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Why the Industrial Revolution Didn’t Happen in China

• garagemc2 10y ago
  As a follow on, one could ask the question: what where the circumstances that led to China being unified and Europe not. Something to do with culture? Something to do with population levels? Something to do with the crops being grown?
  • CalChris 10y ago
    The Roman Empire was a unification of sorts. 27 BC to 476 AD in the west and 1453 AD in the east.
    • ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
      That overlooks the fact that the actual Western Empire was pretty small towards the end, and that Byzantine power really declined significantly after both the Arab conquests and esp after the later highpoint of Basil II.The territory they "unified" was more than often small rather than large.
  • ianai 10y ago
    I think it really just takes one emperor winning and no rebellions that won.
  • girzel 10y ago
    One "explanation" you hear a lot is geography. China's central plain is... a plain. It's easy to conquer and hold a plain. Europe has got mountains in the middle, plus various odd bodies of water getting in the way. That makes it much more difficult (given ancient/medieval modes of transport and warfare) to unify politically. Hence the conditions of perpetual competition that the article mentions. China has mountains around the edges, and had a hell of a time conquering the little kingdoms that were in them. In most cases, the best they managed was tribute, and never really established real administrative control.
    • ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
      Xinjiang interestingly wasn't conquered until the 17th century, I think?
      • seanmcdirmid 10y ago
        China's borders fluctuated a lot over the last 2000 years. Parts of Northern Xinjiang were part of the Han (2nd) dynasty.
        • ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
          Which seems to be the justification for claiming large parts of territory for the PRC.
          • seanmcdirmid 10y ago
            The Tibetan Empire used to control large parts of Xinjiang and western China, but you don't see the Dalai Lama making any claims :). There are very valid reasons for China wanting that territory in their country (security, resources, etc...) and its not like the west + Russia were playing a "Great Game" there just a century ago. China gets the territory because they took it and were able to hold it, plain and simple, it doesn't need a flaky moralistic reason.
            • notahacker 10y ago
              > The Tibetan Empire used to control large parts of Xinjiang and western China, but you don't see the Dalai Lama making any claims :) Many Tibetan exiles are rather fond of "minority in our own homeland" claims which are true only if you define the homeland as covering areas not ruled over by Tibetans for centuries though :)
            • ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
              "There are very valid reasons for China wanting that territory in their country" Or so the Chinese say. One person's security buffer is another person's colonization.
  • zby 10y ago
    One explanation could be the big rivers and reliance on dams, dikes and irrigation.
  • lordnacho 10y ago
    IIRC from Jared Diamond, China is a huge flat field with a couple of rivers to help navigate. Europe, especially preindustrial, was forests and Alps and Pyrenees. A lot of trees in Germany. Italy is hilly. Also, China is unified by language. At least the written kind that lets you run a bureaucracy. The med had a bunch, Latin, Greek and Arabic, and was multiple "countries" for a good long time. About the crops being grown, there's ideas about the difference between rice and the middle eastern crops. Something to do with the fact that rice requires constant attention whereas med crops are intensive only during harvest. Not too familiar with that line of thought.
  • dorfsmay 10y ago
    "Among Celtic and Germanic peoples, the predominant custom during ancient times seems to have been to divide the land in equal parts for each of the sons." (1) Which also applied to countries and why Western Europe kept going from a unified empire to a bunch of countries. The last time this happen was in 843 "When Louis the Pious died in 840, his eldest son, Lothair I, claimed overlordship over the whole of his father's kingdom .../... Lothair's brother Louis the German and his half-brother Charles the Bald refused to acknowledge Lothair's suzerainty and went to war against him. .../... after which Lothair became willing to negotiate a settlement." (2). 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_inheritance_systems#The_evolution_of_inheritance_practices_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_inheritance_systems... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Verdun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Verdun
  • stewbrew 10y ago
    I don't know much about Chinese history but it seems to me that some sort of China as a unified entity existed for 1000s of years. In Europe on the other hand, borders were much more combated due to expansions of this or that empire (Rome, Turkey, France, Germany etc.) E.g. modern Germany wasn't unified as a nation until after the Napoleon wars in the 19th century. In that sense, the EU is a rather courageous project of countries that were enemies not so long ago.
