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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if you were living in this period - England was constantly at war, the trees had all run out, and quality metal was nowhere to be found. You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

Also, if we wanted to go back even further, the true roots are probably the Enlightenment. Before Wilkinson and Watt and Darby could think to develop technology, they needed certain political rights that didn't exist to previous humans. The rights to privately acquire land, create corporations, sell across markets - things that lay people didn't have access to in earlier eras. And most importantly, courts that would enforce said rights for you!

And they needed double-entry bookkeeping! Perhaps one of the most underrated human inventions of all. Your wealth was no longer determined by how much stuff physically hoard, but by a record of entitlements.

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Rights to privately acquire land, create corporations, and sell across markets were extant across different civilizations throughout history.

The Chola merchant guilds had formalized corporate structures that dissipated the risk of long voyages 2000 years ago. Seeing that the Romans traded with the Cholas, the Romans probably had corporate structures too.

Humans have been living in complex societies since the Bronze Age. It’s difficult to run a complex society without some sort of bureaucratic organization.

We tend to underestimate how complex even pre Bronze Age kingdoms were. To rule them, our ancestors came up with an intricate way to let different combinations of symbols represent abstract thoughts.

> an intricate way to let different combinations of symbols represent abstract thoughts

I seem to find that this is still the best way to communicate.

So long as we keep updating the symbols from time to time, such that that they don't deviate too much from other means of communications.

Symbols are always lossy, they cannot be relied on even in the best case. I think what matters are the games we play with them.

Another one is that ancient Mediterranean traders used what were essentially futures contracts to trade wheat and other grains.

I largely agree with this.

But I still think there was something unique about the legal entitlements in 17th century England that didn't really exist in previous eras. Previous versions of complex structures were still family oriented, or had to put up with local power brokers, or were a fiefdom unto themselves.

Like, you didn't see James Watt build a fort and hire goons to protect his assets. But that would have been a completely normal requirement of establishing an organization in the Roman world.

I'm having a really hard time understanding your observation, or how to apply it.

What was unique about legal entitlements 1600s England that wasn't in, say, 1600s Netherlands?

Like, why doesn't the Dutch East India Company count?

Or quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Mine#Free_miners :

> The organizational structure of Falun Mine created under the 1347 charter was advanced for its time. Free miners owned shares of the operation, proportional to their ownership of copper smelters. The structure was precursor to modern joint stock companies, and Stora Enso, the modern successor to the old mining company, is often referred to as the oldest joint stock company still operational in the world.[2]

I'm largely thinking about why the Industrial Revolution couldn't be cooked up during, like, the Roman period despite there being many places with a similar set of ingredients.

My point isn't that England was first or best at these things, but the chronology of these things coming first was essential for the puzzle pieces coming together.

You're walking very close to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

English is an unusual European language using "did" to express some negatives, like "I didn't want it" instead of "I want it not", and with a relatively insignificant gender system in the grammar.

Maybe that was part of the puzzle.

Or perhaps Anglicanism was part of the puzzle.

Or the wealth from colonial exploitation and slavery that was used to fund these projects.

For that matter, when Watt developed his steam engine, Scottish "colliers and salters [were] in a state of slavery and bondage" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Slavery_and... , so there's another puzzle piece. That surely seems like part of the legal entitlements you refer to, albeit in Scotland instead of England.

Or, as English people 150 years ago argued, the natural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and Scottish races -- a puzzle piece that biology has conclusively shown does not exist.

How do you know which puzzle piece is relevant enough to the puzzle, vs. a happenstance?

I'm not familiar with the Chola but one problem the Arab world had during this period was their equivalents of corporations dissolved upon the death of any of the principals. For a trade expedition that might last a year or two this is a perfectly sensible arrangement. But not for large mills or foundries requiring multiple principals to build and run and which might last decades and which can't be easily divided.

The problem is that (early) Medieval Europe has lost much of that.

Romans built blocks of dwelling houses 5-6 stories high, houses with central heating, and running water delivered to their cities (and wealthier homes) by systems of aqueducts and pipes, etc. These are things that we associate with 19th or even 20th century in large parts of Europe.

Sadly, their social institutions, even as famous as the republic, were also not practiced and even forgotten for long centuries. Much of the Enlightenment was fueled by re-reading and re-understanding of classic Greek and Roman works, which felt fresh and mind-expanding at the time.

I would not undersell the late middle ages. It was a complex society with sophisticated economics and social structures. Just to pick one example European warfare was highly organized by the late 1400s and enabled them to found huge empires overseas.

