, a belief that technology will always be able to solve any problem that happens to come down the pike. Techno-optimism will cause civilizations to go closer and closer to the edge of the existential precipice because the Malthusians warning about existential threats will always be empirically wrong until it's too late.
> We actually found alternatives to fossil fuel long before we reached a crisis point.
Yes, that's true. And it's quite possible that on a different trajectory it would have taken 1000 years or 10,000 years to reach the crisis point instead of just a few hundred. But what is killing us now is not CO2 per se, but rather techno-optimism and the prisoner's dilemma. No one wants to sacrifice their standard of living for the greater good of future generations. And that seems to me to be a universal dynamic.
But now we're not only relying on physical phenomena but on psychological ones and there lies the typical mind fallacy writ large. The prisoner's dilemma, technological overreach, etc are things characteristic of human brains but there's no reason to believe they're universal.
It's not even clear that those psychological factors are universal across human history, since we only really know much about a few thousand years of it.
But also, those articles aren't about facts, they're about books. Books that make an argument, maybe even a compelling one, but still just an argument. There's plenty of stuff in both those wikipedia articles about the rough edges around the ideas they present. In so far as they "prove" anything they only prove that these things are descriptive of the reality we perceive -- it takes a lot more to prove universality than mere observations of the nearby world.
Yep. I've been in a serious existential crisis over this for the last few years.
It's not like disaster is inevitable. We could cut carbon emissions before they destroy technological civilization, or maybe come up with a practical way to (re-)sequester the carbon we've emitted. But right now it is not looking particularly promising to me, and time is running out fast.
I think if you're that concerned about it, you should be working to solve it, this would surely be the antidote to your worries. Just writing a letter to your representatives would be a simple way to help.
Only if I thought that there was something my representative could do that would solve the problem. The reason I'm in existential despair is that the distance between what I think would need to be done to solve the problem and what can plausibly be done given the realities of our world is vast. Even if we cut emissions to zero tomorrow (which is obviously not going to happen) that would not solve the current problem. I think that if you look at things realistically, we have already passed the point of no return.
So what I am doing is searching for someone who can persuade me that I'm wrong and that there is a plausible path forward that does not involve societal collapse in the near future (by which I mean the next 100 years or so). When I find that person I'm going to put a lot of effort into trying to help them succeed. But so far I have not found them.
I'm also putting some effort into building a legacy (by which I mean a societal legacy, not a personal one) that our descendants could use to rebuild civilization once the planet settles into a new equilibrium. That will probably be at least a few thousand years from now, so this too is a real challenge.
I'm sorry that you are going through existential despair over the climate/energy problem. Existential despair sucks, regardless of cause.
I'm not sure that I'm the best person to persuade you that you are wrong, but I can at least share my perspective. I also don't see writing your representative as being all that helpful. On the other hand, as a physicist who's been working on and thinking about energy issues my entire life, I think that the sheer amount of available negentropy that we are ignoring makes it inevitable that someone will find a solution. There are other renewable energy sources out there other than wind, solar, geothermal, etc which are not even being talked about. One of these is evaporative convection energy (basically what powers hurricanes). It's literally an engine that runs on global warming; the more you use it the more it cools the Earth. There are other ideas as well out there, that one's just the one I'm working on. Someone's going to get it.
Some people get depressed because 'we as a society can't work together to solve this problem'. I don't look at things that way. I see it more like when a customer or standard specifies that you have to use a particular library in your code that is maybe not your favorite. You can gripe and moan and try to get them to change it, but in the end that's the spec. And society's spec for a solution is an energy technology that 1) doesn't make CO2/global warming 2) is cheaper enough than existing fossil tech that it will displace it and 3) actually works. Most existing solutions don't meet 2 and most drawing board solutions don't meet 3. But its far from an impossible spec.
Trying to change someone's weltanshauung is too big for a single post, but if you are interested in a different viewpoint, my email's in profile. Either way, I hope that hope finds you again.
> I think that the sheer amount of available negentropy that we are ignoring makes it inevitable that someone will find a solution
The problem is that negentropy is not the limiting factor. Obviously solutions exist for long-term sustainable energy sources. We even know what they are: Solar. Wind. Batteries. The limiting factor is not knowledge nor negentropy, it's socio-political. We (i.e. pretty much the whole planet) have to implement a solution before the climate changes to the point where there are large-scale planet-wide crop failures. That is the part I am not optimistic about. I don't think our current socio-political structure can handle a global famine, and it also doesn't seem to be capable of allocating the economic sacrifice needed to avoid one.
The thing that scares me most is that the rate of change in the climate is much much faster than I ever expected it to be. Twelve years ago my wife and I moved from LA to SF thinking that would be enough to escape the worst effects. But just in those twelve years I've seen dramatic changes in the climate here. We've gone from reliably wet winters to unprecedented drought and heat in just over a decade. That scares the holy bejesus out of me because if you extrapolate that rate of change into the future we're looking at a very real possibility of global famine before I die, and I'm not that young.
The other thing that scares me is the melting permafrost and concomitant release of methane. That is a genie that will not go easily back into its bottle. (That is the reason I say that even cutting emissions to zero tomorrow will not solve the problem. The permafrost melting seems irreversible to me at this point.)
I mean, had we gone to nuclear power immediately as soon as we could, we likely wouldn't be where we are today. The window isn't that narrow. But there are definitely certain aspects of our ape brains that make us likely to extinct ourselves.
We certainly wouldn't be where we are today, but it's extremely speculative to know where we would be...could be worse or better. One problem I see with where we are now is that once the ball of inertia of group activity gets going, it is very very difficult to get it to go in another direction.
I think the idea is that is certainly feasible for an alien civilization to go from steam power to fission in under 200 years. What makes it a "great filter" in my mind that the idea that the climate change clock might start ticking long before they are aware of it and that there could be a hard time limit.
Most other possible filters aren't as tricky. Sure stars explode, planets get hit by asteroids, and species go extinct, but those are pretty much chance events.
I think at the end of the day, planet destruction, whether it be by asteroids or global warming or anything else…is assured no matter how small the chance is. So the game is multi planet/galaxy settlement before time runs out.
The hilarious part of it all is that we have a sample size of 1(and almost not even one since we haven’t hit the filter yet).
For Homo Sapiens, this is our big risk. But from the aspect of the Fermi Paradox, I don't think it can be a great filter. Obviously a civilization must be multi-planetary to make contact, and once it is multi-planetary it is no longer threatened in this way. But statistically, it is still low probability.
As an analogy, you need to have fire insurance, but most houses in your neighborhood don't burn down (unless you live near wildfires which for the purposes of the analogy I think we can exclude.)
I think the pessimistic argument goes something like this. There is at least one great filter, probably more. Through extreme luck, we have gotten past all but one of them and are very close to the last. We may very well be the only advanced technological civilization in our galactic cluster, and if we don't extend into space soon we are at high risk of being extinct or facing societal collapse.
It's an imperfect analogy, but what I'm saying is: If I have a lot of neighbors, I don't really care if they all have fire insurance. If I'm the only house in the neighborhood, I really need fire insurance.
I'm more curious what would have happened if fossil fuels weren't available on the scale present today. It's pretty remarkable if you think about it, it's basically a shortcut to bypass energy generation limitations for several centuries. What if humans came along before fossil fuels had a chance to form? Would we have had an industrial revolution?
You need oceans and geologic activity for life, so there would always be oil. Coal is from trees dying and piling up faster than they rot…so vascular plants need to develop much earlier than fungi.
It's by no means inevitable that intelligent life (us) would have deposits of fossil fuels available to jumpstart a high technology civilization, akin to the small bit of "fuel" packed into a seed for the young plant to use until it can sprout and photosynthesize. In fact, I wonder if this is the "great filter" and we've already lucked past it.
(2) seems like the key one to me. We seem to actually be quite "lucky" (in the short term) that it took a epochal hot minute for something to evolve to consume dead life so it could just accumulate to such a degree that we now burn like, trillions of ancient dead microorganisms to drive around the block.
But even before the Industrial Revolution, technology was advancing shockingly quickly, at least on cosmological timescales. If there were no commercially exploitable fossil fuels, would we have simply developed better wind and water energy? Even primitive solar (point a group of mirrors at a pot of water to boil it) could have arisen.
This goes in a different direction, but my thought experiment is to think about what would happen if our civilization collapsed. Assuming you had access to libraries and lots of old equipment, could you ever make a new solar cell or a wind turbine.
And the Fermi Paradox is really about becoming a space-faring civilization. You need to do a lot more than boil water to show up on the galactic map.
The first steam engine by Newcomen could have been built by the Romans, but it was hideously inefficient. There's one at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan... it's a 2 1/2 story walking beam engine with a boiler about 8 foot in diameter, all working at NO pressure, and riveted together.
Rated horsepower? 11
The steam was taken in a wide pipe and allowed to fill the cylinder (which didn't really have a great seal), and the intake was closed, then cold water sprayed into the cylinder, cooling the steam and condensing it... pulling the beam down, and thus lifting the water from the mine, in a graceful slow teeter-totter motion. The cooling of the cylinder is part of the reason the engine was so inefficient.
I have no idea how much coal it took to run that, but given that if it wasn't at the head of a coal mine, all that fuel would have to be hauled by animal cart, it wasn't practical to replace 11 horses with something that used far, far more fuel than the equivalent feed for 11 horses (let's say they're in shifts, so 50 actual horses)
Watt couldn't get his improved steam engine to work. The cylinders he had made had gaps of up to an INCH around the piston, and no means of packing he had could contain the steam. It was Wilkinson, who had come up with a boring machine for canon that made a cylinder that was made the gap less than 1/8 of an inch, making it possible to seal in steam, and start to use it under pressure.
Once the bored cylinder from Wilkinson was available to Watt, the efficiency of steam engines tripled, and went up from there. That is how steam engines really got going.
I have a personal opinion on this, which is not scientific, but then again for such a huge question I’m not sure science
can give us a very useful answer anyway.
After visiting Pompeii and a number of other ruins in the area, I sense they were close. You can see it in their highly organized society, advanced construction techniques, complex economy, and vast amounts of labor at their disposal. This was an incredibly advanced society. They where clearly riding some S-curves. If the party had lasted a little while longer, a century, 3 centuries, it seems very possible they could have lit the great spark a thousand years early. We can never know, but I absolutely sense that this was an accident of history and it could have gone another way.
It’s not at all obvious to me that the economy of Rome in 1st century A.D. would have been that much more complex than that of Byzantium in 11-12th centuries.
The vast amounts of labor (including slave labor) might have been more of a hindrance than a help. It takes a labor shortage to create an incentive for innovations that increase productivity.
I have read that argument before. And I totally get that Rome as it existed did not have the right conditions for a British industrial revolution, but it did check many boxes and you could play out many what-ifs had it survived a bit longer. What if slave revolts caused labor prices to sky rocket, what if deforestation had continued, what if some other nice use case for steam power has caused an innovation s-curve on that tech, and so on. History is weird and so are humans. It could have been some hot new toy or religious ritual of the spins that did it. Saying it had to be coal mining is pretty baseless.
Galley oarsmen in the Roman empire were mostly paid professionals, not slaves. The images you might have seen in cheesy old movies aren't historically accurate.
This is a nonsensical question. History is not a march towards an end goal, or an elevation from 'primitive' to 'technological'. This would be like asking 'why no lizard civilization' or 'why no Chinese monotheism'. The things that happen are a succession of complex states and they bear no analysis of sequential 'achievements'. There is no finality. Lifeforms just hunt down energy sources and reproduce, and power structures in society emerge and dissolve. There is no finality, no ascent, no goal.
Edit: maybe in a couple thousand years we will have something like Mycenaean civilization but on the moon and with space elevators. Maybe a chain of volcanic eruptions will send us back to the stone age and in another dozen millennia another version of global civilization will have emerged, this time with oceanic floating cities. For all we know, given the amount of actual evidence and the margins of doubt, global civilizations might have emerged and failed 10 times before.
> However, unlike farming which developed independently in many places at different times, the industrial revolution happened largely in one place, once and then spread out from there
This. We can ask the same question about feudal Japan, Imperial China, Revolutionary France/Germany/Russia/etc.
Maybe it was just a fluke after all, with the benefit of the prior scientific revolution and all that.
In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark says that Imperial China actually had an industrial revolution, in the 11th century. They produced 100,000 tons of iron. They were using the iron to improve productivity of other things. And then the imperial court ordered that everything be shut down because the wrong kind of people were getting rich.
Stark has sources for this, which he documents, but I can't cite them because I don't have the book with me at the moment.
But, presuming that Stark's sources are accurate, Imperial China did have an industrial revolution. The powers that be decided that it was causing too much disorder in their society, so they killed it.
So maybe that's a big part of the answer. When it happens, don't kill it with stupid politics.
Some have argued that the reason Europe's industrial revolution took off is that there was no central authority to shut down industrial development and exploration over the whole continent.
> wrong kind of people were getting rich
In Europe, the nobility wasn't powerful enough to shut down the merchants.
By a number of measures China was more advanced than most of the West after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Why the West Rules for Now goes into this in a fair bit of detail. But Europe spiked up again and, once the industrial revolution hit, the growth essentially made everything that went before look like a flatline by comparison.
Or maybe do? Maybe they were right that, from a societal rather than individual point of view, their industrial revolution was a disadvantage, at least at that stage.
I would imagine the motivation would simply be that Chinese aristocracy had zero leniency with the notion of a wealthy, non-aristocratic class. From the perspective of the power structure, I can only imagine that's what 'wrong people' would mean. There was a similar tension in Europe I think.
Worse in China, I think. I'm very much not an expert, but I think that Confucianism called for a more rigidly hierarchical society than Catholicism did. (And maybe for that reason, the Chinese imperial court was very committed to Chinese society rigidly following Confucianism.)
I don't see any reason to believe that industrial revolution wouldn't have been developed independently in multiple places if the movement of culture and ideas around the globe was as slow (or absent) as it was between all the places that independently developed agriculture.
I thought it all happened because of coal mining. Lumber was getting scarce and expensive in Britain so people started burning coal even though they didn’t have very good coal stoves at first. Demand for coal opened more coal mines. Mines need ground water to be pumped out of them. The first steam engine was a water pump run on coal because that was the cheapest fuel source. Better pumps => more coal => cheap energy => development of better machinery to use it => better pumps… There’s your virtuous cycle.