    • narutouzumaki 10y ago
      The idea that China has always more or less been a unified entity over the ages is at least imprecise, if not completely wrong and propagated due to various reasons by the present day Communist party, but also any people that have a vested interest in China appearing unified and its people considered as one, united. If you check out the Wikipedia article about Chinese history as a starting point, you will see that there have been many periods in which 'China' does not exist. Instead, there were several kingdoms, many different states, or there was only a single state but one could definitely put forth an argument that 'China' is not a direct descendant of that ancient entity. Granted, the extent of fractionalisation regarding both time and geography might be less than in Europe, but it is far from some imagined 'continuued' existence of a Han Chinese state. If you include places like Tibet, Guangdong, Taiwan, Manchuria and Xinjiang in this debate, this rings even truer.
  • h4nkoslo 10y ago
    bloodyshovel.wordpress.com is pretty excellent on this and related issues.
  • h4nkoslo 10y ago
    To describe China as "unified" ignores their dozens of civil wars and conquests by external groups. They kind of have an at best metastable "tough shell / gooey center" dynamic, and I would not be surprised if their proportional deaths by strife were greater than the European number over most timeframes.
    • dredmorbius 10y ago
      Europe was settled and civilised relatively lately (at least by h. sapiens), and saw constant assault from various quarters. The critical region was the Mediterranian, which saw the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Cretian and Minoan civilisations, the maritime culture of the Phoenecians (and perhaps an earlier one, I'm a tad rusty), Greece, Macedonia, Persia, the Romans, Gauls, Huns, Carthage, Moors, Norsemen / Normans, Anglos and Saxons, etc., etc. There was no cultural or linguistic unity among most of those. European territory made external travel (around the coastline) quite easy (good for invaders, hard for defenders to move to where the attackers are). China's geography had a much smaller coastline (relative to landmass), and a far superior interior river network, augmented early (~1,000 BCE IIRC) with manmade canals, making internal movement of forces far easier. China also wasn't surrounded by capable enemies -- India was the nearest significant civilisation. The Mongols managed to invade, yes, but they were a fluke and also managed to occupy nearly all the Eurasian landmass, from the Pacific to central Europe and India. (The Mughal Empire was the result of Mongol invaders of India.) China did see internal strife, but those splits resolved with a resumption of the previous Chinese bureaucracy rather than a replacement of it, as seemed more typical of Europe.
  • namlem 10y ago
    Geographic reasons aside, there is the cultural factor of the Mandate of Heaven, which spread throughout China in its early days. The Mandate held that Heaven wants things to be a certain way, culturally, aesthetically, etc., and this is how everyone should be. This created a sort of religious unity over a large geographical area where maintaining certain cultural practices was considered to be a necessity. As a result, when kingdoms fragmented or were conquered by other peoples, their cultures didn't change much and they continued to be similar to one another, making future reunification much easier.
    • khuey 10y ago
      The West had divine right and the Catholic Church. The pope literally crowned kings in the Holy Roman Empire for hundreds of years.
      • PeterisP 10y ago
        However, the principle of splitting the inheritance (including huge tracts of land) among sons is a big cultural difference that makes countries more fragmented.
  • bane 10y ago
    China's unification is a relatively "recent" phenomenon. Even the area we might notionally think of as "China" historically (maybe the Qin?) was quite small. There have been literally dozens of states within the boundaries of what we today call "China", and which follow some kind of historic thread of connection. You'll notice on maps like this one [1] that only some of the parts of "China" are colored in throughout history. Well, what about the uncolored parts? People lived there too, and organized themselves into groups with governments and so on. We don't bother with them though because some modern government just washes all of them away into the dustbin of history. In a similar fashion, most people don't consider the Eastern Roman empire "Rome" after the fall of the Western Empire. But it was no more or less "Rome" than say, the Eastern Jin was. Even today, China isn't unified, Taiwan operates as an independent entity. 1 - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Territories_of_Dynasties_in_China.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Territor...
