As far as I know, the Industrial Revolution started with coal mining. As shafts got deeper there was a need to pump in water and air, and then to lift product out. These steam engines at the site could run on low quality coal allowing all of the good stuff to be sold. The Industrial Revolution really started with these mines in the UK.
As regards slavery and other factors, once the steam engines were invented and began making the companies who owned them more productive, human labor was outcompeted. Slave labor is not free as humans are quite expensive in food, water, shelter, medical care, and support for these things. Humans also require rest, and restrooms. Given that humans prefer not be enslaved, there’s also a cost to capture. Once an economic replacement for slavery and/or indentured servitude is available, these practices tend to disappear. Even animal labor usually disappears when machines are available, as animals require the same basic care that machines do not. In the USA, slavery hung around longer than it did in Europe largely due to reward for the capture of runaways provided by government, as well as a late start to industrialization.
> As far as I know, the Industrial Revolution started with coal mining.
I don't think that's correct. If you are looking for a one-sentence "how did the Industrial Revolution start" summary, I wouldn't use this.
My recollection was that things kicked off with the first mechanized mills, locating along streams which used hydraulic or steam power for their energy.
EDIT: The book describing this is called Behemoth: The History of the Factory by Freeman. You can read read relevant pages in the book preview online.
> Rapid industrialization first began in Britain, starting with mechanized spinning in the 1780s,[21] with high rates of growth in steam power and iron production occurring after 1800.
The romans had industrial scale water driven mills. But what you need to keep the running, when one emperor falls and another kingdom falters, is a empowered citizen ship with venture capital, that is out of reach of the king, making innovation resilient.
For me the industrial revolution started with the "familys" taking hold in the netherlands, england, germany - backing ventures, banking, becoming a powerhouse outside of the hierarchical power houses of olden times (king, serf) and not relying on militias, but lawyers, contracts and sometimes even rule of law (free cities).
Its the end of hierarchical anarchy (and yes, rome in some ways was just as anarchic if you fell out of grace with the emperor)..
What you're describing is more of a social revolution (upset of traditional societal structures). As always with history, the interesting question is whether the latter could have happened without the former.
Its a pre-requisit, as a wittness i call into court venecia, were free enterprise lead to the cities bloom and the return of the feudal ruling structure among its trade partners (osman empire) lead to the decline of this "italian" silicon valley back into obscurity.
Which by deduction means, that you need a trade supporting eco-system, without taxation on the moving of goods. Oceans prefered. Which means, that hermit kingdoms waylaying is the biggest innovation embargo.
Basically, if you never get freedom of movement, and the old world drags enough at your coat, you get stuck forever and a day. The greeks colonialized the mediteranean and from this "outposts" the philosophers were able to cause a ruckus with the tribal-religous culture at home.
Its the liberty of new beginnings, cheap defense against parasitic neighbours + highways that are the secret sauce. And it turns sour inevitably.
Just look at the us becoming more like europe every day and the hopes projected on a new colony project (mars - without new surplus beginnings and highways though).
I have a vague idea what you're trying to describe but this phrase is completely self-contradictory.
Anarchy is the absence of hierarchies. I think you're using "anarchy" in its pejorative sense, roughly meaning "chaos" or "law of the jungle" but using it like this in a discussion about social structures is confusing at best.
>My recollection was that things kicked off with the first mechanized mills, locating along streams which used hydraulic or steam power for their energy.
That goes back to 3BC where the ancient greeks invented it, so I don't think that's a good candidate for the beginning of the industrial revolution. I get the association though, because it is a mechanical system harnessing non-animal power to do useful work.
No, that's true. But to add detail, this is how things kicked off in America particularly, in the late 1700s or early 1800's. The first American mills that could mass produce stuff were located along streams that used the turning of the waterwheels to do their work.
This comes from the book Behemoth: The History of the Factory by Freeman (edit: added this later). One of the main characters is a man named Richard Arkwright. You can see that his biography broadly tracks what I'm describing.
You could call this line the 'origin story' of the Industrial Revolution - the invention of the Spinning Frame (a water powered automation machine, if you will).
> Arkwright and John Smalley of Preston set up a small horse-driven factory at Nottingham. To obtain capital for expansion, Arkwright formed a partnership with Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need, wealthy nonconformist hosiery manufacturers. In 1771, the partners built the world's first water-powered mill at Cromford, which covered both carding and spinning operations and employed 200 people.
> To obtain capital for expansion, Arkwright formed a partnership with Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need, wealthy nonconformist hosiery manufacturers.
This goes to u/qikInNdOutReply's point (cross-thread) about citizens with venture capital.
Knowing nothing about this, my hunch is there were many prerequisites.
Another interesting aspect (to me) is how some innovations (efforts) manage to avoid being snuff in their cribs. Everett's whole Diffusion of Innovation about the sociology of it all.
Mechanised mills existed in Roman times, but they didn't use them to mass produce textiles, they used them to grind flour for the local people. Similarly coal mining was around in Roman times (and they did transport that internationally) but Roman coal mines weren't deep pits pumped by steam engines. (The invention of the Newcomen engine is a good candidate for an early start date to the Industrial Revolution)
On a similar note, the Romans built quite a few canals, but "Canal Mania" in the UK involving a lot of capitalist ventures building extended transit networks across the UK is an arguable starting point for the Industrial Revolution
I was always taught the industrial revolution started earlier than that with the work of people like Abraham Derby, the elder. For perspective, he died in 1717.