That is a super common explanation, but doesn’t square with the fact that steam power was a complete side note of the first half of the First Industrial Revolution, which used water power almost exclusively (wind, animal power as well).
Indeed, which is why water power was the main motive power for the FIRST industrial revolution which developed precision machining. Gotta bootstrap somehow.
We can, perhaps, hypothesize that lacking the interconnected maritime world of the 1700s, more independent industrial revolutions may have occurred. But it's a tricky hypothesis to support because those revolutions also breed transportation revolutions (especially if the condition of "isolated, unable to trade for enough survival resources" that the British Isles had is a significant incentivizer; isolated places that can put these engines to transportation have great reason to do so). So it would have needed to be some very close-in-time revolutions to happen in multiple places instead of one happening in one place and <70 years later has been transported everywhere by the engines of motion the revolution creates.
Because having an industrial revolution implies that transportation and navigation are widespread, it's kind of a given that an industrial revolution can only happen once.
This is probably correct. When the north and south fought in the American civil war, the northern states had a highly industrialized economy while the south was almost entirely agrarian. In fact, perhaps because of the dichotomy between the two regions, the north may have been under even more pressure to mechanize. They had 5x more factories there than in the south, and more than twice the rail mileage.
It's an interesting thought, but I've always heard that the cotton gin was actually responsible for propping up slavery in the US south, as counter-intuitive as it that may seem?
That sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox, and in fact the article has this snippet: "The expansion of slavery in the United States following the invention of the cotton gin has also been cited as an example of the effect.[12]"
True, but the cotton gin only made processing cotton more efficient. It didn't help in actually growing or harvesting it. So unfortunately, more efficient processing did encourage more production by manual (slave) labor.
One interesting factiod¹ is that a root cause for the transatlantic slave trade was that Africans were the only plantation workers that didn't die of malaria after a few years. Both local natives, and imported Europeans kept dying off.
¹ As in, I've seen it stated as fact, but am not sure how true it is
However, slavery didn't prevent (or even effectively compete with) the invention either, like the OP and many others have suggested about Roman slavery
This is the correct answer. Most answers here focus too much in technology, but forget about economics. And even if they had more technological advances, it is difficult for a technology to became competitive when you are competing with slave labor. And if slaves are supposed to operate your technology, this also creates several technological restrictions: slaves always will treat their working tools badly, so you cannot have machines with delicate parts.
They transitioned from a democracy to an empire in which entrenched power didn't need to innovate. Additional their power structure was extraction based in terms of lands that they conquered and integrated into the empire.
At a certain point in the growth of the empire I am sure that the ability to move classes was more political/militaristic than through entrepreneurial capability thus it limiting individual drive to achieve.
As well I am not sure how much public funding there was available to literacy / sciences.
I'm reading a relevant book right now called "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"
While it hasn't yet touched on the Industrial Revolution, it's addressing very similar issues around farming, cities, society, technological progression (and regression) politics etc.
How far have you gotten into it? What's your impression?
I started reading it on the subway (so, 10 minutes at a time). So far it feels overly repetitive. And the evidence feels very cherry-picked -- though I don't have the relevant expertise to know for sure.
It is cherry picked but I think that doesn't affect the value of the book.
Essentially the point of the book is: "it used to be uncontested that all human societies in the past functioned in a particular way and moved through certain phases of evolution but we show that in at least some cases, that was not the case". Since he's only trying to attack the absolute statement that all societies fit a certain pattern, finding even one counter-example (i.e. cherry picking) to a general rule still serves his purpose since he's digging for existence proofs and not establishing a new absolute of his own.
His political purpose (and he's completely open about this) is to show that human societies have already existed that followed all kinds of patterns and that therefore certain things that we consider inevitable and almost like laws of physics about human societies are choices and could be made in a different way.
It's not a meta analysis but rather an attempt to counter widely held but incorrect (in the eyes of the author) assumptions about human societal evolution. Much of the book was "We used to believe this, but now we have evidence that shows that to be at least partially incorrect". Many times he pauses and says "we really don't know but..." and I feel that's honest because much of it is conjecture.
> an attempt to counter widely held but incorrect (in the eyes of the author) assumptions about human societal evolution.
Doesn't the book take decent arguments to deranged conclusions in Graeber's trademark style? From the reviews I've read, the books supposedly argues that egalitarian thought was introduced by Native Americans to Europe and that the Enlightenment was based on these borrowed ideas. And the book supposedly also portrays mammoth houses i.e. hides stretched over mammoth bones and tusks as an example of monumental public works. Is that not the case?
> egalitarian thought was introduced by Native Americans to Europe and that the Enlightenment was based on these borrowed ideas
Not exactly or rather that's not the conclusions I gathered. He points out that Native Americans were fully aware of the European way of life (not innocent & naïve as they were portrayed), and openly mocked it.
>And the book supposedly also portrays mammoth houses i.e. hides stretched over mammoth bones and tusks as an example of monumental public works.
There are actually numerous examples of complex "public" works (irrigation, light farming, monument building) cited to back up the claim that complex societies, or large works of civic architecture were possible without the modern structures of politics, and even royalty.
Much of the book is basically showing how human evolution was not a single inevitable line forward from hunting gathering > farming > complex civilization.
Too much to write here but I enjoyed it (just finished!)
My Kindle says I'm 45% in (including footnotes), but honestly I'm struggling a little bit with said repetitiveness. It's fascinating stuff, but the real exciting insights are far and few in between. I have a limit for how many dates/places and names I can take and I'm almost there.
As far as cherry picking evidence I understand your concern but it didn't bother me as much of it was used to dispel previous conclusions and assumptions based on an even more limited understanding.
A lot of it is like:
"We thought humans went from A, to B to C but really humans went from A, to B back to A and then to D and here are some great examples".
I'll probably pick it back up in 6 months. Happy reading!
I feel like singling out Rome is unnecessary here.
Why Rome specifically? Civilizations existed in the mediterranean (and elsewhere) for thousands of years before and alongside Rome. Why even assume that the industrial revolution had to emerge from a civilisation anyway. History suggests quite a lot of technology came from pastoralists, nomads, tribal agrarian societies, etc.
Alexandrian inventors were more likely to have recorded their patents and have those survive to modernity. My guess is that a prototype steam engine, or even functionally useful devices, probably were invented many times in many places.
The industrial revolution, seemingly, had a lot of chances to happen. Perhaps that's the answer. It was an unlikely occurrence, and that's why it didn't happen all those other times. Tracing back the specific path that led to steam engine prowess in England is interesting... but somewhat arbitrary... probably.
For example, the flying shuttle doesn't really need a steam engine. It could be powered by a water wheel, windmill or muscle power. Power isn't really the bottleneck.
I think what the flying shuttle actually needed from the steam engine was inspiration.
Rome is "singled out" precisely because a lot of (Western) people mistakenly assume that they were on the cusp of an industrial revolution, and just ran out of time or something before the barbarians and the Dark Ages snuffed it out. They were a powerful state, populous, technologically and politically sophisticated, and we see toy devices from time to time that _look_ like tech that helped bootstrap the Industrial Revolution. There are discussions of Chinese civilization that are equally fascinating. [1]
The author's point is that an Industrial Revolution requires a very precise set of conditions to occur. Those conditions didn't exist in Rome, and they weren't far enough along the tech tree to make it happen even if they did exist. [2]
He does acknowledge that we have one and only one example of an I.R. happening, and that it overspread the globe before we had a chance to observe another independent example. (This stands in contrast to agriculture, where we have several.) Perhaps you are right, and there are another set of conditions that could trigger a similar result among another civilization, or a nomadic society. (Deeply skeptical though.)
[1] China is probably a good argument for why the specific conditions need to exist. They were even deeper into the tech tree than the Romans, and it still didn't trigger. Maybe they just ran out of time though; we'll never know.
[2] You could do a similar study on Mesoamerican cultures and the wheel. We see toy wheels, why no "wheel revolution" there? Probably because of a very similar set of conclusions.
OK. I also didn't mean to come off harsh. The author uses Rome largely as a stand-in for "ancient world" in any case.
The reason I brought this up is because I want to push back against the frame which implies conditions made it impossible for Romans to have had an industrial revolution or that conditions made the revolution inevitable in England.
If you widen the frame to include many civilizations, even many eras of roman history... it becomes more plausible that England was a fluke.
To the first point, I don't see exactly where we disagree. "Rome" is effectively used by the author as a placeholder for "ancient world." He also notes that there is/was an ongoing discussion about being on the cusp of an industrial revolution.
I just pointed out that (a) Rome is not particularly unique. That's an anglocentric notion. Lots of civilization^ existed. Even Rome's empire (eg damasus) consisted of mostly ancient civilisations. Most territories across its borders (eg parthia) were also civilisations. Beyond that, more civilization (eg china). They're all candidates, even if we assume that kind of empire is necessary... though I don't see why we should.
>> The author's point is that an Industrial Revolution requires a very precise set of conditions to occur.
This is the point I am pushing back against. I mean, how do you distinguish between a conditional requirement and a post fact anecdote? Just because it happened a certain way, doesn't mean that it had to happen that way.
For example, the flying shuttle doesn't really require steam engines. It's just an automated loom. You could probably power one with a foot pedal. Meanwhile, textile (like steel) is an obviously valuable trade good. You could have probably gotten rich in the neolithic with a battery of flying shuttle equipped loom.
Trade goods, unlike steam power, have vast markets. You can sell as much as you can make.
I'm curious about why the flying shuttle was invented so soon after the modern steam engine. The availability of engines as a power source doesn't explain it, IMO, given how little power a loom requires. I suspect that steam engines' important contribution to weaving was not the engines. It was the engineers. It was engineering. It was a mindset.
Once the mindset exists, the machine is not that hard to invent. It's clever and amazing, but achievable. Motivate good engineers to automate the loom, and they will do it. The mentality to really try, hard, to invent an automated weaving machine... that's the secret sauce, IMO.
> "Rome" is effectively used by the author as a placeholder for "ancient world." ... Rome is not particularly unique. That's an anglocentric notion.
I'm not understanding your criticism of the author choosing Rome. The authors' expertise is in this region of the world & the Romans in particular. Would you have been happier if he'd picked Han China? Would the conclusions have been any different?
>> The author's point is that an Industrial Revolution requires a very precise set of conditions to occur.
>>> This is the point I am pushing back against. I mean, how do you distinguish between a conditional requirement and a post fact anecdote? Just because it happened a certain way, doesn't mean that it had to happen that way.
I didn't represent the authors point very well. He acknowledges in the article—
"Now all of that said I want to reiterate that the industrial revolution only happened once in one place so may well could have happened somewhere else in a different way with different preconditions; we’ll never really know because our one industrial revolution spread over the whole globe before any other industrial revolutions happened."
The only option we have is to look at all the other potentials that existed during the 1700s. Why didn't the IR trigger in Italy? Or Russia? Qing China had a lot of the same positive variables, including tech tree depth. So what was unique about Britain at that time? This is why historians zero in on things like coal, and textiles. But we can't know for sure because of the sample size of 1.
Ok... I think I must have worded the first comment regrettably. I didn't mean to rebut the author's points, quibble or criticise even. He writes well, interesting and I like it.
I am taking this as a discussion piece and going into the other possibility your quote eludes to. 1-v-1 comparison to Rome is interesting, so is widening the field to "antiquity" or even pondering the possibility of non-urban industrial revolution.
I agree with your last points. I'm not even sure we have a sample size of 1. We're not even clear about what happened in 18th century England. Was it science? Engineering? Some set of specific inventions? Politics? "Financial machinery" perhaps, like the proliferation of trading paper like insurance notes, sovereign bonds, and stocks in early companies.
On HN, science and engineering seem like the main ingredients, maybe trade. When I studied economics, you might be surprised to hear, they was taught as economic history. They thought the main ingredient was stock/bond/insurance trading. Politics, resources and trade in the second tier. Technology and science was 2nd tier, at best. They thought of technology as emergent given the right conditions.. derivative basically.
I think a lot of Tories to this day are certain that Georgian politics, culture & tastes are what made England Great.
To me though... I have a bias/preference/opinion is to start downstream as possible. I think the IR's "killer feature" was mass production. The steam engine always seemed like the better symbol for the IR. So do trains and other engines. The humble flying shuttle though? An automated loom is an industrial powerhouse.
If I could go back in time and be some ancient King's investment advisor, I would be betting everything automated textile weaving. A water wheel would do me fine for power. We'd be the richest kingdom of any age, and I would finally be a guildmaster.
It isn't being singled out, Rome is the guy's expertise, and he tends to write articles drawn from his expertise.
"Bret is a historian of the broader ancient Mediterranean in general and of ancient Rome in particular. His primary research interests sit at the intersections of the Roman economy and the Roman military, "
Well, Bret Devereaux is a scholar of Rome, plus Rome had really a lot of resources under its control. The empire was huge, comparable to the modern EU, and had a good transport network both at sea and on land. Most of the other civilizations were dwarfed by Rome at its maximum extent, or at least didn't have as big internal market as Rome did.
Is Imperial hugeness a key factor? If so, why not the Achaemenids, the Chinese?
Why assume that a massive empire in necessary though? It doesn't take that empire-scale resources to build any of these. These aren't really more resource intensive than a Mill to invent or build. The steam engine, which Bret focuses on, is a pretty localized device... unlike textiles and metals which can be exported easily.
Even if export is a key driver, there were plenty of small or decentralized civilisations that could have easily leveraged massive economic zones. The Phoenicians, for example, could have conceivably built the export economy Britain ultimately built in the 18th century.
BTW, I didn't mean to neg on the author. I enjoyed the essay a lot. I felt it was a discussion piece, so discussing.
Personally, I'm inclined to think the "when" is more important that the "where," if it isn't mostly a matter of chance. IE, if England hadn't industrialised first, another country would have.
Once you have a widespread mentality that produces thoughts like: "I'm going to try building an automatic loom," I believe that many of the challenges early modern engineers overcame could have been overcome at many times.
The steam engine might have required symbioses with coal fuel and coal mining needs, but metallurgy (as others point out) and weaving (the flying shuttle) don't. If you are a well resourced blacksmith you can have a crack at metallurgy.
