https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ Skip to content A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry A look at history and popular culture Menu * Home * Resources for Teachers * Resources for World-Builders * Book Recommendation List * Guest Posts * Contact * About the Pedant Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? Bret Devereaux Collections, R.A.S. August 26, 2022August 26, 2022 24 Minutes This week we are taking a look at the latest winner of the ACOUP Senate poll, which posed the question "Why didn't the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?" To answer that, we need to get into some detail on what the industrial revolution itself was and the preconditions that produced it, as well as generally sketching the outlines of what the Roman economy looked like. This certainly won't be a comprehensive description of either so much as merely nailing down the definition of the industrial revolution and the basic outlines of the ancient Roman economy to see what elements of the former were missing from the latter. As always, if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon; members at the Patres et Matres Conscripti level get to vote on the topics for post-series like this one! And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings. Email Address [ ] Subscribe! The Question That said this is a question that is not absurd a priori. As we'll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution - a great many of the preconditions were missing - but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship. As I've mentioned before, the dominant feature of the historical debate among scholars about the shape of the Roman economy is between 'modernists' who argue the Roman economy is relatively more like a modern economy (meaning both that it was relatively more prosperous than other ancient economies but also that the Romans themselves maintained a more modern, familiar outlook towards money, investment and production) and 'primitivsts' who argue that actually the Roman economy was quite primitive, less prosperous and with the Romans themselves holding attitudes about the economy quite alien to our own. But here we need to get into a bit more specificity because beneath that quick description it is necessary to separate what we might call the 'old modernists' and the 'new modernists.' The 'old modernist' view of the Roman economy ran essentially from the 1910s to the publication of Moses Finley's The Ancient Economy (1973) which fairly decisively put an end to this view of the ancient world; the major 'old modernist' scholars were Teney Frank and Michael Rostovtzeff. In many ways Frank and Rostovtzeff were blazing a trail, some of the first to attempt really systematic study of the Roman economy drawing on the complete range of sources (which the increasingly interconnected world of the 1800s and 1900s made possible). The late 1800s and early 1900s are full of studies like this: the first efforts to pull together everything and then comprehensively assess topics often in massive and magisterial multi-volume works (e.g. Beloch on ancient demography, Mommsen on the structure of the Roman state and law). Those grand magisterial studies then go on to form the foundation for later scholarship, though this is often in the form of later scholars pointing out all of the ways that those grand magisterial studies were wrong. Frank and Rostovtzeff's works form the necessary foundation for everything that followed but they both fell into versions of essentially the same mistake of assuming that Roman social and cultural systems largely mirrored their own. This is an easy mistake to make generally but it must have been an especially easy mistake to make in societies that were only starting to industrialize and so still had a lot of old agrarian social structures; great landholders in their manors with their tenants (think Downton Abbey) and household servants must have seemed very much like the Roman elite indeed. And the anxiety of those great landholders facing an upwardly mobile class whose wealth didn't come from land must also have seemed very familiar too; Rostovtzeff especially reads this sort of proto-capitalist orientation into the Roman equites.^1 And so both Frank and Rostovtzeff assumed the Romans thought about money, profit, finance, wealth and even progress mostly the way they did. The picture that emerged from those assumptions was exactly the sort that prompts this question: Rome as a highly advanced agrarian economy, growing in wealth and even potentially in the early stages of that wild capitalist^2 economic takeoff - except that it never quite got there. Needless to say that vision enhanced the apparent bitterness of Rome's decline. Finley's The Ancient Economy (1973) essentially detonated a bomb in that sort of scholarship and created a clear break between those 'old modernists' and the 'new modernists' who are ascendant in the scholarship today. Finley^3 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. While Finley's school of thought (the 'primitivists') have largely lost the argument post-1990 or so, the 'new modernists' that won it would hardly contend that the Roman economy was very much like the Europe of the 1600s and the 1700s, verging into modernity. Instead they stress that Rome, while it was a complex agrarian economy, was nevertheless still a fundamentally agrarian economy, which in turn demanded different mindsets, risk calculations and so on.^4 The thing is, being a particularly complex or efficient agrarian economy doesn't seem to have been the most important thing for producing the industrial revolution or it almost certainly would have happened earlier and probably not in Europe. So let's look at what the industrial revolution was. The Industrial Revolution The first key is understanding that the industrial revolution was more than simply an increase in economic production. Modest increases in economic production are, after all, possible in agrarian economies. Instead, the industrial revolution was about accessing entirely new sources of energy for broad use in the economy, thus drastically increasing the amount of power available for human use. The industrial revolution thus represents not merely a change in quantity, but a change in kind from what we might call an 'organic' economy to a 'mineral' economy.^5 Consequently, I'd argue, the industrial revolution represents probably just the second time in human history that as a species we've undergone a radical change in our production; the first being the development of agriculture in the Neolithic period. 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, largely because the world of the 1700s AD was much more interconnected than the world of c. 12,000BP ('before present,' a marker we sometimes use for the very deep past). Consequently while we have many examples of the emergence of farming and from there the development of complex agrarian economies, we really only have one 'pristine' example of an industrial revolution. It's possible that it could have occurred with different technologies and resources, though I have to admit I haven't seen a plausible alternative development that doesn't just take the same technologies and systems and put them somewhere else. Now we can't cover the entire industrial revolution with all of its complex moving parts but we can briefly go over the core of it to get a sense of the key ingredients. Fundamentally this is a story about coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy. That's not the whole story, by any means, but it is one of the most important through-lines and will serve to demonstrate the point. The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact. The steam engine is an excellent example of this problem. Early tinkering with the idea of using heat to create steam to power rotary motion - the core function of a steam-engine - go all the way back to Vitruvius (c. 80 BC -15 AD) and Heron of Alexandria (c. 10-70 AD). With the benefit of hindsight we can see they were tinkering with an importance principle but the devices they actually produced - the aeolipile - had no practical use - it's fearsomely fuel inefficient, produces little power and has to be refilled with water (that then has to be heated again from room temperature to enable operation). [image-5][image-5]Via Wikipedia, an illustration of the ancient aeolipile, an early use of steam to create reciprocal motion. Apart from the use of steam pressure, the aeolipile shares very little in common with practical steam engine designs and the need to continually refill and heat the water reservoir would have limited its utility in any case. So what was needed was not merely the idea of using steam, but also a design which could actually function in a specific use case. In practice that meant both a design that was far more efficient (though still wildly inefficient) and a use case that could tolerate the inevitable inadequacies of the 1.0 version of the device. The first design to actually square this circle was Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric steam engine (1712). The basic principle here is that you have a boiler at the bottom connected to a cylinder with a piston; a valve opens which admits steam from the boiler into the piston; the steam is at very low pressure, so a weight on the arm helps pull the piston up. When the piston reaches the top, another valve opens and sprays water into the cylinder, condensing the steam (by cooling it) and creating a low pressure zone so that atmospheric pressure pushes the cylinder down; in this basic design it is the down-stroke that is the 'power stroke.' Though a substantial improvement on previous efforts, the Newcomen engine had all sorts of limitations: the power it could produce was limited to atmospheric pressure, the motion it created was jerky rather than smooth and most importantly it was hideously fuel inefficient. [image-1][image-1]Via Wikipedia, a diagram of Newcomen's atmospheric steam engine. The boiler (A) produces steam at relatively low pressures which push up the piston (D). When the cylinder (B) is full, cold water from a reservoir (L) is sprayed into the cylinder, condensing the steam in the cylinder and creating a partial vacuum. This causes atmospheric pressure to push down the piston, which then pulls down on the fulcrum (F-H), creating reciprocal motion. Now that design would be iterated on subsequently to produce smoother, more powerful and more efficient engines, but for that iteration to happen someone needs to be using it, meaning there needs to be a use-case for repetitive motion at modest-but-significant power in an environment where fuel is extremely cheap so that the inefficiency of the engine didn't make it a worse option than simply having a whole bunch of burly fellows (or draft animals) do the job. 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. But fortunately for Newcomen the use case did exist at that moment: pumping water out of coal mines. Of course a mine that runs below the local water-table (as most do) is going to naturally fill with water which has to be pumped out to enable further mining. Traditionally this was done with muscle power, but as mines get deeper the power needed to pump out the water increases (because you need enough power to lift all of the water in the pump system in each movement); cheaper and more effective pumping mechanisms were thus very desirable for mining. But the incentive here can't just be any sort of mining, it has to be coal mining because of the inefficiency problem: coal (a fuel you can run the engine on) is of course going to be very cheap and abundant directly above the mine where it is being produced and for the atmospheric engine to make sense as an investment the fuel must be very cheap indeed. It would not have made economic sense to use an atmospheric steam engine over simply adding more muscle if you were mining, say, iron or gold and had to ship the fuel in; transportation costs for bulk goods in the pre-railroad world were high. And of course trying to run your atmospheric engine off of local timber would only work for a very little while before the trees you needed were quite far away. But that in turn requires you to have large coal mines, mining lots of coal deep under ground. Which in turn demands that your society has some sort of bulk use for coal. But just as the Newcomen Engine needed to out-compete 'more muscle' to get a foothold, coal has its own competitor: wood and charcoal. There is scattered evidence for limited use of coal as a fuel from the ancient period in many places in the world, but there needs to be a lot of demand to push mines deep to create the demand for pumping. In this regard, the situation on Great Britain (the island, specifically) was almost ideal: most of Great Britain's forests seem to have been cleared for agriculture in antiquity; by 1000 only about 15% of England (as a geographic sub-unit of the island) was forested, a figure which continued to decline rapidly in the centuries that followed (down to a low of around 5%). Consequently wood as a heat fuel was scarce and so beginning in the 16th century we see a marked shift over to coal as a heating fuel for things like cooking and home heating. Fortunately for the residents of Great Britain there were surface coal seems in abundance making the transition relatively easy; once these were exhausted deep mining followed which at last by the late 1600s created the demand for coal-powered pumps finally answered effectively in 1712 by Newcomen: a demand for engines to power pumps in an environment where fuel efficiency mattered little.