Why no Roman industrial revolution?

That betrays a deep misunderstanding of the Roman Empire. Because although Rome was sacked and conquered, the Roman Empire continued for another thousand years. The eastern Roman Empire, that is, which was arguably the more educated and advanced half.

I know a lot of people love to see the Western Roman Empire as some pinnacle of ancient technology after which the world plummeted into a thousand years of backwardness, but it only looks that way from western Europe. And the real strength of the Romans didn't lie in its technology, but in its massive trade network and in its organisation. They were good engineers because they could organise big engineering projects. They maintained massive road networks. That helps a lot in the spread and use of technology.

Of course the collapse of that trade network did slow the spread and therefore development of technology, but most of the technology was never lost (except underwater concrete, I believe), and the collapse of trade did create new problems which lead to other forms of technological progress, especially in agriculture.

And here's a possible answer: I think there's a good chance that if Hannibal won the battle of Zama, we would have had a Roman industrial revolution.

Why? Because competition is the mother of invention, and military competition doubly so. The industrial revolution was the outcome of a few hundred years of cutthroat military competition between Britain, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Sweden, the Ottomans, and maybe 10 or 20 other military powers in the theater. Sure, it was the coal and the steam engine that we associate with the industrial revolution, but there were thousands of innovations that preceded that, and many, if not most, were the product of the immense survival-of-the-fittest pressure generated by the perpetual tensions of living in such a bellicose area.

After the Roman victory at the battle of Zama, Rome was left without any significant military competition. They defeated and sometimes conquered almost anyone they encountered. The ones that they couldn't just outright defeat (the Germans and the Parthians) were only able to withstand the Roman onslaught, but not to pose any threat to Rome themselves.

But in an alternative history where Hannibal wins at Zama, we might have Carthage as a counterweight to Rome, maybe for a century or more. That would have kept the Greeks in the game too. And the Greeks were actually 3 powers (Macedonia proper, the Seleucid empire, and Ptolemaic Egypt). So at least 5 strong and quite evenly matched military actors around the Mediterranean. It is not inconceivable that a few hundred years of competition between these 5 actors could have resulted in an industrial revolution one millennium prior to the one we had.

One example: Roman concrete - still going strong after 2000 years. Modern concrete is lucky to last more than 150-200 years.

Another example: Water and sewerage reticulation - Roman water supplies and sewerage systems are still at work after 2000 years. It's only about 140-150 years ago that New York reached a comparable level of water and sewerage works to those in Rome.

One word: Priorities. Different peoples have different priorities as to what is important in a culture. Just because Roman priorities were different to ours doesn't mean their priorities were not as good as ours.

In a specific sense, market pressures, high demand and the depletion of readily available resources have led to continuous pressure for energy- and labour-saving innovations in mining in general since at least the 1500s. The copper mines of Falun and Røros in Scandinavia (where large mining operations started in the mid 1600s) present examples of that trend.

In a more general sense, one can observe a continuous improvement of mechanisation and material in production during the Middle Ages with an increase of innovations and technical understanding in the 1600s. This was a general trend that, even if it were following a different trajectory, would have meant an every increasing accumulation of technological knowledge. Perhaps the electric motor would have been invented before the steam engine or oil had been exploited before coal -- and everything would have taken a little longer. But with technical knowledge expanding further and faster, it would only have been a matter of time before economically viable applications for primitive heat engines emerged.

A related question might be: why no Chinese or Indian (subcontinent) industrial revolution? Those societies are rightly called great civilizations, and they were _no_ fools. Why no industrial revolution?

But his foray into history was a book, "Lead and Lead Poisoning in Antiquity" which was lambasted as a bit hasty and heavy on secondary sources. There was also some criticism on a pure chemical basis, for example he cites the lead pipes and lead lined aqueducts as possible major direct sources, but the plumbing of Rome suffered from the hardness of its water and its calcium carbonate buildups were 'legion' (is that a pun?) and are mentioned in ancient times. It would eventually serve as an an insulating barrier against water contacting lead directly.

In this reexamination of Nriagu's work ( https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wi... ) "aelius stilo" provides sources that build on Nriagu's premise without discounting it, and suggests that the practice of boiling down unfermented grape juice (must) to syrup (defrutum and sapa) to flavor wine was almost certainly done in lead vessels, or copper vessels that had been coated in lead to avoid the bitter taste copper corrosion imparted into the mix.

