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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

When & where do you think the Industrial Revolution happened?

Started late 18th century, after several decades of European countries and US states abolishing slavery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...). Why, when do you think it happened?

Serfdom was completely ended in England 200 years before the Industrial Revolution, and while slaves were still present in England, they were never a significant part of the labor pool. What other conditions had to be met, or is it simply a matter of waiting two centuries after eliminating slaves/serfs from the labor pool?

My point was that it sounds likely that something like the industrial revolution would happen after the abolishment of slavery, when there's more pressure on people to be inventive. Not that it has to happen immediately

Why then did it not happen after the Black Death decimated Europe?

indeed, if you look at how long it took for segregation to happen, centuries seems a good measure of delayed effect.

England, like many of the European powers, vastly benefited from the slavery in the Americas through trade. Former English territories such as South Carolina (it was theirs for a century leading up to the Revolutionary War) or Georgia, were aggressive slave states and England was heavily responsible for that condition. England was the largest slave trader in the 18th century, as such the foundations of slavery particularly in the colonies were overwhelmingly their responsibility. England's wealthy slave owners were still very active in the slave trade well into the 19th century (into the 1830s). Their direct role in the slave trade, as such, didn't cease until about 50-60 years prior to the industrial revolution (their indirect role, responsibility and benefit extends far longer than that).

European powers outsourced their slavery to the Americas, directly funding, operating and protecting it, while feigning morality about it at home.

The most obvious example of the negative influence of slavery on industrialization is the split of the early US into free and slave economies, and the near complete failure of the slave economy to industrialize.

I'm not saying the elimination of slavery/serfdom isn't a necessary precursor; I just don't think it was a sufficient condition. What is the complete set of necessary and sufficient preconditions to have an Industrial Revolution?

I don't know if this is a complete set, but:

1. economic freedom

2. printing press

3. a view of the universe that it follows rules that can be discovered and modeled in the small

4. the scientific method

5. protection of property rights, enforcement of contracts, rule of law rather than corruption

> economic freedom

China certainly supports that premise. The before and after on their shift toward economic liberalization, is something beyond dramatic. A 50 fold expansion of their economy in a mere three decades after Deng Xiaoping began the liberalization.

It's also interesting to note that wealthier resource nations that heavily lack economic freedom such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela (formerly semi-wealthy in their case), also mostly lack modern industrialization and have routinely failed to develop their economies.

Russia is another example of this in action. Putin will continually fail to see high level economic development under his regime, as the nation almost entirely lacks economic freedom. The primary means by which Russia can expand its economy under his oppressive rule, is through natural resource prices moving higher (which accounted for most of Russia's economic gains from 2001-2013, leading up to the price of oil imploding in 2014 and sparking a terrible recession there). Russia's GDP in 1991 was $518 billion (when the price of oil was $20). It was $1.28 trillion for 2016. Inflation adjusted (much less further adjusting for the higher real oil prices today), they've made very little self-sustaining economic progress, while burning through vast energy resources.

The USSR is a powerful counterexample. In 1914, Russia was a backwards agrocentric economy that was one of the poorest of Europe. 25 years later, it's an industrial juggernaut on par with, or perhaps even (especially as feared by many at the time) better than the US.

Who cares if you have to starve a few tens of millions of peasants to death to drag them into the industrial age?

The British certainly didn't, roughly thirty million Indians starved during their industrial revolution.

Since the US heavily supplied the USSR in WW2, I don't think they were industrially on par with the US.

It's not, it actually proves the point extremely well. The USSR's industrial base was built by foreign industrial firms, including from Germany and the US. The USSR then proceeded to nationalize most of it (see: the German Junkers aviation company; German manganese mining + US industrialist W. Averill Harriman; British and US gold mining firms in the 1920s; and dozens more, all victims of bait & switch Russian nationalizations). The Soviets would have foreign industrialists build what they could not, usually after running an industry into the ground, and then they would turn around and nationalize it back.

Or consider the largest hydro dam in the world at the time, built at Dnieprostroi by Americans (designed by Hugh Cooper). The turbines were supplied by America as well. That single dam increased Soviet power production five fold. The Soviets crowed about that achievement, and they had nothing to do with it.

Steel plants, tractor plants, the list goes on and on, built by American industrialists. Then either nationalized or otherwise proclaimed to be the great product of Soviet industrialization.

They did that frequently between 1914 and the 1930s. The Soviets also never repaid the US lend-lease transfers, which would be worth several hundred billion dollars today.

To make things even worse, during the 1920s, the US and Western European powers subsidized the USSR with vast food aid, as they starved their people and exported their grain production to countries such as Germany (so while the US and others were supplying aid, they were simultaneously profiting by selling their domestic crops into other markets). During that time millions of Russians starved to death.

The USSR was not even remotely close to the industrial scale of the US in 1940. The US had economic output greater than Germany + the UK + France + the USSR by 1940.

This is a good article on it from 1988:

"How America Helped Build The Soviet Machine"

http://www.americanheritage.com/content/how-america-helped-b...

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