^6 With a use-case in place, these early steam engines continue to be refined to make them more powerful, more fuel efficient and capable of producing smooth rotational motion out of their initially jerky reciprocal motions, culminating in James Watt's steam engine in 1776. But so far all we've done is gotten very good and pumping out coal mines - that has in turn created steam engines that are now fuel efficient enough to be set up in places that are not coal mines, but we still need something for those engines to do to encourage further development. In particular we need a part of the economy where getting a lot of rotational motion is the major production bottleneck. [image-4][image-4]Via Wikipedia, a late version of Watt's final steam engine design. Watt made a number of improvements to the Newcomen engine, adding a separate condenser to allow the cylinder itself to remain hot, including a vacuum jacket around it to limit the energy loss from heat loss and eventually introducing a double-action where the piston was pushed by steam pressure in both directions, enabling a stronger and smoother stroke, along with gearing that allowed the reciprocal motion of the piston to be translated into the rotational motion necessary for most tasks. You may be thinking that agriculture and milling grain is the answer here but with watermills and windmills, the bottleneck on grain production is farming, not milling; a single miller with a decent mill can mill all of the grain from many farmers, after all. That's not to say mechanized grain milling couldn't realize gains, just that they were slight. No, it is the other half of the traditional agrarian economy: textiles. You will recall that the major production bottleneck, consuming 80% or more of the time intensity of textile production (not including fiber production), is spinning the fibers into thread - a process which relies on lots of rotational motion (as the name implies). And indeed, in the 1700s, further improvements in looms (the flying shuttle) had intensified this bottleneck by making weaving progressively more efficient. And yet again we have serendipity because Great Britain was the major center of textile production for much of the world. Through the Middle Ages, the movement of wool textiles was one of the most important trade systems in Europe: wool produced in Scotland and Wales was moved to England where it was turned into thread and then cloth and then sent to the Low Countries to be dyed before using Europe's river systems to reach consumers all over the place. European imperialism had only intensified this system because British conquests in India had directed massive amounts of cotton into this same system alongside the wool. But there is another key step necessary here: the steam engine produces rotational motion and the spinning process requires rotational motion but you also need a machine capable of turning lots of rotational motion into real efficiency gains for spinning. Prior to the 1760s, no such machine really existed. Since the Middle Ages you had the spinning wheel, but applying a lot of energy to a spinning wheel isn't going to help - the spinner is still only managing a single thread. Still the pressure to produce spinning technology that could match the efficiency gains of the flying shuttle was on and in 1765 it resulted in the spinning jenny, developed by James Hargreaves. The spinning jenny allowed a single spinner to manage multiple spools at once using a hand-crank. Unlike the spinning wheel, which could be a household tool (and thus before 1765, most spinning was still literally 'cottage' industry, farmed out to many, many spinners each working in their homes), the spinning jenny was primarily suited for commercial production in a centralized location (where the expensive and not at all portable spinning jennies were). The main limit on the design was the power that a human could provide with the hand-crank. [image-2][image-2]Via Wikipedia, a diagram of a spinning jenny, with a hand crank (B) that can be used to turn multiple spools at once, multiplying the efficiency of the spinner. And now, at last, the pieces in place the revolution in production arrives. There a machine (the spinning jenny) which needs more power in rotational motion and already encourages the machines to be centralized into a single location; the design is such that in theory one could put an infinite number of spools in a line if you had sufficient rotational energy to spin them all. 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 - the power needs to be steady and regular, things which the wind is not. But the developments of increasingly efficient steam engines used in the coal mines now collide with the developments in textiles: a sophisticated steam engine like the Watt engine could provide steady, smooth rotational motion in arbitrary, effectively infinite amounts (just keep adding engines!) to run an equally arbitrary, effectively infinite amount of mechanical spinning jennies, managed now by a workforce a fraction of a size of what would have once been necessary. [image-3][image-3]Via Wikipedia Commons, a photo from the Library of Congress showing how many spinning 'mules' could be connected via an overhead shaft to a single large source of rotational motion, like a steam engine, allowing truly massive amounts of thread to be spun at once by a much smaller work force (in this case smaller in more than one way; this picture was taken as part of the records of the National Child Labor Committee, an example of boys (center) working in textile mills. The work could be dangerous as there were few safety systems in place). The tremendous economic opportunity this created in turn incentivized the production of better steam engines and the application of those engines to other kinds of production; there is a whole additional story of how the development of the steam engine interacts with the development of new artillery-production methods (both relying on the production of strong, standardized pressure-containing cylinders). All of those use-cases push steam engines to become smaller, more fuel efficient and more powerful, which in turn increases the number of tasks they can be put to. Eventually in the 1800s, these engines get small enough and fuel efficient enough to be able to move their own fuel over water or rails, collapsing the prohibitive transportation costs that defined pre-industrial economies and in the process breaking the tyranny of the wagon equation, decisively transforming warfare in ways that would not be fully appreciated until 1914. But the technology could not jump straight to railroads and steam ships because the first steam engines were nowhere near that powerful or efficient: creating steam engines that could drive trains and ships (and thus could move themselves) requires decades of development where existing technology and economic needs created very valuable niches for the technology at each stage. 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. Why Not in Rome? Putting it that way, understanding why these processes did not happen in the Roman world is actually quite easy: none of these precursors were in place. The Romans made some use of mineral coal as a heating element or fuel, but it was decidedly secondary to their use of wood and where necessary charcoal. The Romans used rotational energy via watermills to mill grain, but not to spin thread. Even if they had the spinning wheel (and they didn't; they're still spinning with drop spindles), the standard Mediterranean period loom, the warp-weighted loom, was roughly an order of magnitude less efficient than the flying shuttle loom, so the Roman economy couldn't have handled all of the thread the spinning wheel could produce. And of course the Romans had put functionally no effort into figuring out how to make efficient pressure-cylinders, because they had absolutely no use for them. Remember that by the time Newcomen is designing his steam engine, the kings and parliaments of Europe have been effectively obsessed with who could build the best pressure-cylinder (and then plug it at one end, making a cannon) for three centuries because success in war depended in part on having the best cannon. If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn't have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn't have had any profitable use to put it to. All of which is why simple graphs of things like 'global historical GDP' can be a bit deceptive: there's a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent. 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. But we can still note that the required precursors for the one sample we have didn't exist in the Roman economy. But then that raises, I think, another question with how we think about economies in the past: if it wasn't on the cusp of a revolution, what made the Roman economy unusual? The Nature of the Roman Economy Broadly speaking we can think about human production as fitting into three major types: non-agrarian hunter-gatherer societies, agrarian and pastoral societies, and finally industrial societies. The first merely harvests what the environment already provides, while agrarian and pastoral societies actively reshape local ecology to make it provide more. Yet both are 'organic' economies in that nearly all of the energy they use (with a few, largely marginal exceptions) is provided by muscle power which in turn derives from food consumption which in turn derives, ultimately, from solar energy and photosynthesis. Industrial economies, by contrast, derive the majority of the energy they use from sources other than muscle power - initially chemical reactions (burning coal and other fossil fuels) and later nuclear power, solar, etc. The point is that these systems are not merely different in degrees, but different in kind, functioning on a very different basis with different potential avenues for growth in production. In an industrial economy, there are many new potential sources of energy which can be harnessed for production, whereas in an organic economy inputs are functionally limited to the land. New land can be brought under cultivation (or cultivated more intensively) of course, but marginal gains decrease rapidly (because the best land is cultivated first and because adding more labor to already cultivated land, while it can increase harvests, is less efficient than cultivating new land) and there is a fairly hard ceiling on total production of this sort that was, for the most part, fairly low. Nevertheless there is room in an organic economy for small sorts of efficiencies that can collectively add up to greater economic output, albeit not on anything like the scale of increasing output in an industrial economy. We've actually talked about some of this before. The summarize, it is broadly supposed by historians that the Roman economy (particularly c. 100 BC - 200 AD or so) was remarkably productive for an organic economy enabling a relatively high general standard of living for an organic economy. How does that happen? We think there are a few favors that led the Roman economy to perform better. First, the Roman Empire as a result of its conquests created a linguistic, customs and monetary union over the whole Mediterranean, which was kept relatively free of things like pirates and bandits. Each of these changes made markets more reliable and efficient, which in turn could mean that a larger proportion of farmers could specialize their farming output (with elite estates probably leading the way), resulting in higher total output as the market supplanted safety-through-diversity farming strategies common in agricultural economies with low degrees of farming integration. That greater output then enables the economy to support more specialized workers with high productivity making non-agricultural goods which thus become more common and eventually affordable by the farmers. We can see these processes only imperfectly, but archaeological evidence in the early empire seems increasingly to indicate there was meaningful regional specialization (most visible with olive oil because of how it was transported), suggesting these processes were at work. Likewise, we see specialized non-agricultural goods showing up in non-elite contexts at greater rates, suggesting that even the lower (non-slave, an important caveat for this period) classes have greater access to these things. [Shipwreck-Chart][Shipwreck-Chart]Shipwrecks (and by implication, shipping volume) in the Mediterranean 1500 BC to 1500 AD. As the volume of shipping grew, it would have been easier for farmers to trust markets to provide essentials from other parts of the Mediterranean and thus for some regional specialization to emerge, resulting in overall gains in productivity. We see this clearest in olive oil production, where the wares of production