Why the Industrial Revolution Didn’t Happen in China
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Technologically, the Empire was close in one key way. They had weapons factories turning out steel weapons. They knew steel, and could make it is small quantities. But they never advanced to the Bessemer converter, which made steel in bulk, fast and cheaply.[1] This invention was surprisingly late; it was invented around 1855 and didn't work right for another 20 years. Yet it's not complicated, just non-obvious. The Romans could have built and used a Bessemer converter.
With steel, running carts on rails would have been an obvious next step, what with all the heavy stuff needed in steelmaking. With coal and furnaces and steel, someone would have figured out steam power. Railway mania could have happened in 100AD.
There may have been something like the Bessemer process in 11th century China, but it didn't result in volume production.
The Romans never invented the concept of the corporation. They never developed common carriers or a commercial mail system. There was a huge empire, rich individuals, and guilds, but few if any inter-city operating organizations. So there was nothing in being ready and able to exploit new technology.
Even aside from "commercial" innovations in eg textiles, something like Newcomen or Watt's steam-driven pump that let them run their gold mines more profitably, or easier manufacture of military metal goods, would have been of intense interest to the state.
Slave revolt or rising lower classes were one of the greatest concerns to Roman elites. Broad social stability seems to have been of greater interest to the state then momentary technical advantage. Organization and discipline were the advantages they tended to rely on.
Secondly to create en impetus for industrialization you need sufficient level of specialization and large enough markets. Long before steam engines, canals were dug, and specialized production was done in large warehouses in Britain. Before that in the Netherlands. You had nothing like that happening n Greece.
I think too often the economic aspects of technology is forgotten. Thomas Edison didn't make the first light bulb. Nor did Steve Jobs make the first smart phone. But they both made enough improvements on their respective products that they could gain mass appeal.
John "Iron-Mad" Wilkinson, who had a cannon factory, had figured out how to bore smooth holes accurately. He got a Watt engine for his cannon works and re-bored the cylinder to a reasonable tolerance. Efficiency went up by a factor of 3. Then he cut a deal with Boulton and Watt to make cylinders, and steam engines started to really work. That was all it took.
The early railroad era used few machine tools. Boring and turning were about it. Parts were rough-cast or forged, with minimal finish machining. Lots of hot forging and hammering. Primitive lathes, more like wood lathes than a modern lathe with a slide rest and precision screws. Look at any pre-1900 steam locomotive and notice that all steel and iron surfaces are either round, flat, or cast. The ability to machine arbitrary surfaces only came in around 1930. It's amazing how much was accomplished with such basic tools.
Watt himself was opposed to both high-pressure and mobile designs, and was able to enforce those reservations through a 25-year extension to his initial patent, at least within England.
His machines typically delivered 5-10 hp, 3.7 - 7.5 kW. Watt's company had delivered just shy of 500 steam engines by 1800, with a total output of 11,200 hp, about 8.4 MW.
One of the aspects of modern metallurgy that's been impressed on me was the improvement in batch control through sensing equipment -- optical temperature measurement and spectroscopic analysis to determine composition, both mostly post-WWII developments.
This is why sensing (and derived from that: control) are so crucial -- with increased manufacturing tolerances, you can do things not previously possible, including several phase-change type thresholds.
They were building steam engines and boilers out of cast iron, which is a terrible material for pressure vessels. Watt was worried about boiler explosions. Steel was 60 years in the future.
One of the aspects of modern metallurgy that's been impressed on me..
We now know that the Titanic's hull steel was below its transition temperature at which it became brittle when it hit the iceberg. Its designers did not know that. Metals are a lot better than they used to be.
Yes, Watt had his reasons, but even low pressure operation had its benefits, and Watt, and his patent, blocked any exploration of alternatives. Both Smil and Weissenbacher emphasise this strongly (though I suspect Weissenbacher's relying strongly on Smil). Watt also rejected small-scale and mobile steam engines.
Speaking of Titanic, the 1950s telling, A Night to Remember, is on YouTube. Metallurgy aside, the story as one of human hubris, impending doom, and the contrasts between those who realised fully the magnitude of the disaster unfolding and those who were entirely oblivious is profound, and I suspect has been playing on my psyche....
The mongols offered them to annex them peacefully, if they agreed to pay tributes and taxes, as well as put their armies to their service, but they refused and the mongol response was incredibly violent.
This resulted in a massive setback from which they could not recover for some significant time.
Their cultural legacy however survived temporarily in Islamic Spain (Al-Andalus), which was later lost to europeans in the Spanish Reconquista. The knowledge collected by the Islamic civilization was assimilated by europeans through the Toledo School of Translators, which translated all arabic/greek/hebrew/etc... into latin, and then disseminated to the early Universities and scholar centres such as Oxford. During the crusades, anything arabic was destroyed/burned and the latin versions remained.
This would be the real origin of the Reinassance, which is not a popular historic view due to the revisionism fueled by the crusades.
Please take some time to read more on the subject rather than to just say "this never happened" just because you don't like it (i.e: revisionism).
What I posted was a way to challenge the western view of "we figured it all out ourselves", where in reality, we borrowed inspiration from many cultures and then erased the ones we didn't like from history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...
