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Why did it take so long for humans to have the Industrial Revolution?
That's a reader request from the especially loyal Harrison Brookie. First, you might wish to go back and read the MR reviews and debates of Greg Clark's Farewell to Alms,
More generally, extended periods of economic growth require that technologies of defense outweigh technologies of predation. They may also require that the successful defender, at the same time, has good enough technology to predate someone else and accumulate a sizable surplus. Parts of Europe took a good deal from the New World and this may have mattered a good deal.
Building a strong enough state to protect markets from other states is very hard to do; at the same time the built state has to avoid crushing those markets itself. That's a very delicate balance. China had wonderful technology for its time and was the richest part of the world for centuries but never succeeded in this endeavor, not for long at least.
England was fortunate to be an island. Starting in the early seventeenth century, England had many decades of ongoing, steady growth. Later, coal and the steam engine kicked in at just the right time. English political institutions were "good enough" as well and steadily improving, for the most part.
Christianity was important for transmitting an ideology of individual rights and natural law. As McCloskey and Mokyr stress, the Industrial Revolution was in part about ideas.
There are numerous other factors, but putting those ones together -- and no others -- already makes an Industrial Revolution very difficult to achieve. It did happen, it probably would have happened somewhere, sooner or later, but its occurrence was by no means easy to achieve. The Greeks had steam engines, proto-computers, and brilliant philosophers and writers, but still they did not come close to a breakthrough.
One question is how long the Roman Empire would have had to last to generate an Industrial Revolution and don't mention the Eastern Empire smartypants.
If you are asking why the Industrial Revolution did not occur in the Mesozoic age, or other earlier times, genetic factors play a role as well.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 17, 2010 at 07:35 AM in Economics, History | Permalink
Comments
Do we ignore the Enlightenment entirely? Rationalism had nothing to do with our ability to exploit resources effectively?
Posted by: Neal at Mar 17, 2010 7:41:12 AM
I think the answer is "never" wrt the empire.
1. It was just too easy for the well connected to take from those who were creative, or to use the state for their own gains.
2. Also the guild system was extremely successful at keeping new innovations out.
Posted by: Doc Merlin at Mar 17, 2010 8:03:54 AM
You do need a certain amount of scientific knowledge to build a steam engine that generates energy at a viable cost. The Greek engine didn't have a piston, which separates it from future designs, but it also relied on steam to do all the work, like pre-Watt devices. You need to know something about atmospheric pressure to make better use of your fuel. You need a barometer to deduce this "something", which means you need both the scientific method and quality glassware. But glass doesn't have military applications outside of optics at sea; it's really fragile! So this brings us back to the need for order and peace, which are more important than liberty if you want to achieve basic technological advances.
Inequality, the handmaiden of specialisation, helps too.
Posted by: Millian at Mar 17, 2010 8:10:58 AM
The Romans were a slave society, and that availability of underpriced human labor distorted investment away from capital and thus retarded any possible industrial development.
Posted by: Tom T. at Mar 17, 2010 8:20:47 AM
An "industrial revolution" is entirely dependent on concentrated and relatively cheap sources of energy; first coal then oil.
Posted by: DWhite at Mar 17, 2010 8:24:46 AM
Neal: Enlightenment happened too late, the causation would have to go the other way.
Do we have at least some decent if imperfect hypotheses about it? Anything remotely Malthusian-ish or postulating genetic factors (like Clark) is of course too wrong to even talk about.
Posted by: Tomasz Wegrzanowski at Mar 17, 2010 8:37:12 AM
do we ignore the organizational innovation of the joint-stock corporation?
Posted by: nazgulnarsil at Mar 17, 2010 8:52:13 AM
I think that Kingsley Amis's Book The Alteration makes a great alternative history depiction about how the industrial revolution might have been delayed had the reformation not happened. It made me think about the differences within Christianity that led to greater individualism and respect for individual rights. It's obviously not a 'theory', but a good fictionalization.
Posted by: Simon Halliday at Mar 17, 2010 8:53:52 AM
What Millian said. Without Galileo, Newton, and their fellow scientists, the industrial revolution could not have happened.