I think that in 18th century england, enough people were educated in engineering. In renaissance Italy, Da Vinci was pretty unique... and the only textbooks he had were Aristotle and such.
Why are there more startups in 2022 than in 1992? The culture had yet to develop.
We have very little understanding about how most other empires functioned. For instance we know were little about the Achaemenids and what we do know comes almost exclusively from Greek sources.
Rome is the most understood and researched ancient empire in the west which naturally makes it a primary candidate for such discussion.
> Why assume that a massive empire in necessary though?
I agree. Even Britain wasn’t exactly an empire in this sense during the late 18th century. And even if we go back to Rome, technological progress didn’t really stop after Rome “fell”. It might have even accelerated in some regions of Western Europe after the worst periods of the dark ages were over. By if we look at more practical fields like agriculture and metallurgy Europeans were already quite a bit more advanced than the Romans (who arguably had entered a period of stagnation several centuries before the fall of the Western Empire) ever were by ~900 AD.
Hugeness maybe not, but highly developed internal market always helps.
One of the overlooked factors that the author mentions briefly is metallurgy. Better metals translate to better machines. Even today, quite a lot of our technological effort is stymied by metallurgy. For example, China still struggles to develop a reliable jet engine for its fighters, and it took a lot of time for SpaceX to stop Raptor2 combustion chambers from melting in the heat. (IDK if this has been fully solved actually. But they are conducting static fires.)
A steam engine needs to tolerate a lot of pressure. Ancient metals couldn't do that.
>Realizing this, textile manufacturers (we’re talking about factory owners, at this point) first use watermills, but there are only so many places in Great Britain suitable for a watermill and a windmill won’t do
It might be prudent to interject at this point that the windmill itself did not appear until 9th-century Iran, and the more common horizontal-axis version is first seen in the 12th century in the Low Countries. The possibility of a vacuum and thus the fact that air is a substance (rather than a quality of the world) was first conclusively shown by Torricelli in the 17th century. It's very hard to imagine not knowing things that we have taken for granted since early childhood. Even if you could make things spin by manipulating gases (which is what a steam engine does), it's very hard to improve your design if you have no idea what's going on inside it!
I wouldn't underestimate the importance of improved steel-making technology to the spread of the industrial revolution. All the machinery that made up the industrial revolution - pressurized steam engines, water turbines and pumps, etc. - relied heavily on high-quality steel that wouldn't fracture or explode under constant use. Railroads relied on steel rails, as did shipping and the spread of industrial methods of waging war.
One of my favourite daydreams is accidentally going back in time and having to build an internal combustion engine. I think I would go with a hot-bulb engine with cylinder walls thick cast bronze.
I remember a story (possibly anecdotal) about an inventor who shows a roman emperor a working steam engine and he basically pays him off and sends him into retirement.
Another account repeated by Pliny the Elder [1] and Roman courtier Petronius [2] has the emperor Tiberius execute an inventor who created a flexible drinking glass and demonstrated it to him. After the inventor successfully tested the vessel and claimed he was the only one who could replicate it, Tiberius had him beheaded because he figured such a material would make gold and silver lose value.
It's hard to sustain innovation when indie hackers are paid up to shut up or basically get beheaded for building an MVP in their dorm room. Founders use to have it rough.
I remember a story (possibly anecdotal) about an inventor who shows a roman emperor a working steam engine and he basically pays him off and sends him into retirement.
Innovation never really came from MVPs like this to begin with, Bell Labs is what's considered the founding step to the modern world you'd be in delusion to think it was a bunch of young adults in their dorms, sure they're parents and friends may have given them the patents and ideas to do it but it was never them that did the hard work to begin with or really anything besides take credit.
> not clear to me that there is a plausible and equally viable alternative path from an organic economy to an industrial one that doesn’t initially use coal and which does not gain traction by transforming textile production
Here, in a nutshell, is an explanation for great power competition. Societal advancement requires step changes in productivity. Leaps in productivity require proximity to means of production. Production requires resources, and resources require access. Access is competitive. Competition breeds conflict, creates winners and losers, and fosters its own forms of advancement and innovation - often at terrible humanitarian short term costs.
Nevertheless, being a winner ultimately means your society persists (Great Britain), and being a loser means your society expires (Roman Empire).
I think that the term industrial revolution is a bit misleading even, it should be named the fossil fuel revolution. Because cheap and abundant energy is what differentiates the world post industrial revolution from the world before more than anything else
> Improvements to the steam engine were some of the most important technologies of the Industrial Revolution, although steam did not replace water power in importance in Britain until after the Industrial Revolution
Precisely this. Coal for powering machinery was just at the science experiment stage in the First Industrial Revolution. Water power was the workhorse. Even for iron and steel making, America (which has an abundance of trees) relied primarily on charcoal well into the mid 1800s.
Wasn't the workhorse the workhorse before water power, allowing larger scale farming - which itself is another large step in human history towards increased efficiency and mass production that predates both the industrial revolution and the Roman empire.
I believe horses and even people were also used to drive non-agricultural machinery before water and steam.
The underlying theme to all these things feels more like "automation" than any specific energy source which are seemingly arbitrary (whatever is at hand, quite literally sometimes).
The energy source is actually very important, because it dictates how much energy you have to invest to gain extra energy. Using draft animals has a very low rate of return. During my grandparents' time, the draft animals used to produce the food consumed about a third of the total farm produce--and this is likely to be a more efficient farm than any that existed a thousand or two thousand years ago.
Fundamentally, this means you have wildly different costs for energy. Modern electrical energy costs around ten cents per kilowatt-hour. Gasoline fuel costs in the US right now turn out to around eleven cents per kilowatt-hour basis (although obviously an internal combustion engine isn't the same efficiency as a electric engine). By way of comparison, a single workhorse for an entire working day will put out maybe 6 kWh of energy, and the food input requirements for that workhorse are going to cost far more than 60 cents.
Yes, I think thats probably a better way to think of it.
The "water frame" was a key element of the industrialisation, and what was that initially powered by? That's right horses. It was only because they used water later on that it got that name.
The fact that they were basically automating an industry that India had led for centuries, and couldn't compete on wages seems key to the whole thing (and still needed government support to stop the cheap manually produced imports from crushing the early automation).
Another example is the early use of steam engines in iron production, where they were used to pump water, which then did the actual work (because steam engines couldn't rotate yet).
It’s still energy. The difference in power output between a horse and an engine is quite large. You also need cheap energy in order to automate anything. Energy derived from people and horses is expensive.
Bingo. When trees are abundant charcoal is the superior fuel. It’s much cleaner to burn than coal, weighs less and doesn’t require you to mine it out of the ground which is difficult and dangerous.
I’d argue the difficulty of mining and burning coal are what kicked off the industrial revolution. Mines necessitated the invention of coal powered pumps and other equipment. To burn coal efficiently you need iron stoves which drove demand for foundries and metallurgical development. Once you’ve got lots of coal and lots of iron and people who know how to work with it you start getting bright ideas about other things you can do with all that coal and iron.
That would be a good argument for the second half of the first industrial revolution, but in the 1700s (the industrial Revolution starting around 1760 or so), steam power was a footnote.
A footnote that was arguably one of the key driving forces though. Coal was burned in stoves and used in blast furnaces as well as in newfangled Newcomen Engines
Even Canal Mania, the Industrial Revolution mass expansion of boat transport using horses and artificial ditches (all tech familiar to the Romans) kicked off in the 1760s as a way to get coal out of the Duke of Bridgwater's mines.
They already transported the coal by boat, and they copied the idea of artificial canals as an obvious incremental improvement. I'd say the business aspects of canal mania might have been a bigger factor.
So the overly neat "its was all about coal" story doesn't really hang together.
One of the first canals in the UK was built, because someone blocked the river with a weir, so that they could run a watermill. It's all a bit fractal.
Sure, pound locks were an obvious incremental improvement back in the early centuries AD when the Romans built probably the first artificial cuts in the UK.
But it took heavy loads of coal and the economics of canal operating companies halving the coal price in Manchester to convince people it was a good idea to invest in building artificial ditches up hills all over the country to return a profit[1], which of course then opened up scope for new industrial enterprises alongside them. The Romans were perfectly capable of that level of engineering, but they focused on other things, even closer to home.
Agree that "it's all about coal" is too simplistic, but coal was a big deal even before steam mills and trains were commonplace.
[1]not all of them did, obviously. But at least they had limited liability corporations by then...
You coukd say one of the big leaps with canals, beyond the initial ones that expanded/followed existing rivers and remained flat, was the building of aquaducts to take canals across valleys which of course is heavily associated with Romans (though as far as I'm aware that wasn't used for transport of anything but water).
This is essentially a definitional issue - do you define it narrowly, with multiple sequential revolutions along the path of industrialization, or broadly, with multiple phases? The facts are the same either way.
Personally, I prefer the latter view, on account of how the various stages interacted. Water-powered mechanical fabric manufacture greatly expanded the use case for rotary-output steam engines, and both technologies took off synergistically when the latter became available with sufficient efficiency. Mechanized manufacture greatly expanded the use case for mechanized transport...
No. "Water power is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower). Steam engines used coal, ie fossil fuels. By your defintion, even nuclear plants would be "water power".
> No. "Water power is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines"
Which is what powered most factories throughout the industrial revolution. Not using electricity obviously, machines would be connected by belt to overhead power shafts, which were connected to a water wheel.
I think coal is exaggerated. The early industrial Revolution, especially in the US, relied much more heavily on water power to drive machinery than coal. In fact, for the First Industrial Revolution, steam power was a footnote. Coal was used for making steel in England, but America primarily used charcoal for iron and steel well into the mid to late 1800s.
Coal enabled faster scale up in the Second Industrial Revolution and on into the 1900s, but it was not essential for industrialization.
The argument here is that coal was specifically necessary to iterate the steam engine to the point that it was viable even on dearer fuel.
In the context of railroads, at least in the US, railroads were primarily reliant on wood fuel for steam power during the First Industrial Revolution. But until steam engines became efficient enough to the point that Stephenson could build his Rocket, a steam locomotive powered even by coal wouldn't make for a viable railroad. So without coal, you get no railroads, and without railroads, I doubt you get to the Second Industrial Revolution because inland bulk transport is still too limited.
But again, steam power was irrelevant to the economy in the early part of the first industrial Revolution (1760-1800). The first industrial revolution relied at first almost exclusively on water power. Mills and bellows and such were designed to run on water power. Power loom was designed at first for water power. And a lot of the early steam-powered equipment was actually water-powered, with the steam engine serving to pump water to run the machines.
Coal wasn’t essential for the first industrial Revolution, except maybe to keep Britain from freezing to death in the winter.
The coal-essentialism argument is partially an anachronism as water powered machinery was supplanted by steam (and later electricity) in the Second Industrial Revolution.
It seems like the earliest practical steam engine was the Newcomen Engine which wikipedia dates to 1712. It was extremely inefficient so it was pretty much used only at coal mines to pump water out. That water had to go somewhere and formed a canal system in England that helped take the coal to market. I think the problem with trying to find the cause of or the source of a phenomenon like the Industrial Revolution is that it's obviously multi-causal. And the inter-related bootstrap process is fascinating.
This seems to be a common thread here in the forum, but I'm very confused. You yourself claim that the steam engine was essential for pumping water - what does the "steam was irrelevant" side actually think would have provided enough energy to pump that much water? Not anything whose caloric output depended on the input from farmers' fields, for sure, those were used for other consumers. Steam for the first time gave access to an energy source independent of feeding someone or something oats, that wasn't constrained to being next to the perfect stream.
Not to mention that TFA actually has an example of a steam engine driven industry that was central to the GDP of the UK, pretty much destroying the "it was only water, never coal" argument.
Rivers provided the power for water. Steam engines were a kind of hack to allow you to run pump powered machines away from rivers, but this was a tiny proportion of the first part of the industrial Revolution.
And perfect streams weren’t required, just water falling a certain height. Headraces and tailraces were dug to distribute water power to places nearby but not directly on a river. I’m thinking of cities like Minneapolis built on rivers whose industry (milling grain to flour) was powered precisely by such water-driven machines.
This is partly a geographical/topological thing. The Northeast US--which is mostly what we're talking about--has a lot more fast flowing rivers and streams than England. So it was natural to site mills on those rivers and build waterworks to extract power from the water.
Hmmm. This argument would be a lot more convincing IMO if the Roman Empire had expired because it lost out to a more industrialized neighbor. Rather, it mostly just collapsed under its own weight.
Rome wasn't defeated per se; it more or less rotted from within, as the value individuals got out of the society did not match the value put in and the center failed to hold. That was a risk of their economic and societal model independent of the existence / non-existence of an industrial society contemporary to them; there was nothing about Rome's arrangement that guaranteed perpetual stability.
That was just a consequence of internal collapse, which prevented Romans from properly defending themselves, as they successfully did in previous centuries.
the Roman Empire institution collapsed, their form of society still exists and it's still at the hearth of many western civilizations. roman law, sewer and water systems, flushing toilets, aqueducts, roads, concrete, wellness centers, baths, and much more.
they are all inventions of the romans that shaped the western culture, helped the social aspect of what we call "society" develop and brought higher living standards where they were not present, things that today still define the difference between developed countries and developing ones.
Paris, Milan, London, they did not know what a sewer system was and what "hygiene and cleanliness" meant, before romans made them a standard for the empire.
A spinning wheel is not required to industrialize textile production since it's just a convenient way to use a spindle. What you'd need is industrial-scale frame jacks to allow one person to run dozens of spindles at the same time plus an external power source to apply.
Same goes for milling (grist and saw), smithing, or any of dozens of other artisan crafts that were obviated by the development and application of external power sources.
Surely the main point is that the Romans didn’t need an industrial revolution of the type we had later.
They had no need to pump out water from deep mines, or need to reduce the cost of labour for producing cheap goods.
They certainly had an architectural/construction revolution so would have likely have developed similar solutions to the same problems if they had them.
The western industrial revolution started by replacing both paid and slave labor with machines. Note, while Rome built many great technologies like roads, aquifers, indoor plumbing, sewers, architecture, and standardized tax law. There was no such thing as due process within their democratic process. i.e. if a dozen people from the community dropped your name on pottery shards into the anonymous legal pot, than you were banished from the city without trial.