Crediting the right people for their achievements is fundamental for being a real meritocracy. A racist theocentric revisionist view of the world is not a meritocracy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_School_of_Translators
That was certainly part of it, but it was also because they managed to burn through the cultural & intellectual capital they had captured from Persia, Byzantium & North Africa. They Islamic Golden Age was much the same as the golden year one might experience if one stopped saving and burnt through all of one's savings in 12 months.
I don't know what Crusade-fuelled revisionism you might be referring to; I think that in the Middle Ages folks gave credit to the Dar al-Islam for the classical learning it captured from Persia, Byzantium & North Africa.
Is not that they destroyed themselves.
Then, they did have scientific and cultural achievements of their own and this is reflected in their buildings that you can now visit in Spain.
Sounds reasonable. But you are addressing my personality and bias now.
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Your mode of expressing them is getting in the way of your message. How you address this is your own concern. You seem quite bent on extracting personal battles from any discussion. I find that tedious.
That said: it seems unlikely you'll change in the near term. I've merely tried to help. I'm out.
Knowledge isn't consumed in the knowing. It can be forgotten.
And there's the case that when it did finally happen, in England in 1800, it was so utterly compelling that it spread around the world within a few years.
My view increasingly is that threading the industrialisation needle required a pretty specific set of bootstrapping steps, any one of which out-of-sequence could put the kibosh on the whole affair.
I've been looking at the genesis of the industrial revolution (and moreso, its opposite, the potential conclusion of it and general collapse of industrialised technological society) for the past five years. Joel Mokyr's been studying the concept for rather longer, and has been editing a rather attractive series through Princeton University Press on the subject, including books by himself, Gregory Clark (UC Davis, A Farewell to Alms), Robert J. Gordon (Northwestern, The Rise and Fall of American Growth), and others. Recommended.
I've been looking at the dynamics of technological mechanism, and am settling on roughly nine:
1. Fuels, energy storage, and prime movers.
2. Materials, properties, and abundances.
3. Power transmission and transformation.
4. Specific process knowledge (what's conventionally seen as "technological knowlege").
5. General systemic knowledge (what's conventionally seen as "scientific knowledge", to which I add history and geography).
6. Information acquisition, processing, transmission, and storage.
7. Organisational systems: governance, business organisation, financial systems, military organisation, accountancy, courts & laws, religion, ethics, and moral codes.
8. Dendritic systems: Transport networks, communications networks, cities, nations, trade and commercial networks, information systems, knowledge-as-web (see James Burke), social networks.
9. Sinks and unanticipated consequences. What Mokyr calls in another recent piece (WSJ) "bite-back".
Looking at this, Rome had some elements (strong social structures, fairly strong material systems), but was profoundly lacking in others -- Italy has virtually no domestic coal, and had been stripped of much of its native wood (Rome imported wood heavily, and there's a reason for the stone architecture), and the empire lacked a positional numerical system and all the computational capacity that entails.
From some of my recent reading, much of it Vaclav Smil's Energy in History and Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power (which draws heavily on Smil, though also others), a few points become clear:
1. As Mokyr notes, Britain was not subject to successful foreign invasion after 1066 -- in fact World War II was the first time in nearly 900 years that London came under direct attack, and even then there was no actual substantial foreign invasion. Whilst mainland Europe was discovering itself in the 18th and 19th centuries, England was busily inventing commerce and industry.
2. Coal. There are four great coal beds throughout the world, with England sitting atop the remnants of one. That continued through parts of Europe, most especially France, a small portion of northern Spain and Portugal, Germany, and Silesia. The US has an absolutely massive deposit (about 1/4 the global total), actually stemming from the same Carboniferous-era forest system as the North American and European plates were joined some 300 million years ago. The fourth is in China, and smaller deposits are found in Australia and South Africa. Industry required coal. (Mokyr and Clark's comments notwithstanding, from other references in this thread.)
3. Geography. England's island status not only afforded it protection from invaders, but access to trade, both from within the island and from the Continent. With most significant settlements near the coast, goods could generally move throughout the island. This was crucial, as until canals (hard to create) and railroads (required iron, or better, Bessemer steel to avoid split rails, and steam traction), overland transport was not viable (see Smith's Wealth of Nations for a comparison of ship and wagon transport from Scotland to London, and realise that Smith himself travelled on horseback over several weeks when he ventured to London for university).
4. Colonies. England could count on its possessions for raw materials, food, and as an opportunity to export its excess population. Imports included the critical goods of lumber (short in England), food, sugar (dense carbs), tea (whose heating provided purified water), pitch (for sealing ships), Irish grain (which continued to be exported through the Irish Potato Famine of the 1850s, during which the island's population fell by half), and Indian saltpeter (crucial for gunpowder). These proved to be an interlocking set of pegs that provided England with key advantages.
5. A set of strongly self-serving economic principles. A highly illuminating insight to how "free trade" was viewed in 1870s England vs. the United States is provided by way of the highly prescient Wikipedia Edit War of 1874: the British publishers of Chamber's Encyclopaedia included an exceptionally indignant EDITORIAL STATEMENT (busted capslock key included) concerning the "extensive alterations" made by their American printing partners to certain key articles, beginning with Free Trade (either "the most important and fundamental truth in political economy" or "a dogma of modern growth, industriously taught by British manufacturers and their commercial agents". The British view was at odds not only with the American, but also the French and German, nations which followed quite deliberate government policies of industrialisation, similar to China's or Korea's of current times, as expounded by Frederick List's "National System". For more: https://redd.it/4xe2k1
England's lead didn't hold, however. By the late 19th century it was challenged by both France and Germany, which had caught up quickly (thanks in large part to their own native coal endowments), and rapidly began to fall behind the United States, which had not just coal but the lubricant of the second explosion of the Industrial Revolution: oil.
