People generally underestimate just how special the conditions of 17th century Britain were.
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.
I think this link has been posted before. The conditions for using coal for steam power were pretty unique. They were using it in larger amounts for heating, it was plentiful and easily accessible, but getting slightly harder. The fuel was right at the location where they needed to move things and pump water, so it didn't matter that the first machines were wildly inefficient. And then iteration upon iteration. It must have been an exciting time for those seeing the changes happen, although it wasn't fast by our standards today.
The Roman Empire didn't have this confluence of circumstances. The question is, was the IR inevitable?
Social scientists would say the IR was inevitable given the political institutions of Britain at the time. Military people might say similar from naval strength; the geopolitically inclined might argue it from geography/politics. Technologists lean on utility and feasibility of coal.
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.
My personal view is that military adventures were generally a drag on economic growth that never paid for themselves.
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.
It’s possible to loot and burn a country without creating much net economic value.
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.
Aside from wealth transfer capitalism is good for raising money for new ventures. Some of that kicked off around then eg.
>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.
I was studying how those mechanical calculators (like the one in "Hidden Figures") worked, and it struck me that Hero of Alexandria, or whoever made the Antikythra mechanism, could have easily made one. I thought long and hard about why Hero actually didn't make one of them.
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.
Better than that, the printing press is a stupid simple idea that could have been invented basically as soon as you had writing. Wooden printing blocks were used for hundreds of years before the press. As soon as someone had the idea to use it for letters, you could have a functional (if crude) press after a few iterations. Bootstrapping widespread literacy with cheap reading materials.
> 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
Fun fact: The romans had abacuses (abaci?), which represent a positional number system--including a representation for zero. A Roman abacus would have beads arranged for both decimal (base 10) and dozenal (base 12) calculations--because some of their measures, e.g. 12 ounces to a point, were in base 12 much like the metric system is base 10-centric today. (the wiki article "Roman Abacus" has some nice pictures.)
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.
I've long thought the answer is as simple as it is boring: their metallurgy just wasn't good enough.
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.
The Roman Empire never could have experienced an industrial revolution for numerous factors, including never utilizing coal. The technological level, and their overall mode of production, simply wasn't there. People think of the Middle Ages as a time of regression, but that's flatly not true. The European "Dark Ages" witnessed the invention of three-field crop rotation and the heavy plow. These were big deals, because the increased food surplus allowed more people to work at other tasks, including technological innovation. The later Middle Ages saw the development of effective guns and the printing press (itself modeled after other mechanical contrivances).
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.
I've heard it postulated that the industrial revolution was only possible because of fossil fuels (obviously), but also they if we use too much easily accessible fuel, whether that's coal or oil, and had some kind of dark age, we would be unable to restart civilization.
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.
It highlights the difference between engineering and science. Of course, engineering works better as an applied science, but engineering predates modern science by thousands of years.
> engineering predates modern science by thousands of years
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.
> 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)?
> Great merchants flourished, but “in order to be truly valued, they eventually had to become rentiers, as Cicero affirmed without hesitation
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?
Without a replacement for John Wilkinson[1], who was obsessed with the production of, and profit from, cast iron... you're not getting a cylinder boring machine. Watt can't do anything useful towards an efficient, high pressure steam engine without them.
I won't disagree with that. I was just comparing two theoreticians; I'm not sure what Greek or Roman I'd pair with Wilkinson. We tend not to know the Greek and Roman engineers by name.
One of the great mysteries of human history is why that is.
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.
I would have said Quakers. Because of persecution after the English civil war (Quaker Act of 1662, mostly), they couldn't hold public office. So they went into commerce & industry.
"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."
Basically, lack of IP protection = no patent or copyright. Now our patent length is OK, but copyright is far too long.
In old Rome, if you made a new process, you locked up the shop and kept it secret. Anyone steal the secret and you could do nothing. There are stories of Roman senators killing inventors to maintain a controlled market.
In addition, Rome had zero electronics, and no document tradition via printed books = all hand copies(printing in old China) There some relics that hint at plating cells for silver and perhaps gold, but no firm data
on its face I don't know that patents alone drove the industrial revolution - I imagine that the modality of labor and capital also played a significant role
This convo reminds me of .. “my contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities—especially in the southern colonies—could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capital —"
Probably extend that to structuring societies around legal frameworks and institutions as well. Things like labor contracts, stable interchangable currencies, standardized education, etc. Lots of parts undergirding the industrial revolution.
> According to Petronius (c. 27 AD – c. 66 AD) in his work Satyricon, the inventor of flexible glass (vitrum flexile) brought a drinking bowl made of the material before Tiberius Caesar. The bowl was put through a test to break it, but it merely dented, rather than shattering. The inventor repaired the bowl very easily with a small hammer, which he pulled from a pocket in his toga, according to Petronius. After the inventor swore that he was the only man alive who knew the manufacturing technique, Tiberius had the man beheaded. It has been suggested this was either to protect the existing glassmaking industry,[2] to ensure that glass remained breakable as an effective planned obsolescence or because he feared that the glass would devalue gold and silver, since the material might be more valuable.
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.