Posted by: capitalistimperialistpig at Mar 17, 2010 8:58:24 AM
The answer with the Roman's will always be "never", they relied too much on human energy. It was built into their system. Just consider the reliance on masonry. They never used water-powered saw mills. These should have been well within technical limits and lord knows Gaul had enough forests.
Which gets us to a reason that is not emphasized enough in your explication: individual property rights for the common man. Once monarchical limitations were finally imposed (Glorious Revolution, English common law, expanded representative bodies in central and western Europe after the 30 years war, refocusing of thought from the polity of the "King's Two Bodies" to a rational civil, civic centered polity viz Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment) remunerative innovation could speed quickly ahead.
It is always easier to understand the answer a different way: Why did humans go so quickly from horse power to steam power, in the comparitive blink of an eye, after the American and French Revolutions?
Posted by: Matt F at Mar 17, 2010 9:05:59 AM
I propose several key elements:
1. Fixity resulting in transmissability via the printing press. Prior to the printing press nearly all things were forgotten or even worse conveyed in grossly error ridden forms. For a knowledge revolution, one needs actual knowledge. The printing press is a machine that creates more machines resulting directly in our current xray lithographed (printed) circuits, and now, printed organs (organovo.com)
2. Cheap public domain intellectual materials to mine to fill new demand/markets. Several thousand years worth of manuscripts to mine to fill the demand for a growing reading public (fall of Constantinople didn't hurt - curious timing that...)
3. Market concentration leads to larger market share of languages - marginal languages can no longer compete when printers decide what books/languages to sell. "Winner take all" languages gain populations. Countries become larger. Governments become larger. City power declines. Country power increases. Countries bump into one another...
4. Hundred years style war(s) drives military innovation under general stalemate conditions where outcome is novel technology where each side seeks the weapon that will end all war. For example, the drive to propel cannonballs to greater distances drove improvements in smoothness of cannon bores. Once sufficiently precise and sealed, one could replace the cannonball with a piston.
5. shampoo, rinse, repeat
Posted by: da55id at Mar 17, 2010 9:18:15 AM
The only argument that seems convincing to me is Marshal McLuhan's idea that production follows media. The industrial revolution was made possible by the invention of printing press and the subsequent accelerated pace of knowledge. This incidentally explains why in Europe.
In other words the factories literally came out of the miniature model of the printing press.
Why specifically in Britain, say not in Holland, is only a chapter in the book about the print.
Posted by: Ben Atlas at Mar 17, 2010 9:32:07 AM
Two reasons:
1. As Carl Sagan noted in his classic TV series “Cosmos”, the age of Enlightenment played a key role. This is mainly a philosophical issue. There were times in ancient Greece when rational thinking was dominant but then came the mysticism, which ruled for nearly 2000 years. During those 2000 years humanity did not progress much in terms of population numbers, food supply, life span, health, science, industry, etc. And that lasted until Enlightenment came.
2. The ability of certain nations to gain access (by force) to cheap labour and resources. British Empire drew on the resources of India, China, Australia and North America – all taken by force. Also let’s not forget that USA were build by “slave owners who wanted to be free” ;-) So to a great extent Industrial Revolution was done at the expense of the less advantages nations and races.
Posted by: Consumer at Mar 17, 2010 9:47:45 AM
To those who say coal and fossil fuel.
http://reason.com/archives/2009/01/07/chiefs-thieves-and-priests
"One of the things that Marco Polo reported to the amazement of Europe was that those Chinese people are burning rocks. So the Chinese had access to coal already, and that extra energy didn’t make them wealthy."
Posted by: Floccina at Mar 17, 2010 9:48:19 AM
I think a factor is a higher accessible population. "The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market?" Of course Tyler list some factors that allowed the population density to rise.
Posted by: Floccina at Mar 17, 2010 9:52:14 AM
Slavery is the deal breaker with the Romans. They had nice market-friendly law (much, much better than all medieval law until the Salamanca school), long periods of peace and an understanding of things like interest, accounting, commercial loans and the beginnings of shares (you could buy shares in a ship, for example).