It has also been argued, that a series of incompetent leaders starting with Caligula had caused the empire to enter a downward trend. Much how Julius Caesar grew the empires influence through bloody conquest, his successors ambitions simply exceeded the civilizations limits economically.
It is fascinating how a whole civilization could collapse simply by having a few greedy fools in charge. However, I am certain we are different.. ;-)
> There was no such thing as due process within their democratic process. i.e. if a dozen people from the community dropped your name on pottery shards into the anonymous legal pot, than you were banished from the city without trial.
That's Athens, not Rome, which had very little in the sense of actual democratic processes indeed, even in republican times. The tribal assembly was continually overshadowed by the senate, and the only popular institution of any power was the tribunate of the people with it's veto powers -- practically lost during the Punic wars until the government started to break under the strain of the wrongly-incentivized oligarchy.
It has been many years, but concilium plebis made plebiscita that were legally binding for all citizens if I recall. Servius Tullius had also given the vote to others not of the original founding tribes.
I do believe you are correct about the Athens origin of the clay shards though. The subject of exile was confused with the story of Cicero, who was a character who traveled an awful lot. ;)
Yes, they did have that power. They did not, however, actually use it a lot (at all?) after the Punic wars AFAIK (the senate had in practice taken on the entire government as a war measure, and effectively shut out the tribal assembly of any decision making), and when the assembly again started to wield that it under the Gracchi brothers, they are basically reinventing the participation of the non-senatorial citizens because the old system had effectively lapsed. And we are by that time in the "it started to break" phase.
What? The Romans weren’t going to lose the Punic wars as long as there was a new generation of men reaching fighting age every spring. They learned from their mistakes, and Hannibal’s invasion of Italy was doomed from the start because there was no resupply plan.
I'm entirely unsure what you read in my comment. The Punic war was mentioned as a reference time from when on the senate had basically co-opted the entire Roman government.
That's simply not true. All three of the historical dictatorships during antiquity (The Gracchi brothers + Marius) were caused by 'Ballot stuffing' by slaves.
Those weren't dictatorships, given that that word has concrete meaning during the Roman Republic. The actual dictatorships were those of Sulla and Caesar, and neither dictatorship was elected by the tribes.
Also, very much true. Original poster talked about ostracization in anient Athens, but assigned it to Rome.
I'd point out that your comment reads like an optimate framing of the tribunates of the Gracchi brothers - I know that they gained unconstitutional multiple terms in a row, but as far as I know their popularity was genuine, not requiring what sounds exactly like the complaint of an oligarch about the riff-raff.
Roman economy and military power is considered to have been at it’s peak around the time of Marcus Aurelius, who ruled 120 years after the death of Caligula.
Then again Romans didn’t really practice ostracism either…
>Then again Romans didn’t really practice ostracism either
IIRC, the Roman historian Polybius described exilium, relegatio, Aquae et Ignis Interdictio, and more commonly Deportatio as being favored over other forms of punishment.
>Marcus Aurelius
I hope you were thinking of Antoninus Pius instead. ;)
You’re describing the Athenian ostracon. The Romans did not have that and did in fact place a great deal emphasis on the law-as-such in a way we would consider it analogous to due process.
The Roman historian Polybius described exilium, relegatio, Aquae et Ignis Interdictio, and more commonly Deportatio as being favored over other forms of punishment.
Of course, my memory may be incorrect, and you should study the matter yourself.
If I recall correctly, Relegatio was banishment from the Roman province via magisterial decree. Aquae et ignis interdictio was a more severe version stripping individuals of most legal rights.
> It is fascinating how a whole civilization could collapse simply by having a few greedy fools in charge. However, I am certain we are different.. ;-)
The author would have done well to leave out of a lot of the engineering details, or at least give them less emphasis. That would have made it less interesting to HN, no doubt, but would have concentrated the reader's attention on his point (expressed in several bolded passages) that socioeconomic factors stood in the way of industrialization in spite of any particular technological advance.
It would be interesting to compare Rome with Imperial China, where development was similarly hampered by structural factors, such as the lack of incentives for increasing agricultural output.
With the new Game of Thrones spin-off coming out, I was just re-reading some of the author’s hilarious posts on how ridiculous and shallow the show/book were when it came to logistics [0]. Glad to see Bret Devereaux’s popularity growing; his deep dive posts feel like a welcome throwback to the golden age of blogging
I like this blog, but "ridiculous" and "shallows" are not words I would use to describe escapist fantasy fiction.
It simply has goals that are different from history documentaries. It thrives in fantasy stereotypes whose intersection with history is flimsy on purpose; these are stories about dragons and magic, after all. This is not Braveheart being hilariously erroneous while at the same time purporting to be about real history, only "slightly" exaggerated: Game of Thrones completely disregards the real world, and because this is on purpose, I think criticisms from "realism" are unwarranted -- unless being done just for fun, like this author seems to do [1].
Besides, it's a sliding scale: Game of Thrones, by real world standards, is probably more realistic in its unreality than, say, Lord of the Rings. Neither is wrong to be unrealistic, being more parables or entertainment than actual history.
Of all the criticisms to be made of A Game of Thrones as literature, I think "being shallow" is not one of them.
> "Finally, before we dive in, two final caveats. First, this is not a criticism of George R.R. Martin’s world-building. There is, after all, no reason why his fantasy world needs to be true to the European Middle Ages (we’ll talk about known/possible historical inspirations as they come up). I do not think Martin set out to design a sneaky medieval culture lecture in fantasy novel form, so he cannot be faulted for failing to do what he never attempted."
Martin's goal was clearly a sort of political realism (e.g. a lot of what's going on is heavily inspired by the War of the Roses, a real historical scenario), so complaints about how something was politically unrealistic are probably most relevant. He's very concerned with "people really act this way" or "people really fight over things like this", and not as much with "people can really build a 700 foot tall wall with medieval technology".
(That said, the specific article danso linked to is actually one where being nitpicky about logistics makes plenty of sense, because the show chose to make the entire episode about logistics. Once you make a topic the centerpiece of an episode, you'd better get it right. :D)
It's also worth separating Martin's goals and the TV showrunners' goals. In some ways this is where a lot of the criticism of the last seasons of the TV show come from, as the showrunners had to break out on their own without Martin's plot to rely on. This changed the implicit priorities of the show, and the audience noticed and weren't thrilled. Perhaps best exemplified by the last part of the show where the surviving lords of Westeros elected Bran as king "because he had the best story". (Though there was also the way that armies started basically teleporting around, because although Martin didn't care that much about logistics, he still did care a bit.)
Everyone is aware AGoT has a lot of inspiration on the Wars of the Roses. Its fantasy depiction of fantasy nobility and feuds is more "realistic" than, say, The Lord of the Rings (the work of "medieval fantasy" that looms large over all others), so I'd say it does a good job at it. It also has dragons and magic, so let's not take this inspiration too far, shall we?
The author of the blog we are quoting understands this, fortunately. He's being nitpicky for fun's sake, as he readily admits in one of his initial articles about AGoT [1]:
> "But first, I want to answer a question: Why am I bothering? Isn’t this all a bunch of useless nitpicking? Well, first – what did you expect from a blog named A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry? Useless nitpicking is our specialty."
He then goes on to say:
> "But – for once – I think this is useful nitpicking. For a great many people, Westeros will become the face of the European Middle Ages, further reinforcing distorting preconceptions about the period."
It's true that fiction, especially in movies and TV shows, reinforces what people think they know about the past. See how many people (and games) repeat terrible tropes from the wildly inaccurate movie "Enemy at the Gates", and think the Soviets basically constantly mowed down their own troops at the first sign of wavering, or that at Stalingrad there were not enough bullets or weapons for every soldier.
So I feel the author's pain. Then again, neither the AGoT novels nor TV show pretend to be about real medieval history, they just claim to be inspired by it. If the audience thinks this represents real history to any degree, maybe they should have paid more attention to all the dragons, magical weapons and undead zombies in the show?
PS: the blog author's point about how medieval armies were raised, their numbers, and the involved logistics is fascinating and extremely interesting. It obviously doesn't work like this in AGoT or Lord of the Rings!
> Game of Thrones completely disregards the real world, and because this is on purpose, I think criticisms from "realism" are unwarranted
This is not true, any work of fiction needs to be believable within the bounds it sets for its world. Those bounds are extended to include dragons and magic, but no more. The rest of it should be as close to the real world as possible. There's a term for this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisimilitude_(fiction)
Yes, I'm aware of this term, back from when I read Tim O'Brien masterful Vietnam War novel, "The Things They Carried" (which I recommend if you haven't read it).
A Game of Thrones has plenty of verosimilitude. The thing about it is that's about feelings, the emotions in the reader. If you read it and something takes you out of the moment -- "wait, this makes no sense! this character would never do this!", "dragons!? nobody ever mentioned dragons before!", "what, one man defeated an army of hundreds single-handedly!?" -- that breaks verosimilitude. But within AGoT, very few things do this. It's self-contained and, within the span of your reading it, self-consistent. It won't resist a medieval history scholarly review, but then again, it's not meant to, and neither is it "shallow".
That's a fair point, and I'm wrong to imply that, at least in the case of the "Loot Train Battle", that the problem is with GRRM, since IIRC, the books have not yet reached that plot point (and I haven't read the books).
But I do think it's fair to still critique the TV show, fantasy trappings and all, for shallow and inconsistent world-building and logic. The Loot Train Battle is an event that is symptomatic of the showrunners rush to wrap up the sprawling threads that they so carefully rolled out in the earlier seasons — by season 7, teleporting across the continent was just an accepted thing, and that correlated IMHO with a rise in incoherent and unsatisfying subplots.
What I liked about the early seasons of GoT was that even for a fantasy world, there was a real sense physical space. Many of the 1st and 2nd season's developments arise because distance is a factor — e.g. the time it takes to go from Kings Landing to Winterfell, from Winterfell to the wall, etc. The Red Wedding results because the only sensible crossing from north to south is controlled by a long-declining minor House.
Not sure how the showrunners could've worked around GRRM creating an improbable situation where Kings Landing is supplied by The Reach/Highgarden (again, haven't read the book, so maybe this is not the case?). But the showrunners seemed dead set either way to depict a big dragon-vs-army battle, logistics be damned.
I think a critique or analysis of the internal consistency of AGoT is valid and fun! The blog is fascinating in its depth. I just don't think it's necessary to call the books or show "shallow" when they deviate from real-world history or plausibility; like the late Terry Pratchett would argue, it's all about "the story". And the story is engrossing, in my opinion.
You'll get no argument from me about the TV show getting inexplicably rushed and inconsistent in the later seasons. I think most viewers were disappointed by that :(
I disagree, because I think you can't have it both ways.
I love Sci-Fi, but I generally don't like Fantasy as a genre. As soon as magic, wizards, dragons, orcs or elves enter the picture, I check out.
We can debate the logical consistency of my specific preferences (e.g. "Star Wars is more Fantasy than Sci Fi. The force is just magic!"), but I feel how I feel.
Game of Thrones was the first fantasy book(s) and show that I enjoyed in spite of the fantastical elements, and I grew to embrace them nonetheless. I'm not the only one. The reason why the books and show became such a massive cultural phenomenon is BECAUSE it was loved by people who normally don't like fantasy because the "medieval politics" of it all were beloved regardless of any fantasy backdrop.
I have to imagine this was by design. The tone was consistent, and George RR knew what he was doing. He created a world grounded in reality that forgot about magic, then brought it back in (remember, at the start of the series, all the characters except a few regard dragons and magic and zombies as myth and legend because they've been gone for so long)
So I think it's entirely valid to criticize the internal consistency and realism of his works and hold them to a realism bar.
I don't know why you disagree, because I think we're actually in agreement!
It's perfectly fine to judge the internal consistency of a work of fictional world-building. I think AGoT is fairly consistent, give or take.
It's not an accurate depiction of medieval warfare -- the blog's author argues it's actually a better match for the Thirty Years War, with its large professional armies and its loss of human life -- but then it doesn't claim to be. Judging the vassal system ("bannermen") and how it differs from medieval history is interesting, but it's unfair to consider the fictional world "shallow" or "ridiculous" simply because in real medieval history, vassal armies and levies were much smaller.
All things considered, the Wars of the Roses inspired political infighting and feuds that resulted in shocking betrayals and murders are pretty "truthy". Way more than say, how Lord of the Rings depicts aristocracy and the behavior of "rightful" kings ;)
I am too much of a grumpy realist to enjoy fantasy books anymore. Magical cursed dragons I can handle. But anytime there's like, a giant fortress city in a wasteland with no agrarian economy I get thoroughly distracted trying to imagine how much food they go through.
I just started reading Bret's blog in the past couple weeks with the LOTR posts. Was quite the rabbit hole that I still haven't come out of, love the blog! Anyone with an interest in history should check his blog out.
GRRM wasn't even involved with the show at this point, the books don't have anything as bad as the show in terms of travel time where they completely stopped caring about things in the last 2-3 seasons
Considering that ship loans were known already to the Greeks, that assertion is wrong. They were a feature of the antique world, and the fact that Mohammed declared them an abomination would indicate that they worked rather too well.
And there was a recorded instance of futures selling in olive oil in Ancient Greece.
But to the GPs point, while there were contracts, there were no tradeable claims, no capital markets and no professional management separate from the ownership, all of which we associate with the early British and Dutch trading companies and eventually railroads and industrial concerns.
I think a big part of it was that coal was useless in the smelting process during roman times due to its impurities. Coke wasn't discovered until ~400 AD and it wasnt even really used until ~900 AD.
Without the need for lots of coal, there was less incentive in steam engines.
meanwhile Roam already good means of smelting iron (wood->charcoal). I think had Roam discovered coke, it would indeed had an industrial revolution.
I suppose it all depends on your definition of "industrial".
Some Roman inventions have not been matched in the modern world. One that immediately springs to mind is 'concrete'. Roman concrete is far superior to modern concrete. Some modern concrete is only a century or so old, but is rotting away rapidly, while a lot of Roman concrete remains two thousand years later.
Rome was a slave economy. When you are using millions of slaves for no-cost labor, there is little need for develop technology to improve industrial output. Being a slave society has been Rome's undoing. It started in Middle Republic period. It not only prevented industrial progress, but also killed the economy for everyone other than the richest few because those richest few were able to flood the economy with near-zero-cost produce and products, bankrupting anyone else. This caused slow concentration of entire economy, then farmland, then actual land, in the hands of the few elite and started the transition to the feudal economy.