  • jernfrost 10y ago
    I you look at world geography you can see that large tracts of plains seem to support large empires. E.g. consider the Russian Empire, the Mongolia and various Arab empires. They also support strong central governments. In contrast Europe has a lot of rivers, mountains and forrest dividing the lands naturally. E.g. you can see this replay itself at every level, e.g. within Scandinavia, flat Denmark had a stronger central government than Sweden early on. While e.g. my home country Norway full of fjords, rivers and forests always had very weak central power. Nobody could easily hold such a country. I think the good part of that though is that such a situation foster democracy. These large plain countries always seem to end up strong but autocratic. I don't think there is any accident that Russia lagged behind the rest of Europe in freedom and development of democracy. Switzerland is another example of a mountain country with strong democracy traditions and also historically very hard to keep control over by central powers. Now China does of course have lots of maintains as well, but it matters how they are distributed. They still got quite large plains. I think there was a simulation ran, which simulated the creation of empires just based on geography and China was far more likely to produce empire's with its geography than Europe.
  • woodandsteel 10y ago
    I have read that one important factor that kept Europe fragmented was England. Thanks to the English channel, it is very difficult to invade. However, it could be if some country took over the whole of Europe. The English realized this, so whenever some country like Spain or France threatened to conquer the rest of Europe, England would put its military strength on the other side to prevent this from happening.
• pastProlog 10y ago
  One reason the Industrial Revolution happened in northern England is manor lords began seizing the land that belonged in common to the peasants and enclosing it. Newly impoverished peasants would then become cheap labor for industrial factories. This is similar to what Deng Xiaoping and his successors did in China over the past few decades.
  • yuhong 10y ago
    What is also fun is what Richard Duncan is calling "creditism", which technically actually started with Japan beating US. Before this there was the gold standard.
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    The Enclosure acts and Poor Laws. Discussed in Smith. Possibly also Toynbe's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution, though I'd need to confirm.
• wojcech 10y ago
  "Why the West rules for now" has an interesting take on this
• jostmey 10y ago
  If I understand the historian's viewpoint, the industrial revolution happened in Europe because it wasn't too dogmatic. I wonder if research today has become too dogmatic -- most big labs are run by older professors pushing their ideas onto the next generation.
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  I think this theory "fits the facts" as we know them but for me it fails for me on South America. South America was much more like early Europe in that it has both a diversity of groups, geographic features that make it hard to conquer, and competition. So what was missing that left the empire of Brazil falling behind when Europe was racing ahead?
  • metafunctor 10y ago
    This is an interesting question. For some reason, the European scientific culture to question everything and preferring “useful knowledge” apparently did not transfer to Brazil with the Portugese. Here's an excerpt from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, discussing education in Brazil which I think is relevant: http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education
    • rmk 10y ago
      Thanks for that excerpt. It was an entertaining read!
      • Animats 10y ago
        I remember that section from decades ago, mostly because of Feynman writing: “When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called "triboluminescence.'". Reading that, I thought "could it be lasing?". A laser is two parallel mirrors around a medium with electrons in an excited state. Squeezing a crystal will produce electrical energy by piezoelectricity. Crushing a crystal will produce parallel planes, at least momentarily. So the preconditions for lasing exist. This is still an open question today. Lasing of crystals under pressure may have been observed in some exotic materials.[1] But it doesn't seem to be the main light-emission mechanism in triboluminescence. [1] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002ApPhL..81..460R http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002ApPhL..81..460R
        • 10y ago
• helloworld 10y ago
  Amid all the gloomy U.S. Presidential campaign rhetoric, this made me smile: There's a debate about the extent to which everything that can be invented has been invented. Have we picked all the low hanging fruit, can we continue to grow the way we did? I take a very optimistic view. I think if you want to summarize the future of technology, the short summary is, "You ain’t seen nothing yet."
• namlem 10y ago
  IMO, the author is being unfairly generous to the intentions of Europeans. He has it right when he says it's about competition, but then he goes on to credit Europeans for being more interested in progress and general welfare than the Chinese. That interest in progress and public welfare did eventually show up in the 19th century, but until then I'd say it was more about competition for money and power. The elites of the European nation states simply wanted anything that would give them a leg up on their neighbors. Anything that could either benefit their military or create a trade surplus was especially prized.
