Could Rome have had an industrial revolution?
reaction.life
reaction.life
I have seen the industrial revolution always as
paper -> printing press -> better paper -> newsletters -> more reading & books -> more inclusive institutions -> ...
I can't see industrial revolution without large number of books and reading just before it.
Acemoglu & Robinson have pointed out that the eastern and western Europe were almost identical in institutions in the middle ages but then Western Europe developed just slightly more inclusive institutions.
In Russia print office was established by Fedorov in Moscow and printing was heavily censored. I think Russia had long time only 4 printers. Meanwhile tiny Scotland had something like 7-8 printers at the beginning of 1700's and many Scottish inventors followed. Germany, France, England, Portugal etc. had printers in every major city.
* It could have happened other places, but started in England by pure dumb luck.
* English legal structure (common law and property ownership rules)--note that the Glorious Revolution took place before the Industrial Revolution, unlike, say, the French Revolution.
* English economic situation (holding a large mercantile empire).
* English natural resources (the loss of the forests to make charcoal, prompting the need to dig deeper to get coal).
As I said, there's certainly no consensus on why it occurred in England. Generally, the more interesting question is not why it occurred in England and not France, but why it occurred in Europe and not China, which after all had access to things like the printing press long before Europe.
To actually answer your question, one feature of Western Europe in the Early Modern is that serfdom was effectively abolished. Russia and Poland did not abolish serfdom until the 1800s (in the case of Poland, after the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist). Slavery is generally considered to retard the development of technology, and serfdom is similar enough to slavery that it would have a similar effect if such an effect exists. In that vein, it's dubious to think the Industrial Revolution could have developed in Eastern Europe.
The romans were producing a huge amount of lead and other metals at levels not achieved again until the 18th century. The graph is pretty striking. And it's a logarithmic graph so doesn't give the full perspective of just how ahead of their time they were.
* Commentary, same piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15690293
* No comments, author who inspired this piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15840705
Anyway, the answer is not so complicated: capitalist production is not a question of markets or wealth, but of a set of social relations between owners of capital and each other, and owners of capital and laborers, where laborers depend upon owners of capital for their subsistence, and where capitalists are set in a situation of compelled competition, where they must extract constantly increasing productivity from their laborers in order to maintain their status. That is, the conditions for the emergence of the industrial revolution come about when participation in a competitive market is, on the whole, compulsory rather than optional, and where competition between capitalists is compulsory, such that the livelihoods of both capitalists and laborers is contingent upon technological improvements in productivity. This turns into a self-reinforcing cycle, and before you know it we have airplanes, iphones, empires of working poor, and global warming.
Throughout most of history, participation in market society was generally an optional thing. The small landholding peasant brought goods to market when they could but they did not depend on markets to live. Now we require markets to live. At some point in England in the early modern period, this cycle of market dependence and competition emerged, grew out of control, and spread out conquering the world.
Reading them as an adult really impressed me that her family was remarkably close to the "landholding peasant" model that you describe. As the family moved from one settlement to another, the description of possessions that they brought along suggests that they were accumulating basically zero wealth, for quite a time period.
And at that point, the industrial revolution was already running full steam (literally) in the eastern US and in Europe.
Bear in mind that Laura Ingalls Wilder had help from her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who is one of the founders of the American libertarian movement. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Wilder_Lane :
> In late 1930, Lane's mother approached her with a rough, first-person narrative manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, Pioneer Girl. Lane, using her sense of what was marketable, took notice. She recognized that an American public weary of the Depression would respond warmly to the story of the loving, self-sufficient and determined Ingalls family overcoming obstacles while maintaining their sense of independence, as told through the eyes of the spunky "Laura".
What you read was therefore likely selected to appeal to that vision of independent landholding peasants.
That said, the Wilders did depend on markets to live. They depended on a rifle, and on metal tools (including sewing needles), and tin pots. Nor do they make their own cloth. I'll quote some lines from "Little House in the Big Woods":
> The nearest town was far away. Laura and Mary had never seen a town. They had never seen a store. They had never seen even two houses standing together. But they knew that in a town there were many houses, and a store full of candy and calico and other wonderful things--powder, and shot, and salt, and store sugar.
The calico, powder, and shot were essentials. Likely salt too, though it may simply be much easier to get from the store than naturally, rather like store sugar vs. maple sugar/snow sugar.
You can also see some of the "compelled competition, where they must extract constantly increasing productivity from their laborers in order to maintain their status" in Chapter 12: "The Wonderful MACHINE", when the threshers come with machinery which in one day with four men and eight horses can harvest as much wheat as four men could in two weeks. This is seen as progress, but once everyone does it, the prices will drop, and future farmers must then seek out ever more productivity.
It is the Osage, in "Little House on the Prairie", who best fit efficax's description of a people who were not dependent on market dependence.
For instance, Mary's illness is mentioned in the local paper twice, according to this paper which argues that it was likely meningoencephalitis, not scarlet fever, which caused her illness and subsequent blindness. Interview at https://www.npr.org/2013/02/07/171413261/laura-ingalls-siste... and paper at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/ear... .
We're at risk for creating a new dark age (mid-to-late 20th century onward) though the use of excessive encryption, proprietary file formats, abandoned digital storage media. and abuse of copyright.
The Dark Ages generally (to historians) connote the time between the end of the Roman Empire to around the end of the Viking Age and the rise of feudalism in the High Middle Ages, or about ~400s-1000s. The term mostly refers to the lack of comprehensive written records caused by the collapse and general loss of effective bureaucracy.
Originally, the term was used during the Enlightenment era to distinguish the "enlightenment" of modern times with the "backwardness" of the past. The association with the Catholic Church being the cause of backwardness was part of a general attack on Catholicism by Protestants for getting everything wrong.
In reality, the Catholic Church was pretty much the only surviving institution of the former Roman Empire in the Dark Ages. Virtually every record in Western Europe that survives from the Dark Ages is a result of the Christian monks or other church officials, being the only institution capable of producing the durable written record we desire. The church was also one of the heaviest sponsors of science during these times, basically being one of the only institutions that could afford to have people doing such work.