Hacker News Reader

Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

Dan Carlin is not a professional historian and I've always found this explanation one of those layman, just so stories that is way too pat. I've found, for example, that there are people who know 8 things about China and can confidently tie every single Chinese social phenomena to one of those 8 things. As someone who knows 1000 things about China, many of the explanations are patently against the well accepted consensus (ie: change X didn't happen because China is collective vs the individualized West, it happened because there was a change in tax law in 2017 that altered how accrual accounting worked).

Professional Historians are aware of the 8 things/1000 things divide and are careful to caveat the limits to their knowledge and not get too far over their skis. Professional storytellers have fewer compunctions and can confidently believe and assert things that aren't good history.

View on HN

Like anything else I am certain I am wrong in interesting ways. I can just personally understand the idea that if every need I had was catered to I probably wouldn't spend a lot of time wondering how I could go about innovating. A lot of the brilliance was spent on how they could keep poor people in check, get more slaves, and aquire more power. Hence why a lot of what was going on seemed to deal with exactly those needs. They seemed to spend a lot of time warring, entertaining the poor, and politicing competition to death. But I am also a layman, so I leave space to be wrong.

How would you reconcile

    The Industrial Revolution was the transition from creating goods by hand to using machines. Its start and end are widely debated by scholars, but the period generally spanned from about 1760 to 1840.

and

    It was only after many failed attempts that, in 1807, the slave trade in the British Empire was abolished. However, slaves in the colonies (excluding areas ruled by the East India Company) were not freed until 1838 – and only after slave-owners, rather than the slaves themselves, received compensation.

coupled with the knowledge that the early industrial revolution was very much driven by the mass scaling up of processing the raw materials of the slave trade (cotton, sugar, flax, etc) via power sources, driveshafts, and machines operated by people very much in slave like conditions (not technically slaves but effectively locked into dismal work conditions with no real options for many to leave).

I mean, you somewhat layout the context for me. If slave trade was abolished in England in 1807 I can only assume public sentiment started shifting well before then to cause law changes. Huge chunks of populations with capital and power were becoming against slavery. The increases in material coupled with the societial shift from slavery in certain areas would seem to create conditions where the capital, power structure, social norms, and need for labor saving of a different kind to arise. I don't think slavery needs to be gone for the conditions of the industrial revolution to occur, but I do think a critical mass of society has to reject the idea for it to happen.

My understanding is that even poor Romans would have slaves and that their usage was ubiquitous. Slaves had slaves and the Roman world seemed consumed with always warring to produce even more slaves. I'd hardly say the world only a few generations away from slavery being abolished in major nations is a fair comparison to Rome at even it's most anti-slave, but I am always open to other thoughts on the subject. I am not an expert, but I do feel I have a reasonable understanding of the motivations of human people regardless of era.

Laying out the context as I did rather negates this:

> I was mainly stating that I think the absence of slavery is needed.

The Industrial Revolution began before slavery ended, there was no "absence of slavery" as a prerequisite.

The UK Abolitionists were a relatively small group of independantly wealthy relatively newly rich, rich on the back of wealth from India and the New World (cheap labour and slave labour) and from trade and shops.

Even after the end of direct UK involvement in the trading of slaves and the closing of their slave plantations in British territories the UK continued to supply copper for use in the slave trade [1] and take significant inputs from the North, Central, and South American slave plantations.

There's no clean break where first cheap labour (slavery or close to it) is eliminated and then machines take over.

At best there's a transition period, but as the world about us demonstrates even when automation and labor saving machinery is wiespread slavery and abuse of labor continues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manilla_(money)

Well said. Ever since I started reading Taleb and Harari I have become really skeptical of anything that sounds like a story.

If your theory of some historical development sounds like a nice complete satisfying story with no weird loose ends then it's probably not what happened.

What always gets me is that they had some steam powered toys that would spin around and no one connected the dots that it could be used for something. I agree it is only a factor, but I cannot see how it didn't significantly reduce the motivation for anyone to just think about how work could be done better. They already had a solution and they constantly spent effort to get more of it.

Need a canal dug? Slaves. Need more fields tended to? Slaves. Need to mine more materials? Slaves. Need to manage the growing slave population? Believe it or not, slaves.

I just can't help but draw parallels to now and put myself in their shoes. When I sit down and think about problems I want to solve my mind often drifts to computers, robotics, and code because that is the world I live in and the tools I have available. If I grew up a well to do Roman home and had slaves, was brought up seeing all the problems they solved, and sat down and had a problem I cannot see how my mind would act any different. I would look at my world and the tools I have at hand. If it was a big project It was never the lack of some invention to take care of it. It was simply the number of slaves you needed. And guess what, they sure seemed to have the entrepreneurial spirit when it came to that in spades. What they invested in is a reflection of their thinking. I cannot stete enough how not expert I am at this, but these threads of thinking are not entirely bonkers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com