  • applecore 10y ago
    The Enlightenment has its roots in Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The enormous progress of American capitalism in the 19th century sprang out of the preceding European intellectual movement.
• tomohawk 10y ago
  "The first of the unprovable premises on which science has been based is the belief that the world is real and the human mind is capable of knowing its real nature. The second and best-known postulate underlying the structure of scientific knowledge is that of cause and effect. The third basic scientific premise is that nature is unified."[1] The above describes the Christian world view which was prevalent in Europe. 1. Henry M. Morris, Biblical Basis for Modern Science (Baker, 1991), p. 30.
  • Chinjut 10y ago
    This is a distinctively white Christian thing? Surely there have been, since ancient times, people in every corner of the world who believe the world is real (whatever it amounts to to believe this as opposed to not believing it) and recognize cause and effect (again, I can't even fathom what it would amount to to be a civilization which did not acknowledge cause and effect). ETA: Looked up Henry M. Morris. Ah; he's a young Earth creationist, and "the father of modern creation science". I see.
    • noiv 10y ago
      If you get into the quantum realm cause and effect start to get really blurry. Nevertheless quantum theroy is an exact description of nature. Maybe cause and effect is just a very good model of our daily experienced macro world and therefore hardcoded in our brains.
    • tomohawk 10y ago
      You seem to think that bringing race into this is somehow acceptable. It's not. If you have something specific against the quote other than innuendo, I'm sure there are less offensive ways to make your point. Looking at other world views prevalent at the time, the metaphysical was inextricably tied up in the physical. Christianity asserts that the world is real, and that it is worth studying.
      • tpeo 10y ago
        You mean your particular sect of christianity. Christian Gnosticism and Catharism are just two historical christian sects who denied the reality of sense-perception, and who were purged for that. Not to mention christian mysticism, specially that of Meister Eckhart, or Spinozism, or any Neoplantonist interpretation of christian tradition. Christianity isn't a single theological or even metaphysical tradition, but a multitude of ones pinned to a more or less single oral tradition embodied in the bible. Specially, christianism doesn't entail physicalism. Furthermore, I don't see what's exceptional about "the world" being "real". Even the Eleatics and the Neoplatonists would've agreed to that, granted that "the world" be their "One", even though they asserted that sense-perception is illusory. If these words are taken in their most general sense, then this proposition becomes a platitude. You might as well say that "whatever is, is". And no one has ever seriously argued that nothing exists (Gorgias of Leontini did only in jest).
• Certhas 10y ago
  I have yet to read all of it, but I have liked what I have read of the following overview article: Why did the Industrial Revolution Start in Britain? https://orbi.ulg.ac.be/bitstream/2268/188592/1/Why%20Did%20the%20Industrial%20Revolution%20Start%20in%20Britain.pdf https://orbi.ulg.ac.be/bitstream/2268/188592/1/Why%20Did%20t... It actually discusses several diverging schools of thought.
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    Including Mokyr's earlier work. He's been tackling this since the 1970s.
• maceo 10y ago
  This article ignores decades of scholarship about the roots of the industrial revolution and capitalism. The short answer is that the Europeans (maybe for some of the reasons given in this article), were greedier than the Chinese. It's likely that the Chinese empire reached the New World before Columbus. http://www.economist.com/node/5381851 http://www.economist.com/node/5381851. But the thought of enslaving an entire population and stealing all their natural resources didn't even occur to the Chinese explorers. Whereas the Chinese expeditions were financed by the empire, the Europeans expeditions were financed by debt, so the men needed to arrive on land and quickly acquire wealth for themselves at all costs, or else they would return to Europe broke or never return at all. And this led them to commit the horrendous acts in the New World we know so much about. Western Europe, now full of gold and silver stolen from the New World had levels of wealth it had never experienced. This led to increased demands for certain goods (like English wool), which forced the population off of the land and into urban centers, thus creating the landless working class. This process was called The Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure. An urban, landless working class, was a necessary condition for the industrial revolution. The extraordinary wealth ready to be invested in industry, a product of colonialism and the slave trade, was another necessary condition for the industrial revolution.
