For decades, historians were deeply skeptical of the potential of the ancient world to generate sustained economic growth. Influenced by Moses Finlay and Karl Polanyi, historians saw the ancient and modern worlds as separated by a cultural and economic chasm. Prior to the Industrial Revolution-era leaping of this chasm, individuals supposedly lacked “economic rationality,” did not seek opportunities to maximise profit, and were disinclined to use new technology for economic purposes. This view is no longer credible.That last point needs to be greatly elaborated. The Romans did use new technology for economic gain, but rather selectively. Aqueducts ? Sure. Underfloor heating ? No problem. Steam engines ? Invented... but employed on a minuscule scale !
I believe it's one of the Science of Discworld books (I forget which one) that discusses the idea that technologies only take off if the market is ripe for them. The problem I have is that it's difficult to see what would prevent steam engines from "going viral". The Romans had gearing, they had steam, they had wood and coal for fires. Yes, they also had slaves... but why would that make replacing them with steam engines less appealing ? The Romans seemed to have suffered from a curious trend of inventing ingenious devices which solved very specific problems in clever ways but never fully exploited them. I know the obvious only seems so with hindsight, but in the case of a steam engine it seems very hard to believe that no-one would wan to tinker and see how much further it could be developed.
But at even the Roman empire at its peak in the reign of Marcus Aurelius does not appear to have been on the verge of modern economic growth. Rome lacked some of the crucial characteristics of Britain on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. There was no culture of invention and discovery, no large population of skilled tinkerers or machine builders, and no evidence of labour scarcity that might have driven the invention of labour-saving inventions.Necessity may be the mother of invention, but curiosity is not easy to suppress. Not having a pressing need for a steam engine didn't stop Heron of Alexandria from inventing one, so what stopped it from taking over the world ?
First, there those who tend to think that market expansion is sufficient for sustained economic growth. They will be inclined to favourably quote Adam Smith from his lectures on jurisprudence that “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice”. Many libertarian-learning economists are in this category but few active economic historians.
Second, there are those who argue that colonial empires or natural resources like coal were crucial for modern economic growth. Pop versions are common among many historians and sociologists but this position has little support among economic historians.
Third, there are those who argue that ultimately only innovation can explain the transition to modern economic growth. This is the position of the majority of economic historians. However, this third group is divided between those who seek to explain the increase in innovation in purely economic terms and those who see this as an impossible task and argue that the answer has to be sought elsewhere, perhaps in something that can be broadly defined as culture.
The idea that simple economics could explain why innovators developed labour-saving machinery like the spinning jenny in 18th century England (but not in France or India) is advanced by Bob Allen. It is perhaps the dominant view in economic history at the moment. But it has come under criticism recently as the evidence for a high-wage economy in 18th century England appears weaker than was previously supposed (see the work of Judy Stephenson).I'd have to agree with that last paragraph. Reducing everything to economics is genuinely fascinating (and for me a new perspective) but that can't be all there is to it. My job would be utterly impossible without some pretty advanced tech, but God knows I don't do it for the money, let alone for the sake of advancing economic growth.
Also, I have to say I love the "shards per capita" as an estimate of economics. Perhaps we could have "henges per capita" for the Celtic societies.
https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/could-rome-have-had-an-industrial-revolution-4126717370a2
This is an enormously fun and compelling read -- and not just the article, I read the sample chapters available for Kingdom of the Wicked, by Helen Dale at Amazon and greatly enjoyed those as well.
ReplyDeleteRoman empire was based on the richest. So the economy as well. Modern capitalism is based on mass production for the masses. It is completely different paradigm. It is not the Atlases unchained who built capitalism. It is a mass consumer.
ReplyDeleteHaven’t read the article yet but I’ll pipe up first and say steam engines that are actually capable of doing anything useful - more, are so much worth using that they can pay for all the labour of cutting wood and shlepping water and so on - are no easy proposition. Heron of Alexandria’s “engine” definitely doesn’t qualify. Also, what will it be made of? The costs of reliable metal components directly affect the risks people will subject them to.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there’s a certain inventive ferment going on in 17th and 18th century Europe that tends to find applications for ideas that would otherwise just stay as curiosities. That ferment thrives on constant competition between powers that have a lot of surplus. Both constant low-level war and capitalism (as a form of continuous economic warfare between companies) lend a nervous urgency to invention that a single dominant empire with a well-regulated food supply lacks.
Have now read the article and it is fascinating but I find the questions over-determined. Specifically, I find them overly determined to find an explanation for a phenomenon of historical hindsight.
ReplyDeleteTl:dr - I reckon some sort of industrial quickening could have happened at many times in history - in fact, little ones have happened, but they don't look just like that "revolutionary" event we've been told about, so we tend to miss them. And the conditions to make the Industrial Revolution we know and love were many and complexly tangled. And we tend to hold an exaggerated view of the importance of The Industrial Revolution anyway. It's all tied up with our idea of the Superiority of the West, which BTW looks like it's about to come crashing down.