That's another story.
I Rome had succeeded (or China, or Persia, or the Mayans), I suspect one consequence might be we'd be now well into discovering the intracacies of long-term remediation from industrial CO2-induced greenhouse warming of the planet.
I'm always looking for insights, sources, and more than anything else, criticisms of things which are incorrect, unclear, or don't stand to inspection.
Fermi's Paradox is another fascinating element, and there are a number of other possible choke points and filter which could also come into play: the Cambrian explosion (complex multicellular life), sex, intelligence, ice ages, the Moon, fossil-fuel stores in the first place, arrangements of continents, etc., etc.
But several changes seemed to have emerged fairly widely and across multiple regions. Agriculture in particular arose independently and at roughly the same time (perhaps a few centuries difference) in the Middle East (Mesopotamia), Yangtze River, Mayan civilisation (Yukatan Peninsula), and possibly a few others, within 500 - 1,000 years of each other. *This at a time when there was no communications between the Americas and the African-Eurasian continent.
Or the intricacies of surviving in a post-nuclear world!
Even if the Romans had that technology... which was preceded by many others like hot blast furnaces... they would have been stopped by other challenges.
A rudimentary steam engine was invented in 1 AD in... Roman Egypt. But it wasn't until after the discovery of atmospheric pressure and other pressure related discoveries when it could be turned into a workable technology, and even then, it required further innovations such as the present in Watt's reciprocating engine.
The romans also knew about a predecessor of railroads: wagonways. e.g: the Diolkos wagonway, and wagonways through the Roman Empire. But in this case wagons were pulled or pushed by animals or people respectively.
But now the problem is: How do you level vast portions of terrain in the first place, in a scalable way? blasting through TNT and such. Which wasn't discovered either.
So I am afraid that romans on trains could not be a thing.
Wouldn't slave labor solve that issue?
So even if you had similar working conditions, I think you would have dramatically different social pressures and interests.
Especially in the beginning of the industrial revolution when there were as many alternatives for automation as today.
The railroad was a generalisation of tracked road, wheeled cart, and prime mover.
Random events always happen. Every country will always experience a random bad leader. It will happen sooner or later. What is best then to have a land area unified into one or split into 10 different countries? One bad leader among 10 occasionally will not pull the whole area down. One bad leader for the whole area can pull the whole area into the dark ages.
Consider the Chinese emperor which banned all Chinese naval exploration and trade? That could never happen in contemporary Europe, because if your country got such a dumb leader your neighbors would quickly outcompete you and it would become very obvious how stupid that decision was within short time.
Being political divided is thus a good insurance against doom. Imagine someone like Hitler rising to power in a unified Europe? There would be no way to counter his madness.
That is why I think that China's rise today will eventually end up being a temporary thing. It will eventually stagnate, because China doesn't have anything to clearly challenge it. I also think this will be America's downfall in the end. We can already see an almost Chinese way of seeing the world in America. Instead of Mandate of Heaven, we got American exceptionalism, which means America is very poor at absorbing ideas from abroad. The thinking is always that America is best and has nothing to learn from the foreigners. Not all that different from the Chinese view when the British came knocking on their door.
What is great about Europe is that we got this big playground for political and society experiments. Different countries try out widely different models for society. I see this among Nordic countries as a microcosmos. Each country try out different ideas and then we copy what works from each other. Many of the policies e.g. enacted in my home country Norway has previously been tried out in Denmark or Sweden.
Europe became dominated by the US and the Soviet Union. They ceased to be truly independent. Through the United Nations, the US made wars of aggression illegal. This is mostly to avoid another world war.
You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_World_War_II
What would it even mean, in the current state of the EU, for "a Hitler to rise to power in it"? First, he would have to be supported by a large number of member states (in which case it would be likely that even without the existence of the EU, that sort of leader would have become widespread in Europe), and then, he would be president of the European Parliament? Of the European Commission? I doubt he would be very harmful there, except possibly to the EU as an institution.
I believe the EU can (and probably should) integrate quite a bit further before the problems you raise can realistically happen. I think member states should be given lots of freedom in non-foreign-policy, non-budgetary choices (as they currently are), which leaves a lot of room for the experimentation you describe, and less power to individually veto negotiations that are much more effective when Europe acts as a block. No-one wants to have to certify their cars or get an insurance license 27 times to service 20 million people on average each time.
As a last resort against utterly stupid decisions or policies, of course, member states are always free to leave.
Edit since I can't reply. It's hard to imagine, but it wasn't always so, and rich states always have a net tax outflow to poorer states. It's the political equivalent of burning your ships; you have to make it work, for no other course is survivable. Slavery and economics forced the question, but the American Civil War was first and foremost to answer the question: can a state leave?
Note this is only about your last sentence, I agree with all the rest.