But the romans actually did innovate. Or at least put other's knowledge to massive use.
The scale of planning and engineering put into their infrastructure is just awesome.
It's not just roads. Their sewage systems, water treatment plants, siphons, aqueducts, pipes... IDK if any of you had a deep dive into this, but I watch some YT channels by spanish professors and this people were no joke.
And they seemed to have some research on materials too.
In particular, they didn't innovate in general technologies, like energy/information production/transmission, or metallurgy. Hard to beat slaves as a general technology， even concrete is no match.
“There is direct evidence that the Romans mechanised at least part of the extraction processes. They used water power from water wheels for grinding grains and sawing timber or stone, for example. A set of sixteen such overshot wheels is still visible at Barbegal near Arles dating from the 1st century AD or possibly earlier, the water being supplied by the main aqueduct to Arles.”
I think that aqueduct is an example of energy transmission.
“Ausonius attests the use of a water mill for sawing stone in his poem Mosella from the 4th century AD. They could easily have adapted the technology to crush ore using tilt hammers, and just such is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia dating to about 75 AD, and there is evidence for the method from Dolaucothi in South Wales”
“They also used reverse overshot water-wheel for draining mines, the parts being prefabricated and numbered for ease of assembly. Multiple set of such wheels have been found in Spain at the Rio Tinto copper mines and a fragment of a wheel at Dolaucothi. An incomplete wheel from Spain is now on public show in the British Museum.“
I think that shows innovation in technologies (not as fast as happened in the industrial revolution, but it is innovation)
"Italy never got as large number of mills as Britain as the rivers flowing into Northern Italy have too large variation in water flow. That is part of the reason Romans could never utilize waterwheels to a great extent."
I worry that capitalism is using us in a similar manner.
Neoliberal capitalism has given us a lot of very cheap, very technologically advanced stuff. An extremely basic integrated circuit in the 1960s costs the same as an entire iPhone now, accounting for inflation. Accounting for inflation, automobiles are as cheap as they've ever been, and have many more features that work much better than they ever have.
But ... the edges wear thin. A Raspberry Pi (computer) and a Raspberry Pie (food) may be purchased for around the same price. A varied and healthy diet can be quite expensive (though there are deals to be found if you can travel to get them). Companies want to "add value" to food with extensive processing that increases the engineered taste factors to make us consume more. Housing is insanely expensive in many areas. Health care in the United States is not designed for any humans - not doctors, nurses, other professionals, and certainly not patients.
Neoliberal capitalism won't innovate on these areas. Are we just stuck with what we have? Certainly government mandates could change the game, but just like the Romans, people think the system is working because they can buy a smart phone and a gaming console and some cheap snacks and go for a ride in their fine automobile.
We can't see what the collapse will be, and we can't see what's next. I wonder how many Romans talked like this? I don't believe that our doom is inevitable, but I also think that progress requires specific intention, and progress can be very easily disrupted.
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I have a thesis that the economic benefits of integrated circuit microchip and the economic benefits of neoliberalism cannot be distinguished. They both feed each other. I don't see myself putting enough effort into researching it and writing it up, but I strongly believe that thesis.
I'm not sure what you're complaining about, exactly. A raspberry pie is mostly service, not product - you get it for things like convenience and company and time. You can tell because the frozen version is much cheaper. And if you want to go further lower, you can actually make pies at home for pennies - all you need is a sack of flower and a bunch of frozen fruit. And capitalism even makes it easy for you to do it - if you decide it's something you really want, you can invest a couple hundred bucks in home equipment to do most of the work.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but a couple of reads of your comment and I still think you're complaining that things go well :)
The complaint seems to be that things like raspberry pies are cheap while nutritious food is expensive. The market optimizes for that consumers want without accounting for invisible costs like poor health outcomes from routinely eating calorie-dense nutrient-sparse food. Likewise affordability of healthcare is not optimized for in the US; the incentives in that market drive it towards high but subsidized prices. Someone who is well-employed benefits from health insurance that make prices reasonable-ish, but anyone not subsidized by their employer or government is effectively left out of the market.
This is not a state of affairs where a free market will sort things out. In the food case, the prerequisite of rational agents in the marketplace is not met; people are bad at making good long-term health decisions and will vote with their dollars against their best interests.
In the healthcare case the real transaction is not happening between the consumer and healthcare provider, but between the provider and employers or governments and no party has incentives to change this (except maybe the government following the will of the people). This relationship provides employers a way to attract and retain talent and makes a lot of money for providers.
I find a lot of the criticism of healthcare today to be misguided.
Why would healthcare be inexpensive? Go into a clinic today and there’s a legion of professionals who attend to each patient. Each of them has years of training, even the clerk at the desk.
They use a whole battery of expensive equipment. Multi-million dollar machines to literally see inside your body.
Every piece of tubing, bandage, needle, plastic fitting, etc is sterile, and used only once. They are made in a facility to exacting standards which is in turn monitored and supervised by another network of professionals with reams of policy dictating how the equipment is made, accounted for, and an army of lawyers behind the scenes as well.
The facility itself has exacting standards for cleanliness, emergency power, disaster-resistance.
The medical records are held in computer systems which abide by HIPAA requirements, again with a team of engineers and cybersecurity professionals ensuring that standards are met.
Healthcare is expensive because it’s expensive. The alternative is suffering with untreatable injuries or just dying, which we take for granted because we don’t see it that much anymore. We don’t have country doctors working out of their house charging a few bucks for a visit.
Are there inefficiencies? Is there waste, fraud and abuse? Are there greedy pharmaceutical execs making billions of dollars on the backs of unsuspecting pill poppers? Could we do things better or cheaper? I’m sure we could, but I don’t think there’s some kind of grand conspiracy to make us slaves to our employers vía medicine.
I'm not just talking about the cost, I'm also talking about the experience.
The alternative isn't a lack of healthcare, it's a compassionate experience that understands that we are people, not bags of money. Individual medical centers may live up to that standard, but the industry does not.
> I don’t think there’s some kind of grand conspiracy to make us slaves to our employers vía medicine.
There doesn't need to be a grand conspiracy, just aligned incentives. The result is the same.
It's also true that modern cutting-edge healthcare is expensive any way you slice it. In free market capitalism it is up to each person to bear that cost. This means that some people will not be able to afford treatment or will be plunged into crippling debt. I'm of the belief that if we can treat someone with a health problem then that treatment should be available to them either for some marginal cost or for free. Basic human needs can not be subject to market pricing as consumers are essentially under duress when making purchasing decisions; they cannot choose to forgo lifesaving medicine should the price be unreasonable.
Interesting that my comment sounds like a complaint.
The Romans had a huge blind spot because of their economic system.
We have a huge blind spot because of our economic system.
What is that blind spot? What's in that blind spot? We're in the last stages of the information revolution. The maturity of the information revolution will continue for as long as civilization does; we are continuing the industrial revolution even now.
The Star Trek Original Series and Next Generation both showed a "post-scarcity" society. What is most scarce in our society that prevents a post-scarcity society? What does an economy look like in post-scarcity?
We have Science Fiction, it's entirely possible that ancient Rome had futurists too.
Think of my comment about RPi/Pie in terms of economic revolutions. A society that can make a pie only needs a few things that are relatively easily gathered. An adult human could reasonably invent a pie in any age, from the Stone Age until now. That such an incredibly simple food may be underpriced by advanced technology requiring millions of cumulative person-hours of technical progress is simply astounding.
> What is most scarce in our society that prevents a post-scarcity society?
Nothing. We could have had post-scarcity society since 1950s at least (Haber Bosch process means enough food for everybody, everything else is optional and/or could be achieved by redistribution). Yet we refused to do it cause we value marginal improvements in our comfort more than survival and lack of serious suffering of others. We're already making things scarce on purpose (see NFTs and art in general). People want things that are scarce even if that's the only property of these things, and they value these desires enough to deny other people resources they need to live.
Thinking that this will somehow change in the future just because of some new technology making more stuff non-scarce is naive. We'll invent something that doesn't exist yet just so that we can have it while others can't. There will never be post-scarcity as long as people are people.
>Neoliberal capitalism won't innovate on these areas.
Wouldn't you put the transition from agriculture based economy under neoliberal capitalism? We went from 90% farm employment to 10% while massively increasing output.
Tech folks don't think food production is exciting so they miss all the innovation.
As to housing and health care, we don't have "neoliberal capitalism", we have highly regulated, captured, markets. If you moved to zero zoning in SF you'd start to have innovative building.
The quality of food is better in a modern market like whole foods today than what you got 50 or 100 years ago. Or if you like it super fresh, in pretty much every city you have organic produce at multiple local farmer's markets. Or look at restaurant options today vs even 40 years ago. Coffee today vs Folger's. Fair trade chocolate vs Hershey's. Access to fresh fruit, year round, via global supply chains. I don't know what hasn't gotten better. The worst thing about food today is abundance of cheap (value?) junk food, but that's an accomplishment in its own way.
> I worry that capitalism is using us in a similar manner.
That's the entire point of capitalism. Reinstitution of feudal economy, or even worse, slave economies, through economic system. In post Civil War US and post-emancipation Brazil, the slave economy was reinstituted through 'free market' precisely using capitalist methodology. Former slave owners kept wages low, which forced now-freed slaves to work for even less economic return than before. Because now the slave-owners did not even have to feed their slaves and keep them healthy enough to work. They could just discard them when they couldn't work.
> but just like the Romans, people think the system is working because they can buy a smart phone and a gaming console and some cheap snacks and go for a ride in their fine automobile.
I very much think that people don't think that the system works. Only those who are in or above the top 10% of the society. The rest are aware of the brutal reality of the system and they are unwilling participants in it for that reason. Exactly the same with later Rome. Which is a reason why Rome fall so easily and so fast - there was no difference in between their former Roman masters and their new feudal overlords as far as Romans were concerned.
A lot of these are demand-side problems. Apart from a small slice of the population that is educated about nutrition, people actually want the cheap, tasty, processed food. In places where more highly educated people are concentrated, you actually do see innovation around conveniently getting people healthy food, farm-to-table, etc.
Yes, capitalism will happily cater to your worst vices. But then again, it will just as happily cater to your best virtues. I'd call it a problem of information and education, not a problem of capitalism.
I'm sorry to hear that after you tried to move, you were run down by a professional slave-catcher, and had the letter "FUG" (for "fugitive") burned into your forehead! But I'm glad you weren't crucified and so are still alive to give us your hot takes on how slavery was pretty good.
If Amazon or Uber workers were slaves they probably would be treated better.
Not saying that slavery is by any means even slightly positive. Just that economic system allows for extreme exploitation of people without alternatives.
concentration camps were (are?) built to kill people, subject them to abject torture, to hell, it was not an economic end let alone an ostensibly sustainable venture
Depends on the country. Soviet ones (Gulags) were created for economic purposes as much as for political. The economic idea behind the Gulags was to extract free slave labor out of population and basically free calories out of their bodies - the prisoners were barely fed, so their bodies had to burn their own tissues (starting with fat) to survive. Millions of prisoners/slaves doing hard manual labor for no pay and eating 800 kalories per day helped the country's rapid industrialization in the 20s and 30s.
Yeah, that is annoying. They should feed themselves. Maybe give them a small plot of land where they can grow their own food on the side? Let's call it feudalism.
People still romanticize the antique so much they miss that the medieval period saw quite a few advancements.
Why did the Romans not have an industrial Revolution?
For that you need a society that actually has incentives to efficiently use the labor available. Like in capitalism where you pay the workers based on hours. And the prerequisite for that was feudalism, the development of cities, start of manufacturing and so on. One economic system leads to another. Not easy to just leapfrog from a slave-holding society into the industrial age.
Yes, the Roman military enterprise demanded technological innovation both to expand and maintain their conquered territories. But their productivity as the OP pointed out was severely hamstrung by the plentiful slave labor that conquest afforded.
All of those existed before Romans. From Sumeria to Indus Valley civilization to Egypt. If you dive into their history and watch related channels, you will find even more amazing things. What Romans did, however, was building them systematically and in a standardized fashion to bring them everywhere. That is an innovation.
However...
Aside from that and what advances Rome was able to do from their inception until the Late Republic period, Romans did not innovate as you would describe it. That's why the Roman history from Middle Republic until its fall is a story of slow decline and deterioration into feudalism.
Slaves are not no-cost labor, they have market price (i.e. capital costs), and you need to feed them (i.e. operational costs). Also, to get simple rotational power, you do not need slaves, you just need oxen.
Rome was also a usury economy, which concentrated the wealth of the empire into fewer and fewer hands. People were often forced into slavery on latifundia to avoid starvation.
The roman experience is one reason why the pre-Reformation church was so set against usury.
Thankfully, we won't make the mistake of allowing usury to dominate our civilization again. :|
"A latifundium is a very extensive parcel of privately owned land. The latifundia of Roman history were great landed estates specializing in agriculture destined for export: grain, olive oil, or wine."
Wasn’t debt slavery abolished quite in Roman history?
I don’t think there is much evidence that free citzens were often reduced to slavery. Slaves were almost exclusively war captives or imported from abroad.
Slavery is bad, but it's not no-cost. At the very least you have to feed the enslaved and also give them the bare minimum of care, if only to protect your investment. And then there are the societal costs of enforcement.
I would submit that any Roman farmer or businessman relying on slave labor would be overjoyed to purchase any device that would cut the need for slaves in half. (Or even by 10-20%.)
A device that cuts manual labor only does so for a single purpose. A Roman farm would have grain fields, livestock, and orchards. Slaves on the farm could do all of the jobs the farm required. A harvesting gin of some sort would only reduce the labor needs for a small portion of the farm's output.
For mechanization to reduce manual labor on Roman farms they would need to switch to monoculture crops of a type that were conducive to mechanization. It would take machines being extremely cheap to beat Roman slave labor where conquests of neighboring territories were constantly bringing in new slaves.
That implies that other kinds of landholding did not have access to cheap labor - but serf, sharecroppers, and farm hands are all pretty cheap under the right circumstances.
