Comment by highfrequency | Hacker News Reader

Comment by highfrequency | Hacker News Reader

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It's more complicated than that. Mechanization of the textile industry (initially with hand power, then water power) was underway well before the steam engine's widespread adoption.

Given the massive importance of textiles to Britain's economy and the substantial efficiency gains before the steam engine was used in textile factories, I don't think it's fair to say that the industrial revolution was entirely a coal/heating driven coincidence.

These three non-coal factors were also at play in stimulating the automation of spinning and weaving:

1. High wages relative to capital costs (compare with India, the previous textile leader, where it was uneconomical to invest in machines to reduce human labor)

2. Relatively elastic input supply of cotton from American colonies, and relatively elastic output demand for textiles throughout Europe, India, Africa, Asia and America.

3. A parliamentary system that significantly prioritized commercial interests relative to monarchies like Spain, France, China. This was relatively unique in the world (exceptions include the Dutch Republic and Italian city-states like Venice), and certainly unique among states of Britain's size and defensibility. It's important to remember that kings don't really care whether GDP per capita goes up 1% per year or 0% per year; they care about glory from empire expansion and regime defense (and the latter is often manifestly counter to commercialization and automation, which simultaneously empowers a threatening merchant class and also leads to revolts and instability among the lower class.)

Note that the first two largely stemmed from Britain's increasing domination of world trade, itself founded on a combination of naval hegemony, efficient capital markets, and shipping expertise (many of these inherited from the Dutch legacy following the Glorious Revolution).

Outsized results are almost always caused by a confluence of many interacting factors rather than a single explanation like coal deposits.

There was also a fourth factor, the concentration of a literate and mechanically skilled[1] workforce in the areas that industrialised first, the Midlands.

Making ploughs and other agricultural machinery, cutlery, military arms, and other bits of machinery (axles for carts and carriages for instance).

The exploitation of coal for kinetic energy allowed the industrial revolution to continue, but yes, it certainly got underway well before coal had any contribution of this sort.

I would add that because nearly all of it is invisible, the role of heat in industrial processes is now widely underestimated. Making salt, the precursor for many chemicals as well as having many uses itself; scouring wool, making bricks (way more efficient than using stone), and many more. Coal enabled all of these to be scaled up well beyond the carrying capacity of any country's forests.

Edit: oh, and of course iron smelting!

1. But not particularly well paid.

And a sixth factor, North-West Europe's backwardness in anthropological terms, which enabled labour mobility, moving to where the work was.

Most of Eurasia had a communitarian family form, in which adult sons and their spouses lived with their parents, and were married young, while still economically dependent on them.

In NW Europe the ancient neolocal nuclear family form was still in use. Adult children moved out of the parental home on their own marriage. This meant they could move to wherever there were good work prospects rather than being stuck on the family farm.

In nearly all of Eurasia getting the necessary urban workforces would have been a difficult job.

Do you have any evidence that the nuclear family is “ancient”? I would have expected they the communal form predated it, but you seem to be implying that it was a later development

And yet, the Song dynasty had a proto-industrial revolution, complete with deep mining for salt and natural gas, water powered forges, blast furnaces for steel, and so forth. This would be between 960 - 1279.

China had a labor surplus for much of its history. There were not enough economic opportunities, and ever growing numbers of marginalized young men with varying skills in militia training leading to increasing banditry, uprisings, and so forth.

Yes, the labor surplus was caused by China's family structure. In China women married as teens and started bearing children young.

In Northwest Europe, women married when they and their prospective husbands had saved enough to form a new household, typically 24 to 27 years of age. That is several fewer children per woman.

It was also self-balancing. When population was high, wages decreased, so women married later, so population decreased in the next generation. And vice versa.

In China, childbearing was not regulated by economic conditions so the population was controlled via famine, which tends to bring riots, banditry and so on with it.

It's ... a theory. Close inspection of European history may reveal a system of dowries and a lot of marrying young, large families, and famines (e.g. in Bohemia) even in the 18th century, but I'm quibbling.

North-west Europe. The Seine Basin, the Low countries, and England primarily. Scandinavia and (iirc) Scotland had stem families. Ireland and most of the rest of Europe, including Bohemia, had something closer to the communitarian type, so famines there are unsurprising.

If Emmanuel Todd is to be believed, on this, his primary area of expertise. Like Noam Chomsky he branched out into other topics later.

Of course there were other regulators in China. Female infanticide was a primary one. Sex ratio imbalances also cause trouble though.

Do you have a source you can point me to regarding sex imbalances in china historically. demographics, and its sibling, economic growth are super fascinating subjects.