Long version:
We all know from school that Britain ruled the waves and a quarter of the world in 1900 and that it did so by inventing the industrial revolution around 1750 (right?), so what's the exceptional condition in Britain that can explain a supposedly unique industrial animating spirit? Why the Spinning Jenny here, not there? And the Steam Engine and Humphry Davy and it's tempting to go back through the Royal Society and School of Night and say "look, Englishmen have always been clever coves."
But Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries was full of clever and resourceful Dutch, French and Italian people inventing stuff and it wasn't at all obvious until after the 7 years' war that Britain would come out on top. The Netherlands had just as much of an industrialized society in 1600 as the Brits had in 1780 - they just used wind power instead of coal. And before that the Italians, and the Arabs, and the Romans, and the Chinese.
To take the Spinning Jenny in particular, its revolutionary potential depends on several things:
1. a market for cheaper cotton clothes (including aethetic/market preference for cotton over tanned leather, felt, wool or flax - this came to Britain from India, via the East India Company, which brought in finished clothes, bolts of cloth and colourful printing techniques, which were copied, expanded and forced at musket point back onto Indians, see "the Calico Craze" of the 17th century)
2. a steady supply of cheap cotton fibres (that means slavery, first in India, then Egypt, then Louisiana)
3. large-scale shipping, to move the cotton cheaply from its tropical growing zone to processing centers
4. a pool of cheap, mobile and expendable labourers, which can be imprisoned in dark Satanic mills and experimented on at will, until industrial workers are refined out of it
5. sufficient people with the mobile wealth (coin, fiat currency) to demand a sufficient quantity of product to make the whole thing worthwhile. This is complicated by their needing to be sufficiently concentrated to make distribution practicable.
If any of these things is missing, what you have is a delightful toy rather than the makings of a novel world economic condition.
So why would a Spinning Jenny be more welcome in Britain than in France or the Netherlands?
1. Colonialism - the British had worked hard to disenfranchise Indian weavers over the previous 40 years and would redouble and -triple their efforts every decade once the machine was available. Through out backwards-pointing telescope it looks like the Jenny would inevitably spawn ever greater automated machines to expand the trade but really, stuff like the Louisiana Purchase and the Royal Navy defending the Atlantic slave trade were necessary to make those machines pay for themselves.
2. War - in particular the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Spanish Succession, Austrian Succession and 7 Years' War slowly, uncertainly put Britain in the military lead on the seas and cleared France and the Netherlands out of the garment-producing trade in India. Change a couple of key battles and alliances, and we'd be talking about Dutch business acumen and ingenuity (and praising Nieuw Amsterdam as their World Capital) or the inevitability of French gloire and connaissance.
ReplyDelete....my bigger question is, why didn't the Mughals defend their textile industries and investigate these red-haired barbarian pirates? Maybe because they looked so unimpressive, once they got off their ships, until it was too late - but the question suffers from the same mistakes in thinking as "why was England exceptionally suited to having an Industrial Revolution?" I don't think Mughal princes could've looked at their low-caste weavers and seen the trajectory of history pulling away from them. I don't even think Robert Clive really could've looked at the cotton shipping industry and thought "one day this will make my country rich." Instead, I bet the whole process is improvised step by step, with luck playing a huge role, and if anyone sees successfully a single year into the future, they count themselves amazingly wise.
Richard G I think part of the answer to the bigger question is that, from the top of any entity, the people at the bottom look unimportant. They're "just" the serfs who make clothes, handle support queries, whatever; the problem is that until they stop doing what they're doing, you don't find out what they're holding in place.
ReplyDeleteWhen it's purely internal and you can keep the low-caste doing what they're doing were it not for greed, you get deposed rulers and political revolutions. When there's an external force, you can see your whole society collapse when millions of small legs are taken away from the edifice.
Interesting stuff. And yet, I can't help feeling that the answer still eludes discovery.
ReplyDeleteGranted, a very specific machine like a spinning jenny may require equally specific circumstances in which to flourish. But something more generic like a steam engine ? I mean the most generic type possible, that simply converts steam into any form of useful work. I find it very difficult to imagine any sort of mind that could create such a device and yet not want to experiment further and see how far it could go. First, surely such a creative mind wouldn't stop there, out of sheer curiosity if nothing else. Second, because the economic applications of something so generic are obvious and applicable to so many situations.
Rhys Taylor I think the answer to that question lies in pure economics; at core, a slave or an animal is a mechanism for converting cheap foodstuffs into useful work. A steam engine a way to convert a combustible fuel into useful work, with steam as the intermediary.
ReplyDeleteIn a warm climate (such as Greece or Southern Italy), the slave or animal basically just needs food and water to function. The steam engine needs fuel and water to function. The economic question is then "what's cheaper - burnable fuels for the steam engine, or edible fuels for the slave or animal"? I posit that in a Mediterranean slave-owning society, the fuel cost of the steam engine never made it to cheap enough to replace slaves and animals (who effectively need edible fuel).
so... the urge to industrialise requires a certain stability and scale of market. And steam engines for transport by land or sea require a whole infrastructure around them - on land, roads, fuel depots and water tanks/towers. At sea regular coaling stations, because a ship that can’t go is a deathtrap.