  • Spooky23 10y ago
    That's an equally inadequate summary of some revisionist takeaways. Fundamentally, the Chinese were in a box. Japan was in isolation, and surrounding countries were no threat to the kingdom. China's problems were all internal, which made looking beyond their boundaries for solutions counterproductive.
  • briholt 10y ago
    This comment reflects a worrying trend I keep seeing, which I'll summarize as: the answer to all history is that Europeans are evil. Whatever the question or the circumstance or the evidence, we have to contort them to confirm our pre-determined narrative that Europeans are evil. This, of course, is nonsense. The Chinese were equally as greedy as everyone else at the time. The idea that China didn't capitalize on its expeditions (to any location) for humanitarian reasons is patently absurd and easily disproven. It begs the obvious question - why did they finance expeditions if not for greed? Were the Chinese the pre-TV model for Star Trek - boldly exploring the seas for the benefit of all mankind? Get real. See Lim Hong[1], the 16th century Chinese pirate who ruthlessly slaughtered half of Southeast Asia. This comment reflects a highly selective and ethnically targeted historical ignorance and misattribution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lim_Hong_(pirate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lim_Hong_(pirate)
• reasonattlm 10y ago
  It has been argued that a big part of the picture leading up to the industrial revolution is concurrent growth in life expectancy and wealth. The former and the latter both drive one another, and the effect of small increases compounds over time to generate sufficient capital and interest for technological progress. http://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html http://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html "During the 17th and 18th century the English economy underwent a dramatic transformation: its capacity to feed and increasing population increased impressively. ... Perhaps for the first time in the history of any country other than a land of recent settlement, rapid population growth took place concurrently with rising living standands. ... The notion of life expectancy provides the most important tool to examine the phenomenon of mortality, taking into account the age structure of the population. Life expectancy at age x is the average number of years that a person of age x will still survive at a given date. The most commonly used indicator is e(0), life expectancy at birth (or at age 0), but sometimes other statistics like e(1), e(5), e(20), e(50), are also tabulated. Their main advantage is that they capture age-specific mortality profiles: for instance, an increase in mortality concentrated in the age-group between 20-25 (due, for instance, to a long war) would affect e(0) but not e(30) because the probability of survival, given that a person is already 30, does not change. Decisions about future capital and consumption are not taken by the agent when he is born but, rather, when he is twenty or twenty five years old. Therefore, the relevant survivial profile for considering the influence of mortality over investment choices is given by adult life expectancy. In fact, making the distinction between e(0) and adult life expectancy is expecially important for our problem because adult mortality behaves in a completely different way from infant and child mortality in the first half of the 18th century: adult mortality rates decreased very sharply from the end of the 17th century, while infant and childhood mortality rates were unusually high between 1680 and 1750. ... If life cycle inspiration was present in rural England in the 18th century, farmers who were becoming aware that old people were gradually living for longer periods must have been more concerned about their own means of subsistence in the future. This may have been an important stimulus to reduce consumption, increase savings and take into account longer horizons." Which still leaves open the question of how and why the early parts of this avalanche got started in England but not in Taiwan or Japan or Sardinia as analogous islands, and why the actual timing as opposed to any other plausible century.
• WalterBright 10y ago
  "The Triumph of the West" by Roberts goes into considerable detail explaining it.
• Animats 10y ago
  Worth asking: why didn't the Industrial Revolution happen in the Roman Empire? Technologically, the Empire was close in one key way. They had weapons factories turning out steel weapons. They knew steel, and could make it is small quantities. But they never advanced to the Bessemer converter, which made steel in bulk, fast and cheaply.[1] This invention was surprisingly late; it was invented around 1855 and didn't work right for another 20 years. Yet it's not complicated, just non-obvious. The Romans could have built and used a Bessemer converter. With steel, running carts on rails would have been an obvious next step, what with all the heavy stuff needed in steelmaking. With coal and furnaces and steel, someone would have figured out steam power. Railway mania could have happened in 100AD. There may have been something like the Bessemer process in 11th century China, but it didn't result in volume production. The Romans never invented the concept of the corporation. They never developed common carriers or a commercial mail system. There was a huge empire, rich individuals, and guilds, but few if any inter-city operating organizations. So there was nothing in being ready and able to exploit new technology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process
  • jwhitlark 10y ago
    Romans, like most societies, were very protective of their social order, and ignored or suppressed most inventions that might threaten it.
