[HN Gopher] Why no Roman industrial revolution?
___________________________________________________________________
Why no Roman industrial revolution?
Author : Tomte
Score : 366 points
Date : 2022-08-26 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| danso wrote:
| 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
|
| [0] https://acoup.blog/2019/10/04/collections-the-
| preposterous-l...
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| 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
| driscoll42 wrote:
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| [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."_
| kemayo wrote:
| 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.)
| the_af wrote:
| 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!
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://acoup.blog/2019/05/28/new-acquisitions-not-how-
| it-wa...
| deanCommie wrote:
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| 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 ;)
| danso wrote:
| 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.
| the_af wrote:
| Thanks for your reply.
|
| 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 :(
| dtheodor wrote:
| > 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)
| the_af wrote:
| > _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".
| WalterBright wrote:
| The article misses a larger point. The industrial revolution
| followed a turn towards free markets.
|
| For example, the Chinese are the source of a lot of inventions,
| but they weren't exploited. The Europeans exploited them. Why?
| Because of the free market profit motive.
| politelemon wrote:
| Typo in the first paragraph? The title indicates the question is
| why there wasn't a revolution. Opening sentence quotes
|
| "Why did the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?"
| triceratops wrote:
| He writes fast and copiously. Typos are common on his blog.
| Don't care 10/10 content.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| >Realizing this, textile manufacturers (we're talking about
| factory owners, at this point) first use watermills, but there
| are only so many places in Great Britain suitable for a watermill
| and a windmill won't do
|
| It might be prudent to interject at this point that the windmill
| _itself_ did not appear until 9th-century Iran, and the more
| common horizontal-axis version is first seen in the 12th century
| in the Low Countries. The possibility of a _vacuum_ and thus the
| fact that air is a substance (rather than a quality of the world)
| was first conclusively shown by Torricelli in the 17th century.
| It 's very hard to imagine not knowing things that we have taken
| for granted since early childhood. Even if you could make things
| spin by manipulating gases (which is what a steam engine does),
| it's very hard to improve your design if you have no idea what's
| going on inside it!
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| > 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).
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| 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.
| tda wrote:
| 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
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The industrial revolution used water power.
|
| 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
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| t_mann wrote:
| > The industrial revolution used water power.
|
| 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".
| zardo wrote:
| > 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| tomxor wrote:
| > Water power was the workhorse
|
| 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).
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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).
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| 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.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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...
| LtWorf wrote:
| This seems a very extreme oversemplification that explains
| nothing.
| bodhiandphysics wrote:
| It would have been a little hard for the romans to
| industrialize textiles... they didn't have spinning wheels!
| bregma wrote:
| 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.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| > collapsed under its own weight
|
| That is a productivity/innovation issue at its core.
| anikan_vader wrote:
| >> just collapsed under its own weight.
|
| I mean, it suffered a series of military defeats at the hands
| of Germanic peoples.
| 988747 wrote:
| That was just a consequence of internal collapse, which
| prevented Romans from properly defending themselves, as
| they successfully did in previous centuries.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| dustingetz wrote:
| which book do i read to unpack this
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| ilkan wrote:
| So we are the Romans of crypto, doing cool experiments? And it
| won't take off until the equivalent of worldwide deforestation
| and peasants freezing in the wintertime?
| jamiek88 wrote:
| No because crypto is a useless scam on the whole.
|
| The exact opposite of an Industrial Revolution.
|
| Actually it's more of a virus or a parasite upon our industrial
| society. Adds no value, consumes gigawatts.
| ben_w wrote:
| Depends.
|
| Cryptocurrencies are (or at least the famous one is)
| deliberately inefficient. Most of the times I've brought this
| up or seen someone else bring it up, a bitcoin fan insists this
| is a selling point. If so, it's only going to get worse unless
| it's banned.
|
| OTOH if you meant cryptography, then quite possibly yes.
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| My sort-of-joking-conspiracy-theory is that "Satoshi Nakamoto"
| was a clandestine sentient AI who invented cryptocurrency as a
| way to incentivise the hairless monkeys networking together as
| much processing power as possible.
| intrasight wrote:
| 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.
| archi42 wrote:
| 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?
| ramesh31 wrote:
| 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.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> 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 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/
| lynguist wrote:
| 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.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| lynguist wrote:
| Digits of pi: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/comput
| e/calculating-1...
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Overall the medieval era was something of a setback in the
| aggregate if you look at social development overall in the
| western core. (See Figure 3. https://aspeniaonline.it/why-the-
| west-rules-for-now/)
|
| 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.
| tjs8rj wrote:
| 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
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 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.
| evv555 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The amount of technology that _was_ developed in the Medieval
| times is quite long:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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...
| kreig wrote:
| 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.
| drspock11 wrote:
| 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.
| t_mann wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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...
| lohfu wrote:
| I think a more intriguing question is "Why no Chinese industrial
| revolution?" Their economy was nowhere near as slavery or serfdom
| based, and was impressively technologically advanced
| relaxing wrote:
| I'd guess the answer is similar - there was no constraint on a
| key resource to act as a forcing function.
| chroma wrote:
| The weirdest thing to me is that the Chinese had sky lanterns
| 2,300 years ago but they never scaled them up to hot air
| balloons. It took 2,000 years before Joseph-Michel Montgolfier
| saw some laundry billow as it dried above a fire, inspiring him
| to build a flying machine.
| zzbzq wrote:
| What amazes me is we've had hot air balloons for 250 years
| and still haven't scaled them into partial vacuum space
| zeppelins, we're still burning rocket fuel like it's the dark
| ages
| peter303 wrote:
| A similar argument could be made for China. They had expertise
| and capital, but not the incentives to jump to an industrial
| economy.
| speedbird wrote:
| 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.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| Slaves. No need.
|
| When it was banned in modern era, the industrial revolution
| happened.
| maire wrote:
| I don't think the relation between slavery and
| industrialization is as simple as you think.
|
| Industrial cotton mills and the invention of the cotton gin
| produced more slavery in the US. I am not sure about elsewhere.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I always thought of it as the other way around. Industrial and
| agricultural machinery was ultimately cheaper than owning
| slaves to do the same work. The industrial revolution happened,
| and slaves were no longer economical. The same goes for draft
| animals, too.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Newtons calculus and formalization of fundamental mechanical
| physics was needed. The end.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| I've always heard that the prevalence and normalization of
| slavery eliminated incentives for technology creation and
| adoption.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 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.
| thiagoharry wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| While true to some extent, it is worth noting that the Romans
| did have _water mills_. They clearly weren't totally
| uninterested in mechanical energy.
| mmmpop wrote:
| 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?
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| thisiscorrect wrote:
| 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]"
| praptak wrote:
| This does not counter OPs point. The invention caused the
| increased demand for slave labor. It wasn't slavery which
| caused the invention.
| notahacker wrote:
| However, slavery didn't _prevent_ (or even effectively
| compete with) the invention either, like the OP and many
| others have suggested about Roman slavery
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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
| Symmetry wrote:
| I don't know about that. The US south was happy to employ
| things like the cotton gin.
| debacle wrote:
| The answer is almost always tooling + resources. Scientific
| advancement outpaces tooling + resources - look at biology,
| physics (micro + macro), genetics, etc.
| [deleted]
| boringg wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| baking wrote:
| This is why I tend to think that the industrial revolution and
| technology is "the great filter" for the Fermi Paradox. Life,
| intelligence, agriculture, society can all occur with relatively
| high probability, but each planet has, at best, one shot at a
| technological society and a brief window solve the problems that
| it creates before everything collapses.
|
| Also note that global warming is determined by the ratio of CO2
| produced to the amount that was in the atmosphere before the
| industrial revolution. Planets with lower CO2 are actually worse
| off because the temperature will rise faster for the same amount
| of CO2. Also, Earth is helped by having a lot of oceans that
| absorb CO2.