But if you have chattel slavery, you are never going to have the incentives to actually put the labour-saving devices you know about (eg steam engines, gear-shafts, crank-shafts etc) into practice. Why would you bother when slaves are so cheap and plentiful because your government is so good at fighting wars and winning?
Posted by: skepticlawyer at Mar 17, 2010 10:03:59 AM
Floccina: did you read the second page of that article?
England's population density and deforestation drove a need for coal.
Posted by: Trevindor at Mar 17, 2010 10:09:08 AM
Don't forget Will. Any culture or society that was going to produce an Industrial Revolution had to want it. They had to believe that gains in productivity and earnings were worth the trade-offs: cultural shifts, a new way of life, a mass movement from agrarian to urban labor by the underclass. An industrial revolution requires the transformation of industry into something entirely new, big cities, high population density and the ability to think and plan on a much larger scale then is necessary in an agrarian society.
This has to be driven by specific needs and values or all the technology and wealth in the world isn't going to make it happen.
Posted by: Tom Noir at Mar 17, 2010 10:19:16 AM
Perhaps the solution is more mundane. What about the invention of accounting? The concept of balancing, and the math, certainly figure into a lot of the equations.
And looking at the books would spur one in certain directions, like increased efficiencies.
Posted by: Paul McMahon at Mar 17, 2010 10:26:43 AM
Didn't James Watt use his patent protection over the steam engine to keep people out for a long time? I heard that guy slowed down progress for quite a long time.
Posted by: Josh Fulton at Mar 17, 2010 10:51:55 AM
Paul,
Modern accounting was invented in Pisa and surrounding cities in the 1200s. A bit too early. So, no, that is not it, although it does not hurt to have it.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Mar 17, 2010 10:52:51 AM
One question is how long the Roman Empire would have had to last to generate an Industrial Revolution and don't mention the Eastern Empire smartypants.
Why shouldn't smartypants mention the Byzantines? That was the rich, learned, most commercial part of the Empire. The idea that Rome fell in the 5th century is a Western delusion.
It's a good question why the IR didn't happen in the immediate neighborhood of Constantinople. There was instability in exactly which provinces were part of the Empire, but Constantinople was more London than London for hundreds of years on end.
Posted by: Bill at Mar 17, 2010 11:07:59 AM
Steven Johnson's entry -- The Invention of Air -- is also well worth reading.
Posted by: glory at Mar 17, 2010 11:11:18 AM
Anyone here read Ellen Meiksin's Woods book The Origins of Capitalism? I'm not an archaeologist or an archivist, and so can't review the relevant evidence myself, but she argued that that capitalism began in the English countryside around the 16th/17th century. The English state was early in establishing the rudiments in the rule of law, and this allowed the nobility to rent their land to tenants. The tenants, wanting to make a profit, tried everything they could to raise yields, and there were a proliferation of agricultural journals(made possible by the printing press) in which innovations in farming were widely shared and copied. The successful tenants expanded the amount of land under their tillage, and the food supply exploded. As well, the tenants found ways to make farm workers more productive, so that there was a huge pool of surplus labor in the countryside. Of course, enclosure also played a role in all of this. Anyway, the penniless peasants started to move to the cities to look for work, the agricultural surplus lead to a rapidly expanding population, and all of these things contributed to the rise of the cottage industries which set the stage for the industrial revolution. It was this prior agricultural capitalism which explains why England and not some other nation in Europe.
Posted by: P at Mar 17, 2010 11:22:47 AM
Regarding ignoring the enlightment, TC doesn't.
"As McCloskey and Mokyr stress, the Industrial Revolution was in part about ideas"
I don't know about McCloskey, but Mokyr book "The Enlightened Economy," is precisely about the effect of enlightenment on the revolution. The book can be found on the "what we've beeen reading" sidebar.
Posted by: Neal at Mar 17, 2010 11:32:15 AM
The Industrial Revolution was all about substituting capital for the increasingly expensive labor. In ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in China through that civilization's entire history, abundant cheap labor was never an issue, and so there was simply not the need to substitute the relatively scarce capital for it.