If the EU integrates more, and is sufficiently uncooperative with quitters, leaving really would be a last-resort option. I would argue that the UK is a special case, since its ties with the EU were lighter than basically all other members, but even then Brexit will quite possibly hurt it. From Germany to Estonia, member states have a strong incentive to remain.
The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads, 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'
No Article nor Amendment of the Constitution delegates authority over secession to the United States, and thus that power is retained by the several States, or to the people thereof. Thus it's pretty obvious that member states are free to leave any time they choose; it's the only reading of the supreme law of the land which makes any sense.
On this subject the late, great Antonin Scalia supposedly said, more or less: "we settled that issue 150 years ago".
it's the only reading of the supreme law of the land which makes any sense
Much to the frequent lament of Scalia, the supreme law of the land is no more and no less than what a majority of the Supreme Court chooses to believe at that particular time.
Unfortunately that's true (and Justice Scalia was complicit in that: when he was right, he was typically really right, but when he was wrong he was rally wrong); that's why I've always respected Justice Thomas, who really does seem to attempt to consider what the Constitution actually says, requires and is silent on.
The one saving grace is that the Supreme Court is not, despite what folks think, a super-legislature: it only has the power to rule in specific cases. There's nothing which prevents litigants bringing a similar case as one already decided, and the Court is free to ignore a previous, erroneous ruling. So there is some little hope that with the right justices it might ignore bad precedent.
Parent states that a lot of good comes from plurality, because it gives us practical examples and empirical knowledge of all different kinds of political policies, ways of organizing public services, taxation etc. Out of this, states can choose to mirror other's ways of approaching a problem. People can also vote with their feet, a principle without there simply can't be democracy (Loyalty, Voice, Exit). In short, it allows for social evolution.
In contrast, a single state EU has none of this and seems at risk of stagnating and putting in place destructive policies.
Your comment doesn't touch any of this. You just opine that the EU is too weak and should integrate more. As if it was an end in itself.
I don't think peace and competition have to be at odds. We can still have relatively independent states with different ideals and cultures, without having to actually start killing each other by the millions.
And if that's impossible, well, I'll move to the United States, or possibly Mars.
in my mind, that gives every national union (EU included) the "strength through division" you are talking about, but without all that other geopolitical risk.
There's a debate about the extent to which everything that can be invented has been invented. Have we picked all the low hanging fruit, can we continue to grow the way we did? I take a very optimistic view. I think if you want to summarize the future of technology, the short summary is, "You ain’t seen nothing yet."
If you consider that the "real" Industrial Revolution took about 60-80 years to run through in the West, and the West was starting pretty much from scratch, and if we pick a date of some sort, say 1976 (end of the Cultural Revolution), China has been at it for about 40 years. In 20 years (about the same length of time as the West's) it looks like huge parts of China will have been elevated to standards of living that probably exceeded those in the West when we came out of our own Industrial Revolution and will be entering into the next major developmental stage.
If anything a better and more interesting argument is how China was able to reproduce the Industrial Revolution in modern times as a model for economic growth.
- There's already a well developed, wealthy, stable of markets that will buy the output of production along with the domestic development.
- The technology to kick off the development has largely already been developed, China just had to import it and get people to run the equipment and work on the assembly lines.
What's just as interesting is the ways in which it's the same:
- Powered by Coal - just like Britain, America and Wallonia
- Rapid urbanization triggered by the rise of manufacturing jobs
Here's an excerpt from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, discussing education in Brazil which I think is relevant: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
Reading that, I thought "could it be lasing?". A laser is two parallel mirrors around a medium with electrons in an excited state. Squeezing a crystal will produce electrical energy by piezoelectricity. Crushing a crystal will produce parallel planes, at least momentarily. So the preconditions for lasing exist.
This is still an open question today. Lasing of crystals under pressure may have been observed in some exotic materials.[1] But it doesn't seem to be the main light-emission mechanism in triboluminescence.
Thus the crops in the Americas were more specialized regionally because the folks who cultivated them and potential adopters had little reason to make any effort to spread the crops and reach the widespread diversity of foodstuffs available in the Eurasian continent.
Obviously he lays out his other argued sources but this seemed to be a big one as far as something that encourages trade and interaction between civilizations.
I recall there being a mention made of the fact that South America doesn't have very many domesticatable animals.
Another thing I seem to remember from that book is that we do have occasional evidence of various discoveries of the wheel in the Americas, it just never caught on due to lack of cart-pulling beasts. (skimmed the book: evidence of wheels in Mexico, but no Llamas north of the Darien gap)
Besides, preindustrial transport did not happen anywhere on the scale required to transport bulk goods like base nutrients over the distance between latitudes of different biomes. Luxuries and spices, sure, but not basic foodstuff with low value per unit. Even the roman empire never really left their comfort zone of wheat-producing regions.
I think Iraq, Egypt, Iran and India were all as hot as they are now and they all had some of the greatest civilizations. Historically these "countries" spread beyond current political borders which more or less encompasses a continuous stretch of land and I am talking in that sense.
Not really, we are talking 3000 to 4000 years ago and certainly climate was colder then.
When we talk about Egypt we know there were very fertile land and cities then that are desert now. In Mesopotamia there were terrible deforestation done by humans that is recorded on documents and salinization of fertile lands that are now also desert but at the time supported millions of people.