| 86J8oyZv wrote:
| I mean, had we gone to nuclear power immediately as soon as we
| could, we likely wouldn't be where we are today. The window
| isn't _that_ narrow. But there are definitely certain aspects
| of our ape brains that make us likely to extinct ourselves.
| baking wrote:
| Certainly. I think we can point to the fossil fuel industry
| misdirection on greenhouse gases and the anti-nuke movement.
| mym1990 wrote:
| We certainly wouldn't be where we are today, but it's
| extremely speculative to know where we would be...could be
| worse or better. One problem I see with where we are now is
| that once the ball of inertia of group activity gets going,
| it is very very difficult to get it to go in another
| direction.
| baking wrote:
| I think the idea is that is certainly feasible for an alien
| civilization to go from steam power to fission in under 200
| years. What makes it a "great filter" in my mind that the
| idea that the climate change clock might start ticking long
| before they are aware of it and that there could be a hard
| time limit.
|
| Most other possible filters aren't as tricky. Sure stars
| explode, planets get hit by asteroids, and species go
| extinct, but those are pretty much chance events.
| Salgat wrote:
| I'm more curious what would have happened if fossil fuels
| weren't available on the scale present today. It's pretty
| remarkable if you think about it, it's basically a shortcut to
| bypass energy generation limitations for several centuries.
| What if humans came along before fossil fuels had a chance to
| form? Would we have had an industrial revolution?
| kurupt213 wrote:
| You need oceans and geologic activity for life, so there
| would always be oil. Coal is from trees dying and piling up
| faster than they rot...so vascular plants need to develop
| much earlier than fungi.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| It's by no means inevitable that intelligent life (us)
| would have deposits of fossil fuels available to jumpstart
| a high technology civilization, akin to the small bit of
| "fuel" packed into a seed for the young plant to use until
| it can sprout and photosynthesize. In fact, I wonder if
| this is the "great filter" and we've already lucked past
| it.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| Oil is the fossilized remains of plankton. Anywhere life
| develops would have oil eventually.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Right, if:
|
| 1) plankton or something plankton-like develops and
| generates a lot of biomass, and
|
| 2) its remains aren't dispersed or digested by other
| organisms, and
|
| 3) it has time to turn into petroleum, and
|
| 4) all of this happens far enough ahead of intelligent
| life so that it's ready when they need it, and in
| sufficient quantity to bother.
|
| You could build a "Drake equation" model about how likely
| this is, and maybe it's pretty likely, but it's not
| inevitable.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| But even before the Industrial Revolution, technology was
| advancing shockingly quickly, at least on cosmological
| timescales. If there were no commercially exploitable fossil
| fuels, would we have simply developed better wind and water
| energy? Even primitive solar (point a group of mirrors at a pot
| of water to boil it) could have arisen.
| baking wrote:
| This goes in a different direction, but my thought experiment
| is to think about what would happen if our civilization
| collapsed. Assuming you had access to libraries and lots of
| old equipment, could you ever make a new solar cell or a wind
| turbine.
|
| And the Fermi Paradox is really about becoming a space-faring
| civilization. You need to do a lot more than boil water to
| show up on the galactic map.
| stormbrew wrote:
| This assumes a lot of things about alien physiology, structure,
| and tolerances are the same as humans. It's not hard to imagine
| the possibility of a species arising that either is less
| affected by a greenhouse effect or at maybe exists in an
| environment where it doesn't happen.
|
| That's not even getting into the possibility of different paths
| to energy production.
|
| This is always a problem with any Fermi paradox thought
| experiment. We're extrapolating so much from a sample of 1 and
| we understand so little about even that one case.
| lisper wrote:
| The details don't really matter. What matters is that 1) a
| new source of energy is discovered which 2) disrupts an
| existing equilibrium which in turn 3) brings about ecosystem
| collapse faster than even intelligence can adapt. The exact
| mechanism by which this series of events plays out is
| irrelevant.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's such a negative thought experiment isn't it?
|
| Not saying it doesn't hold some water but man it's bleak.
| lisper wrote:
| Yep. I've been in a serious existential crisis over this
| for the last few years.
|
| It's not like disaster is inevitable. We _could_ cut
| carbon emissions before they destroy technological
| civilization, or maybe come up with a practical way to
| (re-)sequester the carbon we 've emitted. But right now
| it is not looking particularly promising to me, and time
| is running out fast.
| bamboozled wrote:
| What are you doing about it?
|
| I think if you're that concerned about it, you should be
| working to solve it, this would surely be the antidote to
| your worries. Just writing a letter to your
| representatives would be a simple way to help.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I agree the details don't matter, which is precisely why
| there's no reason to believe (2) or (3) is universal other
| than that it's our own experience.
|
| You are taking our _details_ and extrapolating them to a
| universal filter.
|
| Most people die of old age. A very small number of people
| die of being hit by rocks falling from the sky. Only one of
| these is a broad filter for who survives into the next
| century that everyone has to go through, but if you only
| knew the life of one person you could not say with
| certainty which one it was.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| > Finley sought to demonstrate that the ancient economy was not
| 'proto-capitalist' in its orientation but rather a decidedly
| alien economy where economic relations were structured by status,
| legally enforced class and slavery more than money or profit.
|
| This is one of those things Marx really nailed with the idea that
| a "mode" of production wasn't just determined by labor and
| material but that it is also determined by the relationships
| between the participants in a political economy or the
| "relations" of production.
| jollyllama wrote:
| In summary: Surplus of slaves. Mediterranean climate. Why bother?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| The western industrial revolution started by replacing both paid
| and slave labor with machines. Note, while Rome built many great
| technologies like roads, aquifers, indoor plumbing, sewers,
| architecture, and standardized tax law. There was no such thing
| as due process within their democratic process. i.e. if a dozen
| people from the community dropped your name on pottery shards
| into the anonymous legal pot, than you were banished from the
| city without trial.
|
| It has also been argued, that a series of incompetent leaders
| starting with Caligula had caused the empire to enter a downward
| trend. Much how Julius Caesar grew the empires influence through
| bloody conquest, his successors ambitions simply exceeded the
| civilizations limits economically.
|
| It is fascinating how a whole civilization could collapse simply
| by having a few greedy fools in charge. However, I am certain we
| are different.. ;-)
| Amezarak wrote:
| You're describing the Athenian ostracon. The Romans did not
| have that and did in fact place a great deal emphasis on the
| law-as-such in a way we would consider it analogous to due
| process.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| The Roman historian Polybius described exilium, relegatio,
| Aquae et Ignis Interdictio, and more commonly Deportatio as
| being favored over other forms of punishment.
|
| Of course, my memory may be incorrect, and you should study
| the matter yourself.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| More important, they had to be found guilty at some sort of
| trial
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| IIRC, many simply fled capital punishment during the
| trials by renouncing citizenship and choosing exile over
| certain death.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| I don't think Patricians were killed that often...non
| citizens probably didn't see much protection from the law
| - might as well be a slave.
|
| Banishment (forbidding anyone from offering food shelter
| or warmth from the hearth) was probably worse than death
| for most Romans.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| >probably worse than death for most Romans
|
| Yep, brutal to the lower castes, and political
| consequences for the remaining family honor.
|
| Being a stateless immigrant today is probably not much
| better. It is likely wise to be cautious around those
| idealizing empires. =)
| Attrecomet wrote:
| > There was no such thing as due process within their
| democratic process. i.e. if a dozen people from the community
| dropped your name on pottery shards into the anonymous legal
| pot, than you were banished from the city without trial.
|
| That's Athens, not Rome, which had very little in the sense of
| actual democratic processes indeed, even in republican times.
| The tribal assembly was continually overshadowed by the senate,
| and the only popular institution of any power was the tribunate
| of the people with it's veto powers -- practically lost during
| the Punic wars until the government started to break under the
| strain of the wrongly-incentivized oligarchy.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| It has been many years, but concilium plebis made plebiscita
| that were legally binding for all citizens if I recall.
| Servius Tullius had also given the vote to others not of the
| original founding tribes.
|
| I do believe you are correct about the Athens origin of the
| clay shards though. The subject of exile was confused with
| the story of Cicero, who was a character who traveled an
| awful lot. ;)
| kurupt213 wrote:
| What? The Romans weren't going to lose the Punic wars as long
| as there was a new generation of men reaching fighting age
| every spring. They learned from their mistakes, and
| Hannibal's invasion of Italy was doomed from the start
| because there was no resupply plan.
| tomrod wrote:
| > It is fascinating how a whole civilization could collapse
| simply by having a few greedy fools in charge. However, I am
| certain we are different.. ;-)
|
| Marx and Hegel really were visionary.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Hegel wasn't a historical materialist though, the other way
| around no? IIRC Phenomenology of Spirit, we're about in the
| era of The Beautiful Souls
| yywwbbn wrote:
| Roman economy and military power is considered to have been at
| it's peak around the time of Marcus Aurelius, who ruled 120
| years after the death of Caligula.
|
| Then again Romans didn't really practice ostracism either...
