FDR goaded Japan into that attack by cutting off their oil and suppressed intelligence about the impending attack to ensure a decisive entry into WWII over the opposition of 90% of the American public. Having political leadership so opposed to the will of the people is a state US 'democracy' seems perpetually unable to end, re Iraq, Vietnam, WWI, WWII etc. Hearing US lecture governments that fight on behalf of their people instead of manipulating them into war would be a national embarrassment if Americans weren't firmly ensconced in their pro-US empire media bubble.
PS: FDR began sending supplies to the USSR before pear harbor despite its mass murder and atrocities across Eurasia and extreme unpopularity of the Soviet government with the US public. The embargo with Japan was made for geopolitical reasons and any "humanitarian" argument is post hoc.
EDIT: Remarkably, President Herbert Hoover remained politically active in the post-FDR media landscape and his account of the events and of FDRs actions leaves little room for doubt about FDRs aims in his foreign policy with Japan.
Do you have a cite for the suppression of US intelligence prior to the attack? The mainstream history sources I've read have suggested no such thing and led me to believe the US really was caught with their pants down. The Japanese sent an envoy to alert the US after the attack started, but while trying to maintain plausible deniability that they tried to make contact beforehand.
Also why would you pin the fundamental blame on FDR cutting off the oil? Japan was running a pretty brutal occupation of China at the time. Continuing to supply oil would be supporting that occupation. It's true though that part of Japan's motive for the attack was that oil was running out.
FDR didn't cut off Japan's oil because of their occupation of China. During Japan's occupation starting 1937 American companies were making plenty of war profits supplying oil and metal to Japan's military, with the US government only sending strongly worded letters.
Japan's oil was cut off in 1941 because they started seizing Southeast Asian colonies of European powers that had been occupied by Germany in 1940, and these colonies were significant suppliers of oil and rubber for the conflict in Europe. If Japan had limited its activities to China the US might have continued its war profiteering indefinitely.
>>Also why would you pin the fundamental blame on FDR cutting off the oil? Japan was running a pretty brutal occupation of China at the time.
See chapter 8 of The Challenge of Grand Strategy: The Great Powers and the Broken Balance between the World Wars. War between Japan and the United States was a certainty to FDR's advisors if an oil embargo was imposed.
Stuff like paypal exist so that powerful people can shut you out of the economy if you challenge their power. They complain about money laundering while the CIA is the biggest money launderer in the world and no one goes to jail when Deutsche bank launders Jeffery Epstein's payments. But operating a Bitcoin mixer is a federal offense. They are scared.
The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple. In fact, there's an argument to be made that it once did exactly that. Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.
Disclaimer: I don't know English history well enough to put together a better explanation, but I'm sure this has been the subject of a number of PhD theses. Maybe someone can point to a source that goes into better detail.
The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple.
The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians.
I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens.
Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits.
Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't.
Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.
Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.
I've studied the causes of the Industrial Revolution a little(in undergrad classes) and one of the points that stuck with me is that early-modern machining had greatly improved. Roman-era lathes were of a different character[0] and their limitations in accuracy and power were a major dependency to the development of other machined parts. As well, the Romans had a pre-Newtonian physics and mathematics, limiting the percieved applications of their inventions. There really is a lot that 1000-2000 years of background development gives you.
The early moderns are also interesting because of the wage issue, which is not quite what it seems. It is known that wages were high following the Black Death, and this created room for mercantile economics powered by double-entry bookkeeping, rather than tributary ones, to take over the political economy. Everything in the modern period becomes a bit more of a business. However, the political class then moved to lower wages and adopted such as part of early merchantalist theory - keep them lean and hungry so they work hard.
This attitude encouraged the development of impressment, indentured servitude and chattel slavery: the easiest way to move a worker's wages off the books was to turn them into property. Thus by the mid 1600's, you already have a world where the populace has been disempowered and coerced into the project of colonial nation building(a means of putting more assets on the books - claim the rights), and the backlash to that powers an interest in developing liberalism in the 1700's, which coincides with the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Smith. There's a lot of history that coincides with "and then this philosopher published a very relevant work".