More pertinently, the "expensive" farm workers of the industrializing countries weren't expensive enough for farming to be mechanized until the 20th century. Second half of that before it had replaced manual forms of farming entirely. Farming itself never was the driver for industrialization, but a rather late profiteer of it. It follows that farm slaves couldn't have been the blocker for industrialization, at least not as directly as you assume.
My completely amateur theory is that the reason there was never any Roman industrialization is because there were no innovations in literacy and information storage or spread. Aka, the printing press.
The lack of innovation in this field was likely because of class issues, especially the upper class wanting to retain control over knowledge.
There is a reason why industrialization followed the invention of the printing press, and not the other way around.
1 million upvotes for the right answer. The printing press was the single, greatest factor responsible for the Industrial Revolution. It contributed to an exponential spread of knowledge that led to a rising tide of industrialisation. Most ancient civilizations had their geniuses, mathematicians and engineers - but they couldn't pass on their knowledge permanently.
Not so sure. The educated Roman elite could certainly record their knowledge onto various medium (tablet, papyrus, etc.). Sure, it wasn't disseminated to the masses (who couldn't read anyway), but it wasn't lost, at least not until the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Empire had extensive written records on all kinds of things, particularly as pertaining to the military.
That’s the thing - innovation in fields like metallurgy or carpentry usually come from actual practioners. A blacksmith in the north of England might have developed some new smelting technique but that technique would have no way of being transported across Europe since the blacksmith couldn’t write it down.
The educated elite mostly wrote about things they knew and cared about - law, warfare, religion. Learning in these fields often advanced much faster than, say, blacksmithing since the elite class was invested in writing and sharing and learning about them.
Good point. Many innovative projects (roads, bridges, etc.) were built by Roman army engineers who, while not necessarily elite, were certainly educated and could record their methods. So yes, innovation in areas pertaining to the military advanced much faster. What's surprising though is that improvements in steel production would have produced far superior weapons and therefore you think would be something the Romans would put a lot of effort into innovating on. I'm guessing that blacksmithing wasn't the type of grand project that required oversight/planning by educated army engineers. Or perhaps the hardness of the Roman swords and spears didn't make much difference compared to other military factors (discipline, tactics, defenses, etc.)
If you look at a very broad sweep of cultures at various times... the classification of social classes get very blurry: slavery, peasantry, serfs, cottiers, indentured labour, wage labour... Which of these best represents Middle Kingdom Egypt's labour structure? Is sharecropping the same as medieval european peasantry?
The definition or labeling of these labour class structures don't tell you much about their economic implications. Slaves don't necessarily cost less than sharecroppers, serfs or tribesman. That doesn't mean it doesn't have implications, but they are complicated and relative to the specific of that system.
I just don't buy this linear extrapolation from A to B.
It's more complex than that. The cost of slaves is non-zero regardless of how you shoulder the burden of them; feeding, keeping them in line, giving them tools for their tasks, and so forth. What would've excluded the use of early steam engines for them would've been their higher cost versus their potential output.
Plus, industrialization didn't start with the steam engine, it started with the water wheel and windmill. Whether it was grinding grain, cutting wood, or even running power hammers (some smithies were found around rivers), the industrialization effort before the steam engine was nearly three or four hundred years earlier than the official starting of the late 18th century as told in popular narratives. In fact, I believe there's evidence of industrialization in Europe happening as early as the 11th century in some countries (again, windmills and water wheels running milling and other labor intensive operations).
Another problem with the Roman economy was the lack of complex financial arrangements and instruments. There wasn't any conception of the modern loan or corporate bonds in their world which are integral to the acceleration of industrialization and the growth of capitalism. Rome basically couldn't industrialize because its people and its norms were incongruent with the possibility. And even if some ancient engineer magically did create a simple two stroke engine, there wouldn't be any incentive to invest as to produce them with regularity. At most, they would've been a curiosity of the wealthy with little usage beyond some minor conveniences.
"And even if some ancient engineer magically did create a simple two stroke engine, there wouldn't be any incentive to invest as to produce them with regularity. At most, they would've been a curiosity of the wealthy with little usage beyond some minor conveniences."
To confirm this, ancient greeks invented a simple steam turbine, and was regarded as a "party trick".
Yep, it's a problem that couldn't be solved in Rome as it lacked many essential tools that the so-called Industrial Revolution depended upon. I can't imagine Rome or Sassanid Persia achieving such an industrial breakthrough.
But was that such a big factor? After all, most of the population even in 17thC England was illiterate. Industrial innovation was, at least initially, primarily driven by a small educated elite.
Why would complex financial agreements keep the Romans from large scale automation? The motivation for something like an industrial revolution (automation) is just connectivity within an economy. If I know that the people on this island are paying 3x more for Roman ketchup than I will make 10x more ketchup and sell it for a profit on that island. I have a hard time believing that this wasn't happening all the time in Rome...The Romans had modularized home construction so that they could scale and that doesn't happen without financial incentives and some level of an industrial revolution.
Rome's problem was always crony captilism and the fact that any Voltaire's that might have existed would have been violently executed by the state. Without freedom of thought you have no Industrial Revolution.
If the large scale automation involves technology research and Colosseum-sized capital investments like the Industrial Revolution did, you either need the state or its wealthiest citizens to be interested, or complex financial arrangements for the people that are interested in pursuing that to be able to raise funds
A lot of Rome's more ingenious feats of engineering were geared towards military uses or grand public works in the name of Emperors and aristocrats. There wasn't really the same infrastructure for smart engineers that dreamed they could become wealthy from researching and building a new process for making garments at a lower cost (and they were missing lots of intermediate improvements the British had). Ancient Rome had more freedom of thought than, say, modern China, but a lot less entrepreneurial culture.
>Why would complex financial agreements keep the Romans from large scale automation?
Because the ability to amortize your costs is a boon for outpacing smaller firms. Basically, the more cash you can get your hands on that you can defer the lump sum payment on the more you can build out and thus the more you can produce. It basically becomes a positive feedback loop (this includes state subsidies indirect and direct which I'll leave as a generalized foundation for the sake of a clearer argument).
>The Romans had modularized home construction so that they could scale and that doesn't happen without financial incentives and some level of an industrial revolution.
Modularity was born out of the immediate demand for the product (housing). Note that modern, capitalist, economies build on the basis of volume whether it's housing, smart phones, clothes, and so on. And it can do this due to the fact that costs are amortized over the payment of debt along with the state subsidization as mentioned. Essentially, capitalism fuels itself through debt and state based subsidies (ex. interstate highways subsidize trucking yielding higher profits than would be possible if interstate highways were wholly private). This includes the inducement of markets (ex. prior to the trans-continental railroad the US markets were regional at best and most international trade was by sea for commodities such as cotton, gold, or ores).
Also, Roman upper class had no social need to turn their profits into more profits. They would often build themselves villas, have lavish feasts, and many other temporary luxuries in their place as their social standing was more based in that than in sheer monetary/accounting wealth.
>Rome's problem was always crony capitalism and the fact that any Voltaire's that might have existed would have been violently executed by the state. Without freedom of thought you have no Industrial Revolution.
This here is your primary error, capitalism did not exist prior to the the 17th century (merchant capitalism) at the earliest. Yes, there were loans but nothing to the complexity or legal arrangements that even a modern small business loan has in terms of legal and social dimensions. Today, debts can be carried by corporate entities. In the past though, loans were only to be held by the person or people who agreed to them. It was a rare concept that loans or debts could be owned by someone else (ex. one nation conquering another taking on their debts which is a new concept) which is an important construct for financial capitalism to emerge from industrial capitalism.
Agreed. It's also true that the early Industrial Revolution cotton mills used slave-picked cotton, because although millions of slaves continued to exist and their produce was imported even after slavery itself was banned in Britain, slave labour couldn't possibly compete with industrial mills in output of finished goods. (And not just because the early mill workers often earned little more than the cost of procuring, securing and covering the subsistence of slaves)
The UK had the tech to build mills and the financial system to fund the capital costs of building them though (and a larger, more global market to sell mass produced cotton to)
> There wasn't any conception of the modern loan or corporate bonds in their world which are integral to the acceleration of industrialization and the growth of capitalism
Yes! Great theory. Financial innovation seems as big a driver of industrialization as the discovery of coal or oil.
I would imagine that an oversupply of laborers (i.e. too many people, not enough places for them to be productive) was a bigger factor.
If you read A Farewell to Alms - it has a pretty convincing argument that the industrial revolution only happened because England ran out of land and birth rates declined and that, combined with thriving merchant and textile and finance industries, led to a shortage of labor - which led to innovation.
Trying to point out single factor is a exercise in stupidity.
Time matters, places matter, culture matters, food, existing technology, technological connections with other regions, math, scientific progress, etc etc.
For example you need to be able to make blueprints. To make blueprints you need the math technology, the printing technology, and drafting technology, and the language necessary to all be developed first.
There are hundreds of thousands of different variables. Probably millions. More probably trillions.
None of them aligned for the Romans. All of them aligned for coal mining industry in Britain.
> There are hundreds of thousands of different variables. Probably millions. More probably trillions.
Obviously. The point of the book was to highlight the major factors.
> None of them aligned for the Romans. All of them aligned for coal mining industry in Britain.
> Trying to point out single factor is a exercise in stupidity.
Are you saying the coal mining industry is the cause? Because the industrial revolution leads to the explosion of the coal mining industry, not the other way around.
Why do you need so much coal? For steam engines.
Why do you need steam engines? Because people and animals aren't enough any more.
The article argues it was the other way around - that pumping water out of mines was the use case that allowed steam engines to be funded and improved to the point that they could be used for other things.
This is really interesting! And it's missing from A Farewell to Alms (IIRC).
It seems the textile industry and the train are the large drivers that demand more coal. But it doesn't mention the water pumping problem or the atmospheric steam engine.
That being said - assuming you have an abundance of "Big Burly Men and Daft Animals" - as the article put it - I'm skeptical the steam engine would've found a viable use.
Assuming England hadn't run out of forested land - they wouldn't have been extracting so much coal.
I still think the key points from A Farewell to Alms stand - but this is a super interesting nugget that should've made the book (if it didn't).
The British documentary series Connections (three series, one in 1978 and the others in the 1990s) do an amazing job of showing all the strange and different paths that led to our modern world.
They are when you're conquering your neighbors. Massive Roman expansion led to a huge influx of slave labor. When Rome stop expanding the number of incoming slaves decreases and the value of slaves went up. Later on when Rome was hit by plagues they suffered from a lack of laborers to work the fields and staff the army.
The US was a slave economy in the south and the south did not industrialize until after slavery was abolished. That was a big part of why the south's political power relative to the north was weakening before the Civil War, was a big part of why the south eventually lost the war (they had the more competent generals and their army fought better but the north just had far more people and far more ability to keep its army supplied) and was also a big part of why the north was the stronger region economically long after the war.
If the south hadn't gotten paranoid that Lincoln was going to take their slaves away (he wasn't), they might still have slavery because the slave system meant that the southern elite didn't have to do any work whatsoever (which is basically the gist of why Calhoun called slavery a "positive good"). Sure, they weren't ever going to be as rich as the northern tycoons but they lived far more comfortable lives and didn't see any reason to change that. The north had given up slavery because, in the late 1700s before the cotton gin, it seemed like it wasn't going to be economically viable in the future and most of the founding generation viewed it as a "necessary evil" and genuinely wanted to get rid of it as soon as they could but felt they couldn't (Jefferson, a slaveowner who owned slaves he wanted to free but couldn't because he was always deep in debt, is probably the most famous example of this point of view). Northerners also believed in the ideal of the self-sufficient family farmer and (especially in New England) a Calvinist work ethic. When you regard leisure as a sin, you don't have as much interest in being freed from having to work.
In short, I think the slave economy is a sufficient explanation for why Rome didn't industrialize. When you have tons of slaves and the republic/empire was always fighting more wars to get more slaves, why would you need machines? Especially when the machines would likely require free men to do work to maintain them.
>they had the more competent generals and their army fought better
That's a pretty strong claim. Can you share your source?
My impression has always been that Southern leadership (including generals) spent most of the war LARPing, without any real understanding of how badly things could go for them personally, with their forces having no particular tactical advantages advantage over the North.
Much of my understanding of pro-slavery thought comes from Calhoun: American Heretic by Robert Elder. Calhoun was dead by the time of the war but he was the south's most important intellectual and he was at the center of American politics from the War of 1812 that he helped start until he died in 1850 after paving the way for the Civil War.
2 speeches that are really good in terms of understanding the motivations of both sides at the beginning of the Civil War are the Cornerstone Speech by the Confederate VP (Alexander H Stephens) and Lincoln's first inaugural. Neither speech is particularly hard to read especially with Wikipedia available to look up unfamiliar terminology (i.e. "internal improvements" = 19th century name for infrastructure spending and "domestic institutions" = polite euphemism for slavery). Its especially fortunate for the sake of history that Stephens came right out and said what the Confederates believed because it makes it easy to refute the "it was about economics not slavery" line of argument from Confederate apologists. Lincoln's first inaugural is important as well because it refutes the "it was always only about slavery" argument you sometimes hear in response.
One rather interesting angle in the Cornerstone Speech is how Stephens cites Adam Smith's economics. In the north, the economic nationalist "American School" of Friedrich List and Henry Carey (Carey was Lincoln's primary economic advisor) was more influential than Adam Smith. Unless you're really interested in reading economic theory, I'd say the Wikipedia article on the American School of economics is sufficient to get the gist of the economic ideas that influenced Lincoln.
I'm not entirely sure what to recommend regarding the abolitionist movement because that's an area that's already heavily emphasized in the American education system, at least in my experience. I'm also not sure what to recommend regarding the wave of immigration that finally shifted control of the federal government from south to north in 1860 but this would definitely show up in the Census data and you can still see evidence of it today in how white people from the south are more likely to have English last names than white people from other parts of the country (the mid 1800s wave of immigration was heavily Irish and German).
Another great source for learning about what happened is to get a chance to talk to tour guides at the Civil War battlefields. I think most of my history professors from when I was majoring in history also did tours of the Gettysburg battlefield. The best time to visit is when it isn't as crowded. In the case of Gettysburg, that means avoiding the first 2 weeks of July (reenactment week followed by biker week) unless you specifically want to see the reenactment because the traffic is notoriously awful for those 2 weeks and everything is going to be packed.
US industrialized first (and most) in the parts without slaves.