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| >Then again Romans didn't really practice ostracism either
|
| IIRC, the Roman historian Polybius described exilium,
| relegatio, Aquae et Ignis Interdictio, and more commonly
| Deportatio as being favored over other forms of punishment.
|
| >Marcus Aurelius
|
| I hope you were thinking of Antoninus Pius instead. ;)
| pfortuny wrote:
| Are you sure about the lack of due process? If there was
| something important in Rome it was its citizens (in the legal
| sense).
| [deleted]
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| If I recall correctly, Relegatio was banishment from the
| Roman province via magisterial decree. Aquae et ignis
| interdictio was a more severe version stripping individuals
| of most legal rights.
| deepdriver wrote:
| Another take may be found on Dr. Garrett Ryan's excellent "Told
| in Stone" YouTube channel:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o
| nakedrobot2 wrote:
| Yes, this.
|
| 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.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| 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.
| JackFr wrote:
| 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.
| Mvandenbergh wrote:
| There were all of those things in the Roman empire.
| imtringued wrote:
| And even before the Roman empire in ancient egypt...
| driscoll42 wrote:
| This is fantastic, though of course starting to read it I realize
| I should read his Decline and Fall of Rome series
| (https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...)
| but then there's his "Who were the
| Roman's"(https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-queens-
| latin/) series to read before... fantastic, I love these rabbit
| holes.
| vgel wrote:
| I haven't read his Decline series yet, but The Queen's Latin is
| very good, I highly recommend it.
| unity1001 wrote:
| 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.
| azernik wrote:
| The United States was a slave economy too, and still
| industrialized. That is not a sufficient explanation for Rome.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| 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.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Good sources for civil war motivations and conditions?
| bragr wrote:
| Slavery is usually the reason given why the North
| industrialized and the South did not pre civil war.
| anonporridge wrote:
| 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.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| 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.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > 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.
| pinewurst wrote:
| There was very little direct cross though. The industrialized
| places (cotton milling etc) almost never had enslaved
| workers. Those were mostly on the plantations.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| imbnwa wrote:
| 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.
| replygirl wrote:
| the North won because the South hadn't industrialized
| redwoolf wrote:
| 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.
| bregma wrote:
| I believe the number was three fifths.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Roman and American slavery were very different.
|
| 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.
| trgn wrote:
| 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.
| ed_balls wrote:
| 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.
| desindol wrote:
| Look at the world fair in London almost all of the industrial
| machinery was from non slave states...
| anonporridge wrote:
| The United States still is a wage slave economy.
|
| A vast improvement from a chattel slave economy, to be sure.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Does "wage slavery" just mean "most people are required to
| work in order to survive" ? If so, every society in history
| is like that.
| Epa095 wrote:
| (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.
| trasz wrote:
| No, it means people are forced to work multiple jobs
| because no basic social mechanisms, and when you are poor
| you can be jailed (and then exploited as a slave, slavery
| still pays billions per year in US) for nothing (https://
| twitter.com/dylanogline/status/1550121929939398656 for
| just one example). Not to mention many mechanisms, like
| student debts, seem designed to force people into
| military (https://twitter.com/repjimbanks/status/15628208
| 37140742144).
| ladyattis wrote:
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| > 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.
| pookha wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| ladyattis wrote:
| >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.
| Aunche wrote:
| The Romans also didn't have paper or a printing presses, so
| knowledge only circulated among a relatively small population
| of elites.
| ladyattis wrote:
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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)
| w3ll_w3ll_w3ll wrote:
| "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".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
| zajio1am wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| lr4444lr wrote:
| They do, but at scale that drops, and unlike oxen, they're
| trainable for producing value beyond sheer energy.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Slaves aren't free.
|
| 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.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| 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.
|
| (Basing this all on the history of Rome podcast)
| lazyier wrote:
| 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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > 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.
| origin_path wrote:
| 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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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).
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I think it was the British textile industry that was the
| primary driver of industrialization (of course it used coal
| to power machines to do the work)
| [deleted]
| atchoo wrote:
| Interesting to think that the invention of effective humanoid
| robots could return us to this slave economy with unexpected
| negative consequences.
| desindol wrote:
| Not in a working democracy.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| kalimanzaro wrote:
| Analogous to the British industrial revolution I suppose, where
| the relative cheapness of coal and iron versus labour is
| considered critical.
| dalbasal wrote:
| IDK...
|
| 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.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 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.
| lenkite wrote:
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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.
| swalsh wrote:
| 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.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| 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.
| ajuc wrote:
| They innovated in areas where slaves didn't helped.
| csours wrote:
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| 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.
| danenania wrote:
| 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.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| csours wrote:
| My comment on food is not about the quantity or
| efficiency - those have advanced quite well. It is about
| the quality and value.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| 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 :)
| csours wrote:
| 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.
| ajuc wrote:
| > 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.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| 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.
| docandrew wrote:
| 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 via
| medicine.
| kalimanzaro wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Someone wrote:
| > they didn't innovate in general technologies, like
| energy/information production/transmission, or metallurgy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_metallurgy#Mechanisat
| ion:
|
| _"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)
| lr4444lr wrote:
| 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.
| visarga wrote:
| - Water mills
|
| - Steam engine - the Aeolipile
|
| - Concrete - even underwater concrete
|
| - Automations - see Heron of Alexandria
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPu9OQpH6uo
| beej71 wrote:
| Fine. But aside from the roads, sewage systems, water
| treatment plants, siphons, aqueducts, and pipes, what have
| the Romans ever done for us?
| DigiDigiorno wrote:
| Irrigation? Medicine?
|
| Oh, and the wine.
| SergeAx wrote:
| They just took the whole wine industry from Greeks. No
| added value whatsoever.
| the_af wrote:
| Well played!
|
| "What have the Romans given us in return?"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| More importantly, what have they done for us lately?
| Literally nothing in the past 1000 years.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| re materials: google "pozzolanans"
|
| they knew it worked, and Caesarea in Israel shows that it
| really did.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Similarly slave labour is not free in the economic sense.
|
| You still pay housing, food and time at a minimum.
| kozikow wrote:
| If your job can't afford you housing, food and basic
| healthcare you have it worse than most slaves did.
| nautilius wrote:
| Holy shit, man. What's your take on concentration camps?
| At least the prisoners are not homeless?
| kozikow wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kleer001 wrote:
| 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
| badpun wrote:
| 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.
| aetherson wrote:
| 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.
| cardanome wrote:
| 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.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| 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%.)