Not really, the first steam engine was used in 1606 to drain a coal mine in Spain but they didn’t catch on til the early 1700’s.
England really industrialized via multiple waves transitioning cottage industry and water power driving drop hammers and other equipment to ever more industrial factories. It’s a surprisingly smooth transition where individual inventions like the spinning wheel just keep compounding and driving further increases in efficiency.
Steam power was only used at mines initially because mines where limited by geology. Unlike early factories you didn’t get to decide where the ideal place was you where stuck where the resources where located.
According to Wikipedia, steam engines did go "mainstream" with the coal mine use case, at least to an important part:
The first commercially successful engine that could transmit continuous power to a machine was the atmospheric engine, invented by Thomas Newcomen around 1712. It improved on Savery's steam pump, using a piston as proposed by Papin. Newcomen's engine was relatively inefficient, and mostly used for pumping water. It worked by creating a partial vacuum by condensing steam under a piston within a cylinder. It was employed for draining mine workings at depths originally impractical using traditional means, and for providing reusable water for driving waterwheels at factories sited away from a suitable "head".
The industrial revolution is generally considered to have started around 1760. That’s 50 years after adoption of the Thomas Newcomen steam engine and 150 years after steam engines where in use.
This shows it wasn’t specifically the steam engine that kicked things off, but rather a wide range of factors which eventually caused people to say something different was going on. The stated start of the industrial revolution is really quite arbitrary, but linking it to the seam engine is really a misunderstanding what was going on.
If you want to point to a single invention Benjamin Huntsman developing the crucible technique for steel production in 1740 had a larger impact on the early years of the first industrial revolution. But again it wasn’t any single invention the transition was simply continuous.
I think the causality on slavery is backwards, and the article agrees... Shortages of low-skilled labor encourage automation, because then the (very expensive) automation process becomes cheap relative to labor. The article argues that labor shortages coinciding with excess capital paved the way for automation, which in turn reduced dependence on slavery in the long term.
In this sense, cheap labor is cheap, but also a bit of a trap: it doesn't scale into undreamt of use-cases the way that truly scalable automation tends to.
It also does not reward backpropagation from material sciences.
My favourite example here is the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrara_marble
cause its something both fancied by romans and modern world alike and it was originally sourced by slaves with cludgels as stone masons.
But now its done with industrial tooling, by free man (well free to do whatever the market demands).
> Once an economic replacement for slavery and/or indentured servitude is available, these practices tend to disappear.
Slavery is rampant in the world now. Quite a lot of it in service of the kinds of automation and productivity you describe, but in parts of the world where these discussions aren’t so casual. Slavery hasn’t been obsoleted, it’s been outsourced.
Exactly. We have plenty of examples of past civilizations experiencing similar economic conditions, slavery, etc. So why didn't e.g. the Romans have an industrial revolution of this scale? Coal (and exploitation of fossil fuels more generally) is the singular factor that differentiates the industrial revolution from everything before it.
The Romans had coal [1]. The Greeks had even come up with a design that (remotely) resembles a steam engine [2]. What they didn’t have was the rest of the “tech tree” leading up to a usable steam engine, mostly metallurgy and the physics of work/energy.
We can point to the first industry to truly mechanize as the beginning of the revolution but the technologies that got us there were legion.
The Aeolipile has got to be one of the greatest "what if" moments in human history. I can't help but look at it and feel like humanity was one serendipitous moment away from kicking off the industrial revolution 1700 years earlier. And what would the world look like if Egypt had been the first to industrialize?! It boggles the mind.
Sort of; so did Egypt - but these were more steam devices not engines per se. I think the limiting factor was metallurgy & pressure vessel design before you can do something like Watt did.
Do you have references? I'd be interested to learn about the subject. Quick search gave me [0] for Egypt and [1] for China, and both answers seem to be "not really".
His central observation is that the Industrial Revolution involves "coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy", but that "each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact."
Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric steam engine from 1712 were so inefficient that it made only economic sense in circumstances where energy source is very, very cheap. That was inside of coal mines (not in any other kind of mine), because there coal was cheapest. So the Industrial Revolution required as a starting point that all other kinds of energy sources were so expensive that coal mines made sense, and not any kind of coal mines, but deep coal mines that required a lot of effort to pump water out of them. In other kinds of mines horses would have been cheaper than an atmospheric steam engine. In other words, intensive coal mining had to come first and then the Industrial Revolution followed, not the other way round.
It took over half a century, until 1776, that the steam engine in James Watt's desing had been improved so much that its use made economic sense outside of coal mines, namely in the textile industry. It was in the 1700s that looms and especially spinning machines had improved so much that their combination with Watt's steam engine made sense.
Then there was the combination of steam engines with new methods for drilling cannons. The cylinders needed for steam engines used technologies that had been improved over a long period of time in gun production. Then the steam engine itself was combined with the new invention of drilling cannon barrels (instead of casting them). This resulted in better cannons and also helped to further improve the cylinders for the steam engines.
So why not the Romans? -- Devereaux writes:
"_none_ of these precursors were in place. The Romans made some use of mineral coal as a heating element or fuel, but it was decidedly secondary to their use of wood and where necessary charcoal. The Romans used rotational energy via watermills to mill grain, but not to spin thread. Even if they had the spinning wheel (and they didn’t; they’re still spinning with drop spindles), the standard Mediterranean period loom, the warp-weighted loom, was roughly an order of magnitude less efficient than the flying shuttle loom, so the Roman economy couldn’t have handled all of the thread the spinning wheel could produce."