Posted by: djg at Mar 17, 2010 11:41:57 AM
As others have mentioned information was critical, without decent methods of distributing accurate information it's very hard to sustain a technological revolution.
This doesn't explain it entirely of course, China had developed means of duplicating information, but didn't have a revolution.
What was key in Europe was the fractured political map. Since geography prevented the unification of Europe through military means, Europe was never completely consolidated as China was. A large number of sovereigns competed and had no choice but to adopt innovation or fall behind. A unified and mostly isolated China could afford to take its time and not adopt innovations (same was true of Japan).
A unified China also meant the percentage of people required for soldiering at a given time was lower, making it easier to rely on labor instead of investing in capital.
Posted by: Chris at Mar 17, 2010 12:03:25 PM
The invention of Keynisan economics was clearly the innovation that matters most. Progress really accelerated after "A Treatise on Money" was published in 1930. We are still seeing all teh benefits accrue.
Posted by: Cosmotarian Overlord at Mar 17, 2010 12:09:36 PM
"One of the things that Marco Polo reported to the amazement of Europe was that those Chinese people are burning rocks." Then the Europeans must have forgotten their own history: the Romans had been astonished to find the Britons doing the same.
"Why did humans go so quickly from horse power to steam power, in the comparitive blink of an eye, after the American and French Revolutions?" Those two Revolutions were far too late to matter.
"England's population density and deforestation drove a need for coal." Almost everything commonly repeated about England's deforestation is unhistorical bollocks - see the writings of Oliver Rackham.
Posted by: dearieme at Mar 17, 2010 12:10:49 PM
Case in point on political unification vs division:
A centralized Japan essentially banned gunpowder during the 17th century. This ban probably could have lasted indefinitely if not for its region of competition expanding to include the entire rest of the planet by the 19th century.
This is probably the single best argument against global government.
Posted by: Chris at Mar 17, 2010 12:29:51 PM
They may also require that the successful defender, at the same time, has good enough technology to predate someone else and accumulate a sizable surplus. Parts of Europe took a good deal from the New World and this may have mattered a good deal.
The New World may have been important, but I doubt for this reason. Most of what was taken from there and from asia was not too useful - goods like gold, furs, spices, tea, jewels - luxuries whose procurement would if anything have impeded economic developments that had more long-run potential.
I think the two big effects of the New World were first, new crops - potato, maize, tomato, squash - and second the psychological effect, showing that the future need not be the same as the past.
Posted by: Radford Neal at Mar 17, 2010 12:54:41 PM
"Without Galileo, Newton, and their fellow scientists,"
I think the question is how were men like this allowed to sit around and think. They were unique men, but it seems unlikely there weren't a few others throughout human history.
And thanks to Tyler for getting it right (imho) on Christianity. I have a hard time believing value comes out of conflict whether it is war or antagonism between reason and religion. One may think that the enlightenment happened despite Christianity, but the fact is that the Christians didn't feed very many people to lions.
Posted by: Andrew at Mar 17, 2010 12:57:08 PM
Btw, Peter Drucker notes that Da Vinci was not really an innovator because almost none of his designs ever really saw production.
Posted by: Andrew at Mar 17, 2010 12:58:34 PM
Don't you guys read Adam Smith? The Wealth of Nations explains it. The answer is that Englad had Newton. And that he came after Galileo, and Kepler, and some other people, and couldn't make his theories much earlier.
The Greek, Romans, or Chinese didn't have the technology for an industrial revolution. To make one computing machine (in a lifetime) is very different from building several of them to power an entire industry.
And, by the way, the press and the steam engine came much late to be the cause of the industrial revolution. First machies were mainly powered by men, animals, water or (when it was absent) wind, depending on its size.
Posted by: Marcos at Mar 17, 2010 1:06:12 PM
Andrew - respectfully disagree. Christianity conducted crusades and inquisitions against heretics, killing thousands; also in the fifteenth through late seventeenth centuries burned thousands of witches; not to mention the horrible Thirty Years War which was a war of religion.
Whether you accept Gibbons' thesis or not, it's hard to deny that the rise of Christianity coincided with the decline of civilization for a prolonged period.