We also know there has been at least two terrible changes in climate that lasted at least years that made the Earth cold and dark linked to volcanic eruptions.
Quick googling led me to this scan of an article from 1977: https://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Nef_1977.pdf "An Early Energy Crisis and Its Consequences", looks like a very interesting read.
But in North America, settlers were offered land that they could own if they worked it. This produced an environment of many, many small businesses (farmers), forming the basis of a free market and the resulting dynamism.
I don't suppose it is lost on people that if the land provides your needs, it seems you don't develop a lot of knowledge, and if it doesn't you do[1]. And that correlates at least loosely with myths about losing access to the garden of eden by eating from the tree of knowledge.
[1] Sort of a variation on the maxim, "Success makes you complacent, failure makes you smarter."
The bad luck for South America was that they inherited the Portuguese and Spanish structures of society. Europe was not a homogenous mass of countries. Success within Europe varied widely and South America copied the institutions and land laws of the most backwards countries in Europe.
Portugal and Spain could maintain an illusion of success based on all the wealth they got from their plunder and exploitation.
In that century Spain and Portugal were way more advanced that England or any other part of Europe. For example, Cadiz or Cordoba were way richer than most cities in Europe.
Spain forbid slavery in 1512 and declared all native people equal to Europeans. England by contrast only forbid slavery in 18XX, and only because they used it as an excuse to occupy and colonize Africa.
You could not compare the West conquest of the US(and the extermination of the native population) at the end of 19th century, start of 20th century, with things like rail roads to the Spanish colonization that ended before industrialization.
I only expect you not to be American, first because if you are you are probably over some land stolen and plundered from some native people, and second because it is the country that currently plunders and exploits other countries like Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.
You could say the same thing about the US today if you remove the illusion of success that means the petrodollar and the exploitation of the rest of the world that it represents.
Somewhere around 90% of the indigenous population of North America had succumbed to disease before the United States even existed.
I suspect tropical disease may also have been important.
> Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World is a book by Mike Davis about the connection between political economy and global climate patterns, particularly El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
50m Chinese & Indian starved to death from drought.
25m South Americans got wiped out by floods.
"All we had left was our slaves", one Brazilian wrote.
What is good about Smith's description is that he includes the factors mentioned here as well as a number of others which together give a very good explanation for why the industrial revolution had to happen in Europe and England in particular.
1) As mentioned the fragmentation of Europe gave competition of ideas, and avoided the intellectual stagnation of the great arab and eastern empires.
2) Coast line and river relative to landmass is crucial. You thin land e.g. given more relative coastline than circular. Hence America, Africa and China are poor fits. You also want many rivers criss crossing and not just a few going one direction. WHY? Because before railroads, transport by water will be crucial. Massive amounts of specialization is needed for industrialization. That requires being able to ship products out to as many people as possible cheaply. You can only achieve that with lots of easily available water transport combined with high population density. There is no country fitting that description that Britain in the 1700s. No country had as high population density and high density of rivers and coastline relative to landmass as them.
In fact the country starting a sort of earlier industrial revolution was the Netherlands which had a similar advantage. Due to being under the sea level, digging canals was very easy. So they could dig a lot of them and transport goods cheaply. The Netherlands had nothing else of important resources, they just had high population density combined with an extensive canal network. That made the Netherlands the richest country in the world per capita in the 1600s.
3) Institutions. Adam Smith compares these extensively between the North and South of America. The Portuguese and Spanish possessions had very unfavorable institutions and social structures for economic development. Unlike North America they let a few elites take all the land. It ended up like a sort of feudal system were people worked at the local castle and village for their "lord". In contrast North America was divided into lots of small patches of land with competing farmers selling their products in a free market. North America inherited British rule of law, rather than rule of men, so businessmen in North America could feel safe lending money or investing in ventures with more powerful individuals. In the south you could never know if you'd get your money back from some well connected individual, because written laws mattered little, but connections was everything.
In short I think the receipt for industrialization is many small competing states, lots of rivers and coastline with dense population combined with strong institutions. By strong institutions one might instead say that rule of law is observed combined with some form of democratic or power sharing traditions.
e.g.: Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World -- N. Ferguson
By coincidence, I am reading Alfred Zimmern's The Greek Commonwealth, which has extensive discussion of the economics of classical Athens. The government there had no budget, just a bunch of containers for funds for different purposes, and new expenses were just voted on, along with how the money would be raised, as they came up.
Netherlands and Portugal had an empire in Africa and Asia. The commerce with them and north of Europe(via the Hanseatic League) is what made Netherlands the richest country per capita.
North America was created under totally different circumstances than South America.
For instance, Spanish and French went to Louisiana but could not control the Mississippi river. It was a very hard place to live filled with Mosquitoes that transmitted illnesses that killed most people.
France exchanged that for a small piece of land(Guyane), and it was a good deal at the time.
That this place could later become one of the most fertile places on Earth is only possible because of lots of scientific discoveries that happened later in time, like the combustion engine making possible moving enormous amount of land(creating dykes), DDT killing the mosquitoes, railroads for transporting the grain and the capital generated being reinvested in further development.
We could not extract political narratives for comparing 20th century empires to 15th.
Most people used in the West conquest to native population came from rail roads. Rail roads did not exist before 1850, way later to Spain and Portugal starting to lose territories in America.