"And of course the Romans had put functionally no effort into figuring out how to make efficient pressure-cylinders, because they had absolutely no use for them. Remember that by the time Newcomen is designing his steam engine, the kings and parliaments of Europe have been effectively obsessed with who could build the best pressure-cylinder (and then plug it at one end, making a cannon) for three centuries because success in war depended in part on having the best cannon. If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to."
"All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent."
This is a good argument. I would only add one thing to it: a scientific understanding of the principles behind the new technologies makes major step changes in mechanised capabilities possible ("paradigm shifts" urgh), and probably explains why the Industrial revolution didn't happen in Greece or Rome.
It's those major step changes that open up the doors to unforeseen opportunities and make previously unviable businesses economically possible.
Yes - the UK had the Royal Society pioneering the idea of organised research and result sharing on a national and eventually on an international scale.
Before that "research" wasn't really a thing. Discussions between intellectuals were scholastic and often implicitly about political status. The scientific tradition of hands-on experimentation and observation shifted the emphasis to building and trading rather than debating and conquering.
So effectively the UK invented the concept of invention. Other cultures were imperial, martial, and slave-owning, and ambitious men didn't concern themselves with hands-on work. That was for tradesmen and slaves. Although some invention happened, it was outside the main power hierarchy. It wasn't a tradition.
The UK - only partially, but enough - combined mercantile opportunism with practical invention. It took about a century, but invention became a recognisable tradition in its own right, and a credible high-reward career path for ambitious people. (Mostly men of course. But even so.)
Fascinating, the combination of need (more spinning machines could significantly improve use of thread spinning), the availability of coal plus the steam engines that were improved for coal mining use (bringing up the coal, pulling water out). It kind of all came together. Then boom.
> Industrial Revolution of course requires industrial machines. So as long as the machines are not invented, no revolution can start.
you clearly are not giving enough credit to slavery which is the whole point of this exercise. How are we going to build a case for reparations with you talking like that? :)
I'm not defending anything about slavery, but just as impoverished working class Britons contributed little to the British industrial revolution, but did both suffer and benefit from it, the same goes for slaves. The industrialization of industry would not have been possible without the industrialization of agriculture which created an unemployed labor pool available for urban industrial revolutionary work, just as we saw play out in the recent history of China.
analaguously, I got the impression from the article and the discussion here that slavery was a dead-end trap; a local maxima - without pain being experienced by people who had the ability to change things, there wasn't much incentive to make such change - "just buy more slaves"/"just work the slaves harder"
Slaves/serfs make economic sense primarily on a plantation/manor where they can be given use of a small plot where they construct a shelter and raise their own food. They receive little or no subsidies from the planter/lord.
The difference is that serfs are attached to the manor instead of being owned by the planter. Thus, serfs are not sold, but change lords by inheritance, marriage, or other changes in land rights. Europe was so densely populated that serfs probably had little or no cash value. If you had a manor, you already had serfs.
>The difference is that serfs are attached to the manor instead of being owned by the planter
just want to point out (though I'm not an expert) attaching serfs to the land was a step forward in serf rights. I think (particularly in eastern europe), serfs didn't necessarily have the right to stay on the land.
Agree. One comment though: a 30 year gap between uk and USA outlawing slavery doesn’t seem very significant on the 200k year timescale of human existence.
We are talking about a much longer change than just 30 years. Serfdom was rare in the UK by 1400 long before the American revolution or steam power.
As to slavery “no legislation was ever passed in England that legalised slavery. In the Somerset case of 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled that, as slavery was not recognised by English law, James Somerset, a slave who had been brought to England and then escaped, could not be forcibly sent to Jamaica for sale, and he was set free. In Scotland colliery slaves were still in use until 1799 where an act was passed which established their freedom and made this slavery and bondage illegal.” English merchants where happy to participate in the American slave trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain
The UK didn’t exist before 1922. Or 1801, depending on how picky you want to be.
In Scotland it was still around till nearly 1800 (oddly, the last serfs were coal miners); in England it started its decline just before 1400 and was largely eliminated by 1500 and totally by 1600.
1706/1707 is another reasonable start date to the UK depending on what is meant by that, but in this case I was referring to a geographic location not a political organization.
You're of course only talking about local slavery in the UK. They were among the primary slave traders outside of their home territory. The British Empire and its prominent subjects traded in millions of slaves between 1400 and 1800. Centuries of profit from that slave trade helped fuel investment into industrialization across the UK.
This is a common escape for European apologists of slavery (whether in North or South America). Europe has largely gotten to avoid the consequences of their slave trade (they properly owe many trillions of dollars in reparations). The US history of slavery has nothing on the scale of European slavery - 12+ million slaves across the Americas (and that's merely the first generation number).
I actually mentioned that: “English merchants where happy to participate in the American slave trade”
The point was slavery was economically and politically viable in the American south far longer than Europe. It’s a reasonable argument to suggest Europe outsourced and profited from slavery, but it also wasn’t in peoples faces just as few people consider the working conditions of the 3rd world today when they buy stuff.
Anyway, the slave trade wasn’t that profitable for England. Profits where mostly split between Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark with no country having a massive advantage. Divide 12.8 million people across 400 years and then further split profits between multiple countries and it was a tiny rounding error for the European countries involved. It wasn’t even that profitable for the merchants due to the long trips and high risks involved.
PS: I don’t mean this to be apologist, more pointing out how minimal the gains required before people would inflict horrific amount of suffering.