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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.
| Attrecomet wrote:
| 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.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| 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. :|
| mikepurvis wrote:
| "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."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifundium
| aurizon wrote:
| In Roman days, craftsmen had trade secrets and no patents. If you
| lost the trade secret for whatever = your monopoly was broken.
| Slaves employed in secret crafts were unable to write and well
| guarded.There was no IP as we know it. This carried on until
| widespread printing and reading permitted easy IP spreading - and
| letters patent = a king granted monopoly that evolved into the
| early patents - to-day's melange. Copyright on writing evolved to
| life of author - until Disney came along. Software jumped onto
| writing's coat tails.
| speedbird wrote:
| In a broader context of similar ideas, this is seminal:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_documen...,
| leading to the totally iconic piece of one shot perfectly timed
| tv: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ
| jjk166 wrote:
| The steam engine was not the industrial revolution. The
| industrial revolution was a major transformation of society which
| the steam engine merely was a one such development, and not even
| the most important.
|
| The key to the industrial revolution was that it was the first
| time everything was advancing steadily all at the same time. Just
| taking a look at the steam engine, there is an approximately 200
| year long process where europe went from crude steam pumps, such
| as Jeronimo de Ayanz y Beaumont's steam pump from 1606, to the
| practical steam engines that came into use in the early 1800s.
| Along the way there was the discovery of the vacuum and
| atmospheric pressure, the development of methods to measure and
| alter such pressures, regenerative heating systems, the concept
| of the piston and cylinder, the developments of manufacturing
| technologies that could produce seals adequate for a steam
| cyclinder, improvements to metallurgy allowing for the use of
| high pressure steam, etc. Some people will hold up Savery's steam
| engine or Watt's as "the steam engine" but both these and all
| others represent just arbitrary points in a long line of very
| gradual evolution.
|
| Completely independent of the invention of steam power, you have
| innovations like the 4 field crop rotation, the european seed
| drill, the dutch plow, the mechanical thresher, new world crops,
| land enclosure, and scientific selective breeding which all
| greatly increased agricultural output, allowing a large non-
| agricultural population to be supported for the first time in
| history. Advances in manufacturing such as the development of 3
| plane grinding, the metal lathe and other machine tools, and
| standardized threads made innovations like standardized parts,
| the spinning jenny, and the practical steam engine possible. A
| shift in the very way people thought about production lead to new
| manufacturing techniques for chemicals, paper, glass, iron, etc
| which made these goods both ammenable to the new factory system,
| as well as economical and high enough in quality to allow for
| further advancement.
|
| All of these developments were in turn part of a broader
| scientific and engineering revolution, which best explains why
| the industrial revolution did not occur in other civilizations.
| While invariably every society has produced curious people who
| have tinkered and observed the world, typically these were brief
| flashes in the pan. Someone like Hero of Alexandria would come
| along, make a bunch of cool inventions, then die and nothing
| would come of it. People falsely believe that civilizations like
| the romans were uninterested in technological progress and thus
| did not think to exploit inventions, but that's simply not the
| case. They were very good at and excited about making money with
| some new technology. The issue was that the utility of inventions
| was what they really cared about, moreso than the invention
| itself. The idea of developing technology for its own sake was
| uncommon, to the point that the very few who did see value in
| such projects could not effectively collaborate.
|
| In early modern Europe, you have a unique historical phenomenon
| where a century of so of religious upheaval and warfare suddenly
| mean the traditional status signalling methods of the nobility -
| military achievement and influence in the catholic church - fall
| out of vogue. People need new ways of socially one upping
| eachother, and by chance this takes on the form of the gentleman-
| scientist. Spending all your time and money doing experiments or
| making contraptions with little or no practical utility becomes
| cool. You get tons of incremental but consistent improvements
| which are widely disseminated and further built upon. You get
| people like Watt trying to make a steam engine with a double
| acting piston and it doesn't work because manufacturing methods
| are just not there yet, and then Wilkinson comes along and
| develops a boring machine that makes it possible.
|
| Of course all these things are rooted in deeper trends. For
| example the aftermath of the Black Death really kickstarts
| Europe's development as a labor shortage forces people to use
| land more efficiently to maintain agricultural output, the
| adoption of the printing press allows practical dissemination of
| ideas across a continent, and the timely discovery and
| exploitation of the new world lets Europe avoid what likely would
| have been major demographic and economic issues in the 1500s,
| instead allowing for a period of rapid population growth and
| improvement in living standards.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Can't have an industrial revolution without a printing press.
| Can't have mass literacy without a printing press. Need a free
| market to enable people to profit from improvements.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or even uniform quality of iron produced at scale. Iron isn't
| that bad material, Eiffel tower for example is made from iron
| not steel.
| jotm wrote:
| Steel is just iron mixed with a minuscule amount of other
| stuff. Which is a pretty amazing fact imo
| mpweiher wrote:
| No mention of the scientific revolution? (I did a read + a
| search)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Revolution
|
| Difficult to have the industrial revolution without first having
| the scientific revolution.
| mcguire wrote:
| I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that steam
| engines were the first crossing between science and industry,
| and that the industrial development and use of steam engines
| preceded their take-up as a subject of interest by scientists
| (or the approximations of the time).
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Scientific revolution played surprisingly little role in the
| early days of industrial revolution, which was mostly a result
| of north British engineers tinkering on and improving their
| production processes. Scientific advancements only became
| important during the second industrial revolution, starting
| from late 19th century, and especially in 20th.
| irrational wrote:
| And the scientific revolution first required the protestant
| reformation. The catholic church's stranghold on europe first
| had to be broken before the freedom that ushured in the
| scientific revolution could come about.
|
| And the protestant revolution probably could not have happened
| with Gutenberg's printing press.
|
| Gutenberg's Printing Press > Martin Luther and the Protestant
| Revolution > The Scientific Revolution > The Industrial
| Revolution > Teletubbies.
| ladyattis wrote:
| Also the Islamic Renaissance played a significant role in the
| evolution of the scientific method which gave European
| scholars a foundation to build on. Newton's quote about
| standing on the shoulders of giants is apt here. :)
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > Newton's quote about standing on the shoulders of giants
| is apt here. :)
|
| Even if he was making a jab at Robert Hooke when he said
| it.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Not at all. The disruption and reintroduction of superstition
| caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of
| "witches") held back science by probably a century.
|
| And the Gutenberg press was far less important than the
| invention of cheap paper.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The catholic Counter-Reformation was equally enthusiastic
| about burning witches, particularly in Southern Germany.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| By equally, do you mean at least one order of magnitude
| less?
|
| And even your counter is a response to the reformation.
| I'm not a Catholic, you can't goad me into taking a side.
| I'm observing from outside.
| upupandup wrote:
| Doesn't make sense, Roman engineers discovered steam power but
| it was cheaper and easier to use slaves. It's more of a problem
| of demand. Why would I need a loud clunky steam engine when I
| can hire a dozen slaves who will not only row my boat but
| clean, and perform whole bunch of auxillary tasks?
| jononor wrote:
| Robotics has the same problem today: Human labor is cheaper
| and more flexible. In the future we might see this as having
| been as stupid and inhumane as we today see slavery in the
| Roman times.
| notahacker wrote:
| Roman "steam power" worked nothing like a condensing engine
| and was nowhere near adequate to power a ship.
|
| Ironically, rowing vessels was one of the tasks Romans
| preferred to use freemen where possible. And even the best
| galleys with the most motivated, coordinated and healthy
| rowers were vastly inferior in speed and endurance to
| steamships (or indeed sail powered tea-clippers). But you
| needed a lot of intermediate inventions to get from a
| lightweight device that rotated by blowing out hot air to a
| steamship that could cross oceans. Or from a trireme to a tea
| clipper that would travel faster relying on just the wind,
| for that matter
| ghaff wrote:
| I wonder what the Romans could have done with designs for
| "modern" sailing ships? Though I also wonder how relatively
| useful they would be as warships absent cannons.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Though I also wonder how relatively useful they would
| be as warships absent cannons._
|
| Without cannons, maneuvering becomes a lot more important
| because you rely on either ramming the enemy, or pulling
| up alongside them and boarding them (or both.) These
| tactics favor rowed galleys, which can sprint quick for
| short distances and don't depend on the wind.