The underlying political thing of early modern Europe, of course, was the disunification. The inventors and scholars in this period are always fleeing from a noble that they pissed off and finding refuge somewhere else. A unified Europe would have had more opportunities to surpress technologies, as occurred in China throughout its history.
None of that forms a complete hypothesis, and it doesn't even touch on the "why Britain specifically" question, but it gets it away from being a "Europe so great" anaysis.
There's... a lot of context to the industrial revolution.
First and foremost was easy access to coal. Energy is really where wealth is at. Coal and iron make modern steam engines and rail and trains possible at all. Get that ball going and the possibilities become endless and feasible.
Secondly was not so much economics but financial structure. England had already well-established notions of corporations and stock trading, which made venture fund raising a lot more accessible than loans.
Whatever labor costs might have been, any level of automation would have greatly improved productivity.
That said, perceived labor costs are important. Where slavery operated, the perception of cheap labor made economies less likely to industrialize -- the antebellum American South is representative of this.
Additional factors include having a middle class, a venture/enterprising culture (think East India company), a permissive government, and other things. Perhaps even the background of recent civil wars and religious strife might have helped, I don't know.
You are completely ignoring philosophy. It was the ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men, that made the whole enterprise possible. China had the tools, sure. But not the incentives. Their emperor could not let lose a zoo of creativity, for fear of destruction of the empire.
This kind of smacks of euro-centrism. Especially considering how the West at that time had colonies that practiced chattel slavery, producing vast wealth for the owners of the colonies.
Short answer, sea power drove technological innovation (reliable clocks etc) and a global empire gave Britain access to more raw material for textiles than it could process by ahd, so there was a huge incentive for automation. Also, plenty of domestic iron ore and coal deposits allowed rapid scaling and positive feedback loops. Much of the IR centered on the north of England because they had good ports and the coal and iron ore was right there and did not need to be transported very far. Northern England developed in significantly different economic and cultural directions from the more mercantilist southern part of the country, which differences persist to this day.
I have no disagreement with the points you make, but they seem to tell a different story than one in which ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men were necessary. Watt's great invention came on the eve of Britain's attempt to suppress these dangerous ideas in its American colonies.
To be fair, I think freedom and individuality are part of the story, but that story is more sociological than philosophical. In part, I wonder if it is a consequence of the reformation and counter-reformation, which arrived at an accommodation in which the populace was allowed some freedom in how it conducted itself, so long as it did not challenge the authority of the state.
In the book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, Sir David MacKay says that the reason the industrial revolution happened in Britain might be due to the amount of coal Britain had. Equal (at that time) to the amount of oil under Saudi Arabia.
Relevant paragraph:
"Something did happen, and it was called the Industrial Revolution. I’ve marked on the graph the year 1769, in which James Watt patented his steam engine. While the first practical steam engine was invented in 1698, Watt’s more efficient steam engine really got the Industrial Revolu-
tion going. One of the steam engine’s main applications was the pumping of water out of coal mines. Figure 1.5 shows what happened to British coal production from 1769 onwards. The figure displays coal production in units of billions of tons of CO2 released when the coal was burned. In 1800, coal was used to make iron, to make ships, to heat buildings,
to power locomotives and other machinery, and of course to power the pumps that enabled still more coal to be scraped up from inside the hills of England and Wales. Britain was terribly well endowed with coal: when the Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting in coal under Britain
was roughly the same as the amount sitting in oil under Saudi Arabia."
It’s such a good question, and it wasn’t just the industrial revolution either, a whole bunch of stuff happened in Europe- the development of calculus and physics, new ways of organizing politically, the university system, the new economic system of capitalism, fractional reserve banking, it’s crazy how much Europe changed while the rest of the world didn’t. It’s hard to point to any one thing. Part of it may have been that the rest of the world was sacked and conquered by the mongols, but Europe was spared.
