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 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.
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."
> 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".
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!
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 ;)
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
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.
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?
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.
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]"
However, slavery didn't prevent (or even effectively compete with) the invention either, like the OP and many others have suggested about Roman slavery
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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'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'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!
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.
> 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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
That was just a consequence of internal collapse, which prevented Romans from properly defending themselves, as they successfully did in previous centuries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 i...
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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'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.
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was very little direct cross though. The industrialized places (cotton milling etc) almost never had enslaved workers. Those were mostly on the plantations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] thread[0] https://acoup.blog/2019/10/04/collections-the-preposterous-l...
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.
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[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/05/28/new-acquisitions-not-how-it-wa...
> "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."
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 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.)
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!
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[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/05/28/new-acquisitions-not-how-it-wa...
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 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.
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 ;)
“Why did the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?”
¹ As in, I've seen it stated as fact, but am not sure how true it is
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o
There were no entrepreneurs, no capital, no banks, no investors. There was no incentive for someone to invent something and get rich. So, no one did.
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.
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.
Earth itself is only so big.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages - whole fleets reaching as far as the Red Sea and East Africa.
But then they turned inward.
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.
The three were pretty much in lockstep, Europe slightly ahead, except for the period 600 to 1200 CE, when Europe lagged behind.
Then came the Industrial Revolution, and that's why the West rules, . . . for now.
Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel, also explores this topic.
We, too, stopped flying to the Moon for 50 years because it was too expensive.
Obviously the USA had the wealth to continue the Apollo program and follow ons if the will had been there.
(Have actually seen something like that for real, fully seriously, on the Internet somewhere. Years ago, can't recall where.)
Gutenberg's printing press was a knee in the curve.
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.
*https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-eve...
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.
Cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence is David Graeber's whole shtick.
Full disclaimer: I didn't read Dawn of Everything and I don't intend to. My opinion is based on Debt and some of his other writings.
> but mostly, this reads like a one-sided argument that I don’t know anything about and that I didn’t know was taking place.
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?
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!)
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!
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.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_power_during_the_Industr...
> 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
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_lat%C3%A9ral_%C3%A0_la...
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".
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 mean, it suffered a series of military defeats at the hands of Germanic peoples.
That is a productivity/innovation issue at its core.
Coal enabled faster scale up in the Second Industrial Revolution and on into the 1900s, but it was not essential for industrialization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there any evidence showing this?
Roman insulae were pretty close to modern low-med buildings having four or five stories here.
> 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?
[0] https://technicshistory.com/2021/07/13/the-triumvirate-coal-...
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.
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?
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining
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.
edit: interesting take on this here:
https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/wood-scarcity/
> 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 i...
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.
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?
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."
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.
1712: Newcomen's steam engine.
1765: Watt's first engine.
1800: First battery.
1804: First steam locomotive.
1832: First DC generator.
The book (https://archive.org/details/ahistorycoalmin00gallgoog/page/n...) referenced by wikipedia claims that the change from wood to coal for domestic use occurred during the reign of the first Elizabeth.
(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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Armstrong,_1st_Baron...
(Same guy had the first house lit by hydroelectric power later)
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.
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.
https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining#:~:text...
Similar comments here about the lack of wood driving the use of coal.
https://industrialrevolution.org.uk/coal-mines-industrial-re...
And:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24953925
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.
https://www.bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/62_1_WardeWilliamson.p...
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.
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.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
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?
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.)
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.
That's more impact than the Greeks had.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I expect you're speaking in terms of qualitative violence?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bsnud/is_this_a_joke...
Why do all that work when you could just sit your ass on a beach or in a nice Mediterranean-esque corner of the world?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History#Genesis_and...
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/what-did-the-romans-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790545
I think it never actually happened, but this sort of story reveals a Roman perspective on technological innovation in Roman society.
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.”.
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.
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.)
"If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they [...] wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to."
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.
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/1/8/22872749/john-deere-self...
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_metallurgy#Mechanisation:
“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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32629471
"What have the Romans given us in return?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
Oh, and the wine.
they knew it worked, and Caesarea in Israel shows that it really did.
You still pay housing, food and time at a minimum.
Not saying that slavery is by any means even slightly positive. Just that economic system allows for extreme exploitation of people without alternatives.
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.
- Steam engine - the Aeolipile
- Concrete - even underwater concrete
- Automations - see Heron of Alexandria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPu9OQpH6uo
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://beardyhistory.com/2018/01/01/roman-slavery-and-ameri...
The American industrial revolution was primarily a northern thing. Plus some tooling (like the cotton gin) used in the south to process slave output.
If anything, Roman slaves would have been more fit to be part of an industrial revolution as they could hold educated jobs.
A vast improvement from a chattel slave economy, to be sure.
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.
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)
Yes! Great theory. Financial innovation seems as big a driver of industrialization as the discovery of coal or oil.
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.
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.
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.
To confirm this, ancient greeks invented a simple steam turbine, and was regarded as a "party trick".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
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%.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
(Basing this all on the history of Rome podcast)
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. :|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Roman industry was war and empire building.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It shows the boom from 1400. The boom is actually the rediscovery of methods that were discovered in India.
Lead deposits in 1100 BC until 800: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721818115
It shows the Roman Empire peak.
Lead deposits in 0-1900: https://abload.de/img/8f70e5bd-bc6e-4756-8dbfzt.jpeg
It shows the peak of the Roman Empire and the boom from the end of the 1400s on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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 same author has a great series on whether and how we should think of Rome as falling: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fall-of-rome/
https://www.vita-romae.com/pandemics-in-ancient-rome.html
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
[2] https://handwiki.org/wiki/Engineering:Flexible_glass
I hate myself for having been born with fucking mental problems.
That's a short story by William Golding:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envoy_Extraordinary_(novella)