Lead was generally known as toxic as early as 2500 BC but what may not have been known was the transformative property of heat on chemistry. "stilo" gives some really mean estimates of lead toxicity in syrup and wine, which indeed suggest that wine (not so much water) was the delivery mechanism.

They didn't need to innovate because they had abondant and cheap labor in the form of slaves and whatever machine someone could come up with was more costly than slaves so the journey did not began. This is why the aeolipile stayed a novelty and the roman didn't have an IR: they didn't need it.

well, yes, since the “Dark Age” was just the aftermath of the collapse of Roman Imperial projection of military power and law and order... this phrase is a tautology.

As a thought experiment suppose Britain lacked the necessary precursors to create an industrial revolution. How confident are you that an industrial revolution would not have occurred elsewhere within the last three hundred years?

The very notion of "the Dark Ages" has long been debunked. It's a myth. The Roman Empire collapsed, but other nations rose in it's place and technological progress continued throughout.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

The entire economy seem to have been based on invading somewhere, taking all the goods and people into slavery.

Related question: why aren't we having technological revolutions now that will eventually occur in the far future? Surely, these will happen, so why are we coming up short?

People look at the colosseum, Roman roads, the size of the empire, and things like that and conclude the Romans were brilliant, and in some ways they were: they excelled at practical matters such as engineering, bureaucracy, organizing armies, committing genocides, you know, all those fun activities required to build an empire.

But good science isn't exclusively about practical matters: if "how can we build better buildings, roads, swords, ..." is all you're focused on then you're going to hit a wall pretty quick.

Did Einstein solve any sort of practical problem with special or general relativity? Not really; he was just exploring things for no other reason than the joy of figuring things out. It wasn't until much later that his work because practically relevant, in things like nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors, GPS, etc.

The first water-pumping steam engines used a vacuum to pump up water. It's fairly straightforward, but ... you do need to know about vacuums and pressure – somewhat abstract concepts that don't really have any "obvious" practical applications in the same way that practical engineering improvements do.

I bet at least some of the "missing technologies" mentioned in the article weren't invented by the Romans for the same reason.

The industrial revolution happened when it did, at least in part, because knowledge for the sake of knowledge started being widely pursued.

Most importantly, the Roman economy was built on two things that were simply unsustainable: conquest and slavery. Conquest gave the upper classes and state tons of loot to fund the government, capital expenditures, and further conquests. It also gave them tons of slaves, which I’ll expand on. Eventually Rome hit the limits of what it could feasibly conquer and hold - until that point it was in a unsustainable positive feedback loop that made it seem like a wealthier society (in the sense of the size and wealth of the upper classes, magnitude of cultural and prestige building projects) than it was.

Second, slavery was a hugely important part of the Roman economy. Slavery was less sticky than US chattel slavery, so once Rome stopped conquering so much it began to decline (even though people could still enter slavery or slaves could be imported). Then with Christianity it declined even further.

Slavery is what allowed the Roman industrial and manufacturing machine to work. Nobody would voluntarily choose to work in Roman minds considering the extremely dangerous conditions, and similarly the quality of life of people working in urban manufacturing (making clothes) was terrible because many cities were overcrowded (so also dangerous because of disease). Also, the reason the Roman upper class was so large and able to live such a lavish lifestyle was that they had many domestic slaves performing their household tasks, as well as educated slaves helping them with business. This IMO causes us to overestimate the productivity of the Roman economy because really they just had a way a highly unequal distribution of wealth and a way to force people to perform dangerous jobs.

Also, Rome invested in infrastructure in its conquered territories. So their economic growth was driven for a long time by convergence (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_(economics)) as they absorbed and developed poorer areas and created a more stable trading environment. This growth is also unsustainable, and when the empire starting felling apart it caused the economic regression.

Even though some technologies like Roman concrete or some books were lost with the fall of the Roman Empire, most technology really wasn’t. It’s just that without slavery, a unified governing and military force, and a stable trade environment that the economy fell and priorities shifted. It was still just as hard to build big things as before, and big things like churches still got built. Arguably there was even more of a need for an Industrial Revolution because without slaves the economy couldn’t support a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction that it could before.