Living in Germany is like living in Boston, Chicago or New York, but probably worse: There is winter and you die if you are not prepared. As hard as it sounds, this is a reality that forges the German culture, it puts you in your toes every year.
I was born in Spain, and Spain is cold in winter, but cold being minus two or three Celsius degrees. Having to live with minus 30 degrees Celsius and everything covered by snow, and almost no sunlight is completely different.
But living in Brazil is a shock because their winter is even less winter than in Spain, only Argentina and Chile has a similar winter to Spain and no part of the South hemisphere but New Zealand and Antarctica has something similar to Canada, Russia of North of North America.
In fact, the Brazilians form South(colder) are totally different form the people of the North. More serious, less party going.
Something to do with culture? Something to do with population levels? Something to do with the crops being grown?
China has mountains around the edges, and had a hell of a time conquering the little kingdoms that were in them. In most cases, the best they managed was tribute, and never really established real administrative control.
There are very valid reasons for China wanting that territory in their country (security, resources, etc...) and its not like the west + Russia were playing a "Great Game" there just a century ago. China gets the territory because they took it and were able to hold it, plain and simple, it doesn't need a flaky moralistic reason.
Many Tibetan exiles are rather fond of "minority in our own homeland" claims which are true only if you define the homeland as covering areas not ruled over by Tibetans for centuries though :)
My best guess is that they were able to do this thanks to the advancement required to face off the threads before their eventual rise. There wasn't anybody who could really compete with what they had after those wars were won. The Pax Romana held relative peace in Europe because of that strength.
I'd love someone with more knowledge on the subject to come and answer this - really fascinating subject.
Lots of modern europe was never touched by the Roman Empire because it was too far from the water.
Geography alone doesn't really explain China's early unification, since they had more barriers than Europe to deal with. My hunch is that it is more of a fluke in history that could have happened in Europe also (and did with the Romans).
Warring state periods did occur during history, but stable and strong political unions were the norm in most of the dynasties.
I think spread out over enough time, these pervasive environmental factors do have a real influence. You could see the unity of the Roman Empire as being Europe's fluke, and the disunity of the Warring States as being China's.
But again, it's really all speculative.
Europe, especially preindustrial, was forests and Alps and Pyrenees. A lot of trees in Germany. Italy is hilly.
Also, China is unified by language. At least the written kind that lets you run a bureaucracy. The med had a bunch, Latin, Greek and Arabic, and was multiple "countries" for a good long time.
About the crops being grown, there's ideas about the difference between rice and the middle eastern crops. Something to do with the fact that rice requires constant attention whereas med crops are intensive only during harvest. Not too familiar with that line of thought.
Which also applied to countries and why Western Europe kept going from a unified empire to a bunch of countries. The last time this happen was in 843 "When Louis the Pious died in 840, his eldest son, Lothair I, claimed overlordship over the whole of his father's kingdom .../... Lothair's brother Louis the German and his half-brother Charles the Bald refused to acknowledge Lothair's suzerainty and went to war against him. .../... after which Lothair became willing to negotiate a settlement." (2).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_inheritance_systems...
If you check out the Wikipedia article about Chinese history as a starting point, you will see that there have been many periods in which 'China' does not exist. Instead, there were several kingdoms, many different states, or there was only a single state but one could definitely put forth an argument that 'China' is not a direct descendant of that ancient entity.
Granted, the extent of fractionalisation regarding both time and geography might be less than in Europe, but it is far from some imagined 'continuued' existence of a Han Chinese state.
If you include places like Tibet, Guangdong, Taiwan, Manchuria and Xinjiang in this debate, this rings even truer.
European territory made external travel (around the coastline) quite easy (good for invaders, hard for defenders to move to where the attackers are).
China's geography had a much smaller coastline (relative to landmass), and a far superior interior river network, augmented early (~1,000 BCE IIRC) with manmade canals, making internal movement of forces far easier. China also wasn't surrounded by capable enemies -- India was the nearest significant civilisation. The Mongols managed to invade, yes, but they were a fluke and also managed to occupy nearly all the Eurasian landmass, from the Pacific to central Europe and India. (The Mughal Empire was the result of Mongol invaders of India.)
China did see internal strife, but those splits resolved with a resumption of the previous Chinese bureaucracy rather than a replacement of it, as seemed more typical of Europe.
You'll notice on maps like this one [1] that only some of the parts of "China" are colored in throughout history. Well, what about the uncolored parts? People lived there too, and organized themselves into groups with governments and so on. We don't bother with them though because some modern government just washes all of them away into the dustbin of history.
In a similar fashion, most people don't consider the Eastern Roman empire "Rome" after the fall of the Western Empire. But it was no more or less "Rome" than say, the Eastern Jin was.
Even today, China isn't unified, Taiwan operates as an independent entity.
1 - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Territor...
In contrast Europe has a lot of rivers, mountains and forrest dividing the lands naturally.
E.g. you can see this replay itself at every level, e.g. within Scandinavia, flat Denmark had a stronger central government than Sweden early on. While e.g. my home country Norway full of fjords, rivers and forests always had very weak central power. Nobody could easily hold such a country.
I think the good part of that though is that such a situation foster democracy. These large plain countries always seem to end up strong but autocratic. I don't think there is any accident that Russia lagged behind the rest of Europe in freedom and development of democracy.