ReplyDeleteI’m looking into the latter case right now and the economic imperatives are fascinating. It so happens global steam sea power coincided with the equally global British Empire and they made their network of coaling stations work for commerce and the navy (and sold coal to other countries’ fleets too)... because they had a more or less paramilitary merchant navy that could share resources with the actual military. Because colonialism is a state of commercial war with the rest of the world.
Simon Farnsworth In the story setting Dale locates her Roman Industrial Revolution in the early and mid-2nd century BCE, before the large-scale influx of slaves from the conquests of Greece, Carthage, and Gaul. The Middle Republic provides a window in which, she argues, it is plausible to imagine a machine-based culture taking root.
ReplyDeleteHer Roman industrial revolution also hinges on the survival of Archimedes at the siege of Syracuse.
I have to agree that it is hard to imagine the creative mind which produced the steam engine wouldn't want to tinker with it, push its limits, see exactly what it might be capable of.
Well, it is not as though steam-power infrastructure preceded the steam engine, infrastructure was created in parallel to the use and application of steam power as it was being implemented.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Black there are some places where you get tight feedback loops like that - the steam locomotive was first used at mines where coal and metals were extracted to support... steam locomotives (and other kinds of steam engines, of course). But elsewhere the infrastructure was developed for other uses and just adapted to serving the machine age.
ReplyDeleteThe main market for engines was cotton processing, which depended on sailing ships, to bring together raw cotton, spinners, weavers and buyers on a scale that rewarded industrialization. And the sailing ship infrastructure was started for other purposes (war, luxuries markets, ready-made Indian cloth).
The idea that if you build it, then uses will come is a very recent one (probably one made possible by the industrial revolution and its massive expansion of capabilities and problem spaces). It definitely doesn't match the historical case of the development of industrial steam power. Markets, means of production and distribution for industrial goods were all in place - being competed over - before some bright spark thought to apply steam and get a competitive edge.
I think I've been misunderstood here. My point is not about whether it would be economically sensible to start a steam industrial complex in ancient Rome, but why no-one appears to have even tried to push the technology further. I don't think reducing humans to economic units is sensible in terms of the creative arts. Or to put it another way, if I was doing this job for money I'd have gone mad by now...
ReplyDeleteSo, let me try and rephrase the question. What prevented anyone from even trying any experiments to improve the first steam engine ? What stifled raw curiosity ?
Rhys Taylor we don’t know that they didn’t try, we only know they didn’t succeed.
ReplyDelete.....this is one of those history questions that tend not to yield archives - if the inventor is not already famous or the failure is other than conspicuous, then history forgets. Babbage’s difference engine is a footnote today even though he was famous and the engine relates to a super sexy topic.
...started thinking "well it wouldn't have to be a piston engine, Heron's spinning sphere was pretty much a kind of turbine"
ReplyDeleteen.wikipedia.org - Taqi ad-Din Muhammad ibn Ma'ruf - Wikipedia
1550s - part of the general Islamic science fascination with water pressure for use in fountains. Turns out there's steady tinkering in Europe from 1600 or so.
That stiff doesn't explain why the Romans or Chinese didn't make steam-powered devices but it's interesting as an indication of what might've been possible.
Edit: This was in response to Richard G -- and since I am sometimes terribly slow in editing/composing I missed your rephrase of the question Rhys Taylor.
ReplyDeleteIn the States cotton production was restricted to the South for obvious reasons, and there, pretty much exactly as you describe (once steam locomotives became common) you had very limited rail lines mainly leading to ports and harbors. The South largely relied on ships and barges to bring their product to market, utilizing the Mississippi, Gulf waterways, and Eastern seaboard ports.
Agreed, without question market and trade and transportation networks predate the industrial revolution -- I don't think anyone would dispute that, however the means and methods of the manufacturing North, and the Plantation (slave owning) South always were quite different.
I don't believe I mentioned or even alluded to "if you build it they will come."
Infrastructure building does move in parallel with market needs/growth, driven by emerging technologies.
Rail lines rapidly proliferated across the Northern states as a superior means of moving goods and people and these networks were quite advanced by the time of the American Civil War -- this is one of the reasons the South lost the war as they could not match the speed with which troops could be moved and staged prior to major engagements.
Other case examples of parallel infrastructure building include the establishment of airports and the parallel emergence of the air-freight industry; the overnight emergence and proliferation of hotels, gas station/truck stop plazas, the associated emergence of the summer vacation road-trip culture, all happening in parallel with the creation of the US interstate highway system. This same era also saw population shifts as some towns dried up and died for lack of highway access and entirely new communities grew around access points.
There is a specific case (which may be unique) in Chicago where the establishment of the electrical power grid followed the spread of commuter rail lines -- the all electric inter-linked elevated and subway train networks. ComEd built their booster generator stations along the rail lines because they were a dedicated customer.
Sorry, William Black, my allusion to "if you build it" was really intended as a response to Rhys's question about people of the past apparently not being curious about the power of steam. Sorry for any confusion there.
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