Why industrial revolution is really a head-scratcher, but it seems reasonable to look for connections with the other big things happening at the time to the people involved: discovering and settling the New World, the Reformation, lenses and the consequent discoveries in astronomy and physics and decline of religious orthodoxy.
Posted by: Ak Mike at Mar 17, 2010 1:28:06 PM
"To make one computing machine (in a lifetime) is very different from building several of them to power an entire industry."
The computing machines required were humans. Most of the computational power prior to the industrial revolution was locked up in agriculture. With agriculture vastly more productive after the industrial revolution, but the demand for it finite, computational power was freed up for industry. Prior to the industrial revolution, capital was more valuable; afterward, labor became more valuable.
Now we face the situation where our machines are much better at computation than humans and most humans aren't capable of much useful creativity. Capital has become more valuable than labor again.
Posted by: Chris at Mar 17, 2010 1:48:51 PM
I think that in a very general sense, basic science was needed for the industrial revolution. But I think the answer is economic more than anything else. An experienced engineer can appreciate the enormous amount of work that it takes to go from a basic understanding of something to designing something useful. A lot of the time, most of the work isn't revolutionary or amazing at all. It's just something that a dedicated and relatively smart person can figure out if he spends enough time at it. But it's not interesting work to the scientist. You need an economic motivation for developing processes and engines to slightly improve productivity and then keep doing that over and over again so over time you are finally getting a huge improvement in productivity.
So I think the Chinese may have had the science necessary for an industrial revolution (could be iffy, though- who really knows that much today about the science and engineering of early industrial machine and machine-making?), but never had the right economic structure. England did.
Posted by: mpowell at Mar 17, 2010 1:56:04 PM
If you have secure rights to property, you have the incentive and ability to save and invest in even the crudest capital goods. If you don't have have secure property rights, you might save (hoard is the correct term), but you won't invest, and you will probably save much less to boot. The rest, the technological advance necessary for something akin to the 18th and 19th centuries' industrial revolution, is just a matter of time.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Mar 17, 2010 2:44:49 PM
It is that technology was useful for warfare and the divided power structure that led to an arms race, demanding the accumulation of practical technical knowledge, not any difference between defense and predation, which is largely nonexistent, but an appreciation that technology can produce more gains than those of predation, especially when your opponents are poorer than you.
Posted by: Lord at Mar 17, 2010 3:47:36 PM
Banking.
Some say the Crusaders learnt about what is now known as modern banking from the Arab world, and then perfected it in Italy and England. The only way money can be created is by increasing the total supply of bank credit. The only way all (or many) people can (potentially) become richer and richer is continually increasing bank credit. But the quality of credit is what is important... all experiments to increase quantity alone have failed in the past. And if we had more transparency in loan quality and the much maligned securitized assets, it could promote quality in lending.
Once there is good quality capital, all the technology, art, creativity, etc. will flow... But the quality is what is important -- apologies to Milton for his insistence on quantity.
Posted by: kp at Mar 17, 2010 5:27:52 PM
I'm going to say that textbook history is correct on this one and that the Agricultural Revolution was an important precursor. As long as market power was in the hands of the primary producers of raw materials, there was little money to be made in completely reorganizing manufacturing to take advantages of economies of scale.
Note that mining and metallurgy exhibited industrial scale in several places and times in ancient and medieval history, but as a vertically integrated state-controlled enterprise. This is not the industrial revolution.
Posted by: Cyrus at Mar 17, 2010 6:16:28 PM
I see the conflict thesis via Carl Sagan has been brought up (like in all history of ideas discussions on the web). Here is an interesting refutation of it in the form of a book review by an atheist history blogger: http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/10/gods-philosophers-how-medieval-world.html .
Posted by: Matt at Mar 17, 2010 6:59:43 PM
Matt: good catch there. This relates to Ak.Mike's comment, which firmly mounts the old hobby-horse of the conflict theory: the grand dialectic of religion vs science. Honestly, now. As a classicist, when I hear that the rise of Christianity "coincides" with the fall of the Western Empire, my forehead tends to make contact with the desk. This an extremely outmoded notion, much like Edward Gibbons himself. Please read Peter Brown's "The World of Late Antiquity" if you're willing to educate yourself on this subject.