>I actually mentioned that: “English merchants where happy to participate in the American slave trade”
You didn't actually mention that slavery was legal in many British crown colonies including the American colonies, which wasn't just "happy participation by merchants", but was day to day life for many UK subjects. "Slavery ended in the British Empire after the Slavery Abolition Act came into play in 1833", about 30 years before it ended in the US, a former British Colony independent less than 100 years at that time, a short time by any standards.
The 1833 act only impacted an economically insignificant number of people, which is why it could pass. Notably it excluded lands held but the British East India company.
“Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. They resettled many in Jamaica and the Bahamas” and no that’s not a euphemism for enslaving them in Jamaica and the Bahamas.
People in general treat the slaves near them well, and slaves far away bad. Having a slave as a household servant was most expensive because you treated them well, while you demanded many more hours of work from the slaves working outside who you didn't see as much. And if you can remove the slave to a distance mine - work them to death (that is dead, not the figure of speech), which was more efficient use of money.
My rough model was always simply that all the Western powers practiced African slavery in that period, in the regions in which it was useful (hot, humid, agricultural ones). The same dynamics that led America to have slavery in Mississippi but not Boston led the English/UK to have it in Kingston but not London
1. A reason to create coal-driven machines in the first place (to pump water from mines, when labor and other fuel sources like timer were low), to kick-start the process of mechanical innovation
2. Enough technical/scientific knowhow + conditions for entrepreneurialism (inventor gets to actually make a profit) leading to progressive mechanical innovations, spreading to other sectors like textile manufacturing
3. Easy access to coal (near the surface, in Britain itself) to provide energy for the new machines
4. Access to raw materials to drive textile factories, namely cotton produced by slaves in the Americas
5. An market for low-cost textiles produced using machines, to a great extent India (Indian textile imports were taxed, and exports were encouraged)
6. Capital for new machines/factories, often derived from excess capital from slave-plantations + re-invested profits from industry
It's going to require quite a lot of expertise to tease out the relative importance of these factors, so us laymen should be okay with a general picture. It's okay to admit that.
>In the USA, slavery hung around longer than it did in Europe largely due to reward for the capture of runaways provided by government, as well as a late start to industrialization.
The story I was always told was that Eli Whitney's cotton gin made slavery economically viable for longer than it would have otherwise.
That is a factor too. Slavery is expensive because you have to feed the slave even when they are not working. Same problem applies to using horses, they eat even where the fields are plowed. Machines sitting idle do not cost additional capital (other than taxes) - of course machine sitting idle don't make their payments, but you can arrange those terms with the bank.
Before the cotton gin, wool was more popular because it was less labor. (I'm not sure how silk and flax fit in, but all have their own labor intensive parts pre mechanization). By making cotton cheaper, the labor needed to separate the seed from the cotton was much less and so it was more competitive with others despite the high labor costs elsewhere.
I lately had an idea: Why did the industrial revolution start in the UK? Coal mining was probably a factor. But why in the UK? Coal deposits are abundant in other places as well. But the UK has cold, rainy winters. Coal is good for heating, not only for industrial purposes, like smelting metal. Trees have mostly been cut down by that time. I think they used them for ship building. So if you have the coal mining already there, the other steps are more likely to happen.
IIRC one of the oldest remaining steam engines was built for exactly that purpose. It is on display at the (poorly named IMHO) Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. I say poorly named because it isn't about him, it's about the history of industrialisation.
This is true for the more rural southern states, northern states industrialized way earlier (which goes to prove the rest of your argument about slavery).
But those profits would have been bigger without slavery. Slavery persisted not because it made the south richer overall (it made the south poorer overall) but because it concentrated profits in a handful of political elites. Northern banks and industries, however, would have preferred a richer south with more potential customers.
You can see the non-effect of slavery on overall American wealth by looking at the graph of GDP per capita over time: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/US_Gross_Domestic_Product_(G.... If slavery made America richer, you’d see a drop in GDP per capita after the civil war. But you barely see even a blip.
The article was about Britain. As a matter of historical fact there's a link between the slave trade and industrial development in Britain. Maybe you're trying to defend capitalism or whatever with your hypothetical counterfactuals but that's what actually happened.
Then how did countries with de minimis involvement in the slave trade like Germany, Italy or Austria-Hungary do so much better economically than Brazil? Four to six times as many slaves went to Brazil as to all of the modern USA. The Trans Saharan slave trade where Arabs enslaved Sub Saharan Africans started earlier, lasted longer and enslaved more people than the Trans Atlantic trade too. If slavery was the reason for the Industrial Revolution why aren’t we discussing this in Arabic?
This didn't happen in a vacuum, wall street was full of slave-labor company shares. The speculators and financiers were closer to the financial center.
Understanding the development of Western Europe is one of the most important things historians could be doing right now. Because those lessons can be applied to help developing nations follow the same trajectory to development.
Unfortunately too much of academia is fixated on faulting the west for past injustices, which leads to an unproductive Eurocentric mindset. (Britain will never, and cannot, pay back India what it took, so no point concerning ourselves about that.)
> those lessons can be applied to help developing nations follow the same trajectory to development
Not necessarily: firstly, some of those factors were "have the right geology" (coal/iron/later oil), which you can't replicate even if you want to, and secondly we're already in a developed world. That changes the environment and cost/benefit analysis greatly.
The first person to develop a steam engine and the 1,000th person to do so are working in a very different way.
To develop the third world, it might be more informative to look at the postwar trajectories of Japan, Singapore, Korea, and of course China.