|
| Even after the invention and proliferation of cannon,
| navies and pirates in the Med continued to use rowed
| galleys, direct descendants of ancient triremes, through
| the middle ages into the 18th century.
| [deleted]
| mcguire wrote:
| Here's a question back at you: how well do modern sailing
| ships handle the Mediterranean in winter?
|
| As far as I know, the winds haven't significantly
| changed: mostly from the northwest for most of the year,
| with a period in the spring and summer where they swing
| to the from the northeast. Also, ferocious storms in the
| winter.
|
| Going clockwise along the Med's coast from France to
| Italy, Greece, the Levant, and to Egypt is "downhill";
| going the other direction will take roughly twice as
| long. Sailing along the north coast of Africa is kind of
| dangerous because a storm or navigation mistake plus the
| prevailing winds can put you aground hard and
| unexpectedly.
|
| Modern sailing ships are much better at sailing closer to
| the wind, are much less limited by supplies (it's hard to
| get more than a few days endurance from a rowed galley)
| and are more seaworthy, because they could extend the
| sailing season and take more direct routes.
|
| How much better is that? I don't know, but I suspect a
| fair bit. Galleys still have advantages in some
| circumstances.
|
| Now, if you throw in some even remotely modern navigation
| equipment, that would be stupidly advantageous.
|
| Source: John Pryor, _Geography, Technology, and War._
| notahacker wrote:
| if the Romans were the _only_ empire with relatively
| modern sailing vessels, I 'm not sure lack of cannon
| would have hampered them.
|
| And the inhabitants of most of the areas they'd be able
| to reach beyond the Mediterranean and Red Sea weren't
| going to sail out to meet them.
|
| I guess a Roman conquest of the Americas would be pretty
| boring for archaeologists and architecture students. No
| Macchu Picchu or Teotihuacan, not even a Chan Chan, but
| the crumbling 2000 year old columns of Washington DC
| instead ;)
| ghaff wrote:
| Of course, if you already have the technology to build
| boats, it's not going to take you long to copy the other
| guy's design.
|
| Later sail warships mostly didn't use triangular sails
| either. I assume this is related to volume in some
| manner. Clipper ships were very fast but they had
| relatively little capacity so were used for high value
| goods.
| baja_blast wrote:
| > Roman engineers discovered steam power but it was cheaper
| and easier to use slaves.
|
| I think the key reason why is not because the Roman Greeks
| did some type of cost benefit analysis, it's the fact that
| the idea of applying automation of labor using the
| Aeolipile(which was regarded as a novelty rather than a tool)
| never even occurred to them. The concept of industrial
| production did not really exist yet, even when there was some
| forms of it in existence, the very idea of applying it to
| everything is not something anyone even thought about.
| xhevahir wrote:
| The author would have done well to leave out of a lot of the
| engineering details, or at least give them less emphasis. That
| would have made it less interesting to HN, no doubt, but would
| have concentrated the reader's attention on his point (expressed
| in several bolded passages) that socioeconomic factors stood in
| the way of industrialization in spite of any particular
| technological advance.
|
| It would be interesting to compare Rome with Imperial China,
| where development was similarly hampered by structural factors,
| such as the lack of incentives for increasing agricultural
| output.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I didn't know about this! I always wondered about writing a
| book with that change in mind. I'll read this one instead!
| steve76 wrote:
| dougmwne wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| dougmwne wrote:
| 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.
| bilegeek wrote:
| It also could have even driven more slavery, like the
| cotton gin did to the antebellum south.
| anthk wrote:
| Roman law and customs are still a thing somehow in Southern
| Europe.
|
| Roman insulae were pretty close to modern low-med buildings
| having four or five stories here.
| mminer237 wrote:
| If the Roman Empire had lasted 3 centuries longer, that would
| have been 55 years after Savery's steam engine.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I suspect they meant the Roman Empire at its organizational
| peak, ie around the 2nd Century AD.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Yes I was not referring to the Byzantine empire because as
| culturally interesting as they were, their economy was no
| match for the complexity of Rome.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Good article, a step change in energy production ushered in the
| industrial revolution. The next step change on the horizon would
| be nuclear fusion. I wonder if/when that is achieved we'll look
| back at today like how this article looks back at the Romans.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| The coming decades will be very interesting. We're either going
| to have a step change up or step change down in energy
| production. I hope and am optimistic nuclear (fusion or
| fission), solar, and wind result in a step up. Otherwise the
| step down will be devastating.
| wesleywt wrote:
| Does a pre-plague, slave economy need automation?
| drewcoo wrote:
| Rome had plagues. Plural.
|
| https://www.vita-romae.com/pandemics-in-ancient-rome.html
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| No industrial revolution? What?
|
| The Roman industry was war and empire building.
| Animats wrote:
| There's another route to an industrial revolution that might have
| happened - steel.
|
| The British industrial revolution was built from iron, not steel.
| Mass production of steel didn't appear until the 1880s, with the
| Bessemer converter. This was half a century after the deployment
| of successful railroads.
|
| Iron and steel was known to the Roman empire. The steel wasn't
| very good, even by the standards of antiquity, but it was good
| enough for short swords and some tools. They got as far as the
| "bloom" process, but no further. Despite this, there was a modest
| iron and steel industry.
|
| A Bessemer converter is a simple thing. It's a big iron vessel
| lined with brick attached to a furnace and blower. Roman
| ironworkers could have built one. It's the metallurgy that's
| hard. Bessemer built the thing, but steel quality was random at
| first. Robert Mushet, a metallurgist, after about 10,000
| experiments, figured out how to get consistent quality from the
| process. The basic idea, from Wikipedia, is to apply enough heat
| and air to burn off almost all the carbon in iron ore, leaving
| pure iron. Then add 'spiegel glanz' or spiegel eisen, a "double
| carbonate of iron and manganese found in the Rhenish mountains"
| which was iron, 86...25; manganese, 8...50; and carbon, 5...25.
| Controlled amounts of manganese and carbon are thus put back into
| the molten iron, and steel comes out.
|
| A number of cultures figured out steel by accident. Thus,
| Japanese steel, Damascus steel, etc. Various trace additives -
| vanadium, molybdenum, etc. were used. The Roman empire got as far
| as mediocre steel. But the process was neither understood nor
| reproducible at scale. Mass production required enough analytical
| chemistry to do quality control on the ingredients.
|
| So an interesting speculation is what might have happened if an
| early culture had some people really into finding out what stuff
| is made of. That leads to analytical chemistry. Some Roman
| philosopher might have discovered that if you grind rocks to a
| powder, mix with water, and spray into a steady flame, colored
| light comes out. If you look at that colored light through a
| prism, you see sharp lines, in the same places for the same
| materials, which indicate the elemental composition of the
| material. If they'd happened to talk to someone in the Roman army
| responsible for a sword factory having yield problems, they might
| have gotten some samples of the minerals being used. That might
| have led to the beginnings of metallurgy quality control. As
| there is in a modern steel plant, there would be somebody in a
| little room not too far from the furnaces doing analysis on the
| raw materials.
|
| Steel would still be somewhat expensive, but with a repeatable
| production process, swords and knives would get better. Then
| agricultural implements and other tools. If you need to plow hard
| or rocky ground, a steel plow is a big help.
|
| The next big breakthrough in an an agrarian society with some
| steelmaking capability would be a reaper. The McCormick reaper
| was the first machine that really boosted agricultural
| production. That's what kicked the world past sustenance-level
| agriculture.
|
| So that's an unlikely, but not impossible, alternative path to an
| industrial revolution.
| baxtr wrote:
| I enjoyed that comment very much. It reminded me of good old
| Civilization where you could take paths through inventions in
| order to get more and more advanced over time.
| byw wrote:
| The Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD) was actually close to
| industrialization with high steel and coal productions, but
| apparently never took off due to the lack of a middle class to
| purchase the manufactured goods.
|
| https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Industrialization_of_China#/Hist...
| tuatoru wrote:
| This is a key point that seems to be forever in the blind
| spot of many people who focus on production/supply and
| technologies.