centers in North Africa and Spain are detectable (because they traveled in ceramic vessels that survive) as far away as Britain. Graph after Fig. 2.5 from A. Wilson, "Developments in Mediterranean shipping and maritime trade from the Hellenistic period to AD 1000" in Maritime Archaeology and Ancient Trade in the Mediterranean (2011). Second, the interconnectedness the Roman Empire created also encouraged the spread of innovations in production, both agricultural and non-agricultural, things like watermills for the grinding of grain, new more effective presses for olives, higher quality metal-working and so on. We can map these innovations only imperfectly, but once again archaeology is slowly filling in a picture where the movement of these ideas was significant. Once again I want to note these technologies were not revolutionary but evolutionary and often what was changing was not their existence but their distribution: ideas that had been 'stuck' in one corner or other of the empire can suddenly spread out over those more interconnected lines of trade. Finally we also have evidence (albeit somewhat more tricky) that the period also sees the accumulation of productive capital, plausibly encouraged by the relative stability and peace the Roman Empire created with in its borders. Diet indicators and midden remains indicate that there's more meat being eaten, indicates a greater availability of animals which may include draft animals (for pulling plows) and must necessarily include manure, both products of animal 'capital' which can improve farming outputs. Of course many of the innovations above feed into this: stability makes it more sensible to invest in things like new mills or presses which need to be used for a while for the small efficiency gains to outweigh the cost of putting them up, but once up the labor savings result in more overall production. But the key here is that none of these processes inches this system closer to the key sets of conditions that formed the foundation of the industrial revolution. Instead, they are all about wringing efficiencies out the same set of organic energy sources with small admixtures of hydro- (watermills) or wind-power (sailing ships); mostly wringing more production out of the same set of energy inputs rather than adding new energy inputs. It is a more efficient organic economy, but still an organic economy, no closer to being an industrial economy for its efficiency, much like how realizing design efficiencies in an (unmotorized) bicycle does not bring it any closer to being a motorcycle; you are still stuck with the limits of the energy that can be applied by two legs. As a result, the ingredients for the 'take-off' of the industrial revolution (which involves adding more energy to the economy on a per capita basis) aren't there. While the Romans are coming up with clever ways to drain deep mines (mostly mining for precious metals; deep shaft mining for tool metals mostly seems like it wasn't done. Probably it wasn't generally economical), they aren't doing this at coal mines (because they don't use much coal, though they do use some), which means they don't have the neat coincidence of abundant fuel in a place that needs pumping which gave rise to the first practical steam engines. They also lack the metallurgical capacity to easily build such engines and even if they had them they lack very many industries prepared to be revolutionized by cheap reciprocal or rotational energy (remember, they're only in the slow beginnings of the process of switching to watermills from muscle-powered mills). Instead the Roman economy essentially moved from a 'low equilibrium' organic economy (that is stable at low efficiency, with little specialized farming production and very limited agricultural capital being used) to a 'high equilibrium' organic economy (that is stable at higher efficiency due to markets encouraging specialized production and more agricultural capital). We cannot be sure exactly the scale of production growth that movement entailed; some estimates put it around 25% but these are very speculative; in practice we really don't know. Just as the political conditions provided the 'push' to move the economy from one stable position to the other, political collapse seems to have moved the Roman economy right back down. Roman economic growth, because it was a product of institutions instead of technologies, was not durable in the face of those institutions collapsing. In my view the key takeaway here is just how contingent the industrial revolution was: the industrial revolution that occured required a number of very specific pre-conditions which were really on true on Great Britain in that period. It is 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 (much easier to gather in large quantities and process for use than other fossil fuels) and which does not gain traction by transforming textile production (which, as we've discussed, was a huge portion of non-agricultural production in organic economies), though equally I cannot rule such alternatives out. Much of history ends up this way. As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables. If Spain or Portugal, for instance, rather than Britain, had ended up controlling India, would the flow of cotton have been diverted to places where coal usage was not common, cheap and abundant, thereby separating the early steam-powered mine pumps both from the industry they could first revolutionize and also from the vast wealth necessary to support that process (much less if no European power had ever come to dominate the Indian subcontinent)? This question, like so many counter-factuals, is fundamentally unanswerable but useful for illustrating the deeply contingent nature of historical events in a way that data (like the charts of global GDP over centuries) can sometimes fail to capture. Next week is going to be a gap week because I will be giving a talk at PDXCON2022. I know there were plans to record that part of the event; if that recording is made available (I hope it is) I will be sure to share it here. Share this: * Twitter * Facebook * 1. Historians these days generally reject this pattern of thought which sought to reframe historical systems in the context of modern systems. Perhaps unsurprisingly the scholarship of the early and mid-1900s on labor and the economy in the ancient world was heavily inflected by Marxist historical and economic theory, either by historians who were themselves Marxists (Finley but also G.E.M. de Ste. Croix (fl. 1954-1981) or who were reacting violently against Marxist thought - Rostovtzeff, who fled his native Russia after the Russian revolution, being the obvious example here. These days historians tend to be quite skeptic of 'grand narratives' of this sort, generally contending that the particulars of time and place overwhelm the superficial commonalities upon which such grand narratives rely. 2. Emphasized more by Frank and Rostovtzeff than industrial production. 3. Drawing himself on the work of Max Weber and Karl Polanyi 4. In particular a great many of the essential 'bricks' of Finley's argument have collapsed. Finley argued against trade in bulk staples, a position sustainable in 1973 but not today due to archaeological evidence. Likewise, Finley's argument that the Romans couldn't do sophisticated accounting has crumbled as more evidence for Roman finance has emerged. In many cases it has become clear that what Finley viewed as a general ancient aversion to profit-making, careful accounting and market interactions was in fact just the snobbery of our sources (landed elites for whom a more sophisticated economy created as much competition as it did opportunity) adopting a pose of disdainful moralism; as our evidence has improved it seems increasingly clear that this was a facade even among the elite. 5. Terminology here borrowed from E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change (1988). 6. Likewise the earliest steam engine locomotives were first used in coalmines for two decades (1804 - 1825 or so) before they became efficient enough for general use. Like this: Like Loading... * Tagged * Economic History * Europe * Industrial Economies * Mineral Economy * Organic Economy * Rome * Technology * Textiles [3f4e8a2b40][3f4e8a2b40] Published by Bret Devereaux View all posts by Bret Devereaux Published August 26, 2022August 26, 2022 Post navigation Previous Post Collections: This. Isn't. Sparta. Retrospective 107 thoughts on "Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?" 1. [939df][939df] Jason says: August 26, 2022 at 9:40 am Nice and concise. One misspelling that I caught: pistol for piston in one of the captions. Loading... Reply 1. [3f4e8][3f4e8] Bret Devereaux says: August 26, 2022 at 9:54 am Fixed! Loading... Reply 1. [b41de][b41de] Michael I says: August 26, 2022 at 10:07 am Also the first sentence ends with "Why did the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?". I assume there is a missing "not" in the question. Loading... Reply 1. [870d6][870d6] David Speyer says: August 26, 2022 at 11:50 am Although I would have definitely enjoyed reading Bret's essay on "Why did the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution, and why was all the evidence for it destroyed?" Loading... Reply 1. [3f4e8][3f4e8] Bret Devereaux says: August 26, 2022 at 11:57 am Fixed Loading... 2. [836c8][836c8] cptbutton says: August 26, 2022 at 10:30 am "Early tinkering with the idea of using head to create steam to power rotary motion -" Head or heat? Loading... Reply 1. [7adcc][7adcc] Stephane Bortzmeyer says: August 26, 2022 at 11:25 am Banging your head against water may create steam in the end. Loading... Reply 2. [77704][77704] Nootushya says: August 26, 2022 at 11:55 am Head is an archaic measure of pressure ("static head"), a measure of how high a column of water would have equivalent pressure (p0 = 1/2rv2 + rgh) Loading... Reply 3. [a6298][a6298] Justin says: August 26, 2022 at 4:21 pm > the industrial revolution that occured required a number of very specific pre-conditions which were really on true on Great Britain in that period. on true on ? Loading... Reply 4. [6f22b][6f22b] AMindOfWinter says: August 26, 2022 at 5:03 pm Normally a fan but this is a disappointing post. A post on this topic that follows the modern literature on economic growth would discuss Roman Society: culture, institutions, scientific innovation. Acemoglu, Mokyr, Robinson, McCloskey, and many others have passed by a strict "coal and steam engines" understanding, and even those who stick with such an opinion have to reckon with why such inventions (and the preceding scientific knowledge) were innovated. Also there's a pretty big factual error in this post. Not only was coal not as critical to the IR as Pomeranz and Wrigley assumed, but the substitution cost of coal was not significant. Early efficiency innovations were made using mechanical innovations without involving coal (Things like the spinning jenny, which you mentioned). In addition, the total cost to England of switching from coal to firewood would've been something like 5% of English GDP, a high amount but not super high. A society without coal could've gotten through the initial stages of industrialization. Source: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1361491606001870 In general, the specific technological innovations that drove the IR mattered less than the factors that led to them: culture (McCloskey 2016), institutions (pick an Acemoglu article out of a hat), and human capital (https://doi.org/ 10.1146/annurev-economics-080213-041042, https://doi.org/ 10.1017/S0022050705000112 other such Mokyr articles). Loading... Reply 1. [3f4e8][3f4e8] Bret Devereaux says: August 26, 2022 at 5:33 pm "Points still under contention in the scholarship" is not the same as "factual error." I presented what, as far as I can tell, remains broadly the consensus view among historians. Loading... Reply 2. [26a37][26a37] Matilda says: August 26, 2022 at 9:49 am Interesting topic, but I'm really not sure that I agree with the characterization of hunter-gatherer societies "merely harvesting what the environment already provides". Hunter-gatherer societies engaged in massive alteration of the environment to increase food yields, such as controlled burns to clear forest and scrubland. Sure agricultural societies are orders of magnitude more productive but hunting and gathering still involves managing the environment. Loading... Reply 1. [18a56][18a56] NSH says: August 26, 2022 at 10:28 am I'm not sure that the controlled burns of hunter-gather societies do would count as a "massive alteration of the environment" ie. burning the scrub to get turtles and eggs, some controlled burns to time the flowering on the veldt and some use of fire in hunting. It is not nothing but is it significantly different than what the average lightening strike would do? Or even a herd of elephants passing through? That is quite different than say agriculture which actively changes the landscape in my view. I also wonder where in this complex semi-nomadic groups fit in folks in the style of the "Sioux" who can't really be considered hunter gatherer but neither are they agricultural once they leave their sedentary lifestyle. Loading... Reply 