That slavery is bad for industrial production was a major abolitionist argument. It's been repeated for at least 150-200 years.
de Tocqueville dedicates many pages to just that aspect. He describes sailing down the Ohio, seeing on the right bank teeming with factories and mills, and on the left one only loafers and undeveloped land.
In pop culture too; in Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler is the cosmopolitan embarrassing the old southern aristocrats at cocktails parties, regaling stories about the Union being flush with money and factories, the south being a backwater. That's how he knew which way the war would go.
Only about half of the United States was a slave economy. In the north where slavery was not prevalent, industrialization outpaced the agrarian south. Then after the US Civil War, industrialization took off with the First Transcontinental Railroad being completed in 1869.
The real reason is that wage slavery in the North is more effective than chattel slavery in the South.
When the slaves imagine themselves free and have a slightly greater amount of agency, they are more productive than those who are motivated by the whip alone.
Mostly the North industrialized, whole the South relied on slave labor as long as they could and then sharecroppers and other forms of barely-not-slavery.
The "funny" part about those barely-not-slavery practices, some were outlawed and successfully defended in court by arguing it was... actually slavery, which was illegal but had no "or else".
The US didn't crack down on this until World War 2, and that was just because they were getting bad press about it.
At the time slavery existed, north was much more industrialized then south. The free labor ideology made North have a lot more small producers trying to innovate and earn money in market.
South ressembled and seen itself more like aristocratic gentlemens so to speak. Slavery meant that trades and smaller production were jobs for slaved, looked down at.
And yet the majority of the free, antebellum South was poor. DuBois got it right about the poor Southern white being himself bamboozled by racism as well.
There was very little direct cross though. The industrialized places (cotton milling etc) almost never had enslaved workers. Those were mostly on the plantations.
What is more US slave economy was worse. In Roman times you can become free. It was common for slaves to be paid wages, treated well, and given their freedom.
(Not OP, idk how she defines it). Freedom is a spectrum. There are some parts of American work life which limits people's freedom. The non-livable wages for much low income manual labour means many needs to work multiple jobs, and makes it hard to save money, so you live hand to mouth (less freedom). Tying healthcare for you and your family directly to your current job is a major freedom-remover, even if you save up money to survive a month between jobs it can literally bankrupt you if you or you family gets sick then. There are of course places which are worse, but there are also places in the world where people can quit their shitty jobs knowing that their kids will still get healthcare and school no matter what.
Is a slave zero cost though? Seems like the opposite. You have to pay a large upfront cost for whatever extra marginal output they can produce, which is minimal because you still need to feed/house the slave and their family, but they're probably not the most motivated worker. So you have an expensive worker you need to feed with low productivity. The economics of slaves seem pretty poor quite frankly.
Much of the highly innovative infrastructure (roads, bridges, aquaducts, etc.) was built by the Roman army, which could be considered a form of slavery (with a freedom coupon at the end if you survived), but which had to be maintained at a certain level of effectiveness (i.e., couldn't keep them at near-starvation levels to save money), and was certainly not zero-cost.
Humanoid forms are less efficient than specialist ones. It is a nonsequitor that chasis shape will somehow make a slave economy. But even if improbably sapient robot slaves were a thing part of what made slave economies stink was not upgrading their tools and efficiency. When the tools are designed by a highly educated workforce that pitfall wouldn't apply.
It's really key for people to understand this, because that economic imbalance doesn't require slaves, though slaves are a sufficient condition.
It can also be done (on paper at least) with automation. The key point is "capital consolidation (which can scale) divorced from individual labor output (which does not scale)," and however you get there (slaves or robots), you can create a massive societal wealth imbalance that results in an economic arrangement utterly unlike the arrangement that spawned it.
... that reminds me, my phone pinged five minutes ago. I should go pick up that Amazon package off my porch.
In Netherlands, windmills have been used for a wide variety of applications - pumping out excess water for land reclamation, cuttings logs, making paint, pressing oil. I don't see why this couldn't have added up to an industrial revolution eventually if coal didn't take off nearby. You can use wind to pump water up and then use water for steady rotational power. Basic knowledge of electricity dates back to classical times, so you could potentially leapfrog to that eventually instead of going through an internal combustion engine. In fact, we are now trying to run our industries on wind power because coal is no longer practical for different reasons.
All in all, it's always the case that what actually happened could have only happened in one place, because that place shaped all the details of what happened. Roman empire contributed hundreds of innovations without which one innovation of steam engine would not have been enough to build modern economy either.
To store wind energy, you either need excellent pneumatics (high-precision manufacturing) to compress air or a rectifier (semiconductors!) to charge a battery. I don't think that was in reach. Maybe you could have spun a flywheel, but you'd have a hard time making magnetic bearings without a good theory of magnetic fields and probably Earnshaw's theorem. And it's very hard to move a flywheel.
Pumped hydro won't get you portable power. That's a major limitation for, e.g., vehicles. The train was invented just 66 years after the steam engine (1738-1804).
There is a rather long history of wind being used to transport goods, with horses as a backup when you must transport people or things in any weather regardless of waterways nearby. Alternative paths to industrial revolution may not have produced 21st century conveniences right away, but neither did the actual industrial revolution. You can power factories with pumped hydro.
The necessary developments in math and physics are not to be underestimated. I'm not disputing whether you could eventually do it without coal, I'm attacking the supposition that medieval-to-earlier civilizations (the Song Dynasty, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Roman Empire, etc) could have industrialized if they had only realized one or two key things. There's a whole framework of understanding that had to be established: calculus, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, et cetera; the Europeans had the benefit of importing knowledge from all over Eurasia, from paper (China, imported via Middle East ca. 1200s) to positional numerals (India), to algebra (al-Khwarizmi, born near Uzbekistan, worked in Baghdad). Leonardo Bonacci's schooling in Algeria was transformative for Italian mathematics. Et cetera.
A single wind turbine will only pump water at a measly rate up a large incline. In order to gather enough wind turbines' output to achieve useful energy storage, you need a means of transmission; the electric dynamo dates to 1831, while the electrostatic generator was developed around 1663, but could not operate while transmitting power. Pneumatics require, again, high precision. This stuff only seems easy now because we have so much understanding of the physical world that was unimaginable when Constantinople and Tenochtitlan were conquered. A modern train car can be pushed by hand; a sailing train car with the steel and lubricants available to da Vinci or Ben Sheng would hardly budge without a gale. Coal is so, so easy by comparison.
A weak vacuum was first produced by Torricelli in the early 17th century using a long mercury-filled tube, but the manufacture of an effective vacuum tube takes you right back to the same high-performance pneumatic engineering I mentioned for compressed-air storage — the first effective model produced by JJ Thomson in the mid-19th century, thereby discovering the electron, which was a necessary step for this to be even imagined.
But, to be fair, it's simpler than a semiconductor.
You can create an effective vacuum in a glass tube by filling it with mercury, inverting it, then heating the tube and pinching it off. This is all low tech.
BTW, Edison discovered vacuum tubes by playing around adding extra electrodes in his light bulbs. But he didn't realize what he'd discovered, and it went nowhere with him.
One can transform AC into DC without semiconductors. Vacuum tube technology is the first thing to come to mind. But it is practical even mechanically if the AC frequency is low enough.
DC generators work essentially the same as an AC alternator (motor in reverse). You can get AC-DC conversion by hooking these up to one another, just connect the rotors together.
This blog fundamentally misunderstands the Industrial Revolution. It focuses on specific technological advancements like the steam engine as pre-requisites. The truth is that the discovery of the steam engine was inevitable. The conditions that made it possible were not.
The Magna Carta, which laid the time for a democratic society, was a key precursor. Democratic societies enable the free exchange of ideas far better than other forms of government.
The printing press, often considered the most important invention ever, allowed the exchange and preservation of ideas at a scale never before possible or imagined in history.
Both of these led to the Scientific Revolution in England. The formalization of the scientific method, the discovery of the fundamental laws of nature- it was the Scientific Revolution which made the Industrial Revolution inevitable.
Don't forget double-entry bookkeeping on that list. But I think your claim to a direct link is quite strenuous. Both the printing press and the Magna Carta (as well as accounting) had been well established for centuries when the Industrial Revolution happened.
Perhaps more interesting than the press itself was the rapid increase in literacy believed to have occurred in the century immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution...
I wonder what would have happened in the absence of coal/fossils. Obviously anything requiring higher temperatures than possible with charcoal would have been off limits for a longer period. But what would have powered an industrial revolution instead? Solar? Whale oil? Vegetable oil?
I read a fun book that explored this possibility, “Kingdom of the Wicked” by Helen Dale.
In the story, the Romans have somehow stumbled upon the industrial revolution at the height of the republic, the consequences are fascinating. Very good read.
In Roman days, craftsmen had trade secrets and no patents. If you lost the trade secret for whatever = your monopoly was broken. Slaves employed in secret crafts were unable to write and well guarded.There was no IP as we know it. This carried on until widespread printing and reading permitted easy IP spreading - and letters patent = a king granted monopoly that evolved into the early patents - to-day's melange. Copyright on writing evolved to life of author - until Disney came along.
Software jumped onto writing's coat tails.
An interesting precursor step to coal mining was peat mining and the transport networks that evolved around it, especially in the Netherlands. Lowtechmagazine as usual has an excellent article [0] about it.
I think a more intriguing question is ”Why no Chinese industrial revolution?” Their economy was nowhere near as slavery or serfdom based, and was impressively technologically advanced
The weirdest thing to me is that the Chinese had sky lanterns 2,300 years ago but they never scaled them up to hot air balloons. It took 2,000 years before Joseph-Michel Montgolfier saw some laundry billow as it dried above a fire, inspiring him to build a flying machine.
What amazes me is we've had hot air balloons for 250 years and still haven't scaled them into partial vacuum space zeppelins, we're still burning rocket fuel like it's the dark ages
I've thought about this a lot, and it really comes down to metallurgy. The Romans just couldn't make strong enough steel. The key enabling technology of the industrial revolution was steam power, which is only possible given a theoretical understanding of thermodynamics, and the capability of creating a pressure vessel sufficiently large and strong enough to generate usable power.
Good article, a step change in energy production ushered in the industrial revolution. The next step change on the horizon would be nuclear fusion. I wonder if/when that is achieved we'll look back at today like how this article looks back at the Romans.
The coming decades will be very interesting. We're either going to have a step change up or step change down in energy production. I hope and am optimistic nuclear (fusion or fission), solar, and wind result in a step up. Otherwise the step down will be devastating.
Can't have an industrial revolution without a printing press. Can't have mass literacy without a printing press. Need a free market to enable people to profit from improvements.
Japan's Industrial Revolution during the Meiji era doesn't strike me as exceptionally exemplifying free market principles, but rather a strongly government-driven economic policy with market elements, more akin to the American School model described and advocated by Friedrich List.
Copying industry from other countries is not the same as developing one itself. Japan's military in WW2 was pretty lightly armed, and the rest of the country was not terribly prosperous. Nothing like the postwar prosperity Japan enjoyed.
What industrialised country invented all the innovations utilised by itself without imports from elsewhere?
There are numerous market-oriented countries which failed to industrialise as rapidly as Japan did. And numerous non-market countries which industrialised quite rapidly.
You can start with electric power grids. The oil industry. Many advances in locomotives. Check out the 1893 world's fair in Chicago. The automobile industry. Airplanes.
Electric power grids originated in the UK, as did generators.
Drilling and refining of oil in Silesia (now variously parts of Poland, Germany, and Czechia). The drilling techniques used by Col. Drake in 1869 were based on thousands-of-years-old salt-mining and drilling techniques first developed in China.[1]
The first functional automobiles were produced in Germany, not the United States.[2]
Railroads were invented in the UK and France, though the first US rail boom was occurring at roughly the same time as France's development.[3]
Electric lighting (arc light, incandescent light) was invented in the UK.[4]
After the Wrights, much early aeronautical development occurred in France. In part due to Wilbur Wright's demonstrations and promotions there.
Russia developed, amongst other things: the electric telegraph, punch cards, the first caterpillar tracks, an electric filament lamp pre-dating Edison's, electrified rail, videotape, radio, the solar cell, electric transformers, television (as well as the kinescope, used for tape-delayed broadcasts), petroleum cracking, synthetic rubber, the grain harvester, nuclear power generation, kidney transplants, heart-lung transplant, artificial steroids, and, within your field of aerospace, the helicopter, airliners, emergency parachute, artificial satellites, ICBMs, ABMs, and manned space flight.[5][6]
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Notes:
1. See Manfreid Weisenbacher's Sources of Power for a history of Silesian oil pioneering.
Let's take one your cases: the electric light bulb.
Edison invented it. Earlier bulbs were neither practical nor useful. Edison endured years of lawsuits by those earlier useless bulbs, and they all lost.
How about helicopters? Sikorsky invented the first practical single rotor helicopter. While Sikorksy was russian, he developed the VS-300 in the US.
Electric power grids? The first was in New York City. Edison pioneered most of the technology in it. The first AC grid was at Niagara Falls supplying power to Buffalo, NY.
Don't forget about the Model T. Ford invented the mass produced automobile.
Schilling's telegraph system was a dead end, requiring multiple wires and had a needle swinging to various letters. Morse's one actually was practical, and the first line was in the US.
ICBMs - more like the Germans invented it (V2) and the Russians forced those Germans to extend it for them.
Television had many fathers. Attributing it to Russia is just silly. The first television broadcasting station was in New York. The first electronic television was invented by Farnsworth, an American.
But you can legitimately credit the Russians for the first artificial satellite and the first man in space.
The V2 was decidedly continental with a range of 320 km (200 mi). That would be considered "tactical" under present nomenclature. ICBM is considered for ranges in excess of 5,500 km (3,400 mi).
The first successful ICBM was the R-7 Semyorka (NATO: SS-6 Sapwood), with an 8,800 km (5,500 mi) range. Flight testing began in 1957, and the design was operational by 1958. A modified R-7 launched Sputnik 1, in October, 1957.
I'm not arguing that further development of specific innovations didn't proceed to a high degree in the United States.
But the question regarding Japan was innovation vs. copying. The Unites States, until at least the late 19th century, and arguably well into the 20th, was copying at least to a significant degree. You might care to acknowledge this point.
Your point that countries "[n]eed a free market to enable people to profit from improvements" may have greater merits, though that too seems arguable.