Posted by: Classics owns at Mar 17, 2010 8:16:19 PM
What an utterly pedantic and fatuous question that is exceeded only by the jejune answers posited by most of the commenters on this discussion. The question assumes a technological determinism that betrays a certain naivete.
Posted by: Nik Kondratieff at Mar 17, 2010 10:40:25 PM
So you have no clue, Nik, eh?
Posted by: Tom at Mar 17, 2010 11:24:23 PM
No, No, No, Look specifically at the explosion of mathematics in Italy 1450 onward. It's like Clooney says in Oh Brother, the capability of abstract thought. Of course we know Emperor Zhu Di gave it all to the Pope, as a friendly gesture.Why, because the Chinese are supremely civilized, that is why.
Posted by: Newton Brown at Mar 18, 2010 3:09:13 AM
Trace back the evolution of high volume steel production and you pretty much have the answer.
Until chemistry could figure out the elements in metal and ore and then mix in additives, the production of iron and steel depended on having the right iron ore. And for mass production, the right coal.
At the rise of England as one of the world trading powers, 16th century or so, iron from Swedish ore became available to England which had lots of experience with charcoal and coal, which was good coal for steel production. Then coke was reinvented in Germany early in the 18th century. With mass production of iron, England could develop low pressure steam engines. With refinement of mass production of steel, high pressure steam became possible. Mass production of iron enable railroads, but steel mass production vastly improved the rails allowing increased reliability and speeds.
Iron and steel were produced long ago, but they both required the right combination of local materials; if the iron ore isn't suitable or the trees the wrong type or too few or the coal too contaminated and you didn't know the art well enough to do the right steps, what you produced wasn't worth the effort.
Making steel before then involved days of work starting from iron. The quantities of iron produced was in kilograms, and the steel produced from that was even less because of factors no one really understood. In Asia, the processes were ritualized to the point of religion that required years to master. It isn't the kind of thing a visitor could pick up and take home.
Of course, a synergy occurred between mass production of iron and steel which required steam engines to bring the raw materials together which provided more and better iron and steel for steam engines which drove their improvement.
Iron and steel and steam were some of the technologies that rapidly evolved in the process Clayton Christensen described in The Innovator's Dilemma. Growing demand drives increased production which drives innovation which drives both increased production and demand.
Posted by: mulp at Mar 18, 2010 3:44:13 AM
Classics own,
Ooooh, your moniker proves that you know what you are talking about with respect to the classical
era, obviously. Oooooh, such an authority.
Yes, what happened in terms of the collapse of Roman civilization and economy was a much more
complicated and drawn out affair in Western Europe than Gibbon presented. However, there most
certainly was a collapse, with the peak of real per capita income (and population in Rome) probably
being reached around 300 CE. Indeed, more than one study has argued that this peak of real per
capita income was not achieved again in Western Europe until the onset of the Industrial Revolution
around 1800.
Some of this had to do with the suppression of knowledge coinciding with the intolerance of the
ruling Christians, who came to power not too long after that peak in 300. While the Christians
were occasionally suppressed (generally about twice a century) for not respecting the emperor,
in general Rome was tolerant of a wide variety of religions and made no effort to suppress
philosophy or knowledge. This changed after Theodosius came to power and non-Christian religions
were forbidden (although the Jews managed to hang on in odd corners), and there was active
suppression of Greek philosophy and the destruction of libraries, with the Renaissance substantially
having to do with the rediscovery through the translation of Jews in Spain of Muslim Arabic
translations of Greek works. Of course, the Church did allow for some of Plato's work to be
considered with the neo-Platonist movement, but Aristotle would remain forbidden until Aquinas
achieved a reconciliation with Church doctrine.
In any case, Ak Mike is completely right on the main point regarding Andrew's inane argument.