1. [77704][77704] Nootushya says: August 26, 2022 at 11:52 am There is stuff like niche cultivation, where the landscape is essentially "gardened" over generations, encouraging and discouraging various plants and animals. The Jomon (Japan) turned out to be big nut arborealists, weeding the forests to encourage nut orchards; many Amazonian tribes, rather than leaving the forest pristine wilderness, cultivated groves and stands of different vines and trees, either for plant products or to encourage animals. The Dark Emu hypothesis, for which evidence is more debatable than the Amazonian forest garden, suggests that such niche cultivation was possible over large grassland. The archaeology in Starr Carr in Yorkshire (UK) shows intensive wetland cultivation, with selective reed burning (encourages deer), earthworks for fish weirs, selective forest clearing or replanting, and this is Mesolithic, with a very high (and diverse) yield thousands of years before arrival of farming. The high yields of wetlands niche cultivation causing a population boom in mesopotamia is a hypothesis for why people turned to grasses (because skeletons show that farmers had poorer lives). Loading... Reply 1. [8882e][8882e] Hector_St_Clare says: August 26, 2022 at 12:09 pm Right, as you point out there are lots of intermediate stages between hunter-gatherer and early horticultural lifestyles. Loading... Reply 2. [935da][935da] Thinh says: August 26, 2022 at 10:37 am Then they are not hunter-gatherer, just practice another kind of agriculture. Loading... Reply 1. [26a37][26a37] Matilda says: August 26, 2022 at 12:22 pm Except basically all observed hunter-gatherer societies, from Native Americans to Australian Aboriginals, did this sort of thing. Loading... Reply 3. [ba117][ba117] GreatWyrmGold says: August 26, 2022 at 12:59 pm The problem I have is more the clear divide between "just harvests what the environment provides" and "alters the environment to increase food yields". Farming was not a singular stroke of genius, but a line we draw in the sand between "just gathering" and "real agriculture". Loading... Reply 1. [da049][da049] Nate T says: August 26, 2022 at 1:24 pm Real life is messy and defies easy classification. And yet we need to do classification to study it, else there's no way to do wide-ranging studies that can reveal similarities and deeper truths. Loading... Reply 4. [05800][05800] Dillon Saxe says: August 26, 2022 at 5:33 pm You could say "hunter gatherer adapts and harvests what is there, agriculture creates an ecology", since gardening and adjusting doesn't come close to replacing everything with a wheat field, or bringing a giant herd of probably foreign animals onto land, plus breeding will get more intense. How to fit a quick two sentence version into the blog post I'm not sure how to do. Loading... Reply 1. [b4438][b4438] mindstalk0 says: August 26, 2022 at 5:57 pm I dunno, widespread burning can change the ecology, like keeping grasslands around despite enough rainfall to support forests. Loading... Reply 5. [29170][29170] scifihughf says: August 26, 2022 at 6:51 pm It's hard to draw a line between hunter-gathering and agricultural in what they do, but it's more obvious in the population density that can be supported. In areas that could be used for either, agricultural societies (once they've full converted) have much higher populations, order of magnitude difference. Loading... Reply 3. [3219f][3219f] James W Williams says: August 26, 2022 at 10:02 am In the first sentence... This week we are taking a look at the latest winner of the ACOUP Senate poll, which posed the question "Why did the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?" Shouldn't the quote be "Why didn't ..."? Loading... Reply 4. [6dff8][6dff8] lincoln says: August 26, 2022 at 10:06 am Very nice. Probably one of my favorite ACOUP posts in a while! It's interesting to read this after having just read What We Owe The Future, in which Will MacAskill argues that today's civilization might not recover post collapse, because we might have mined out all the coal by then, and easy-to-access coal was critical to the industrial revolution. Quite interesting, because Deveraux argues here that it was actually *difficult-to-access coal*, not surface coal, which drove the demand for early steam engines. But I guess a post-collapse industrialist would still have plans for higher-tech steam engines (and use-cases for them), so would probably be able to skip past the point of needing deep coal to catalyze it. Still, very interesting to see the contingency of the industrial revolution. Loading... Reply 1. [da049][da049] Nate T says: August 26, 2022 at 1:27 pm Easy access to combustibles will still be an issue. I remember Mote in God's Eye, (spoiler for a 50-year old novel) where a civilization collapses regularly due to population pressure. They build "museums" to safeguard critical technology for the next cycle, but this has been going on for so long that they've used up all the hydrocarbons and even fissile materials around. One character mentions the difficulty of leapfrogging from firewood to fusion power. Loading... Reply 2. [e3913][e3913] SvA says: August 26, 2022 at 1:32 pm I think it was the combination of both: You need enough "easy" coal that the economy can start to depend on it. And once you've used up all of it, there's vastly more under the ground, so it's economically viable to start exploiting those resources at a higher cost. And an even higher amount once you're digging deeper. If you plot the amount of available coal versus the effort you're able to put into mining it, the curve should steadily rise, providing enough energy to support an industrializing economy for the decades it takes to figure out the use of other sources of fossil energy. Or nuclear energy. That certainly is no longer given in Britain, but if the collapse brings sufficient climate change, maybe there'll be another coal-fuelled Industrial Revolution in Antarctica. Loading... Reply 5. [199ef][199ef] Peter Thomson says: August 26, 2022 at 10:18 am Couple of pedantic nit-picks: hunter-gatherers shape the ecology too, often in quite drastic ways - they eliminate megafauna, use fire-stick farming, and encourage food plants in ways that push evolution towards human needs (eg larger seed heads). Second is that Britain was not the largest producer of textiles in the world. That was India, which had a lead in weaving and especially in printing and dying. Over the course of the 18th century Britain set out to supplant India in this trade (probably the single largest global trade sector), using tariffs, subsidies and control of maritime traffic. The application of steam power to spinning (and then weaving) allowed it to do so. So you can add an actively dirigiste state to your list of prerequisites. Loading... Reply 6. [42bb4][42bb4] Ariel says: August 26, 2022 at 10:25 am But why did it take the English to develop the spinning jenny and flying shuttle? Why couldn't the Romans have done the same? Loading... Reply 1. [d551c][d551c] Glaurung says: August 26, 2022 at 12:17 pm The spinning jenny is an improvement on the spinning wheel, which was not invented until sometime between 1000 and 1200 CE. The spinning wheel is one of those commonplace but not at all obvious inventions that, once they were invented, everyone adopted them almost immediately, but someone had to think of the concept first. Like the horse collar or the stirrup or the wheel, the world had to wait until someone thought of the idea and actually made one. Loading... Reply 1. [1a09d][1a09d] Hergrim says: August 26, 2022 at 4:27 pm Spinning wheels actually took a long time to become unbiquitous. In some regions of France, for instance, they weren't common until the 18th century! Similarly, while used for silk production in Italy quite early, they weren't as commonly used for linen or wool for a couple of centuries. In part this was because of capital cost and the need for merchants who were willing to buy and then loan/rent them to their spinners or for the spinners to save up for them, but also because it took time for weaving technology to need such a fast rate of spinning that only mass use of spinning wheels could keep up with it. Loading... Reply 7. [a998f][a998f] David Montgomery says: August 26, 2022 at 10:26 am I was struck reading this by my memory of the 18th Century Scottish thinker Lord Kames, living amid the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, who postulated one of the first systematic economic-age based theories of human history. Kames' model (in his 1758 book *Historical Law Tracts*) he laid out a four-stage model of human history, starting with hunting and fishing, then moving to pastoralism, then to agriculture. So far, so similar with the general model you shared. But in these earliest days of steam, Kames didn't identify "industry" as a qualitatively different mode of human society. Instead, his fourth and (until that point) final stage was "commercial society," born of trade, monetization, and new forms of contract law. For Kames and his followers (which included, ultimately, Gibbon), 18th Century England was a commercial society, but so were some of the most advanced classical economies. Obviously our level of historical analysis is much more sophisticated than Kames and his ilk (with the advantage, among others, of being able to build on them) but it's an interesting prod to think of a different model that recognizes the Roman economy, while still pre-industrial, as nonetheless different in kind and more merely degree from less sophisticated agrarian societies. Loading... Reply 8. [d7316][d7316] nightpool says: August 26, 2022 at 10:30 am Is it intentional that the question posed in the first paragraph is "Why did the Roman Empire **have** an industrial revolution", rather than "Why did the Roman Empire **not** have an industrial revolution"? Seems like maybe a typo. Loading... Reply 9. [ebbf1][ebbf1] Shane Doherty says: August 26, 2022 at 10:34 am I believe one other factor for Rome's organic efficiency was the climate: From around the Punic Wars to the reign of Marcus Aurelius was warmer, wetter, and mostly stable than when scholars were looking at the problem. This made agriculture generally easier on harsher terrain that would later become borderline or non-viable. There was sources talking of vineyards creeping up mountainsides that today you'd have no joy with. This Roman Warm Period began to destabilize around the third century, before being truly gone by the time the empire split in two. Loading... Reply 10. [25d33][25d33] robbbbbb says: August 26, 2022 at 10:35 am Part of the story I have heard around the Industrial Revolution also deals with the availability of labor supply. There's a contrast between 17th century Britain and the Roman Empire in this regard: Labor (in the form of slaves) is cheap and plentiful, whereas Britain is labor-constrained in many ways. I have heard this is related to the Black Plague reducing population density all across Europe, and most specifically in Britain where the plague struck many times, but I wonder how much of a reach that is. So how much does the relative supply of labor play into this? Loading... Reply 1. [784ae][784ae] asazernik says: August 26, 2022 at 11:26 am You briefly mentioned metallurgy, but i think this deserves more attention. Finding new alloys in an era before modern chemistry and crystallography was a matter of chance and expensive experimentation, and the power of heat engines depends nearly linearly (in the low-temperature early-development regime) on the maximum temperature* your engine materials can endure. The cast iron used in Watt's engines has about 100C advantage in operating temperature over bronze, and even more so over the copper used in Newcomen's engine, and that advantage only rose as known-but-expensive steel alloys came in economic reach. In an economy like Rome's, where such strong and heat-resistant materials cannot be had for love or money, the steam engine is stuck at about 1750 levels of efficiency until the scattershot experimentation of pre-modern metallurgy comes upon better steels. * Technically on the difference between said maximum temperature and the environment Loading... Reply 1. [784ae][784ae] asazernik says: August 26, 2022 at 11:29 am Blagh meant this to be top-level. Give us a delete option already WP! Loading... Reply 2. [defau][defau] ad (@ad98832376) says: August 26, 2022 at 4:54 pm If Britain in c1700 were that labour-constrained, you might have expected it to import slaves, as so many of its American colonies did. Put another way: it seems unlikely that Britain invented the Industrial Revolution because it lacked access to slaves, at a time when it was buying and shipping to the Americas tens of thousands of slaves per year. Loading... Reply 1. [d59fa][d59fa] Bullseye says: August 26, 2022 at 6:50 pm Adam Smith, writing shortly before the American Revolution, said that wages were higher in the American colonies than in Britain. I believe this was the main reason so many British moved to America in that era. I've also read that more efficient farming equipment in Britain put a lot of farmers out of work, driving them to the cities, and that this glut of urban labor helped drive the Industrial