+ Chinese polygamy, as Marco Polo observed, allowing well-off men to parallelize reproduction

Iron blast furnaces using charcoal go back thousands of years. But hot blast furnaces using coal are much more recent, and the development of a coal fuelled hot blast furnace that could mass produce pig iron without relying on wood, followed by the Bessemer process to mass produce steel from pig iron was crucial to the Industrial Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_blast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process

It isn’t quite as developed as the Bessemer process, but they were producing steel with a precursor, using a cold blast:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_of_th...

I think you're confusing different engines: Newcomen's first practical engine used for pumping water out of mines predates Arkwright's water powered Cromford Mill by over 60 years and Watt's steam engine by 75. Watt's engine allowed other industries to mechanize without water power so that's the cutoff most people use for the industrial revolution, but coal miners were using a less efficient engine for over half a century by that point.

> Outsized results are almost always caused by a confluence of many interacting factors rather than a single explanation like coal deposits.

That's a complete strawman. I wasn't making that argument at all; quite the opposite! It was the confluence of factors that drove England to use coal that are responsible for the industrial revolution like the population boom, England's geography and dependence on pasture rather than more productive agricultural land leading to deforestation and a robust textile industry, and so on.

The first ~40 years of textile manufacturing improvements (from the spinning jenny in the 1760s to the first major steam powered mills in the 1810s and 1820s) was parallel to and largely independent of the steam engine. Concretely, Crompton's spinning mule used hundreds of spindles simultaneously and was driven by water power. This parallel development to the steam engine arc suggests that coal alone can't fully explain the magic of the British industrial revolution.

There was an incentive to innovate and automate, and a political structure that supported it - or at least did not shut it down - that existed independently of Britain's coal deposits and heating needs.

In my view, the deforestation --> coal --> steam engine arc is important, but just one of several factors (other notable factors being global trade dominance founded on the world's strongest navy and most efficient capital markets, as well a parliamentary system consistently advocating for commercial over monarchical interests). Coal deposits and local deforestation near large cities were not unique to Britain (see China, Belgium and Germany).

> After reading Coal - A Human History I’m of the opinion that the industrial revolution was a complete accident of circumstance on a tiny island that didn’t have enough trees to support its population’s energy needs...

This is the part of your initial comment I am responding to. I don't mean to make it a straw man, but I do disagree with the primacy of the deforestation --> coal arc. I think Britain with more trees would still industrialize; on the other hand I think Britain without its trade empire or navy, or Britain run by an all-powerful emperor would not have industrialized first.

Another take on why the trade empire/navy was more primary than deforestation is that the former had a strong causal relationship on the latter. The Royal Navy's shipbuilding was a major cause of deforestation [1], and the growth of international trade was itself a significant driver of London's population growth which in turn caused the forests to be stripped for fuel.

[1] https://legionmagazine.com/the-royal-navys-war-on-trees/

> My point is that the tremendous pre-steam improvements in spinning and weaving indicate that there was an incentive to innovate and automate - and a political structure that supported it - that was independent of Britain's coal deposits and heating needs.

It just sounds like you're trying to make an ideological point.

What? He's citing facts. (True, he hasn't cited any for the proposition that political structure is important. There are some to cite, though. For instance, see China's 12th-century revolution in iron production that was shut down because the politicians didn't like it.)

To me, it sounds like you are so sensitive to a particular axe being ground that you can't hear it when there's objective evidence to support the viewpoint that you're nervous about.

I imagine the person you’re replying to is a Marxist

Your sentence is a refreshing (for these days) example use of their term in a normative, rather than political and/or pejorative sense.

Marxism is really a consequence of the Victorian era, despite Marx and Engles being German. It is the fruit of not just the economic system of the mid-late 19th century but its social values as well. It makes no sense for the prior period of early industrialization.

Also Britain’s political emphasis of commercial activity predates significant industrialization — just look at the enclosure laws and Corn Laws, and compare them to the contemporary extractive view towards commerce in France.

The reason I said it is because they seemed to be implicitly dismissing anything that isn't a historical material factor (i.e. dismissing an ideological explanation that doesn't address the historical material conditions)

Labor costs are irrelevant, as cheap labor also means cheap labor for making machines. It was uneconomical, and caused economic turmoil even in Britain, there were much more arduous tasks that needed to be mechanized such as threshing, which took up a massive amount of labor that could have been freed instead. The Old regime in France was growing steadily. GDP per capita is a stupid metric, GDP per manhour would make much more sense.

> GDP per manhour would make much more sense

And is why labor productivity is used as a comparator.

The question, still completely applicable today, is the trade off between cost of capital and cost of labor. Will your cap ex ultimately cuts your op ex?

Another key invention there is the joint stock limited corporation, developed for shipping voyages but allowing a new mechanism for financing cap ex.

The problem with GDP per capita is that it encourages marginal work. Let's say you can do all you need in four hours. Then you spend another 36 hours on some bullshit of marginal value because hey, GDP got higher. GDP per manhour would discourage such low value work. If it's necessary its price will rise until it gets worth doing.

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