If I had to pick one factor: I’d say the breakup of feudalism in Europe, in which a lot of hierarchies were thrown upside down, was probably the most important factor. If you read accounts of Chinese science, you often see things like “but then that fell out of favor in the court, and was abandoned.” In a society where everyone has a specific place, and roles and hierarchies are rigid, there isn’t much room for invention and change because it’s going to be seen as threatening rather than as an opportunity by the people one step above you. That would be my guess.
I think it's a hard question because a lot of different things happened in different regions - you can't just point to things that happened in Europe and say "This is why!"
As an example, China had imperial examination[1] for government jobs since 607 - a system not seen in the West until modern times. Ancient Rome built concrete buildings that their descendants couldn't replicate for centuries, yet they failed to start Industrial Revolution.
That is a damn good question that historians still argue over today.
The short version is that the Song dynasty appeared to have all the precursor technology needed for industrialization by the 12th century, but then just didn't. The most commonly held view is probably that society and economics is as important than technology, and that while they at that point had the kind of metallurgy that Europeans could only dream of until the late 18th century, what they didn't have was labor shortages and capitalism, which were what made industrialization something people wanted to actually do. But this is by far not the only proposed explanation.
In general, because of the recent history of the west appears like it, I think we are far too predisposed to view of development as a linear progression towards something, that history has a direction, and that direction is up. For most of history, for most societies, this hasn't really been true. As many societies have spent as long stagnating or even regressing as have advanced. It's just that so long as one advances, eventually it's going to influence it's neighbors, either by taking them over or by having them frantically play catch-up to not be taken over, and so the whole thing has a direction.
This leads to my pet theory for why Europe: Because Europe has managed for almost the entirety of it's history to avoid being conquered by a single empire, so everyone was always afraid of their neighbors, yet there was a solid enough foundation of international law that everyone wasn't at war with all their neighbors all the time. This created both a backdrop that forced states to push to be more powerful, even over entrenched interests, and the conditions where the best way to do this often enough wasn't beating up your neighbors and taking their stuff.
Guns Germs and Steel, Diamond.
From wikipedia synopsis:
"Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of superior intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions."
For example the mediterranean region had 5(6?) domesticated animals and had wheat,barley oats and spelt grains. Asia had rice.
The North Americans in contrast, had no domesticated animals and didn't get maize until shortly before the Europeans arrived.
Because North Europe was more inhospitable place overall (for agriculture et all) and during Middle Ages Europeans started accepting and adopting technologies like their lives depend on it (and it often did).
That has slowly over ages created culture that put premium on technological progress.
Lots of reasons, climate, waterways, lack of glass making technology, understanding of astronomy etc. More detailed explanation: https://link.medium.com/fCP369iaCgb
The Antikythera Mechanism is a computer and was created in Ancient Greece around 100BC. That was a period of time before the Roman conquest of the known world. When there is an empire in power, things do not progress. The knowledge of that device got lost in history.
China has been an empire for much of her history. Being an empire does not help in the technological advancement. But fierce competition helps.
I'm no expert, but China has much, much less arable land than Europe. Something needs to finance industrialization, and in preindustrial times, food was finance because that's what supported a growing population.
Remember the conspiracy nuts who said WMDs were a lie? Or the nut jobs who said the lab escape origin for Sars cov 2 should be taken seriously? Yea. I didnt see the comment you just replied to but Im pretty mad at people who dismiss everything they've been told not to like the way you just did.
This is just Herodotus' well known account right? I don't see any new evidence here, only an informed guess "reconstruction" of what the trip would have been like.
The media class deliberately created these narratives about how "the other side" are unredeemable monsters and the only solution is to vote for one of the two corporate-backed political parties (and certainly not the other one). So I don't sympathize with Katherine Brodsky getting bitten by her industry's own polarization tactic.