Revolution. Loading... Reply 11. [705bb][705bb] Mary says: August 26, 2022 at 10:48 am Ruth Goodman in Domestic Revolution does a marvelous job talking about the use of coal in homes. Such details as the developments in metalworking to let you deal, which were also a factor. Loading... Reply 12. [0472c][0472c] Tobasco da Gama says: August 26, 2022 at 10:57 am This does make me wonder, if the Western Roman Empire had hung around as long as the Eastern one, would *Roman* Britain perhaps have met the requirements for industrialisation a few hundred years sooner than an independent Britain did? It doesn't make sense for a pre-industrial society to ship firewood or charcoal across the Channel, I wouldn't think, so Roman Britain in the mid-second millennium would still have a strong economic incentive to mine coal, creating the same pressures to delve greedily and too deep that led to the atmospheric engine. I'm also inclined to think that once the engine gets to a certain level of sophistication, people will inevitably start to wonder what else they can do with it. The flying shuttle and spinning jenny probably explain why industrialisation took off *so quickly* once the steam engine was invented, but I think as soon as you have a machine that can create rotational energy (which is desireable for a smooth pumping action even if all you're doing is sucking water out of flooded mines) people are going to wonder if they can use it to push a cart. It just might have been a slower revolution than ours was without a more immediate use for the technology. Loading... Reply 1. [45c63][45c63] James says: August 26, 2022 at 12:10 pm I think pushing a ship with steam would have been more likely (after all, we see it happen). And it would have been useful. Ships carry a LOT of stuff compared to carts, and being able to ship more stuff per unit time (either by increasing size of the ship or increasing the speed of it) would more quickly provide return on investment. The application of rotary motion to this problem would be obvious to anyone who's had to row-something every Roman sailor (merchant or navy) would be very familiar with. Rome offers another option for the application of rotary power: War. They had a sort of oversized repeating crossbow (I forget the name) that relied on a hand crank; speeding that up would have obvious benefits. One could also speculate about hurling war darts via a machine akin to an automated pitching machine. If the machine could be made small enough, the rotary motion would help a battering ram. Pour boiling water onto a steam engine and it doesn't have quite the effect that boiling water on people does, after all. Loading... Reply 1. [b4438][b4438] mindstalk0 says: August 26, 2022 at 4:34 pm Or re-winding a trebuchet or torsion catapult. Loading... Reply 13. [da049][da049] Nate T says: August 26, 2022 at 11:01 am A fascinating look at the situation! I've always heard that the industrial revolution couldn't happen in Rome because bronze wasn't sufficient for steam engines, but it's great to see further elucidation on the environment necessary. Are there any pre-mineral industries besides fabric that could have made use of early, inefficient steam engines? Loading... Reply 1. [05800][05800] Dillon Saxe says: August 26, 2022 at 2:02 pm Any industry where lots of energy is needed at a single location* might do it, depending on the cost of labor or other materials, and whether the industry is big enough to have lots of demand. Possibly (based on my limited knowledge) -Metalworking, replacing strikers, bellows, and a few other roles. Was an actual use of these technologies in real life history, though I don't know how fast they caught on. Might come in handy equipping lots of soldiers. -Maybe some shipbuilding tasks (it is all done in one place, though I don't know much much of ancient shipbuilding lends itself to mass production) -Operating big ports possibly, if early cargo crane equivalents or such are worth it compared to lots of people doing the unloading or loading. Big issue is enough big ports existed for someone to think up something like this. *(Rotational or up and down movement isn't particular important, once someone comes up with a good way to convert these types of movement, they can probably convert to any type of movement needed) Loading... Reply 1. [defau][defau] ad (@ad98832376) says: August 26, 2022 at 5:04 pm The essential requirements of life are food, clothing and shelter. The Agricultural Revolution was built on the first of these. The Manufacturing Revolution was built on the second, the only one of the requirements of life to be a manufactured good. Few people have their house delivered from a factory. So I would think that in every alternate history, that Revolution was built around textiles and clothing. (Although if access to cotton really was that essential, I might have expected the thing to have started closer to some actual fields of cotton plants.) Loading... Reply 14. [fc1c4][fc1c4] Fred says: August 26, 2022 at 11:09 am You spell "heat" at one point as "head." Loading... Reply 1. [3f4e8][3f4e8] Bret Devereaux says: August 26, 2022 at 12:04 pm Fixed Loading... Reply 15. [9e52a][9e52a] Leon says: August 26, 2022 at 11:14 am A thought that occurred to me while reading your description of the Industrial Revolution was that this was also a time of rapid scientific progress in thermodynamics, which started out as the science of making better engines. (Oddly, the most important names that come to mind, e.g. Boltzmann and Gibbs, were not Englishmen.) This work required an infrastructure of mathematical technique (algebra, calculus, etc) that certainly didn't exist in Ancient Rome. That leads me to wonder about the causal relationship between thermodynamics and the Industrial Revolution. Clearly there is an arrow from the IR to thermo, but was thermo at all important in designing better engines in the early days? Nowadays it is, of course -- any engineer who designs practical engines needs to understand thermodynamics. Loading... Reply 1. [05800][05800] Dillon Saxe says: August 26, 2022 at 2:05 pm Thermodynamics wasn't important to early industrialization, since the field developed over the 1800's, but scientific developments from the 1600's and 1700's almost certainly are important, such as gas laws and force and motion physics. Loading... Reply 1. [9e52a][9e52a] Leon Avery says: August 26, 2022 at 2:58 pm Well, then, those antecedents might then be seen as another of the reasons contributing to the impossibility (or unlikelihood) of an industrial revolution in Rome. Loading... Reply 2. [30d6c][30d6c] Bormington says: August 26, 2022 at 2:19 pm No, thermodynamics was not an important contributor to the early Industrial Revolution. The reason the most important minds that come to mind in thermodynamics are not British (with the exception of James Joule) is that thermodynamics was invented as a science by Continentals trying to figure out how the British engines worked (Frenchman Sadi Carnot should be added to the list, too). British folks like James Watt worked based on an imperfect understanding of heat combined with practical observation and trial and error. Loading... Reply 1. [9e52a][9e52a] Leon Avery says: August 26, 2022 at 3:00 pm Gibbs was American. Loading... Reply 1. [30d6c][30d6c] Eric Monkman says: August 26, 2022 at 5:56 pm Yes, he was, but thermodynamics was firmly established as a science by the time Gibbs made his contributions to the field. Note that Gibbs spent time in France and Germany attending lectures and interacting with scientists after completing his PhD in the USA. Loading... Reply 16. [51556][51556] Jaojao says: August 26, 2022 at 11:17 am What is your opinion of Robert Marks' "The Origins of the Modern World"? That was basically the only "grand narrative" we read when I was studying history last year Loading... Reply 17. [30d6c][30d6c] Bormington says: August 26, 2022 at 11:21 am Another reason why the Roman Empire probably could not have had an industrial revolution is that lacked a source of demand for mass-produced products. Industrialization is an uneven process. In its early stages, a few producers (e.g. spinners and weavers) create far, far more of a product than they could possibly consume themselves. This means that they must find a wide market for their wares. In modern times, this market is usually rich consumers in developed countries (though these likely buyers consider themselves middle class or even poorer, relatively speaking, they are rich indeed). In early industrial societies, other people are still producing goods at preindustrial levels, so they have limited capacity to absorb the industrially-produced excess. Fortunately for the spinners and weavers of Eighteenth-century Britain, brave sailors had been discovering consumers for over two hundred years. Much of the tropical and subtropical world was a market for British cloth. My favourite illustration of this demand is a drawing by Tupaia, a Tahitian navigator and artist who joined Captain Cook on his voyages. Tupaia depicts a Maori man and a British sailor (or possibly Joseph Banks). The Maori is exchanging a crayfish for some British cloth. The two men had just discovered each other, and already the Maori sees the value in some quality British threads. (The drawing can be seen here: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupaia_(navigator)#/media/ File:A_Maori_man_and_Joseph_Banks_exchanging_a_crayfish_for_a_piece_of_cloth,_c._1769.jpg ). Where would a Roman industrialist find similar demand for his or her products? Could an empire of 45 million have absorbed manufactures on an industrial scale (compare this population to the 11 million in the possessions of the King of England in 1700, with access to a much larger world market)? Without such demand, what would be the incentive for industrialization. The connection between demand and innovation is contentious. Allan (2009) says that demand for an invention can lead to its creation. Mokyr (2009) says that invention on the scale of the Industrial Revolution requires a cultural shift (e.g. the Enlightenment) that is unconnected with material demands. This leaves the question: did the Romans not make lots of thread because they lacked spinning jennies, or did they lack spinning jennies because they did not need that much thread? Loading... Reply 1. [3f4e8][3f4e8] Bret Devereaux says: August 26, 2022 at 12:04 pm Interesting, but I'm not sure I entirely buy this explanation. We see the Romans, for instance, mass batch-firing household ceramics for commercial production and distribution over large areas. The bottleneck was productivity, not consumers. Loading... Reply 1. [30d6c][30d6c] Bormington says: August 26, 2022 at 2:06 pm Pottery breaks easily, making it hard to transport. It also tends to be cheap. Pottery in the Roman Empire was therefore generally produced and consumed locally, meaning that potters had little incentive to expand and produce at industrial scales. One of the few exceptions to this rule was the ceramic production centre at La Graufesenque, in what is now southern France. Pottery was mass-produced in kilns here and exported across the Roman Empire. However, it is likely that this pottery production was piggybacking on demand for wine produced in Southern Gaul. Empire-wide demand for wine led to great local demand by vintners for containers in which to ship their product. My source is Lewit, Tamara, "The mysterious case of La Graufesenque? Stimuli to large-scale fine pottery production and trade in the Roman Empire" in Fulford, M. and Durham, E. (eds) "Seeing Red: New economic and social perspectives on Gallo-Roman terra sigilata", London: University of London Press (2013), pp. 111-120. The case of ceramics supports the hypothesis that Roman industrialization was limited by consumer demand, not productivity. The technology for mass production existed, but was only used in places were demand was idiosyncratically high. If demand was high for pottery for personal use (as opposed to use to carry some other trade good), it would have made sense to mass produce all pottery. Note that, though pottery is fragile, long-distance trade was still possible in pre-Industrial times, as demonstrated by the kilns of Jingdezhen, China. Loading... Reply 1. [29170][29170] scifihughf says: August 26, 2022 at 6:55 pm See Bret's earlier post about the decline or otherwise of Rome, where he discusses factors such as pottery trade in detail https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/ collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-iii-things/ Loading... Reply 2. [05800][05800] Dillon Saxe says: August 26, 2022 at 2:10 pm To be able to sell products, you need people who will use the goods, who are willing to do some sort of exchange. A high population Roman Empire provides the people, they clearly would want textiles as otherwise lots of time wouldn't be spent making them. some sort of exchange or equivalent is the big question, but if Roman farmers were doing at least some trade in farming products, olive oil, etc., than including mass produced textile products in that trade almost certainly happens if they are available. Loading... Reply 1. [30d6c][30d6c] Bormington says: August 26, 2022 at 2:28 pm The question