> faulting the west for past injustices
Many of which are linked directly to present, ongoing injustices, but you'll never read that because you have no interest in engaging with the research itself, only a caricature. Besides, isn't it better history to find out what actually happened rather than just regurgitate the propaganda of the past?
I would argue that "applying lessons" ignores not just local geology, but - more importantly - local / regional culture, politics, socio-economics, etc. as well. It assumes that, throughout history, the rest of the world subconsciously has had - and still has - a need for Western-European frameworks of thinking about their place in the world. Which is very eurocentrist perception of the world.
A hallmark of post-modern historiography is exactly discarding this history can only be perceived through a western-european lens, and acknowledging that there are as many valid ways of looking at the past as there are cultures and people around the world.
> Japan, Singapore, Korea, and of course China
Neither Japan, Korea nor China were "third world" countries before WWII. Or even ever.
On the contrary. Japan was very much an industrialized nation in the 1930s. Before then, it has a long history as a advanced, albeit, regional power. The same is true about Korea. Chinese history itself is rife with empires and kingdoms - having trade networks, technological advances and so on - some of which being as large and influential - if not more - then the Roman Empire during its heyday.
Singapore already was a bustling trade port long before WWII, and has a history of being part of powerful local sultanates before the arrival of the British.
If anything, the examples you gave are quite ambivalent about the historical dynamics that led to their integration in today's modern global economic, geo-political, cultural structures and global power balances which were borne out of post-WWII victors creating a new order for peace and development.
They certainly were third world countries. In 1950, South Korea and Taiwan had a GDP per capita comparable to Kenya, Ghana, or Cote D’Ivoire. China’s was lower than the Congo’s. China was barely richer than Bangladesh. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-.... Japan was more industrialized: comparable to Greece and Mexico. But the US was still five times richer per capita.
Put another way, France had six times higher per capita GDP than South Korea in 1950. Today the two are comparable.
> To develop the third world, it might be more informative to look at the postwar trajectories of Japan, Singapore, Korea, and of course China.
That's the exact sentence, and it doesn't sit right with me for three distinct reasons.
First, it can be read as an an implication: "these 4 countries where part of the "third world" and now aren't given their post-war trajectory." which ignores the history of those 4 nations long before WWII or Western involvement.
Second, makes the same a-historical mistake by assuming that the particular path followed by those nations can readily be transposed towards other regions in the world.
Third, it's a take that ignores the agency other cultures and peoples have to carve out their own place in the world. Moreover, many of the problems in the so-called global south are a direct result of this exact thinking. Countless cultures and ways of living have disappeared over the past 2 centuries because it.
The good old HN incredibly adversarial reading of a single sentence.
It was in reply to "those lessons can be applied to help developing nations follow the same trajectory to development", which does indeed embed the assumption of both a trajectory and that help is being imposed from outside.
> makes the same a-historical mistake by assuming that the particular path followed by those nations can readily be transposed towards other regions in the world
I put "might" in there for a reason. It also might not. It seems like something that might be worth investigating rather than dismissing? If that kind of development is your goal, of course. And it comes with its own assumptions and disadvantages.
> Moreover, many of the problems in the so-called global south are a direct result of this exact thinking. Countless cultures and ways of living have disappeared over the past 2 centuries because it.
Unable to parse antecedant of "this"; colonialism? Western involvement? Copying other countries?
But I'm not sure it's worth replying in this kind of environment.
> Many of which are linked directly to present, ongoing injustices, but you'll never read that because you have no interest in engaging with the research itself, only a caricature. Besides, isn't it better history to find out what actually happened rather than just regurgitate the propaganda of the past?
Whether its true or not makes no difference. Studying history with an eye to past injustices puts people into a mindset of dependency, waiting for their former overlords to help them. But Europeans are never going to pay meaningful reparations for colonialism. Ever. The only thing worth learning from history is how Europe got to the point where it could take over Asia and Africa in the first place.
Britain and France even TODAY extract significant amounts of wealth from their past colonies. This is due to a variety of structures that go back hundreds of years, embedded deeply into the society of both the coloniser and the formally colonized. Ending this extraction of wealth requires understanding how and why those structures formed.
Lots of developing countries currently have per capita GDP comparable to western European countries in 1980 (Like as an example, Netherlands vs Vietnam).
~13000 in "Current US$". You don't adjust for inflation and then adjust for inflation again. Vietnam is considerably lower today on that measure (3750), but if you use PPP the comparison isn't quite as stark (but ends in 1990).
It isn’t just informative for “developing” nations, but also for “developed” nations.
To assume we have reached some endpoint of development is absurd, particularly given historical precedent.
The article posits that industrialisation was spawned out of necessity due to a shortage of unskilled labour, and an excess of underemployed capital.
I find it interesting that the U.K. finds itself once again at a not dissimilar crossroads, with a shortage of unskilled and skilled labour, and with an excess of underemployed, concentrated capital. Growth is sclerotic, the political situation is fragile, and inflation runs rampant. Meanwhile, new technology developed over the preceding century has enabled new possibilities, hitherto unimagined and as yet unrealised.
In history, when exposed to severe stressors, societies typically either flourish or collapse.
Collapse has become less common in the industrialised, interconnected world, so it’s not an unreasonable hypothesis that perhaps the U.K. will somehow find itself at the forefront of a new productivity revolution.
You can't understand the rapid development of western Europe without examining how it's colonialism simultaneously enriched europe and sparked conflicts that are still raging.
