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Comment by Hemospectrum | Hacker News Reader

The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple. In fact, there's an argument to be made that it once did exactly that. Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.

Disclaimer: I don't know English history well enough to put together a better explanation, but I'm sure this has been the subject of a number of PhD theses. Maybe someone can point to a source that goes into better detail.

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The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians.

I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens.

Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits.

Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't.

Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.

Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.

I've studied the causes of the Industrial Revolution a little(in undergrad classes) and one of the points that stuck with me is that early-modern machining had greatly improved. Roman-era lathes were of a different character[0] and their limitations in accuracy and power were a major dependency to the development of other machined parts. As well, the Romans had a pre-Newtonian physics and mathematics, limiting the percieved applications of their inventions. There really is a lot that 1000-2000 years of background development gives you.

The early moderns are also interesting because of the wage issue, which is not quite what it seems. It is known that wages were high following the Black Death, and this created room for mercantile economics powered by double-entry bookkeeping, rather than tributary ones, to take over the political economy. Everything in the modern period becomes a bit more of a business. However, the political class then moved to lower wages and adopted such as part of early merchantalist theory - keep them lean and hungry so they work hard.

This attitude encouraged the development of impressment, indentured servitude and chattel slavery: the easiest way to move a worker's wages off the books was to turn them into property. Thus by the mid 1600's, you already have a world where the populace has been disempowered and coerced into the project of colonial nation building(a means of putting more assets on the books - claim the rights), and the backlash to that powers an interest in developing liberalism in the 1700's, which coincides with the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Smith. There's a lot of history that coincides with "and then this philosopher published a very relevant work".

The underlying political thing of early modern Europe, of course, was the disunification. The inventors and scholars in this period are always fleeing from a noble that they pissed off and finding refuge somewhere else. A unified Europe would have had more opportunities to surpress technologies, as occurred in China throughout its history.

None of that forms a complete hypothesis, and it doesn't even touch on the "why Britain specifically" question, but it gets it away from being a "Europe so great" anaysis.

[0] http://blog.mmi-direct.com/machining-history-lathe-the-mothe...

There's... a lot of context to the industrial revolution.

First and foremost was easy access to coal. Energy is really where wealth is at. Coal and iron make modern steam engines and rail and trains possible at all. Get that ball going and the possibilities become endless and feasible.

Secondly was not so much economics but financial structure. England had already well-established notions of corporations and stock trading, which made venture fund raising a lot more accessible than loans.

Whatever labor costs might have been, any level of automation would have greatly improved productivity.

That said, perceived labor costs are important. Where slavery operated, the perception of cheap labor made economies less likely to industrialize -- the antebellum American South is representative of this.

Additional factors include having a middle class, a venture/enterprising culture (think East India company), a permissive government, and other things. Perhaps even the background of recent civil wars and religious strife might have helped, I don't know.

You are completely ignoring philosophy. It was the ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men, that made the whole enterprise possible. China had the tools, sure. But not the incentives. Their emperor could not let lose a zoo of creativity, for fear of destruction of the empire.

This kind of smacks of euro-centrism. Especially considering how the West at that time had colonies that practiced chattel slavery, producing vast wealth for the owners of the colonies.

> It was the ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men, that made the whole enterprise possible.

So why did it start in Britain, rather than the United States or post-revolutionary France?

Short answer, sea power drove technological innovation (reliable clocks etc) and a global empire gave Britain access to more raw material for textiles than it could process by ahd, so there was a huge incentive for automation. Also, plenty of domestic iron ore and coal deposits allowed rapid scaling and positive feedback loops. Much of the IR centered on the north of England because they had good ports and the coal and iron ore was right there and did not need to be transported very far. Northern England developed in significantly different economic and cultural directions from the more mercantilist southern part of the country, which differences persist to this day.

I have no disagreement with the points you make, but they seem to tell a different story than one in which ideas of freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men were necessary. Watt's great invention came on the eve of Britain's attempt to suppress these dangerous ideas in its American colonies.

To be fair, I think freedom and individuality are part of the story, but that story is more sociological than philosophical. In part, I wonder if it is a consequence of the reformation and counter-reformation, which arrived at an accommodation in which the populace was allowed some freedom in how it conducted itself, so long as it did not challenge the authority of the state.

Might want to read some more Chinese philosophy before drawing such conclusions.

Please, tell me about this Chinese philosophy of "freedom, of the possibility of liberty for all, of equality of men".

Not if you're just going to be sarcastic. Which Chinese philosophies are you familiar with?

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