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Comment by tuatoru | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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...

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