is whether you have a large enough consumer population that you can mass-produce a good in sufficient quantities that the start-up and transportation costs are lower than the costs of producing locally. Keep in mind that, in the case of the Roman Empire, a fabric that would be comfortable on the banks of the Nile might cause one to freeze in the Scythian frosts. The size of a factory's market might be smaller than the whole Empire. Loading... Reply 3. [9160d][9160d] Sarapen says: August 26, 2022 at 3:20 pm Early industrial societies would also create markets at gunpoint. The British, for example, destroyed the looms of Indian weavers and imposed large taxes on Indian textiles to crush the local industry. With greatly curtailed domestic supply of textiles, Indians needed to buy cloth from their conquerors. Loading... Reply 4. [b4438][b4438] mindstalk0 says: August 26, 2022 at 4:42 pm I don't think the IR was driven by selling cloth to Tahitians and such... There's already high demand for domestic cloth, thus all the effort, as mentioned. Effort which people would gladly displace if you can provide cloth cheaper. Also we've see what happened as cloth became cheaper: people *used more cloth*: more flowing clothes, more outfits. (There's also a military side: cloth armor, which I suspect was not particularly cheap: the equivalent of 15 or 30 shirts packed together is a lot. But if cloth is cheaper...) Loading... Reply 18. [51556][51556] Jaojao says: August 26, 2022 at 11:25 am It is sometimes said that Song China was also an unusually developed agricultural economy Loading... Reply 19. [784ae][784ae] asazernik says: August 26, 2022 at 11:30 am (Reposting top-level) You briefly mentioned metallurgy, but i think this deserves more attention. Finding new alloys in an era before modern chemistry and crystallography was a matter of chance and expensive experimentation, and the power of heat engines depends nearly linearly (in the low-temperature early-development regime) on the maximum temperature* your engine materials can endure. The cast iron used in Watt's engines has about 100C advantage in operating temperature over bronze, and even more so over the copper used in Newcomen's engine, and that advantage only rose as known-but-expensive steel alloys came in economic reach. In an economy like Rome's, where such strong and heat-resistant materials cannot be had for love or money, the steam engine is stuck at about 1750 levels of efficiency until the scattershot experimentation of pre-modern metallurgy comes upon better steels. * Technically on the difference between said maximum temperature and the environment Loading... Reply 20. [26085][26085] Matt Neuendorf says: August 26, 2022 at 11:32 am I wonder if the pressure vessels necessary for liquid fire siphons, and the oil extraction necessary to produce the liquid fire itself, might not have provided an alternate route toward industrialization had not the unending pressures of constant existential warfare precluded the Medieval Roman Empire from prioritizing survival over other investment paths. Loading... Reply 1. [26085][26085] Matt Neuendorf says: August 26, 2022 at 11:47 am Bah, that last bit I switched part way through. Read it either as "precluded [them] from prioritizing other investment paths over survival" or as "required [them] to prioritized survival over..." Loading... Reply 21. [784ae][784ae] asazernik says: August 26, 2022 at 11:34 am For alternatives to British textiles as a breakout application outside of coal mines: what about water pumping outside of coal mines? Specifically, I'm thinking of East Asian rice cultivation and its need (in certain strains) for regularly changing water levels. An engine on the efficiency of Watt's could make this doable in a wider variety of terrains and, through labor savings, make more marginal land economically viable to farm. Loading... Reply 1. [8882e][8882e] Hector_St_Clare says: August 26, 2022 at 12:05 pm Water pumping is also useful for production of salt, although I don't know if salt was ever valuable enough to justify the fuel cost (in the pre-modern world) of running the water pumps. Loading... Reply 1. [784ae][784ae] asazernik says: August 26, 2022 at 1:24 pm Salt was VERY expensive in some pre-modern periods; not sure if the numbers work out, but still. Loading... Reply 1. [9e695][9e695] James Felter says: August 26, 2022 at 3:58 pm Salt either came from mines [Salzburg, Austria had a Roman antecedant] or from evaperative collection from coastal salt pans improved with low dykes Loading... Reply 2. [ba4ea][ba4ea] Guy Gordon says: August 26, 2022 at 3:55 pm I believe "a man worth his salt" dates from the Roman Legions. Marching armies require salt. At least some Legionnaires were either paid in salt or given a salt ration called a "salarium", from which we derive "salary'. (Failed to come up with a decent pun involving salt on celery.) Loading... Reply 3. [705bb][705bb] Mary says: August 26, 2022 at 4:04 pm Don't forget the cost of shipping the coal to the mine. Loading... Reply 2. [ba117][ba117] GreatWyrmGold says: August 26, 2022 at 12:46 pm Two points: 1. As Devereaux pointed out, pumping water out of coal mines wasn't just an ideal use case for early steam engines because it was pumping water, but because fuel was abundant in a way it wouldn't be most other places. 2. I don't get the impression that rice cultivation needs water levels to be changed rapidly, just precisely. If nothing else, I doubt anyone in the premodern could breed a strain of rice that couldn't easily be cultivated by muscle power alone. Loading... Reply 1. [784ae][784ae] asazernik says: August 26, 2022 at 1:49 pm Oh I meant not as a substitute for that first application (coal mines), but as a substitute for the second application (textiles). On point 2: traditional rice cultivation doesn't move water with a lot of power, because the only use for a pump (moving water *up*) gets so very power-intensive so very fast. Most water pumps in traditional paddies are lifting water a meter or two at the point of use, from an unpumped shared water source. Modern rice farming can use much more land and is much less vulnerable to variable water levels because water can be pumped up much higher terrain. Even a Newcomen engine could, over a not-ridiculous period of time, irrigate a terraced hill without an uphill water source or an aqueduct leading to one; in this sense, the capital expense and fuel are competing with either losing the land entirely, or with the enormous capital and maintenance cost of an aqueduct. Loading... Reply 22. [1c772][1c772] Adam says: August 26, 2022 at 11:37 am Why didn't the Romans use coal in any sort of extensive way? I remember your series on iron production, and that you needed roughly 100 tons of wood to eventually produce 1 ton of iron products. That involves clearing huge amounts of forests, transporting all that wood, possibly overland, to where you're doing your smelting, (and in practice, that means doing your smelting in the middle of forests, which consequently limits where iron mining can be done), and seems like a massive hassle. I don't know much about comparative fuel efficiency for producing heat, but I would have thought that just mining coal and burning it is way more efficient from a given weight of fuel than chopping down trees. And the Romans definitely had incentives to produce more iron. So why did coal lose out so badly to wood and wood derived charcoal? Loading... Reply 1. [3f4e8][3f4e8] Bret Devereaux says: August 26, 2022 at 12:01 pm For very high heat applications like forging or smelting, mineral coal won't do the job unless it is 'coked' - raw mineral coal has too many impurities and so doesn't typically burn hot enough. The related problem for metal-working is sulfur content; even fairly limited amounts of sulfur in coal used for metal work will utterly ruin the iron as sulfur causes all sorts of problems in an iron or iron-carbon (read: steel) alloy. Finally, mining is hard and labor intensive, more so than cutting down trees (which conveniently grow everywhere whereas coal deposits only occur in some places). Thus we see at most limited use of coal. Loading... Reply 1. [e0460][e0460] emperorcoolidge says: August 26, 2022 at 12:18 pm Why is it that Britain became wood-poor and Italy did not? Was Italy just more heavily forested to begin with, or is it the mildness of winter? Certainly it can't have been until the 17th/18th century at least before Britain rivaled Italy for population density. Loading... Reply 1. [4b98a][4b98a] ChrisM says: August 26, 2022 at 1:34 pm Problem is, Italy does basically no coal production in the modern era, and I'm not aware of evidence that there were ancient seams of coal that were exploited in antiquity, though I am hardly an expert like the good Dr. on that. (They do seem to have found coal in Roman Britain, and possibly the Rhineland/Saar deposits as well? But not in Italy itself.) Something like 90% of all coal that has ever or will ever exist comes from one particular geologic 60 million year period (roughly the Carboniferous) between plants evolving lignin and bacteria and fungi and other decomposers figuring out how to process it. If you don't have rocks from that particular era that are easy to get to, coal is not easy to get to. Loading... Reply 2. [1c772][1c772] Adam says: August 26, 2022 at 6:53 pm Did not know about the need to coke the coal for it to be used in smelting. Thanks for the heads up. Loading... Reply 2. [77704][77704] Nootushya says: August 26, 2022 at 12:02 pm Coking. Coal usually has high sulphur, which makes very brittle and poor quality steel. Coking (anaerobic decomposition like charcoaling), reduces the sulphur content. Coppicing can also regeneratively create lots of wood rapidly without deforestation. Also not all coal is created equal. Anthracite (the og black gold), the highest quality coal (almost pure carbon, highest calorific value) has very low sulphur and is sometimes even preferred in high alloy steelmaking. Coal in British isles is mostly anthracite. A lot of the rest of Europe however is lignite or bituminous coal, which are very smoky, oily and high sulphur. (Most polluting, least energy, opposite of anthracite). Loading... Reply 1. [1c772][1c772] Adam says: August 26, 2022 at 6:54 pm And my thanks to you as well for the heads up about the coking and viability of alternatives. Loading... Reply 23. [f030c][f030c] Unholyguy says: August 26, 2022 at 12:14 pm One nit, you don't HAVE to pump the water to the surface of a mine in a single stroke. It's certainly desirable though Multi stage pumping was known and used though clearly it is more complex and requires running pumps inside the mine Loading... Reply 1. [3f4e8][3f4e8] Bret Devereaux says: August 26, 2022 at 1:29 pm Of course that line was a bit of a simplification. So each pump needs to move all of the water in its system in each movement. Now you can - and they absolutely did - create multiple pumps where each one feeds into a pump system higher up, but if you are relying on muscle power to work multiple vertically stacked pumps you now have the problem of getting that muscle power to the pumps, either by moving the muscle into the mine (not great for a space with limited air supply) or with a transmission system that introduces its own problems. Loading... Reply 24. [583d1][583d1] Faranae says: August 26, 2022 at 12:19 pm The only other place I can think of with similar potential conditions to the British Empire is ancient and medieval China. Archaeology is showing significantly more coal use than previously believed, but on the other hand they didn't deforest to the extent as the UK because prior to the arrival of the industrial revolution, abundant surface seams were sufficient to supplement wood fuel and later bamboo charcoal (and bamboo is fast growing and naturally invasive, so you will not run out of charcoal easily). The other key factor which is mitigated is textile production. While silk is not the only textile produced in China, sericulture is significantly less bottle-necked at the thread production stage - base fibers don't need to spun. So you have at least somewhat less pressure on textile production, perhaps just enough to make a difference? Someone mentioned irrigation of rice fields as a potential application of steam pumps, but it doesn't follow. Rice cultivation doesn't typically require continuous alteration of water levels - it's an annual or semi-annual flood and drain cycle that doesn't need to be done all that rapidly, so gravity and mill systems can and do suffice. Loading... Reply 1. [8882e][8882e] Hector_St_Clare says: August 26, 2022 at 1:17 pm there are "modern" methods of rice farming that call for much more frequent and rapid alternation of water levels, but there's some controversy about whether they work better, http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/aboutsri/methods/index.html Loading... Reply 25. [bf01a][bf01a] buckyaits says: August 26, 2022 at 12:41 pm > 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) Agrarian societies commonly put enormous effort into obtaining spun fiber. The demand was always there. The practical ability to export industrial quantities of cloth and import the raw fiber was not, it happened