|
| Without demand, there is no supply. In highly unequal
| societies there is no motivation to improve production
| efficiency--rather the opposite.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Interesting aside about the McCormick reaper: apparently it was
| joint work between McCormick and Jo Anderson, his slave
| https://richmond.com/special-section/black-history/article_2...
| Pxtl wrote:
| Did Rome have the glassware technology for the kind of
| chemistry research that even renaissance-era alchemists were
| doing, much less Victorian scientists like Dalton?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Glassblowing was invented in the first century BC in Syria.
| kahnclusions wrote:
| In general no, I doubt it. Even though there have been breaks
| and setbacks caused by the fall of empires and rise of
| religions, in general our technological and scientific
| progress has been a steady constant from ancient times until
| today.
| bennyg wrote:
| Maybe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_glass. I don't
| have enough chemistry context to say that the things they
| could produce would be helfpul/hurtful/neutral to any kind of
| chemical analysis.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| This is the sort of comment I love to see on hackernews. Really
| interesting analysis
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The industrial revolution was more about motorized equipment
| than about materials.
|
| Once you have a steam engine you can spin cotton, you can have
| trains, steamboats and later, turbines connected to generators
| in power plants.
|
| It's a big upgrade from windmills, horses and mules.
|
| And you cannot have a steam engine without knowing about the
| gas laws, laws of motion, etc. So advances in math, physics and
| chemistry to extends that were unknown to the romans were
| necessary to get to a steam engine.
|
| You also cannot have an steam engine without having pistons,
| crankshafts, etc. Some of them were known to the Islamic
| civilization.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Ingenious_Devices
|
| So... no! Steampunk romans could not have been a thing.
| tuatoru wrote:
| No, the steam engine came after the industrial revolution was
| over.[1]
|
| In 1840 the amount of steam power per worker in England was
| the same as in 1750. Total horsepower from steam only just
| matched water power in 1830.
|
| And that was in the country using the most steam by far.
|
| 1. https://daviskedrosky.substack.com/p/a-study-in-steam
|
| I recommend Dr. Kedrosky's blog in general, if you are
| interested in material progress.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The ability to efficiently create energy anywhere and the
| maximum level of power that can be output seem critical.
|
| Creating energy, but only in specific locations, doesn't have
| the broader social impact.
|
| And similarly, many applications require a minimum level of
| power (say, 2x horse) before they're fundamentally
| transformed.
|
| The industrial revolution was, from my perspective, an
| ouroboros of the means to produce power increasing our means
| to produce those means, and out of novel raw materials.
|
| Or, in other words... at some point the Romans had deforested
| their environs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation
| _during_the_Rom...
| AS37 wrote:
| I wonder about what, a thousand years from now, people will
| look back on us and say 'if they just did this, they could have
| discovered that thing centuries earlier'.
| spullara wrote:
| Room temperature & pressure super-conductors, if they exist,
| might be so rare that you have to accidentally find them and
| that could happen any time after we have electricity if they
| are simple enough compounds.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| We might also be the pinnacle of civilisation. It is not
| outside the realm of possibility a perfect storm of nuclear
| war, climate change, fossil fuel depletion and the
| resulting collapse in civilisation replaced by warlords and
| distrust of the technology that cause the calamity pushes
| us to a pre industrial society. Sure some books will
| survive but good luck recovering data from ancient
| computers when there's no electricity.
|
| Perhaps in many thousands of years civilisation would
| somewhat recover but by then nearly everything would have
| to be rediscovered.
|
| This in fact is one of the possible answers to the Fermi
| paradox. Intelligent life besides us does exist but has
| regressed to a pre technological state and is unable to get
| back due to depleted resources. Thus it is unable to make
| its self known.
| sakex wrote:
| Nuclear fusion, maybe?
| winter_blue wrote:
| I would imagine most likely something to do with space
| travel.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Copyright and patents.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Battery technology seems like a good candidate given its long
| period of stagnation. Our current progression was informed by
| the hiatus like the microcontroller required lithium ion.
| dalbasal wrote:
| I wonder to what extent any of these ancient industrial
| revolutions would have been similar to the modern one. Mass
| produced crucible steel certainly would have given Rome even
| more military and trade might, but it's hard to see what else
| it leads to.
|
| Same for the flying shuttle or steam engine. Water wheels and
| such were used by Romans. Romans liked useful engineering. But,
| I don't think they were a keystone technology. Rome could have
| still been Rome without water wheels, perhaps. What would they
| have powered with engines, and how much of it? Would they have
| learned to to mine coal?
|
| The flying shuttle is even more interesting to me, because it's
| more independant. Like steel, textile is a trade good.
| Automated weaving probably _would_ have become widespread in
| rome, and changed the economy.
|
| I agree with you though. There are multiple routes to
| industrialisation. Metallurgical techniques could have been
| invented much earlier. Historical happenstance. Some important
| metallurgical techniques _may_ have been invented, kept secret,
| and eventually forgotten. There are lots of curious, ancient
| steel artifacts in museums and even more in lore.
|
| Metallurgy may have been retarded by millenia, because secrecy.
| tus666 wrote:
| > 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.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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).
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Water power doesn't require advances in precision
| machinery.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Indeed, which is why water power was the main motive
| power for the FIRST industrial revolution which developed
| precision machining. Gotta bootstrap somehow.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
|
| Earth itself is only so big.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Maybe without a large international market to sell to, mass
| production isn't very useful?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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_.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| 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.
| imbnwa wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.)
| kurupt213 wrote:
| This sounds like Warf saying Shakespeare sounds better in the
| original Klingon
| mcphage wrote:
| Whoever wrote that line: it was genius.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Also their shipbuilding was impressive.
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Europe's industrial revolution was also profitable, while
| Ming treasure voyages were expensive and resulted in no
| profit.
|
| We, too, stopped flying to the Moon for 50 years because it
| was too expensive.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| triceratops wrote:
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| 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.
| namaria wrote:
| This is a nonsensical question. History is not a march towards an
| end goal, or an elevation from 'primitive' to 'technological'.
| This would be like asking 'why no lizard civilization' or 'why no
| Chinese monotheism'. The things that happen are a succession of
| complex states and they bear no analysis of sequential
| 'achievements'. There is no finality. Lifeforms just hunt down
| energy sources and reproduce, and power structures in society
| emerge and dissolve. There is no finality, no ascent, no goal.
|
| Edit: maybe in a couple thousand years we will have something
| like Mycenaean civilization but on the moon and with space
| elevators. Maybe a chain of volcanic eruptions will send us back
| to the stone age and in another dozen millennia another version
| of global civilization will have emerged, this time with oceanic
| floating cities. For all we know, given the amount of actual
| evidence and the margins of doubt, global civilizations might
| have emerged and failed 10 times before.
| dalbasal wrote:
| I feel like singling out Rome is unnecessary here.
|
| Why Rome specifically? Civilizations existed in the mediterranean
| (and elsewhere) for thousands of years before and alongside Rome.
| Why even assume that the industrial revolution had to emerge from
| a civilisation anyway. History suggests quite a lot of technology
| came from pastoralists, nomads, tribal agrarian societies, etc.
|
| Alexandrian inventors were more likely to have recorded their
| patents and have those survive to modernity. My guess is that a
| prototype steam engine, or even functionally useful devices,
| probably _were_ invented many times in many places.
|
| The industrial revolution, seemingly, had a lot of chances to
| happen. Perhaps that's the answer. It was an unlikely occurrence,
| and that's why it didn't happen all those other times. Tracing
| back the specific path that led to steam engine prowess in
| England is interesting... but somewhat arbitrary... probably.
|
| For example, the flying shuttle doesn't really need a steam
| engine. It could be powered by a water wheel, windmill or muscle
| power. Power isn't really the bottleneck.
|
| I think what the flying shuttle actually _needed_ from the steam
| engine was inspiration.