Who would you suggest modern developing nations colonize?
I don’t think colonization was necessary to European development. Germany rapidly developed too without colonizing anyone. Indeed, I think you have the causation backward. European countries were able to colonize other countries because they had developed ahead of them. India was ruled by a series of foreign powers for hundreds of years before the British. It’s not like the Mughals simply chose not to develop like Britain did.
The industrial revolution was enabled by the rapidly declining price of first iron and later steel.
Making iron requires bringing together iron ore, coal, and limestone in a furnace. These are heavy, and transporting them by horse drawn wagons any distance is expensive.
England was fortunate in having coal mines, iron mines, and limestone quarries either co-located or on the same river so barges could be used. So once charcoal was exhausted and coking developed as the reducing agent, England had a distinct advantage in producing cheap iron.
Once cheap iron was available, it could be used for rails, wheels for mining carts, mining tools, pumps, and eventually steam engines, one thing feeding another in a virtuous cost cycle.
Centuries of political stability before and after the Glorious Revolution (1688) (constraints on the monarchy by parliament and strong political institutions) led to a large merchant and wealthy landowner class. Property rights and unique legal framework (common law) enabled many economic and legal innovations that created the conditions and incentives for industry, and allowed inventors and entrepreneurs to operate and cooperate freely.
Without the unique legal, political, financial frameworks and enlightenment philosophy, the revolution wouldn't have happened in Britain. Technological developments were an emergent property of the fundamental structure of the country at the time.
The Industrial Revolution started in the mid-18th century in England. The steam engine was introduced before the Seven Years' War (1756-63), where England and its allies won and the former essentially became the sole European power in India, though it still only controlled a small fraction of the territory. The Industrial Revolution was well underway before the Anglo-Mysore and Anglo-Maratha wars where England gained control of most of India. The Scramble for Africa was 100 years later. The American colonies were confined on the east side of the Appalachians. The amount of revenue derived from control of that amount of territory couldn't possibly have driven the largest economic transformation in the history of the world. Many empires of similar size have come and gone with no similar jump in the world economy.
>In 1750 Britain imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton, most of which was spun and woven by cottage industry in Lancashire. The work was done by hand in workers' homes or occasionally in master weavers' shops. In 1787 raw cotton consumption was 22 million pounds, most of which was cleaned, carded, and spun on machines.
What could have contributed to the Industrial Revolution, however, is the technology of Bengal, the first region of India that England gained control of. The economy of early-18th-century Bengal has been described as proto-industrial. The lazy "anti-imperialist" critique of the Industrial Revolution in fact undersells India as merely a source of resources. In fact, in the Anglo-Mysore wars, it was the Indians who had superior artillery (though English tactics carried the day) — designs adapted from the "Mysore rockets" were used in the siege of Baltimore, which gave us the infamous line "the rockets' red glare" in that song where they almost seem like an anachronism.
The industrial revolution predates Indian colonization. In fact, you have the causality exactly backwards. The British empire could not have colonized India without their force of industry (ships & machine guns)
> The industrial revolution predates Indian colonization
The first British colony in India was established in 1608.
The only way you can argue that the Industrial revolution predates British colonization of India is to use the date that the colonies were nationalized as the starting point, which is incredibly misleading, as most of modern-day India was already under British control long before direct crown rule, and Britain was already reaping most of the economic benefits of colonization long before that date.
They legally started setting up trade offices in 1608, the Indian rulers accepted them, they didn't conquer India until 1757.
There were some minor battles before 1757, but the major parts of the plundering happened after then, and at that point the industrial revolution had already begun rolling in England with the textile machinery. 40 years later they invented the steam engine, not sure what they could have gotten from India that would help them make that. Europe has plenty of Iron and Coal and extremely good metallurgy skill from making all those cannons, muskets and armours, those are the main ingredients for steam engines.
Without the East India Company maybe the Industrial revolution would have happened in Germany first or something, but it is pretty clear that it would happen in Europe first, nobody else had that extreme scale and quality of ironworking.
> The first British colony in India was established in 1608.
These were trading stations established by the East India Company. You can't really talk about colonization till much later - arguably Clive's successes in Bengal in the 1750's marks the start of real colonization.
The dynamic of colonization after that was very much caught up with the desire of English manufacturers and merchants to find export markets for finished goods, especially cotton.
That would predict Germany being much richer than Austria-Hungary or Britain being much richer than Sweden, or Spain being much richer than Italy. Industrialisation led to enormous power imbalances that made colonisation possible. Northwest Europe was pulling away from the rest of Europe starting in the 1300s.
> This ‘Little Divergence’ is the process whereby the North Sea Area (the UK and the Low Countries) developed into the most prosperous and dynamic part of the Continent. Studies of real wages – the classic paper is by Robert Allen (2001) – and of GDP per capita (e.g. Broadberry et al 2011, Van Zanden and Van Leeuwen 2012, Alvarez-Nogal and Prados de la Escosura 2012) charting the various trajectories of the European countries in detail, demonstrated that the Low Countries and England witnessed almost continuous growth between the 14th and the 18th century, whereas in other parts of the continent real incomes went down in the long run (Italy and Spain), or stagnated at best (Portugal, Germany, Sweden and Poland). This ‘Little Divergence’ is also quite clear from data on levels of urbanization (De Vries 1981), book production and consumption (Buringh and Van Zanden 2009) and agricultural productivity (Slicher van Bath 1963a, Allen 2000).