To a substantial degree the Enlightenment was a response to the horrors of the mass slaughters
of the intra-Christian wars that went on prior to it, with the Thirty Years War alone resulting
in the deaths of something like a third of the population of Germany, even as the boundary
between the Catholic and Protestant zones barely moved. But, who knows, perhaps Andrew agrees
with the Texas Board of Education that kids should study Aquinas and the religious dicatator,
Jean Calvin (who burned his critics at the stake) rather than Thomas Jefferson.
Tom,
Obviously "Nik Kondratieff" thinks that it was due to a long wave, although clearly not of a
Schumpeterian technological innovation sort...
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Mar 18, 2010 2:01:35 PM
Funny, I said nothing about the Enlightenment (or the IR). I agree with Nik that technological determinism is a truly inane view (cf. Jared Diamond's "why would the Agricultural Revolution be a step forward at all in terms of welfare?" thesis). But that's kind of you to conflate my views. What I'm talking about is simply that those who still adhere to Edward Gibbon's thesis (which quite literally includes the claim that "Christians made the Roman character effeminate and weak") are grasping at ideological straws. Speaking of straws, I'm not sure how you managed to straw-man my comment into implying that I somehow cast doubt on the existence of a Western imperial collapse; "there was most certainly a collapse!" Oh, and everybody poops, right?
But your "argument" completely ignores the fact that prior to the rise of the Christian emperors, the Empire approached the brink of collapse in the 3rd century CE for reasons that have nothing to do with your Hollywood-tinged history ("suppression of knowledge"), such as: barbarian invasions, civil wars, disease, severe devaluation of currency, political instability, etc, etc. All of which, by the way, played a role once again in the later collapse of the Western Empire.
But wait, let's ignore that and talk about the Texas Board of Education! Right, those SILLY Christians. Why do we even read historical sources when we have Enlightenment figures like Edward Gibbons to read and interpret them for us?
Posted by: Classics owns at Mar 18, 2010 10:36:06 PM
I don't think any single point of difference stands up:
England had coal: but China did too, earlier
Europe was divided into separate nations: So was India, and South East Asia, and the Muslim world a lot of the time.
England has the English channel (which I think helped a LOT), but so did Japan, and Sri Lanka, and all the South East Asian island countries
Enlightenment: This is just asking the same question again, why there, why then, why not ancient greece
etc.
I think you have to conclude it was the luck to get everything all coinciding at the same place.
AND I'll stick in some extra factors that I don't think anyone has mentioned.
1. Plague hit Northern Europe in the 1600s. Leading to labour shortages (as usual, but this time some people found a substitute).
2. The Normal invasion (1066) and the sinking of the white ship (1120) resulted in England having extremely few hereditary nobles. I seem to remember that at the time of the French revolution, France had 200 000 nobles, England had 200. In almost all countries the nobles had special privileges, you basically couldn't have a business or make a lot of money if you were common. England was forced to allow commoners to legally get rich, they just couldn't function otherwise.
3.No slaves. As usual, Adam Smith pointed this out. Slavery is obviously terrible for slaves, but much less obvious is how terrible it is for slave owners. If you have slaves, you never work hard yourself. Work is for slaves. If you need more work, you need more slaves. For a free man to work and spend capital to make a task easier for a slave is demeaning, for a slave to do so is laziness, and he won't benefit anyway. So no progress. Compare slave owning Southern USA with free Northern USA.
4. The introduction of potatoes and maize and pumpkins etc from the Americas gave a huge agricultural surplus for the time it took for the population to catch up. (Adam Smith again. He was THERE, he saw what was going on.)
5. Trade with the Americas/Indies/China gave rise to a new type of wealth. One that was based on "business" not land ownership and birth. Furthermore this was a high technology industry. You had major powerbrokers and sources of investment capital who owed their position to the latest technology and could see how this directly benefited them. They would probably have eventually been absorbed into the noble classes, but for a while they were different.
6. England and Holland had vast areas of swamp. This could be drained and made into fabulous farmland, but this took technology. So even some of the land holding aristocracy were enormously benefiting from the new technical developments.
7. Property rights. If there is one thing that can destroy our modern society (zombies aside) it would be when ambitious people can more easily get rich through frivolous law suites or government grants than actual business.
Posted by: doctorpat at Mar 18, 2010 10:52:15 PM