I think there’s a lot to be said for the two stage argument. First stage water mill powered factories and canals for transport. Second steam and steam railways.
The answer is almost always tooling + resources. Scientific advancement outpaces tooling + resources - look at biology, physics (micro + macro), genetics, etc.
The steam engine was not the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution was a major transformation of society which the steam engine merely was a one such development, and not even the most important.
The key to the industrial revolution was that it was the first time everything was advancing steadily all at the same time. Just taking a look at the steam engine, there is an approximately 200 year long process where europe went from crude steam pumps, such as Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont's steam pump from 1606, to the practical steam engines that came into use in the early 1800s. Along the way there was the discovery of the vacuum and atmospheric pressure, the development of methods to measure and alter such pressures, regenerative heating systems, the concept of the piston and cylinder, the developments of manufacturing technologies that could produce seals adequate for a steam cyclinder, improvements to metallurgy allowing for the use of high pressure steam, etc. Some people will hold up Savery's steam engine or Watt's as "the steam engine" but both these and all others represent just arbitrary points in a long line of very gradual evolution.
Completely independent of the invention of steam power, you have innovations like the 4 field crop rotation, the european seed drill, the dutch plow, the mechanical thresher, new world crops, land enclosure, and scientific selective breeding which all greatly increased agricultural output, allowing a large non-agricultural population to be supported for the first time in history. Advances in manufacturing such as the development of 3 plane grinding, the metal lathe and other machine tools, and standardized threads made innovations like standardized parts, the spinning jenny, and the practical steam engine possible. A shift in the very way people thought about production lead to new manufacturing techniques for chemicals, paper, glass, iron, etc which made these goods both ammenable to the new factory system, as well as economical and high enough in quality to allow for further advancement.
All of these developments were in turn part of a broader scientific and engineering revolution, which best explains why the industrial revolution did not occur in other civilizations. While invariably every society has produced curious people who have tinkered and observed the world, typically these were brief flashes in the pan. Someone like Hero of Alexandria would come along, make a bunch of cool inventions, then die and nothing would come of it. People falsely believe that civilizations like the romans were uninterested in technological progress and thus did not think to exploit inventions, but that's simply not the case. They were very good at and excited about making money with some new technology. The issue was that the utility of inventions was what they really cared about, moreso than the invention itself. The idea of developing technology for its own sake was uncommon, to the point that the very few who did see value in such projects could not effectively collaborate.
In early modern Europe, you have a unique historical phenomenon where a century of so of religious upheaval and warfare suddenly mean the traditional status signalling methods of the nobility - military achievement and influence in the catholic church - fall out of vogue. People need new ways of socially one upping eachother, and by chance this takes on the form of the gentleman-scientist. Spending all your time and money doing experiments or making contraptions with little or no practical utility becomes cool. You get tons of incremental but consistent improvements which are widely disseminated and further built upon. You get people like Watt trying to make a steam engine with a double acting piston and it doesn't work because manufacturing methods are just not there yet, and then Wilkinson comes along and develops a boring machine that makes it possible.
Of course all these things are rooted in deeper trends. For example the aftermath of the Black Death really kickstarts Europe's development as a labor shortage forces people to use land more efficiently to maintain agricultural output, the adoption of the printing press allows practical dissemination of ideas across a continent, and the timely discovery and exploitation of the new world lets Europe avoid what likely would have been major demographic and economic issues in the 1500s, instead allowing for a period of rapid population growth and improvement in living standards.
My understanding is that it's a settled question in economics that the answer is simply "risk management". This is what was "invented" at the start of the industrial revolution. Everything else already existed.
The question only makes sense if you subscribe to the European centric idea that the Roman Empire fell with Rome and the medieval era was a set back. The truth is things continued to progress in the Eastern Empire, the Abassid Caliphate and in imperial China.
Once you reconsider, the answer becomes obvious. The Roman Empire didn't experience the Industrial Revolution because the necessary technological advancements were yet to be invented. Humanity needed one thousand more years to reach that point and during this thousand years what was the Roman Empire morphed into something different.
> The question only makes sense if you subscribe to the European centric idea that the Roman Empire fell with Rome and the medieval era was a set back.
However, you're absolutely correct that any explanation of why the Roman Empire didn't have an industrial revolution (without moving the goalposts around the technological advancements the Romans did make) has to account for why there wasn't an industrial revolution in the Eastern Roman Empire or China. And the reasonable explanation is that the technology tree wasn't developed enough.
Romans had a similar list of accomplishments; but we're all too tempted to group them together and assume they were simple and easy.
Once you actually start to dig into it you begin to realize how everything is connected together and that while perhaps you could jump start it with a time machine at just the right place; you might not be able to speed it up as much as you'd think. A "build the tools to build the tools to build the machines to build the tools to build the machines to build the tools" problem, if you will.
I basically agree. Arguably there are some innovations in health and science that the right knowledge in the hands of the right ruler/influential person could have advanced by centuries. But, in general, I'm not at all sure that technology overall could have been accelerated all that much even if a time traveler showed the right ruler a stack of modern how things work-style books.
Yeah specific ideas would be powerful and actionable (germ theory, for example; though people had somewhat of a rough working idea of some of it with the concepts of "bad water") though many of those were somewhat in play even in ancient times (often as religious practices).
There have been some books that explored the idea - I recall a series "The Cross-time Engineer" which isn't actually that great, but does have some obvious engineering knowledge.
One thing I do think it gets right is that if you're sending someone back in time to change the past, you do NOT send a scientist, you send an engineer or a mechanic with the Handbook of Chemistry.
>you send an engineer or a mechanic with the Handbook of Chemistry.
Yeah, you want someone who, armed with some basic knowledge can build things. CRC Chemistry Handbook, B&M mechanical engineering handbook, Henley's formulas, How Things Work, information on finding and refining basic materials, how to invent everything...
This answer is circular though: “they didn’t have the technology because they just didn’t have the technology yet”.
Time alone isn’t even really an answer. It only takes time because of the pace of innovation, and the pace of innovation depends on things like culture, tech, geography, population, communication, money, etc
Does it though? Seems to me that the pace of innovation is mostly dictated by previous innovation. Political systems and organisations shift and change. What passes for the core moves. Meanwhile things march on.
I don’t really see how it’s circular. They didn’t have the technology because developing technology takes time. Innovation used to happen on a time scale which made political structures not very relevant.
The technological progress of the modern era is a product of the Renaissance movement beginning in the 14th/15th century. A transformations that cuts through culture, society, and technology. Social changes like the emergence of scientific organizations and Rationalism are impossible to meaningfully disentangle from modern technological artifacts.
You're right that the pace will vary--starting with geographical determinism--but there's still some sense of a technology tree that has to be traversed to some degree whether more quickly or more slowly.
> Overall the medieval era was something of a setback in the aggregate if you look at social development overall in the western core
I'm not especially fond of the world system theory and I'm extremely wary of the concept of core countries but even if we accept for a minute that it makes sense, there is a very simple explanation to that in the theory: western countries which now form the core weren't part of it at the time.
If you look at any global data in the scale of the past 2500 years, be it gases released to the atmosphere from human smelting, be it number of digits of pi that was known, a pattern emerges:
There was an uptick during the Roman Empire, then the activity went down, and by the year 1400 the human activity was actually larger than the peak that was achieved during the Roman Empire. Something happened in the 1400s where all the human knowledge became global on a planetary scale instead of just the realm of an empire. Knowledge from the Americas and from Asia flooded into Europe and left the groundwork for more innovation.
Humanity wasn’t there yet 2000 years ago, but it was there from the 1400s on.
Europe, as we know it, started in the 1400s. Humanism and the printing press and global scale shipping started in the 1400s.
> There was an uptick during the Roman Empire, then the activity went down, and by the year 1400 the human actually was larger than the peak that was achieved during the Roman Empire.
It's extremely easy to verify that this is not actually true.
For your idea to hold, you have to entirely ignore how islam spread to South East Asia through the trade routes of the succeeding caliphates and the trade infrastructure put in place between the Eastern Romain Empire and China. Same for digits of pi, the approximation was improved significantly both in China and Persia during the medieval era. You can check the work of Al Khwarizmi or Zu Chongzhi.
Regarding smelting, Rome did very little. Meanwhile, China had discovered cast iron in 513BC and by the fall of Rome was probably doing more metallurgy than the Roman ever did.
Let's not forget that a big part of these technological advancements was due to the invention of innovative ways of optimizing those devices and process, mainly by formulating and solving mathematical problems by using calculus, which coincidentally, was formulated during these times in Britain and Germany.
So we are the Romans of crypto, doing cool experiments? And it won't take off until the equivalent of worldwide deforestation and peasants freezing in the wintertime?
Cryptocurrencies are (or at least the famous one is) deliberately inefficient. Most of the times I've brought this up or seen someone else bring it up, a bitcoin fan insists this is a selling point. If so, it's only going to get worse unless it's banned.
OTOH if you meant cryptography, then quite possibly yes.
My sort-of-joking-conspiracy-theory is that "Satoshi Nakamoto" was a clandestine sentient AI who invented cryptocurrency as a way to incentivise the hairless monkeys networking together as much processing power as possible.
> Finley sought to demonstrate that the ancient economy was not ‘proto-capitalist’ in its orientation but rather a decidedly alien economy where economic relations were structured by status, legally enforced class and slavery more than money or profit.
This is one of those things Marx really nailed with the idea that a "mode" of production wasn't just determined by labor and material but that it is also determined by the relationships between the participants in a political economy or the "relations" of production.
Humans individually and as as society don't go a lot farther than cavemans that learned to talk and have some technology available for them to use. You'll find that most of the humans in human society don't undertand at all how the heck everthing just works for them to be kept alive in a continous fashion. Neither they understand the critical importance of some practical technologies, even the simplest cultural technologies, like talking, having a written language, etc.
But that doesn't go without consequences, the bulk of humans in a society just fall and follow some "meme" - or several - while they're alive. You name it, family first, friends & freedom (this a popular one nowadays), earn money & respect, save your land - conquer the weak (a famous one in the 40's), make love, not war (70s), etc.
Some memes were quite useful actually, the family first thing have driven most of societies out of the woods regarding human resources for work (it carried its own problems - salary -, because the workforce wasn't anymore slaves, but family), other memes you'll find don't end too much well , like probably the "friends & freedom" which while has some perks for young adults, it is already heavily restricting societies from having a proper young productive population and at the same time enlarging it with non-productive people. Time will tell, after all some "revolutionary" memes in 70s,80s, didn't went to far after the initial years of big fuss.
But, technologies, important ones, radical change technologies. Anyone with power in the society wants "to control it", hence you have - right now - very powerful, almost unbeatable adversaries to fight with, if you want to make a really new, prone to change it all, technology.
Some of them are out the shadow, because of the fight between superpowers,their respective powers that be, have to make public the basic knownledge available (some stuff like fussion, artificial intelligence), because you need to win the game of numbers: as much brains capable attending the development to win the race.. and then control the technology (just the old game, a bit more public).
Then you think what other technologies are out there just completely out of public sight, or even fully hidden as top secret stuff, just waiting to be strictly necessary in their societies.
You know, the ARN stuff we where stuffing into us the last couple of years came just "out-of-nowhere" almost as a finished product (this is what it feels a medical technology almost completely developed: you use it in billions and just have some few millions affected with non-mortal disabilities). Now they're trying - and somehow they're succedding - in getting the genius back in the bottle, nothing has happened, you can go back to your previous technology iteration, don't ask about the other stuff ..or else
I always thought of it as the other way around. Industrial and agricultural machinery was ultimately cheaper than owning slaves to do the same work. The industrial revolution happened, and slaves were no longer economical. The same goes for draft animals, too.
The article misses a larger point. The industrial revolution followed a turn towards free markets.
For example, the Chinese are the source of a lot of inventions, but they weren't exploited. The Europeans exploited them. Why? Because of the free market profit motive.
The British industrial revolution was built from iron, not steel. Mass production of steel didn't appear until the 1880s, with the Bessemer converter. This was half a century after the deployment of successful railroads.
Iron and steel was known to the Roman empire. The steel wasn't very good, even by the standards of antiquity, but it was good enough for short swords and some tools. They got as far as the "bloom" process, but no further. Despite this, there was a modest iron and steel industry.
A Bessemer converter is a simple thing. It's a big iron vessel lined with brick attached to a furnace and blower. Roman ironworkers could have built one. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Bessemer built the thing, but steel quality was random at first. Robert Mushet, a metallurgist, after about 10,000 experiments, figured out how to get consistent quality from the process. The basic idea, from Wikipedia, is to apply enough heat and air to burn off almost all the carbon in iron ore, leaving pure iron. Then add 'spiegel glanz' or spiegel eisen, a "double carbonate of iron and manganese found in the Rhenish mountains" which was iron, 86…25; manganese, 8…50; and carbon, 5…25. Controlled amounts of manganese and carbon are thus put back into the molten iron, and steel comes out.
A number of cultures figured out steel by accident. Thus, Japanese steel, Damascus steel, etc. Various trace additives - vanadium, molybdenum, etc. were used. The Roman empire got as far as mediocre steel. But the process was neither understood nor reproducible at scale. Mass production required enough analytical chemistry to do quality control on the ingredients.
So an interesting speculation is what might have happened if an early culture had some people really into finding out what stuff is made of. That leads to analytical chemistry. Some Roman philosopher might have discovered that if you grind rocks to a powder, mix with water, and spray into a steady flame, colored light comes out. If you look at that colored light through a prism, you see sharp lines, in the same places for the same materials, which indicate the elemental composition of the material. If they'd happened to talk to someone in the Roman army responsible for a sword factory having yield problems, they might have gotten some samples of the minerals being used. That might have led to the beginnings of metallurgy quality control. As there is in a modern steel plant, there would be somebody in a little room not too far from the furnaces doing analysis on the raw materials.
Steel would still be somewhat expensive, but with a repeatable production process, swords and knives would get better. Then agricultural implements and other tools. If you need to plow hard or rocky ground, a steel plow is a big help.
The next big breakthrough in an an agrarian society with some steelmaking capability would be a reaper. The McCormick reaper was the first machine that really boosted agricultural production. That's what kicked the world past sustenance-level agriculture.
So that's an unlikely, but not impossible, alternative path to an industrial revolution.