under more or less the same conditions as a large empire, and Rome qualified. If Rome had somehow developed industrial spinning, the textile trade would have followed. The industry need not be in the seat of imperial power, even though it was historically. It only needs bulk sea trade with the imperial market. Loading... Reply 26. [ba117][ba117] GreatWyrmGold says: August 26, 2022 at 12:41 pm It's possible that it could have occurred with different technologies and resources, though I have to admit I haven't seen a plausible alternative development that doesn't just take the same technologies and systems and put them somewhere else. I've seen plenty of arguments that a slower industrial revolution could be achieved with non-fossil-fuel sources of energy, particularly hydropower (and occasionally geothermal or crude nuclear). This is generally in the context of a post-post-apocalyptic world where industrial technology was lost or alien worlds which can't access fossil fuels for some reason, not alternate history; any nascent hydro-industrial revolution would almost certainly be outcompeted by OTL-industrial technologies using mineral coal. Loading... Reply 27. [54294][54294] AiryW says: August 26, 2022 at 12:41 pm You seem to be mangling the early industrial history. Textile mills were powered by water for 15 years before they were powered by steam. You don't need to invoke "serendipity" to justify coal being used in textiles, it's simply a matter of local availability. Some parts of England were both sheep pasturing and coal mining country but didn't have good water power, meaning that there was a niche for steam mills to compete as an alternative to the water mills. In the US the coal producing regions didn't produce wool or cotton so textiles remained pretty much entirely water powered for almost a century. There's a reason why Lowell, the first town built specifically for a textile mill, was located in an ideal location for water power and nowhere close to coal country, even though steam engines were quite well known at that point. There is a reoccurring fallacy that crops up in alternative energy discussions: people tend to forget that while chemical energy is often extremely abundant, it's expensive and inefficient to translate into what you actually want. If you need kinetic energy, starting with kinetic energy will be both far more efficient and far less capital intensive then translating chemical energy into heat then translating heat into kinetic energy. Coal is great for steel because there you are looking for a new form of chemical energy (reducing oxidized iron to make it pure for steel) but it's not important for textiles and it's not strictly necessary for transport. (Regarding transport, early railroads were horse powered, the B+O railway was only 24 years after the steam locomotive was invented on another continent and it was not remotely connected to coal regions and the canal boom predated the Newcomen engine). We only have one example as you pointed out and in the one example we have coal was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition. Hydropowered machinery was the necessary and sufficient condition. Roman cities had access to quite a bit of water energy in the form of aquaducts but they didn't use it at all. They didn't have the spinning wheel let alone the flying shuttle. It seems they didn't even have good wagons based on what you've written in other articles. If the challenge was moving past industrializing textiles to other things, coal would start to matter but the Roman's weren't even close to industrializing textiles so coal is entirely besides the point. Loading... Reply 1. [ba117][ba117] GreatWyrmGold says: August 26, 2022 at 12:57 pm Bret not only knows about the textile watermills, he incorporates them into his explanation. 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 - the power needs to be steady and regular, things which the wind is not. But the developments of increasingly efficient steam engines used in the coal mines now collide with the developments in textiles: a sophisticated steam engine like the Watt engine could provide steady, smooth rotational motion in arbitrary, effectively infinite amounts (just keep adding engines!) to run an equally arbitrary, effectively infinite amount of mechanical spinning jennies, managed now by a workforce a fraction of a size of what would have once been necessary. To borrow the structure of Devereaux's argument: The watermills encouraged the development of spinning machines that could be turned by non-human rotational power, which could be combined with extant steam engines into a product that was needed in places that didn't have convenient rivers. This encouraged further steam engine refinement, etc. There is a reoccurring fallacy that crops up in alternative energy discussions: people tend to forget that while chemical energy is often extremely abundant, it's expensive and inefficient to translate into what you actually want. If you need kinetic energy, starting with kinetic energy will be both far more efficient and far less capital intensive then translating chemical energy into heat then translating heat into kinetic energy. Coal is great for steel because there you are looking for a new form of chemical energy (reducing oxidized iron to make it pure for steel) but it's not important for textiles and it's not strictly necessary for transport. That's not how efficiency or chemistry works. Chemical energy isn't better at making chemical changes; plus, since the chemical energy is being converted into thermal energy which is converted into chemical energy (in the form of de-oxidized iron and oxygen), steel-production doesn't involve any more conversion steps than a steam engine (chemical --> thermal --> kinetic). More important than that lack of understanding in how coal power produces steel, kinetic-to-kinetic translation is also inefficient. Entropy doesn't give a shit how we classify different kinds of energy! Depending on the mechanical systems involved, kinetic-to-kinetic translation can be near-100% efficient or horrifically inefficient. What matters isn't the form energy takes, but the process that turns it into useful work. TL;DR: You don't seem to understand how coal power, hydropower, or even energy work, and you don't seem to have even clearly read the article you're responding to. I would kindly ask you to make sure you understand the topics involved in an argument before responding to it. Loading... Reply 1. [54294][54294] AiryW says: August 26, 2022 at 2:46 pm "Chemical energy isn't better at making chemical changes" "Entropy doesn't give a shit how we classify different kinds of energy" Entropy is not the only means by which energy is classified. While I was studying this stuff in college for instance there was quite a bit of dreary time spent on reactions that were not prohibited by entropy but were prevented by enthalpy. If you make even the most cursory glance at modern efforts to reduce energy usage you will see a major focus is on electrification because electric processes can often displace processes that are reliant on the chemical bonds in fossil fuels at several times greater efficiency, reducing overall energy demand. You should maybe take a good hard look at your own advice. "that was needed in places that didn't have convenient rivers" Production wasn't displaced from the initial mill towns on the water until the 20th century. Once again if the question was "why was there not a followup to the invention of industrial textiles" this problem would be relevant. Loading... Reply 28. [4b98a][4b98a] ChrisM says: August 26, 2022 at 1:22 pm When I was (very strongly) considering being a historian, this was what I wanted to look at. I didn't at the time, but I would now phrase the question that dominated my first two decades like this: In 1790, when George Washington was President, future president John Tyler was born. Because he remarried late in life and one of the sons from that marriage also remarried late in life, one of John's grandsons is still alive (or at least was in 2020). In 1790 almost all information traveled at the speed of either muscle or wind (1 bit messages could travel faster, with sufficient state capacity to maintain, e.g. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6LGJ7evrAg but that's very rare). So I was fascinated by the question of how, in the course of just three human lifetimes, we go from all communication is by muscle or wind power... to walking on the moon and TikTok. Loading... Reply 29. [4dec9][4dec9] Bill W says: August 26, 2022 at 1:43 pm Two thoughts, not necessarily in conflict with this article. 1. An abundance of slaves supplied adequate energy to power the Roman agricultural economy. 2. The European scientific revolution of the 17th century was a necessary precondition to the technological advances of the industrial revolution. Loading... Reply 1. [defau][defau] ad (@ad98832376) says: August 26, 2022 at 5:22 pm Slaves are not an energy source. They are ultimately solar powered, fed by crops powered by the Sun. Exactly like free men. Loading... Reply 30. [b2fd3][b2fd3] AF says: August 26, 2022 at 1:49 pm What about electricity? In parallel with the development and commercialization of the steam engine, Enlightenment-era scientists were discovering the basis of electromagnetism. Could there have been an alternate industrial revolution with no steam, but with electric motors providing the rotational energy needed to revolutionize production? I don't know if it would work in an alternate history where Britain was missing one of one of the prerequisites for our own industrial revolution. Historically, most electricity was produced using coal and steam engines, and maybe the watermills and windmills that could have produced electricity instead would not have been enough. I think that, even if my electricity-only industrial revolution could have worked, it would still face the same barriers as our own history's coal-and-steam industrial revolution: prerequisite technologies and economic conditions need to be in place to incentivize each step. If an ancient Roman Faraday invented the electric motor and electric generator (perhaps after a century of ancient Roman scientists tinkering with electricity and magnetism), would there be an economic use case that would make the electric motor a way to start industrialization? Would there be such a use case in more recent times, if the Enlightenment occurred on schedule but Britain was missing a prerequisite for the invention/commercialization of the steam engine? Loading... Reply 1. [3f4e8][3f4e8] Bret Devereaux says: August 26, 2022 at 1:53 pm Electricity has to be generated. Initially that meant using a steam engine to turn a dynamo to send an electrical current down a wire; electricity was thus often simply a means of taking power from a steam engine in one place and using it in another place. Indeed, most of our power production still works this way, just using more sophisticated fuels than coal. Loading... Reply 1. [2bc8e][2bc8e] Elena says: August 26, 2022 at 3:40 pm AFAIK most early power plants were hydroelectric, so it may have happened without coal. And Italy is a pretty good place for hydroelectric plants. Also, electric generators and electric motors are more or less the same thing, which would have helped developing uses for electricity. However, while this is one important component of being able to move energy between two places, the other component for doing that with any kind of efficiency is being able to make long wires, and I'm not sure whether a proto-industrial society would have been able to make those in a way that the effort was worth the gain. After all, if hydro power is widely available, one can just use it directly, which is what people in Italy did widely at least in the middle ages and modern era. Other early applications of electricity, such as light, also require materials (a clear glass container that can sustain a vacuum, carbon filaments) that were available in an industrial society, but I'm not sure how easy they would have been for the Romans, and whether they could have been considered useful enough to develop the technology itself on their own. Loading... Reply 2. [b2fd3][b2fd3] AF says: August 26, 2022 at 5:58 pm I mentioned in my comment that in our history, electricity was mainly generated with coal and steam engines. Loading... Reply 31. [5808f][5808f] Alsadius says: August 26, 2022 at 2:01 pm Typo note: > very specific pre-conditions which were really on true on Great Britain in that period. "Only true in Great Britain" is the version you wanted, I think. Otherwise, a very solid essay as usual. Loading... Reply 32. [c4fa5][c4fa5] adamx says: August 26, 2022 at 3:49 pm This is definitely a interesting topic. There are other societies that also reached the edge of modernity but without tipping into industrialization. China had periods where all sorts of machines were invented and used, but never quite scaled the wall. Edo era Japan was extremely modern in a lot of ways, even having the world's biggest city, but it took the military threat of the west to force industrialization. I think there is something interesting about agriculture. The snowball effect of urbanization and