| Hayvok wrote:
| Rome is "singled out" precisely because a lot of (Western)
| people mistakenly assume that they were on the cusp of an
| industrial revolution, and just ran out of time or something
| before the barbarians and the Dark Ages snuffed it out. They
| were a powerful state, populous, technologically and
| politically sophisticated, and we see toy devices from time to
| time that _look_ like tech that helped bootstrap the Industrial
| Revolution. There are discussions of Chinese civilization that
| are equally fascinating. [1]
|
| The author's point is that an Industrial Revolution requires a
| very precise set of conditions to occur. Those conditions
| didn't exist in Rome, and they weren't far enough along the
| tech tree to make it happen even if they did exist. [2]
|
| He does acknowledge that we have one and only one example of an
| I.R. happening, and that it overspread the globe before we had
| a chance to observe another independent example. (This stands
| in contrast to agriculture, where we have several.) Perhaps you
| are right, and there are another set of conditions that could
| trigger a similar result among another civilization, or a
| nomadic society. (Deeply skeptical though.)
|
| [1] China is probably a good argument for why the specific
| conditions need to exist. They were even deeper into the tech
| tree than the Romans, and it still didn't trigger. Maybe they
| just ran out of time though; we'll never know.
|
| [2] You could do a similar study on Mesoamerican cultures and
| the wheel. We see toy wheels, why no "wheel revolution" there?
| Probably because of a very similar set of conclusions.
| dalbasal wrote:
| So..
|
| To the first point, I don't see exactly where we disagree.
| "Rome" is effectively used by the author as a placeholder for
| "ancient world." He also notes that there is/was an ongoing
| discussion about being on the cusp of an industrial
| revolution.
|
| I just pointed out that (a) Rome is not particularly unique.
| That's an anglocentric notion. Lots of civilization^ existed.
| Even Rome's empire (eg damasus) consisted of mostly ancient
| civilisations. Most territories across its borders (eg
| parthia) were also civilisations. Beyond that, more
| civilization (eg china). They're all candidates, even if we
| assume that kind of empire is necessary... though I don't see
| why we should.
|
| >> The author's point is that an Industrial Revolution
| requires a very precise set of conditions to occur.
|
| This is the point I am pushing back against. I mean, how do
| you distinguish between a conditional requirement and a post
| fact anecdote? Just because it happened a certain way,
| doesn't mean that it had to happen that way.
|
| For example, the flying shuttle doesn't really _require_
| steam engines. It 's just an automated loom. You could
| probably power one with a foot pedal. Meanwhile, textile
| (like steel) is an obviously valuable trade good. You could
| have probably gotten rich in the neolithic with a battery of
| flying shuttle equipped loom.
|
| Trade goods, unlike steam power, have vast markets. You can
| sell as much as you can make.
|
| I'm curious about why the flying shuttle was invented so soon
| after the modern steam engine. The availability of engines as
| a power source doesn't explain it, IMO, given how little
| power a loom requires. I suspect that steam engines'
| important contribution to weaving was not the engines. It was
| the engineers. It was _engineering_. It was a mindset.
|
| Once the mindset exists, the machine is not _that_ hard to
| invent. It 's clever and amazing, but achievable. Motivate
| good engineers to automate the loom, and they will do it. The
| mentality to really try, hard, to invent an automated weaving
| machine... that's the secret sauce, IMO.
| Hayvok wrote:
| > "Rome" is effectively used by the author as a placeholder
| for "ancient world." ... Rome is not particularly unique.
| That's an anglocentric notion.
|
| I'm not understanding your criticism of the author choosing
| Rome. The authors' expertise is in this region of the world
| & the Romans in particular. Would you have been happier if
| he'd picked Han China? Would the conclusions have been any
| different?
|
| >> The author's point is that an Industrial Revolution
| requires a very precise set of conditions to occur. >>>
| This is the point I am pushing back against. I mean, how do
| you distinguish between a conditional requirement and a
| post fact anecdote? Just because it happened a certain way,
| doesn't mean that it had to happen that way.
|
| I didn't represent the authors point very well. He
| acknowledges in the article--
|
| "Now all of that said I want to reiterate that the
| industrial revolution only happened once in one place so
| may well could have happened somewhere else in a different
| way with different preconditions; we'll never really know
| because our one industrial revolution spread over the whole
| globe before any other industrial revolutions happened."
|
| The only option we have is to look at all the other
| potentials that existed during the 1700s. Why didn't the IR
| trigger in Italy? Or Russia? Qing China had a lot of the
| same positive variables, including tech tree depth. So what
| was unique about Britain at that time? This is why
| historians zero in on things like coal, and textiles. But
| we can't know for sure because of the sample size of 1.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Ok... I think I must have worded the first comment
| regrettably. I didn't mean to rebut the author's points,
| quibble or criticise even. He writes well, interesting
| and I like it.
|
| I am taking this as a discussion piece and going into the
| other possibility your quote eludes to. 1-v-1 comparison
| to Rome is interesting, so is widening the field to
| "antiquity" or even pondering the possibility of non-
| urban industrial revolution.
|
| I agree with your last points. I'm not even sure we have
| a sample size of 1. We're not even clear about what
| happened in 18th century England. Was it science?
| Engineering? Some set of specific inventions? Politics?
| "Financial machinery" perhaps, like the proliferation of
| trading paper like insurance notes, sovereign bonds, and
| stocks in early companies.
|
| On HN, science and engineering seem like the main
| ingredients, maybe trade. When I studied economics, you
| might be surprised to hear, they was taught as economic
| history. They thought the main ingredient was
| stock/bond/insurance trading. Politics, resources and
| trade in the second tier. Technology and science was 2nd
| tier, at best. They thought of technology as emergent
| given the right conditions.. derivative basically.
|
| I think a lot of Tories to this day are certain that
| Georgian politics, culture & tastes are what made England
| Great.
|
| To me though... I have a bias/preference/opinion is to
| start downstream as possible. I think the IR's "killer
| feature" was mass production. The steam engine always
| seemed like the better symbol for the IR. So do trains
| and other engines. The humble flying shuttle though? An
| automated loom is an industrial powerhouse.
|
| If I could go back in time and be some ancient King's
| investment advisor, I would be betting everything
| automated textile weaving. A water wheel would do me fine
| for power. We'd be the richest kingdom of any age, and I
| would finally be a guildmaster.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Rome is also the author's specialization as a historian, so
| it's a natural area for them to focus on.
| dalbasal wrote:
| OK. I also didn't mean to come off harsh. The author uses
| Rome largely as a stand-in for "ancient world" in any case.
|
| The reason I brought this up is because I want to push back
| against the frame which implies conditions made it
| impossible for Romans to have had an industrial revolution
| or that conditions made the revolution inevitable in
| England.
|
| If you widen the frame to include many civilizations, even
| many eras of roman history... it becomes more plausible
| that England was a fluke.
| Illniyar wrote:
| It isn't being singled out, Rome is the guy's expertise, and he
| tends to write articles drawn from his expertise.
|
| "Bret is a historian of the broader ancient Mediterranean in
| general and of ancient Rome in particular. His primary research
| interests sit at the intersections of the Roman economy and the
| Roman military, "
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Well, Bret Devereaux is a scholar of Rome, plus Rome had really
| _a lot_ of resources under its control. The empire was huge,
| comparable to the modern EU, and had a good transport network
| both at sea and on land. Most of the other civilizations were
| dwarfed by Rome at its maximum extent, or at least didn 't have
| as big internal market as Rome did.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Is Imperial hugeness a key factor? If so, why not the
| Achaemenids, the Chinese?
|
| Why assume that a massive empire in necessary though? It
| doesn't take _that_ empire-scale resources to build any of
| these. These aren 't really more resource intensive than a
| Mill to invent or build. The steam engine, which Bret focuses
| on, is a pretty localized device... unlike textiles and
| metals which can be exported easily.