Likewise, the silicon valley boom happened via massive ecological damage to the surrounding environments.
The linked article seems to argue against itself in places, a surplus of labor is argued to be both good and bad.
I've seen arguments that the Roman empire never underwent an industrial revolution because they had slavery, and thus never needed to automate. The Romans did the resource extraction part right, but never iterated on it to the next step.
It wasn't just access to coal, it was access to coal coupled with the heat engine: heat engines used coal, but led to the production of more coal and in turn created more demand for coal. This positive feedback loop created exponential growth.
The Chinese widely used coal in metallurgy, but did not have an effective heat engine.
These seem more like accelerants than unqualified causes, which is how they're described. Why, each appears throughout history, and they're not making a perfect storm argument that integrates the necessary tech background.
Can it be argued that the cause of the Industrial Revolution was man's insatiable appetite for using our planet's resources? A recurring theme in our history!
Great Britain was an island. By about 1500, its residents had denuded most of its forests for fuel for cooking and heating. So, they turned to using coal. This spurred the need to pump water out of coal mines. The Industrial Revolution represents the uses of these steam-driven pumps for other tasks, such as textile manufacture and steam trains.
"[M]ost of Great Britain’s forests seem to have been cleared for agriculture in antiquity; by 1000 only about 15% of England (as a geographic sub-unit of the island) was forested, a figure which continued to decline rapidly in the centuries that followed (down to a low of around 5%). 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. Fortunately for the residents of Great Britain there were surface coal seems in abundance making the transition relatively easy; once these were exhausted deep mining followed which at last by the late 1600s created the demand for coal-powered pumps finally answered effectively in 1712 by Newcomen."
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
This 'recurring theme' is common to every single organism on Earth. It's only capability that limits life forms other than mankind. It was man's insatiable appetite for survival that got factory workers into the 'dark satanic mills' described by William Blake. Awful conditions there indeed (in many cases) but they worked there in preference to starving to death in the fields. As you point out, they had used up natural energy resources (food & heating) and had no alternative.
I’ve been binging A History of Europe, Key Battles podcast which traces European History from Alexander to WW1. It really gives a great overview of European history and allows for one to see broad trends. For me, the Industrial Revolution is a product of the Enlightenment, Centralization of states (decline of feudalism) and the competitive nature of Europe (no single hegemony on the power).
Even without the overseas Empires Europe probably would’ve been the birth of the revolution.
I find interesting these studies that compare the behaviour of similar cities that got different outcomes.
Another one I saw years ago was made in Germany, to test the Max Weber hypothesis that the Protestant Ethics fostered capitalism. The study compared the growth of both Catholic and Protestant cities. It found no significant difference in the rate of growth. The factor that actually had the most impact on growth was the presence of a printing industry.
> The study compared the growth of both Catholic and Protestant cities
This is misunderstanding of the thesis. Ideas make changes _possible_. It's not like there is simply more change in places where more people adhere to the new ideas.
People think you can find a "cause" for social processes like this in the same way you can find a cause for a materials tensile strength. But you can't. They are complex events, lasting decades, with technological, social, political, economic, and other factors. That means (1) there is NO single cause and (2) nothing can be quantified, so everyone just picks the cause that suits their world view and gives it oversized importance.
This is why subjects like history differ from physics. We should not try to apply ideas from the latter (simple cause-effect chains, reproducibility, fixed true answers) to the former.
> (1) there is NO single cause and (2) nothing can be quantified
Fortunately causal analysis supports 1 and contradicts 2. With good data, models and algorithms you can _quantify_ the strengths of various causal factors, and confirm or discredit models. Time scales don't matter, complexity can be overcome, and even unobserved causes can be modeled.
> This is why subjects like history differ from physics. We should not try to apply ideas from the latter (simple cause-effect chains, reproducibility, fixed true answers) to the former.
Anthropologist Richard McElreath[1] applies bayesian statistical models to a variety of social situations, and teaches others how as well. People have won Nobel prizes for this kind of work[2]. In a sense, you already agree: the foundational component of bayesian data analysis is updating your beliefs as new data comes in.
I am afraid your citations don't support your claim. Those works are about using natural experiments and large sample sizes to estimate causes and effects. But that isn't possible for single, large events like "the industrial revolution" because there is only one such event.
This is why no one can say "industrial revolutions are 8% caused by geography and 12% caused by social structures" with any actual basis for that.
I feel like you are arguing against hypotheticals. The actual papers are available[1][2]. The first uses a spatial model, which means there isn't just one "industrial revolution" but dozens, one per city.
> We rationalize these findings using a dynamic spatial model, where slavery investment raises the return to capital accumulation, expanding production in capital-intensive sectors. To establish causality, we use arguably exogenous variation in slave mortality on the passage from Africa to the Indies, driven by weather shocks.
The second paper focuses on labor-capital substitution. In this view, there are again many industrialization locations, but also each tech is a micro-revolution. You can even see the proposed causal DAG in Figure 4.
> To measure technological change, we collect new, granular data on the diffusion of technologies (both labor-saving and not) in industrializing England. To measure the geographical patterns of labor scarcity, we exploit the massive shock to labor supply that resulted from military recruitment during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815).
Neither paper predicts a boolean "revolution", because thats really an academic construct to describe a shift in practices over time with fuzzy boundaries and definitions. Instead they go after capital formation or adoption of labor saving devices, which seem like reasonable proxies.
People focus maybe too much on the supply side of things. Resources, means of production, capital etc
A puzzle that seems to floating above all this is the role of demand, what people want.
