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Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

The question only makes sense if you subscribe to the European centric idea that the Roman Empire fell with Rome and the medieval era was a set back. The truth is things continued to progress in the Eastern Empire, the Abassid Caliphate and in imperial China.

Once you reconsider, the answer becomes obvious. The Roman Empire didn't experience the Industrial Revolution because the necessary technological advancements were yet to be invented. Humanity needed one thousand more years to reach that point and during this thousand years what was the Roman Empire morphed into something different.

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> The question only makes sense if you subscribe to the European centric idea that the Roman Empire fell with Rome and the medieval era was a set back.

The same author has a great series on whether and how we should think of Rome as falling: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fall-of-rome/

Overall the medieval era was something of a setback in the aggregate if you look at social development overall in the western core. (See Figure 3. https://aspeniaonline.it/why-the-west-rules-for-now/)

However, you're absolutely correct that any explanation of why the Roman Empire didn't have an industrial revolution (without moving the goalposts around the technological advancements the Romans did make) has to account for why there wasn't an industrial revolution in the Eastern Roman Empire or China. And the reasonable explanation is that the technology tree wasn't developed enough.

> Overall the medieval era was something of a setback in the aggregate if you look at social development overall in the western core

I'm not especially fond of the world system theory and I'm extremely wary of the concept of core countries but even if we accept for a minute that it makes sense, there is a very simple explanation to that in the theory: western countries which now form the core weren't part of it at the time.

The amount of technology that was developed in the Medieval times is quite long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology

Romans had a similar list of accomplishments; but we're all too tempted to group them together and assume they were simple and easy.

Once you actually start to dig into it you begin to realize how everything is connected together and that while perhaps you could jump start it with a time machine at just the right place; you might not be able to speed it up as much as you'd think. A "build the tools to build the tools to build the machines to build the tools to build the machines to build the tools" problem, if you will.

I basically agree. Arguably there are some innovations in health and science that the right knowledge in the hands of the right ruler/influential person could have advanced by centuries. But, in general, I'm not at all sure that technology overall could have been accelerated all that much even if a time traveler showed the right ruler a stack of modern how things work-style books.

Yeah specific ideas would be powerful and actionable (germ theory, for example; though people had somewhat of a rough working idea of some of it with the concepts of "bad water") though many of those were somewhat in play even in ancient times (often as religious practices).

There have been some books that explored the idea - I recall a series "The Cross-time Engineer" which isn't actually that great, but does have some obvious engineering knowledge.

One thing I do think it gets right is that if you're sending someone back in time to change the past, you do NOT send a scientist, you send an engineer or a mechanic with the Handbook of Chemistry.

>you send an engineer or a mechanic with the Handbook of Chemistry.

Yeah, you want someone who, armed with some basic knowledge can build things. CRC Chemistry Handbook, B&M mechanical engineering handbook, Henley's formulas, How Things Work, information on finding and refining basic materials, how to invent everything...

This answer is circular though: “they didn’t have the technology because they just didn’t have the technology yet”.

Time alone isn’t even really an answer. It only takes time because of the pace of innovation, and the pace of innovation depends on things like culture, tech, geography, population, communication, money, etc

Does it though? Seems to me that the pace of innovation is mostly dictated by previous innovation. Political systems and organisations shift and change. What passes for the core moves. Meanwhile things march on.

I don’t really see how it’s circular. They didn’t have the technology because developing technology takes time. Innovation used to happen on a time scale which made political structures not very relevant.

The technological progress of the modern era is a product of the Renaissance movement beginning in the 14th/15th century. A transformations that cuts through culture, society, and technology. Social changes like the emergence of scientific organizations and Rationalism are impossible to meaningfully disentangle from modern technological artifacts.

You're right that the pace will vary--starting with geographical determinism--but there's still some sense of a technology tree that has to be traversed to some degree whether more quickly or more slowly.

If you look at any global data in the scale of the past 2500 years, be it gases released to the atmosphere from human smelting, be it number of digits of pi that was known, a pattern emerges:

There was an uptick during the Roman Empire, then the activity went down, and by the year 1400 the human activity was actually larger than the peak that was achieved during the Roman Empire. Something happened in the 1400s where all the human knowledge became global on a planetary scale instead of just the realm of an empire. Knowledge from the Americas and from Asia flooded into Europe and left the groundwork for more innovation.

Humanity wasn’t there yet 2000 years ago, but it was there from the 1400s on.

Europe, as we know it, started in the 1400s. Humanism and the printing press and global scale shipping started in the 1400s.

> There was an uptick during the Roman Empire, then the activity went down, and by the year 1400 the human actually was larger than the peak that was achieved during the Roman Empire.

It's extremely easy to verify that this is not actually true.

For your idea to hold, you have to entirely ignore how islam spread to South East Asia through the trade routes of the succeeding caliphates and the trade infrastructure put in place between the Eastern Romain Empire and China. Same for digits of pi, the approximation was improved significantly both in China and Persia during the medieval era. You can check the work of Al Khwarizmi or Zu Chongzhi.

Regarding smelting, Rome did very little. Meanwhile, China had discovered cast iron in 513BC and by the fall of Rome was probably doing more metallurgy than the Roman ever did.

Digits of pi: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/calculating-1...

It shows the boom from 1400. The boom is actually the rediscovery of methods that were discovered in India.

Lead deposits in 1100 BC until 800: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721818115

It shows the Roman Empire peak.

Lead deposits in 0-1900: https://abload.de/img/8f70e5bd-bc6e-4756-8dbfzt.jpeg

It shows the peak of the Roman Empire and the boom from the end of the 1400s on.

Let's not forget that a big part of these technological advancements was due to the invention of innovative ways of optimizing those devices and process, mainly by formulating and solving mathematical problems by using calculus, which coincidentally, was formulated during these times in Britain and Germany.

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