Why didn't Rome have an industrial revolution?(maximum-progress.com) |
Why didn't Rome have an industrial revolution?(maximum-progress.com) |
Somehow something happened that started the modern era of economic, technological and industrial progress. Before then pretty much everyone lived in a Malthusian trap where economic development was temporary at best.
And there’s still not a great deal of consensus on what exactly caused modern economic development to start happening in Britain.
The Roman Empire didn't have this confluence of circumstances. The question is, was the IR inevitable?
I think all of these arguments have merit. The IR couldn’t have happened in a desert country or one defeated by foreign conquerors or one with ancient Egyptian political institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_india_company
The beginnings of capitalism & colonialism. Systemic wealth transfer is not a mystery.
People at the time argued slavery, resource exploitation and trade were economically important and could only happen through imperial strength.
But I’d argue that 1) those things generally happened anyway post independence 2) labour / resource costs aren’t that important for long run economic growth.
>The Muscovy Company was the first major chartered joint stock English trading company. It was established in 1555
and profitable ventures eg. by Sir Francis Drake
>Drake returned to England in 1580 and became a hero; his circumnavigation raised an enormous amount of money for England's coffers, and investors received a return of some 5,000 per cent.
which may be increased enthusiasm for ventures.
That maybe incentivized people to get rich starting steam engine companies, somewhat like how SV works today, but not like that in ancient Rome?
Guessing a bit here. I'm not a historian. Quotes from Wikipedia.
I did to a visit to Lincolnshire a while back to research some family history of relatives who were there in the 1800s and while the place is a backwater now, it was very SV like back in 1850 with people getting rich quick and building huge houses based on the then tech boom with was railway engines.
The only answer I could come with was this: Nobody asked him to make one.
He had the tools, he had the skills, he had the workshop full of assistants. All he needed was a *purchase order* and we could have had mechanical calculators 2,000 years ago.
If you have minions, ask yourself if you are asking them to work on the right things. If you don't have minions, well ask yourself the same question.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” — The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 - Jul 2022 (308 comments)
Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33200864 - Oct 2022 (151 comments)
Until the industrial revolution itself kicked in, metallurgy was a long and slow slog through incremental improvements in technique. There's no obvious way for a civilization to do a speed run on this process.
I don't think the printing press would have helped. The Chinese had movable type by the 11th century, and it didn't cause an industrial revolution.
The 'tech tree' argument that makes the most sense to me is that, specifically, demand for cannon, lead to enough improvement in metallurgy that steam boilers were something it was possible to construct. That being what really kicked things off. Hero's aeolipile didn't hold to a significant pressure, and if anyone had tried it, their vessel would have ruptured or shattered.
Yep... without John Wilkinson's boring machine, you can't make a proper Watt steam engine.
So I wonder if it happened in Britain because it’s colder there.
To summarize, was a steady increase in mechanization and technology throughout the Middle Ages in Europe. The Netherlands were an early leader in the 17th century. hey had what could be described as an incipient industrial revolution. It got to the point where (IIRC) a minority of the population was employed in agriculture (which was astonishing for the time). After around 1700, various factors (among them the ascendance of British power) caused somewhat of a deindustrialization.
Across the channel, the British starting using coal (and coke for steel) because they were running out of wood. The same situation happened in another place, several hundred years before. The Southern Song dynasty of China was more-or-less forced to step away from traditional Confucian agriculture-focused economic policy due to the loss of the North, among other things. Capital-intensive industry increased (such as blast furnaces). They also increasingly advanced mechanical devices. Increased iron production caused them to start running out of wood. Like the British did hundreds of years after, they switched to coke for iron production. Their iron/steel production reached around 100,000 tons/year, which is absolutely astonishing. Sadly, the Mongols were still able to overrun them.
The Southern Song Empire was the precisely the wrong time and the wrong place for an industrial revolution, even though everything else completely fit together.
It talks about how wheelbarrows seem both evident and necessary, and, in certain historical contexts, are none of those things.
We tend to imagine past societies the same as ours, just less technically advanced. But they're not; they're almost alien. The same historian has another video, about time travel to medieval Europe, which I think illustrates this alienness (strong otherness, if you will) of the past really well.
And that engineering sucked, it was the end of the 18 century that it actually started to take off after Newton had invented the basic physics equations.
Before then stuff like projectile trajectories and load calculations were just hunches by people, not something you could trust or work with at scale. That meant a good engineer couldn't transfer their knowledge to a new person, basically making scaling up any kind of invention impossible.
A single person might have been able to make steam engines, but without science he had no way to transmit that knowledge because it is way too finicky for a person to just learn by hunches.
acoup - Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
Key idea/thesis in that essay:
> 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.
[…]
> As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables. If Spain or Portugal, for instance, rather than Britain, had ended up controlling India, would the flow of cotton have been diverted to places where coal usage was not common, cheap and abundant, thereby separating the early steam-powered mine pumps both from the industry they could first revolutionize and also from the vast wealth necessary to support that process (much less if no European power had ever come to dominate the Indian subcontinent)?
Really worth a (re-)read.
Discussions on it:
How does conclusion arise from the provided excerpt, which says: "But of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman"?
Does "agriculture" here somehow means becoming a "rentier"? Maybe "(agricultural) landlord" is implied?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkinson_(industrialist)
The historical record of coffee begins in the 15th century. It's been claimed that it was cultivated much earlier in Yemen or Ethiopia, but both of those places were literate at the claimed times (6th and 9th centuries respectively), and there's no evidence at all that this is true. Once it showed up, it spread quite rapidly, for all the obvious reasons.
It's a berry, the fruit is edible, and the bean is large, potentially nutritious if you don't know what it is, and obviously, neither of these things is poisonous. It beggars belief that, at the very least, local pastoralists didn't know about it, and presumably make some use of it, but as a crop, it's very recent.
Romans imported so much silk from China that they passed laws against buying it, more than once, because of the amount of silver which was leaving the empire. They had spices from as far as Indonesia. But no coffee, and no tea.
Just one of those things.
Proving that people who build walls to keep immigrants out do not fare well.
"Charles II, 1662: An Act for preventing the Mischeifs and Dangers that may arise by certaine Persons called Quakers and others refusing to take lawfull Oaths."
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp350-...
https://genius.com/Good-will-hunting-good-will-hunting-bar-s...
lol
So yah, Hero of Alexandria would not have had to even make any conceptual leaps like inventing positional number systems. The abacus he already had in his pocket would have been all he would have needed to get him started in the right direction.
What’s wrong with stealing the moon?
William Jardine’s subjugation of China made him a lot of personal profit, but it’s dubious his enterprise ever paid enough tax to cover the cost of the opium war. Sending navies across the world is expensive.
And remember: pillage before you burn…