Switzerland is another example of a mountain country with strong democracy traditions and also historically very hard to keep control over by central powers.
Now China does of course have lots of maintains as well, but it matters how they are distributed. They still got quite large plains. I think there was a simulation ran, which simulated the creation of empires just based on geography and China was far more likely to produce empire's with its geography than Europe.
The English realized this, so whenever some country like Spain or France threatened to conquer the rest of Europe, England would put its military strength on the other side to prevent this from happening.
Yes, talking about the industrial revolution happening in Rome or China in the distance past is sort of like that in my opinion.
I'm as pro free market as the next (liberal) economist but competition had little to do with why the IR didn't happen in China.
One obvious counter example to the article: Europe had centuries of bloody competition before IR, so why did the IR take so long to come about?
And the simple answer is that what enabled the IR to happen was the Enlightenment and the core of the Enlightenment is essentially, value pluralism. Before the Enlightenment, God or his representative on Earth, the monarch, was the sole source of truth. Science, or any other sources of truth were squashed. The Enlightenment broke that link, most obviously with Locke's argument for the separation of church and state.
The lack of value pluralism also explains the lack of innovation and progress in other cultures through history.
A footnote: Machiavelli is misunderstood in the popular culture. The reason he is so important is not because he was the originator of the idea that there are different moral frameworks for princes (rulers) and the ruled, but that it a necessary, indeed a good thing that there are different moral frameworks. Machiavelli wrote in the 16th century, and was one of the early value pluralists.
I've been meaning to run the calculations as to how much a full first rate ship's fire would equate to in wood equivalents. I'm basing this off of the HMS Victory, a 104 gun first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy.
Armament consisted of 30 x 32#, 28 * 24#, 30 * 12#, and 2 each 12# and 68# forecastle guns.
A single round from all guns (unlikely -- a broadside would be half the armament) would then unleash 1.1 tons of iron shot.
From Vaclav Smil, iron smelting requires an 80:1 ratio of source fuelwood to output iron, with the fuelwood first being converted to charcoal, a 4:1 reduction itself.
Firing all guns of the Victory expends the smelting power of 92 tons of fuelwood -- about 30 cords.
Canon could manage perhaps 2 rounds in a minute, with sustained rates of 20-40 rounds in an hour. At the upper bound, we're looking at 3,600 tons of wood in shot consumption.
The Victory herself required 6,000 trees in construction, was refurbished after her first major engagement at a cost greater than her initial construction, but perhaps in compensation, remains to this day as the oldest commissioned warship, having first launched in 1768.
I haven't done the calculation of gunpowder usage, though I've got a reference for 6# charge for a 24# gun. If that's proportionate to all guns, then a full round would be 1/3 ton of powder.
If anyone has a source for UK or US arms manufacture (guns, shot, powder) for the 17th - 19th centuries, I'd be quite interested. -18th centuries, I'd be interested.
The China that existed before the Communists took over had this absurd foot binding practice that took 50% of the working population off the 'job market'. Meanwhile, in the West, women did most of the harder work, with their children in cottage industries that pre-dated the full on Industrial Revolution.
Selling opium to China probably didn't help with their economic development either.
Why did the Industrial Revolution Start in Britain?
https://orbi.ulg.ac.be/bitstream/2268/188592/1/Why%20Did%20t...
It actually discusses several diverging schools of thought.
The above describes the Christian world view which was prevalent in Europe.
1. Henry M. Morris, Biblical Basis for Modern Science (Baker, 1991), p. 30.
ETA: Looked up Henry M. Morris. Ah; he's a young Earth creationist, and "the father of modern creation science". I see.
If you have something specific against the quote other than innuendo, I'm sure there are less offensive ways to make your point.
Looking at other world views prevalent at the time, the metaphysical was inextricably tied up in the physical. Christianity asserts that the world is real, and that it is worth studying.
Christian Gnosticism and Catharism are just two historical christian sects who denied the reality of sense-perception, and who were purged for that. Not to mention christian mysticism, specially that of Meister Eckhart, or Spinozism, or any Neoplantonist interpretation of christian tradition. Christianity isn't a single theological or even metaphysical tradition, but a multitude of ones pinned to a more or less single oral tradition embodied in the bible. Specially, christianism doesn't entail physicalism.
Furthermore, I don't see what's exceptional about "the world" being "real". Even the Eleatics and the Neoplatonists would've agreed to that, granted that "the world" be their "One", even though they asserted that sense-perception is illusory. If these words are taken in their most general sense, then this proposition becomes a platitude. You might as well say that "whatever is, is". And no one has ever seriously argued that nothing exists (Gorgias of Leontini did only in jest).
Which pretty much originates in greek philosophy. So, is the root cause of science and industrial revolution a bunch of greek getting scholarly competetive two millenia ago to outwit eachothers?