Late middle ages / early Enlightenment, say, 14-15 centuries, were very cool in their special way, with very complex social structures. ThInge like the Hanseatic league, the great geographical discoveries and conquests, the beginning of modern science, the flourishing of arts — this all required highly advanced society, compared to, say, what Charlemagne or (imaginary) king Arthur would have.

The very concept of "the Middle Ages" in Europe tends to muddle our thinking.

Life in 700 AD was completely different from life in 1400 AD. Cities, population density, building styles, international trade, weapons and warfare, agricultural methods, secular institutions - almost nothing stayed the same.

People tend to even forget that the official definition of "the Middle Ages" stretches back into the Dark Age, where kings were more like chieftains, castles basically unknown, even most of the clergy struggled to read and write, and a typical member of the elite warrior class looked nothing like a stereotypical knight.

> Sadly, their social institutions, even as famous as the republic, were also not practiced and even forgotten for long centuries.

I mean, the main social institutions that underpinned all the others in Rome were massive human trafficking and looting operations. The enlightened Greeks weren't any better.

My personal guess is that we would've had the industrial revolution thousands of years earlier if these groups we like to glorify in our history books would've laid off the enslaving, murder, and robbery.

Its hurts that people like you are here solely to make others throw out the baby with the bathwater. MLK JR was a baptist. Do i have to hate him because of the baptists' pro-life stance? JKF was a kennedy; do i have to hate the civil rights act because of his illgotten wealth?

On the one hand, you have a family that smuggled alcohol and a person who has religious views I don't hold. On the other hand you have people who, as a civilization, committed unapologetic genocide, rape, robbery, and founded their economic system on human trafficking . Personally I don't see how these are remotely comparable.

I'm not saying the Greeks and Romans didn't have any merits at all. Can we learn some things from them? Sure. Do we have to call them 'great,' and aspire to be like them? Absolutely not.

The travails of the early inventors in Britain are tragicomic in terms of the opposition they faced.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kay_(flying_shuttle)

Weavers rioted against his invention. He hardly collected any royalties from his invention in England, and departed for France persona non grata. The French manufacturers also did not pay royalties on the monopoly to the flying shuttle granted him. He died in poverty.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright

He lost a major patent case, which allowed competitors to use his inventions. He did make money because he owned mills himself rather than being a tinkerer like Kay.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hargreaves

He was run out of town because his spinning jenny put too many spinners out of work. He moved to the town that bought thread because they welcomed the lower prices. His patent survived but did not stop others from copying.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Crompton

Crompton could not afford to patent the spinning mule, so he open sourced it following promises from manufacturers to pay him a fee. The promises were broken. Crompton never made any money from his invention.

Then, as now, a patent is only worth one's ability to fund litigation.

If you read English literature from the mid-18th century there doesn't seem to have been a sense that they were in the late stages of humanity. People were adaptable and accustomed to tolerating hardships that would shock most of us. Yes, the large trees had mostly been cut down but they were able to import enough lumber for essential construction projects.

One of the most important, but that people forget very often. They needed to right to have strange ideas without being chased down and killed due to them.

The Europe science and engineering moved into England much before the economical activity, and as far as I can see, it was mostly because of that one. Some of the greatest minds of the time were literally chased outside of Italy during that move.

Also, it's a right that was missing from most of the world for about a millennium by that time.

The Europe science and engineering moved into England much before the economical activity

interesting- I haven’t heard of this view before. can you give some examples?

History of corporations: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40697762

(Paywalled, but you may be able to find a copy.)

Private land is almost as old as record history. So is selling across markets.

Double entry book keeping was invented in the late 15th century.

All of these existed for centuries before the steam engine.

I think your 15th century date is for a book describing double-entry bookkeeping, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Della_mercatura_e_del_mercante...

Regarding its invention, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping#Histo... says:

> The earliest extant accounting records that follow the modern double-entry system in Europe come from Amatino Manucci, a Florentine merchant at the end of the 13th century.

and lists precursors under "Other claimants".

England may have run out of trees but Canada hadn't.

Hell my own country didn't have any forests left by the 17th century and built ships from Baltic timber. For 300 years the entire world fed European industry with its natural resources. It is why God created Africa.

> You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

So which great invention is just around the corner now?

> at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

I wouldn't call the industrial revolution "the greatest moment of human progres". I would call it "the moment that sealed our fate". Climate change, un-renewable resources scarcity, biodiversity collapse, etc. We are headed at a breath-taking rate towards a planet that will be hardly inhabitable for us. We may only subsist as nomadic tribes only a few centuries from now.

> And they needed double-entry bookkeeping! Perhaps one of the most underrated human inventions of all. Your wealth was no longer determined by how much stuff physically hoard, but by a record of entitlements.

Yet when you bring up a certain recent improvement to records of entitlement around here, you tend to get crucified. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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