scientific advancement seem to me to be contingent on advancements in mechanization of agriculture, though this seems to follow rather than lead to some degree. But even the industrial revolution followed the renaissance, enlightenment, and colonialism (with the columbian exchange of crops); perhaps there has to be a base of conditions before you get to even the idea of mass machine labor. As to the extreme particulars, what you said about industrialization only happening once creates a certain sort of idea that it could only happen that way, which I think is a bit of a stretch. But of course that's one of those things we can never know. Perhaps the efficiency of rice agriculture is why it didn't happen the the east in the first place - China, India, and Japan had high urban populations at various times, and a pretty high knowledge base (Edo Japan was very literate by the standards of the time), but perhaps because the didn't run into the manpower and environmental restrictions of Britain didn't have the need to industrialize. Japan actually did have forestry issues but the government stepped in and prevented the sort of deforestation that happened in Britain. Ironic to think this may have prevented industrialization. Loading... Reply 33. [5481a][5481a] Thomas Scheevel says: August 26, 2022 at 4:07 pm Nice, something I've been reading a good bit on lately! There's one book in particular, Andreas Malm's 2016 book "Fossil Capital," which covers most of what I'll write here, which is well worth anyone's time who's interested in the Industrial Revolution. To the question of whether any other place had all the ingredients for an industrial transformation, there is one place: Northeastern China. There, as in England, there was a population concentration that had outstripped the wood supply, and had turned to the abundant coalfields to supply heating needs. The state of development of coal mining was at a high degree, and the technical arts around it, mining and metallurgy, were in a state roughly on par, and surpassing in some cases, the state in Europe in the 17th century. (Including in cannon.) Also, crucially, the textile trade was at a high state of development, with raw cotton fiber being shipped in great bulk from the northeast, in Henan, Hebei, and Shandong down to Jiangnan (area south of the Yangtze, around Shanghai, Hangzhou, many other large cities) for spinning and weaving. For a European equivalent, think taking the whole wool output of England, shipping it to Hamburg, Bremen, Lubeck, even Konigsberg, all those big Hanseatic League ports, and only then spinning and weaving into cloth (then shipping it all the way back for a good chunk of the cloth!). (I just found this nice summary paper about Ming / Qing - era cotton trade - https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/ Documents/Research/GEHN/GEHNConferences/conf8/PUNEZurndorfer.pdf - if anyone is interested in reading more) So, all the *technical* pieces are in place. But we had *The* Industrial Revolution, not two of them. What was different? Let's just pick a year as a kind of snapshot to get a vague idea of the era preceding the Industrial Revolution. Choosing 1650 - in England, there was a rather weak republic - the Revolution (also called the Civil Wars) were being wrapped up with the Parliamentarians on top, the king executed the preceding year. In China, the Qing state had taken the imperial throne six years earlier, and were slowly mopping up Ming loyalists for the next twelve years. So both places had large political changes through very significant military action going on. That isn't a difference. What is different is the nature of the states which had been taken over by new masters at this point. There is a world of difference between what the Chinese imperial state could accomplish and what the English state could do. The English state was barely capable of keeping an army paid, but the Qing had inherited from the Ming (even after the damages of war) a civil service capable of maintaining tribute and taxation over a region with a similar population to all of Europe. (Though the Commonwealth in England would be short - lived, the size of the state apparatus would not wildly change with the Restoration and subsequent Glorious Revolution of 1688, especially compared to the Chinese imperial state.) This is important for one crucial reason - in England, the state was alternately powerless and disinterested in maintaining the bulk of the population on the land, as a peasantry. By contrast, this social stability was an explicit goal of the Ming and following Qing, even as their internal dynamics became more and more commercial, with merchants rising to very high status. (From an already high status, well above anything seen to this point in Europe. We are talking about the place where banknotes were first issued, as early as the 11th century! To regard China as somehow culturally foreign to merchant activity on a grand scale while portraying any European locale as inherently mercantile is to ignore world history before the past few hundred years.) To summarize - in England in the broad period both sides of 1650, there formed a large and desperate working class shorn from any personal means of support, while in China the state managed a similar (but not identical) set of contradictions, keeping the old social systems in place with gradual changes. The work done by English laborers, of whom a large part, by my example year of 1650, were properly working-class in the modern sense, shorn of their own productive property, is being done in China by people largely stable in their social situation, possessing by custom or ownership that which they work on, accompanied by a small (and intentionally being shrunk as part of Qing policy) underclass. We get a final confirmation of the importance of social decisions to the question of an industrial revolution from Andreas Malm's work that I mentioned at the beginning. In what I think is the most thoroughly argued part of the work, he demonstrates that at *no point* during the transition from water power to (coal-fired) steam was energy from the fossil source cheaper per unit energy. Rather, the more expensive form of power won out due to the fact that this expensive form of power could be moved directly to the concentrations of population. Why is this important? We return to the social dynamics - water-power, abundant in Britain (especially in the north of England, Scotland, and Wales), is distributed widely across the landscape. When the workers are distributed to match, each factory became its own little village, quite far from other population centers. This is not a problem for moving inputs and product (they're on a waterway after all, it's fantastically cheap to move the goods) but it is a huge problem for trying to squeeze more work out of the workers. If the workers organize for any purpose, the boss has a very hard time replacing them, as the surplus potential workers are all quite far off. So, the advantages that English capitalists possessed in having that large and desperate working class were being negated by the requirements of their abundant and cheap energy source. Over the very broad century around 1750-1850, the factory owners bit the bullet, paid for expensive steam power, and moved their operations into city centers, where they could find an easily disciplined surplus of the poor to be their workers. The increased reliability of the labor supply (not the power supply!) and the slow technical improvements to the engines eventually give steam dominance. By 1839, when Britain would force opium into Chinese ports by naval gunfire, steam had become technically well-developed enough that the gunboats that fought for Britain fought under steam power. (Though they still sailed for transit.) The Industrial Revolution had properly happened in Britain, but not in China, despite all the *technical* ingredients being present for it to happen. Northeastern China had cheap coal, well-developed mining industry, high technical proficiency in metallurgy, a booming textile trade in cotton (not to mention silk, which had been a global export commodity for two millennia from this region!), and plenty of hilly and mountainous places which could provide water-power. It did not, though, have the Industrial Revolution. The decisions of the people in each place, with the hand that they had been dealt by history to that point, made all the difference. The backwater English kingdom, pressed on all sides by rivals flush with cash from colonial looting, had only a weak state with which to preserve its social order, and developed a great mass of poor and dispossessed people, fertile material for textile manufacture along capitalist lines. (Which slotted neatly into England's already prominent place in pre-modern world of textile trade.) The Ming and later Qing, having much more ability to chose, chose to preserve their social systems, in turn loosening the pressures to develop the technologies we are talking about now, by avoiding the social situation where they would develop in Britain. (As a last technical note on the main bottleneck in textile production, spinning - it seems to me that spinning wheels were at a higher state of technical development in China than in Europe, maybe all the way through their replacement by the spinning jenny. I saw references that Chinese spinners were working on wheels with multiple spindles for cotton from the 14th century onward. This may have reduced the pressure to develop the jenny or some equivalent, on top of the different social situation.) Loading... Reply 1. [705bb][705bb] Mary says: August 26, 2022 at 4:26 pm Were that true, the capitalist who turned to steam would have been outcompeted by those who stuck to water Loading... Reply 34. [5e5b0][5e5b0] Chuck says: August 26, 2022 at 4:23 pm Good read. One small typo: "The summarize" -> "To summarize" Loading... Reply 35. [b4438][b4438] mindstalk0 says: August 26, 2022 at 4:25 pm typo: The summarize One guess I had for an alternative take-off path was putting natural philosophers discovering electricity and its uses, and then hydropower being used to generate that. Wouldn't give you as huge a take-off, though it would be a cleaner and more sustainable one! Though there's also the use of coal in blast furnaces to make lots more steel, for rails and such. Rome may not have been anywhere near the spinning path but it seems at least like they could have been; after all the spinning wheel and flying shuttle loom were 'organic efficiency' improvements themselves. OTOH, at an abstract level, what steam engines brought in was heat engines: the ability to convert heat differences into work. This is a new thing! And then, in reverse, to turn work into heat differences -- active refrigeration! This is also a new thing. My hydroelectricity path doesn't lead directly to those, just to having more work in the economy. (Then of course chemistry and synthetic fertilizers provided a way for work to turn into more food.) Separately, there's the question of horse-drawn combine harvesters and such. Even if there's no coal or hydropower, does such machinery get you to having 50% or 75% of the work force not involved in farming? That seems like a big deal too -- no more food, but fewer people involved in making it, thus free for other things. Loading... Reply 1. [b4438][b4438] mindstalk0 says: August 26, 2022 at 4:36 pm Forgot to subscribe. WP sucks. Loading... Reply 36. [f74f0][f74f0] dr. fancypants says: August 26, 2022 at 4:28 pm This piece answers questions I had in mind years ago, spurred on by a mix of my high school Latin class studies and decades of playing as Rome in the Civilization series. Great stuff. Also, your discussion of the preconditions for the Industrial Revolution calls to mind all the time I spent watching James Burke's "Connections" so many years ago, so thank you for that (I still recall that series with great fondness). Loading... Reply 37. [0d598][0d598] John Goose of Konstanz says: August 26, 2022 at 4:51 pm I was struck by the contraposition of "Romans" and "Britons". Weren't they one and the same for almost 400 years? If we take that into consideration, then the arguments about the unique suitability of the British Isles for the commencement of the industrial revolution kind of fall flat. Or was Britain of AD 43-410 so different from Britain in the late 18th century (more forests, different population distribution) that the two are incomparable? Loading... Reply 38. [8ee1f][8ee1f] Ed8r says: August 26, 2022 at 5:31 pm My usual late contributions to the proofreading department: tinkering with an importance principle > important surface coal seems in abundance > seams gotten very good and pumping out > good at The summarize > To summarize there are a few favors that led > a few factors were really on true on Great Britain > only true for historians tend to be quite skeptic of 'grand narratives' > skeptical Loading... Reply Leave a Reply Cancel reply Search for: [ ] [Search] Updates every Friday! You can support this project via Patreon, and by spreading the word! My Tweets Recent Posts * Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? * Collections: This. Isn't. Sparta. 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