(I read TotW decades ago, I might misremember it.)
http://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html
"During the 17th and 18th century the English economy underwent a dramatic transformation: its capacity to feed and increasing population increased impressively. ... Perhaps for the first time in the history of any country other than a land of recent settlement, rapid population growth took place concurrently with rising living standands. ... The notion of life expectancy provides the most important tool to examine the phenomenon of mortality, taking into account the age structure of the population. Life expectancy at age x is the average number of years that a person of age x will still survive at a given date. The most commonly used indicator is e(0), life expectancy at birth (or at age 0), but sometimes other statistics like e(1), e(5), e(20), e(50), are also tabulated. Their main advantage is that they capture age-specific mortality profiles: for instance, an increase in mortality concentrated in the age-group between 20-25 (due, for instance, to a long war) would affect e(0) but not e(30) because the probability of survival, given that a person is already 30, does not change. Decisions about future capital and consumption are not taken by the agent when he is born but, rather, when he is twenty or twenty five years old. Therefore, the relevant survivial profile for considering the influence of mortality over investment choices is given by adult life expectancy. In fact, making the distinction between e(0) and adult life expectancy is expecially important for our problem because adult mortality behaves in a completely different way from infant and child mortality in the first half of the 18th century: adult mortality rates decreased very sharply from the end of the 17th century, while infant and childhood mortality rates were unusually high between 1680 and 1750. ... If life cycle inspiration was present in rural England in the 18th century, farmers who were becoming aware that old people were gradually living for longer periods must have been more concerned about their own means of subsistence in the future. This may have been an important stimulus to reduce consumption, increase savings and take into account longer horizons."
Which still leaves open the question of how and why the early parts of this avalanche got started in England but not in Taiwan or Japan or Sardinia as analogous islands, and why the actual timing as opposed to any other plausible century.
The short answer is that the Europeans (maybe for some of the reasons given in this article), were greedier than the Chinese.
It's likely that the Chinese empire reached the New World before Columbus. http://www.economist.com/node/5381851. But the thought of enslaving an entire population and stealing all their natural resources didn't even occur to the Chinese explorers. Whereas the Chinese expeditions were financed by the empire, the Europeans expeditions were financed by debt, so the men needed to arrive on land and quickly acquire wealth for themselves at all costs, or else they would return to Europe broke or never return at all. And this led them to commit the horrendous acts in the New World we know so much about.
Western Europe, now full of gold and silver stolen from the New World had levels of wealth it had never experienced. This led to increased demands for certain goods (like English wool), which forced the population off of the land and into urban centers, thus creating the landless working class. This process was called The Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure. An urban, landless working class, was a necessary condition for the industrial revolution. The extraordinary wealth ready to be invested in industry, a product of colonialism and the slave trade, was another necessary condition for the industrial revolution.
Fundamentally, the Chinese were in a box. Japan was in isolation, and surrounding countries were no threat to the kingdom. China's problems were all internal, which made looking beyond their boundaries for solutions counterproductive.
This comment reflects a highly selective and ethnically targeted historical ignorance and misattribution.
Unfortunately, people like the interviewee explain away early western economic domination by referring to Western European intellect and culture, and ignoring the dark side. This has been the case since the beginning of economic history. Adam Smith didn't even bother to discuss slavery in The Wealth of Nations even though he knew how critical it was to the development of capitalism.
It's time to be honest about how we got here. If the ugly truth offends you, I don't know what to tell you.
...
> I neither wrote not implied that Europeans are evil
The answer is free markets. The industrial revolution happened in free market countries.
BTW, gold and silver extracted from the New World doesn't explain it.
1. Gold and silver are not economic wealth - Spain (the main recipient of it) experienced inflation.
2. Spain did not become the dominant power in Europe, though it should have if exploiting the New World was the key.
3. The IR happpened in the US starting around 1800. The US was not extracting gold/silver from elsewhere, had no empire, had no banking system to speak of, was a nation of subsistence farmers, had no great cities, etc.
In a similar vein, I was quite surprised to learn how industrial early 19th century Peru was, until they decided to screw development and just exploit the land.
(Though I think the internal comparison of different parts of the US is more relevant, since they operated under the same political and economic frameworks, yet developed quite differently. Maybe a relatively free market is a necessary condition for industrial revolution, but it sure as hell isn't sufficient.)
That's an astute observation. The slave based southern economy did not industrialize. Slavery is not a free market. I do not know of a free market economy that failed to industrialize.
As for slavery being profitable, one of the big drivers of the Civil War was it was becoming unprofitable, and the South needed to protect its inefficient economy. Separating itself from the North meant it could enact protectionist trade barriers (which were not allowed by the Constitution).
Like so many things in human history, the end of slavery came about less because of a moral awakening, and more because it didn't pay anymore.
Because they had accumulated so much wealth from plundering the New World, they became lazy and dependent for goods on poorer, and more industious nations, (the English for example). On the other hand, the English, which didn't have all that wealth were forced to produce real-value;
Around the 17th century, they overcame Spain to become a dominant power in Europe; The role of colonialism was secondary in the wealth production of modern European nations.
What? The British mastered the slave trade and its Caribbean slave colonies were perhaps the most productive of the era.
Spain not only exploited South America, but also administered it and gave it a lot of wealth and education to those places.
In fact, some places in South America went sour after independence because it was much better administered before. In places like Argentina, genocide to the native population happened after independence, not before.
Once and again people project England situation today to the past, but you have to look at the England of the past, that was certainly not more industrious.
Industry in England is copied and improved from the Netherlands from a political plan like the Meiji period in Japan. Before that it was a very poor country and certainly not harder working than the rest.