An instance where it seems a key factor is the US consumer revolution. But maybe it was instrumental before.
Also today, you get a distinct feeling that many parts of the world do not stay underdeveloped (using conventional GDP etc) because they cant do otherwise, but because they dont want.
Developing a knack for wanting more goods or services does not seem to be trivial or uniform.
Surely demand is the easy piece: people with one set of cloths and one piece of furniture, want more stuff.
When you have a lot of stuff already, then people demand things like leisure time, freedom, justice, etc which conflicts with production of goods. But when you are basically a subsistence farmer you just want more stuff first and foremost. I find the idea that some places have not developed because the people there don't want things quite alien to be honest. Who is cold and doesn't want an extra blanket?
You are thinking about very basic needs. Most of the world is (thankfully) beyond that stage. You need to explain why while industrial capacities are available for centuries now, there is a very varied picture in terms of development.
Its precisely this assumption that "demand is given" that questioned. Demand seems to be a more complex beast.
I actually think it's the other way around. I can plausibly explain differences in development levels by pointing to 1001 different factors from colonial legacies to geography to corruption to infrastructure etc. It is your conjecture, that people just don't want things in some of these places (sorry if that is reductionist?) that requires a lot of justification. What makes people in some places lack demand while rich westerners like me demand so much? Why did my poor ancestors living with similar levels of poverty have demand when these people do not?
and I would probably agree that most of them have some role, but ignoring the demand side is fundamentally flawed (in principle) given how circularly an economy works, especially over the long run.
Quantifying precisely what role demand plays would need careful justification and counterfactual economic "experiments" [0] but that was not my point. My point is that it is a factor seldom discussed, whereas even casual exposure to non-western society shows that people have very diverging attitudes towards consumption which are very culture driven.
[0] This should not be so difficult. Even today, centuries after the industrial revolution in many parts of the world 50% of the population is not even granted any agency, let alone be drivers of economic demand.
People want whatever advertisers put in front of them - companies would not spend billions on advertisements if they didn't induce people to want things.
That's to say - in a modern society most people have what they need and have no real want other than what their social, political, and corporate masters tell them they want.
There was a fascinating article about 6 months ago on 'why no roman industrial revolution?' which dove into the convergence of requirements - and almost coincidentally convenient technological advances - that led to this happening when and where it did - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187
The 'we can't run counter-factuals' comment in the opening paragraph of TFA is the crux of course, though Bret Devereaux's article (via HN link above) provides some highly compelling arguments about the key 'causes'.
Civilization and Capitalism, Vol 1 by Braudel[one], and Energy and Civilization: A History by Smil[two]
A combined read yields a picture of the "industrial revolution" not as a single event- industrialization preceded the use of the steam engine; renaissance Europe was substantially more industrialized than early medieval Europe due to increased use of water power and animal power.
Exhaustion of wood as thermal fuel (largely for blast furnaces), exploitation of peat and coal, and development of steam engines followed.
in short: New market based economies on former church land that was reclaimed after the conversion to church of England, coupled with a lack of workers due to war set the scene for mechanization
What distinctly differentiated industrializing Europe from anything in its past and anything in its contemporary world for so long was its socio-economic model.
Capitalism and the attendant far greater class mobility, much like dot com boom, attracted intellectual horsepower to industry in the service of seeking wealth and advancing up the social ladder.
Chattel slavery not only fueled the industrial revolution but laid the foundation for our modern world.
Capital accumulation, investment of capital, private ownership of the means of production (people), high levels of wage (free) labor and efficient (non-paid) use of the factors of production (people) - are all mechanisms of capitalism that reach their maximum potential under the conditions of chattel slavery.
Yes, what a great point! This is why Mauritania had all of the world's richest men until 1981 when they outlawed slavery. If they hadn't done that Bezos and Musk would have nothing on the founders of Mauritanian SlaveTrade Corporation.
Similarly it's why southern plantation owners where by far the richest people in America until the civil war. Carnegie and Vanderbilt had nothing on them. Strange though that nobody knows their names, must be censored by the Neo-Confederacy.
Chattel slavery still exists around the world, why aren't they the richer than the places where chattel slavery is outlawed? Where ever machines replaced human labor slavery has been outlawed and is richer than the places where labor is done manually and still allows slavery.
The whole point of industrialization was to replace human labor with machines and obviate the capitalist need to own slaves!
> Chattel slavery still exists around the world, why aren't they the richer than the places where chattel slavery is outlawed?
Chattel slavery no longer exists. That involved perpetual, lineage based bondage and breeding.
The global economy has evolved so why would you expect countries using a 15th century approach to outperform modern economies? Also, smaller economies don't have the ability to shape global monetary policy in their favor nor have the weaponry to enforce it.
So we should be flat out denying the existence chattel slavery in some parts Africa and Asia still because it is not a part of the modern global economy?
The essence of what I feel is wrong about the modern discussion around exploitation of human beings is this: So we just need to accept the original sin that our modern lifestyle has the origin of the slavery of the past only, that the stuff that we buy now is not based on exploitation of labor today.
Our stuff is sometimes from sweatshops. Our gadgets contain materials like Cobalt from "artisanal" mines in Congo. But hey somebody is getting a wage for their labor so it is not slavery even if they get punished for not meeting "quotas"...
I'm not engaging in illegal behaviour by using the archive.ph link, in fact, I'm reporting it to The Economist as it shall be DMCA'd (I will not, but I stand by my reasoning).
