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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

My suspicion is that the Enlightenment's transvaluation of all values to valorize individuals, the material, change, and progress is what was required, excluding material conditions.

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?

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The Ming and Mughal dynasties were both at the precipice of industrialization in the 17th century as was the Song dynasty in the 11th-12th century, but they all collapsed around the period proto-industrialization was achieved.

The Ming Dynasty fell in the mid-1600s due to the political instability of the Manchus migrating southwards and southern Chinese satraps trying to make their own states, Mughal proto-industrialization in the late 1600 and early 1700s collapsed when Maratha raids in the Bengal Subha destroying manufacturing capacity in what's now Orissa and Bihar and Sikh, Jat, and Pakhtun rebellions against the Mughals in Punjab, KPK, and Eastern Afghanistan lead to the collapse of Mughal rule northwest of Delhi, and the Songs collapsed in the 1200s due to Chengiz Khan's conquests.

A similar story happened in Safavid Iran around the same time when Nadir Shah, a nomadic herder and coatmaker from Khorasan, lead his horde to sack both the Mughals and the Safavids.

China, South Asia, Central Asia, the Caucauses, and Iran were basically in a state of collapse in the 1600s-1700s similar to that of the Western Roman Empire, Han Empire, and Gupta Empire in the 4th-6th century, leaving their environs ripe for European intervention.

There is the theory that in China and India labour was too cheap to encourage development of artificial sources of energy.

Perhaps related: Amazon and the size of its firefighting team, and more recently Microsoft and its army of lawyers. Why invest in the advancement of distributed computing when you can just plug holes with armies of engineers, and why invest in computer security when you can flood the media with bullshit and discourage lawsuits with the size of your war chest?

I don't know about India but that's probably not true in China. China was close to industrial revolution twice, once in the Song dynasty, once in the Ming dynasty (oil and natural gas application were documented), both disrupted by regime change from foreign invasions. Comparison with europe at the same time would suggest that the average Chinese enjoyed relatively better living conditions and intuitively would result in more expensive labor. It is unclear whether industrial revolution would start without the invasions, or were the falls of the dynasties inevitable, but the "cheap labor" theory is quite a bit off in quality in comparison to some other proposed theories, and even if present, could be a result of some other underlying cause than being the problem itself (which may seed a myriad of other problems that impede the progress).

>My suspicion is that the Enlightenment's transvaluation of all values to valorize individuals, the material, change, and progress is what was required, excluding material conditions.

The Ottomans couldn't block them from the Silk Road

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