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Comment by TrapLord_Rhodo | Hacker News Reader

The pedant wrote the same article from the concept of ancient rome. What's interesting is that the industrial revolution didn't start in europe... it started in Britain and then spread to wider europe. Which is funny as the author completely skips over britain when it mentions the founding of the industrial(Machine) revolution.

tldr; There is a long list of requirements and prerequirements for a machine revolution to occur. The industrial revolution was not inevitable.

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

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It depends on what you call industrial revolution. If you refer only to manufacturing powered by steam engines (Savery's, Newcomen's, Watt's) then yes, Britain was the first mostly because they were the ones with enough coal for those machines.

However the steam engine marks what is commonly called the second phase of the industrial revolution.

Manufacturing with machines with other sources of power was widely spread in other parts of Europe long before steam engines. They used wind, water currents and horses for grain mills, textiles production, wine production, etc.

This kind of suggests that if only there had been readily available coal in location X (a statement copied over in a majority of history websites) then the industrial revolution might have started in X. [ there was such availability in many locations other than Britain ] Innovation and imagination were likely prime drivers necessarily allied with the geographic features conducive to its advance.

https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/131/635/1135/5955447

Author here, I didn't conveniently skip over England. In terms of the Industrial revolution I have written about why England industrialized first: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/why-england-industri...

But this story is not about the industrial revolution but about the fascination for machinery that spread around Europe in the 1500 and 1600s and which laid the foundation for the later industrial revolution in Britain. This story never gets to the industrial revolution as that isn't the topic I am covering.

Just to add to this, you also need an agricultural revolution to go with the industrial revolution, otherwise the first would just not get off the ground. More exactly, you need to be able to feed more and more urban people (who presumably work in industry) using less and less rural people (who presumably work in agriculture). England also had a mini-agricultural revolution accompanying its first industrial revolution, that’s why the gentleman farmer had become a thing.

If you don’t have that you risk your industry thing to not take off, because living in the town/city is too expensive because of the lack of food or because of its high relative costs, or you might try and do what Stalin did when he industrialized the USSR in the 1930s, that is force millions of peasants to die of hunger in order to feed the city folk.

The “how to feed an army on the move” guy went into detail on this - the amount of food you need to overwinter per person is tremendous.

It is possible it’s all down to the potato.

China did have an agricultural revolution however in the the 1600 to 1700s which cause a very rapid population growth. And even before that Chinese agriculture was far more efficient than European agriculture: They could grow multiple times through the year, the had seed drills and better plows. In terms of agriculture they were far ahead.

What they lacked was the conditions and incentives to make large number of mills. Thus with fewer mills, one did not develop the same machine focus in China as in the West.

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