|
| Even if export is a key driver, there were plenty of small or
| decentralized civilisations that could have easily leveraged
| massive economic zones. The Phoenicians, for example, could
| have conceivably built the export economy Britain ultimately
| built in the 18th century.
|
| BTW, I didn't mean to neg on the author. I enjoyed the essay
| a lot. I felt it was a discussion piece, so discussing.
|
| Personally, I'm inclined to think the "when" is more
| important that the "where," if it isn't mostly a matter of
| chance. IE, if England hadn't industrialised first, another
| country would have.
|
| Once you have a widespread mentality that produces thoughts
| like: " _I 'm going to try building an automatic loom_," I
| believe that many of the challenges early modern engineers
| overcame could have been overcome at many times.
|
| The steam engine might have required symbioses with coal fuel
| and coal mining needs, but metallurgy (as others point out)
| and weaving (the flying shuttle) don't. If you are a well
| resourced blacksmith you can have a crack at metallurgy.
|
| I think that in 18th century england, enough people were
| educated in engineering. In renaissance Italy, Da Vinci was
| pretty unique... and the only textbooks he had were Aristotle
| and such.
|
| Why are there more startups in 2022 than in 1992? The culture
| had yet to develop.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Any discussion of Rome quickly devolves into a discussion of how
| the modern world is like it.
|
| Which is the error cited at the start of that article. Let's
| analyze going forward from Neolithic rather than backward from
| now.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| In Netherlands, windmills have been used for a wide variety of
| applications - pumping out excess water for land reclamation,
| cuttings logs, making paint, pressing oil. I don't see why this
| couldn't have added up to an industrial revolution eventually if
| coal didn't take off nearby. You can use wind to pump water up
| and then use water for steady rotational power. Basic knowledge
| of electricity dates back to classical times, so you could
| potentially leapfrog to that eventually instead of going through
| an internal combustion engine. In fact, we are now trying to run
| our industries on wind power because coal is no longer practical
| for different reasons.
|
| All in all, it's always the case that what actually happened
| could have only happened in one place, because that place shaped
| all the details of what happened. Roman empire contributed
| hundreds of innovations without which one innovation of steam
| engine would not have been enough to build modern economy either.
| scythe wrote:
| To store wind energy, you either need excellent pneumatics
| (high-precision manufacturing) to compress air or a rectifier (
| _semiconductors!_ ) to charge a battery. I don't think that was
| in reach. Maybe you could have spun a flywheel, but you'd have
| a hard time making magnetic bearings without a good theory of
| magnetic fields and _probably_ Earnshaw 's theorem. And it's
| _very_ hard to move a flywheel.
|
| Pumped hydro won't get you portable power. That's a major
| limitation for, e.g., vehicles. The train was invented just 66
| years after the steam engine (1738-1804).
| bismuthcrystal wrote:
| One can transform AC into DC without semiconductors. Vacuum
| tube technology is the first thing to come to mind. But it is
| practical even mechanically if the AC frequency is low
| enough.
| docandrew wrote:
| DC generators work essentially the same as an AC alternator
| (motor in reverse). You can get AC-DC conversion by hooking
| these up to one another, just connect the rotors together.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I think Tesla invented an electromechanical way to convert AC
| to DC.
|
| Also, vacuum tubes work as rectifiers, and are much lower
| tech than semiconductors.
| scythe wrote:
| A weak vacuum was first produced by Torricelli in the early
| 17th century using a long mercury-filled tube, but the
| manufacture of an _effective_ vacuum tube takes you right
| back to the same high-performance pneumatic engineering I
| mentioned for compressed-air storage -- the first effective
| model produced by JJ Thomson in the mid-19th century,
| thereby discovering the electron, which was a necessary
| step for this to be even imagined.
|
| But, to be fair, it's simpler than a semiconductor.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You can create an effective vacuum in a glass tube by
| filling it with mercury, inverting it, then heating the
| tube and pinching it off. This is all low tech.
|
| BTW, Edison discovered vacuum tubes by playing around
| adding extra electrodes in his light bulbs. But he didn't
| realize what he'd discovered, and it went nowhere with
| him.
| abetusk wrote:
| 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?
|
| [0] https://technicshistory.com/2021/07/13/the-triumvirate-
| coal-...
| chasil wrote:
| The Romans killed Archimedes, (eventually) closed all the Greek
| schools/universities, and decayed into superstition.
|
| 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.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| 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
| mcphage wrote:
| What have the Romans ever done for us?
| jacobolus wrote:
| 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.".
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's more impact than the Greeks had.
| baja_blast wrote:
| > 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.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| 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?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| dd36 wrote:
| And, as stated elsewhere, a middle class that could
| consume it.
| djmips wrote:
| > 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 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.
| chasil wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/what-did-the-
| romans-...
| callmeal wrote:
| >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 ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
| abetusk wrote:
| 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?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > 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.)
| xyzzyz wrote:
| 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.
| sidibe wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| 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.
| chasil wrote:
| Well, this simplistic view appears to be shared here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790545
| [deleted]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > 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.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The author has a rather extensive post on the why forests
| we're cleared: iron.
|
| 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."_
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| abetusk wrote:
| 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?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 in the new English colony of Virginia.
| baking wrote:
| 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.
| abetusk wrote:
| 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?
| mcguire wrote:
| 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._ "
| peteradio wrote:
| What motivates man? Probably sex, if that need is already
| satisfactorily met then why arbitrarily pursue
| technological advancement?
| ldng wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| Large scale use of coal predates electrification and
| railroads.
|
| 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/ahistorycoalmin00ga
| llgoog/page/n...) referenced by wikipedia claims that the
| change from wood to coal for domestic use occurred during
| the reign of the first Elizabeth.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Armstrong,_1st_Ba
| ron...
|
| (Same guy had the first house lit by hydroelectric power
| later)
| xenadu02 wrote:
| > 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.
| Salgat wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| 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.)
| mcguire wrote:
| Additionally,
|
| " _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._ "
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| If they did see the utility, they might have simply
| killed you for threatening the pack animal / slave
| industries.
| paganel wrote:
| > 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 Ile-de-France region, i.e. Paris and its
| surroundings.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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.
| DabbyDabberson wrote:
| reminds me of Doc building that ice maker in Back to the Future
| III.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I would have invented paper and the printing press.
|
| Gutenberg's printing press was a knee in the curve.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| I often daydream similar things. And it looks like we're not
| alone: https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/
| triceratops wrote:
| That's pretty much the plot of _A Connecticut Yankee in King
| Arthur 's Court_. Although that involved steam engines.
| autokad wrote:
| I think a big part of it was that coal was useless in the
| smelting process during roman times due to its impurities. Coke
| wasn't discovered until ~400 AD and it wasnt even really used
| until ~900 AD.
|
| Without the need for lots of coal, there was less incentive in
| steam engines.
|
| meanwhile Roam already good means of smelting iron
| (wood->charcoal). I think had Roam discovered coke, it would
| indeed had an industrial revolution.
| josefresco wrote:
| 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.
|
| *https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-eve...
| timmg wrote:
| 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.
| josefresco wrote:
| 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!
| unmole wrote:
| > And the evidence feels very cherry-picked
|
| 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.
| josefresco wrote:
| 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.
| timmg wrote:
| One of the reviews from GoodReads (linked above) summarizes
| how I've felt (so far):
|
| > 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.
| Mvandenbergh wrote:
| I liked it.
|
| 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.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| It takes a bit of time to pick up and tie everything
| together. I enjoyed it a lot, but some parts didn't stand out
| that much.
| churchill wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
|
| [2] https://handwiki.org/wiki/Engineering:Flexible_glass
| conviencefee999 wrote:
| 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.
| jotm wrote:
| Sure, but somewhat lesser, but still innovation, on the
| Internet/WWW itself was made by young adults in their dorms.
| Current billionaires included.
|
| I hate myself for having been born with fucking mental
| problems.
| narag wrote:
| _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._
|
| That's a short story by William Golding:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envoy_Extraordinary_(novella)
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