    • soufron 10y ago
      They were so protective of their social order that they kept killing each others...
      • jwhitlark 10y ago
        Killing was a large part of their social order.
    • h4nkoslo 10y ago
      Is there any evidence of the Romans engaging in Amish-style quashing of an invention for social stability purposes? Even aside from "commercial" innovations in eg textiles, something like Newcomen or Watt's steam-driven pump that let them run their gold mines more profitably, or easier manufacture of military metal goods, would have been of intense interest to the state.
• bane 10y ago
  It did, it just took a hundred years to kick off, by all reasonable comparisons, China is in the middle of its part of the industrial revolution and there are signs that its about to slide out of it into the next phase of development. If you consider that the "real" Industrial Revolution took about 60-80 years to run through in the West, and the West was starting pretty much from scratch, and if we pick a date of some sort, say 1976 (end of the Cultural Revolution), China has been at it for about 40 years. In 20 years (about the same length of time as the West's) it looks like huge parts of China will have been elevated to standards of living that probably exceeded those in the West when we came out of our own Industrial Revolution and will be entering into the next major developmental stage. If anything a better and more interesting argument is how China was able to reproduce the Industrial Revolution in modern times as a model for economic growth.
  • woodandsteel 10y ago
    China could industrialize much faster because all the needed science and industrial inventions had already been developed by the West. The real question for China is whether its present form of government can sustain development over the long term.
    • bane 10y ago
      Yeah, China's situation is a bit different: - There's already a well developed, wealthy, stable of markets that will buy the output of production along with the domestic development. - The technology to kick off the development has largely already been developed, China just had to import it and get people to run the equipment and work on the assembly lines. What's just as interesting is the ways in which it's the same: - Powered by Coal - just like Britain, America and Wallonia - Rapid urbanization triggered by the rise of manufacturing jobs
• soufron 10y ago
  The industrial revolution did happen in Japan though... and without any of the key factors explained in the article.
  • jwhitlark 10y ago
    They had outside pressure driving it, though. I'd probably go so far as to say that no society voluntarily chooses an industrial revolution, they have it forced upon them by a variety of pressures.
  • woodandsteel 10y ago
    The term "industrial revolution" refers to what happened in the West. Japan industrialized, but the gigantic set of scientific discoveries and technological inventions and economic and governmental innovations that allowed Japan to industrialize were borrowed from the West. The link is about why this all happened there and not in China.
• jernfrost 10y ago
  This is why I think the EU is a dangerous idea. It has become this truism that we are stronger together. No, we are not. Europe conquered the world, because we were divided. Our strength came from our division not our unity. Random events always happen. Every country will always experience a random bad leader. It will happen sooner or later. What is best then to have a land area unified into one or split into 10 different countries? One bad leader among 10 occasionally will not pull the whole area down. One bad leader for the whole area can pull the whole area into the dark ages. Consider the Chinese emperor which banned all Chinese naval exploration and trade? That could never happen in contemporary Europe, because if your country got such a dumb leader your neighbors would quickly outcompete you and it would become very obvious how stupid that decision was within short time. Being political divided is thus a good insurance against doom. Imagine someone like Hitler rising to power in a unified Europe? There would be no way to counter his madness. That is why I think that China's rise today will eventually end up being a temporary thing. It will eventually stagnate, because China doesn't have anything to clearly challenge it. I also think this will be America's downfall in the end. We can already see an almost Chinese way of seeing the world in America. Instead of Mandate of Heaven, we got American exceptionalism, which means America is very poor at absorbing ideas from abroad. The thinking is always that America is best and has nothing to learn from the foreigners. Not all that different from the Chinese view when the British came knocking on their door. What is great about Europe is that we got this big playground for political and society experiments. Different countries try out widely different models for society. I see this among Nordic countries as a microcosmos. Each country try out different ideas and then we copy what works from each other. Many of the policies e.g. enacted in my home country Norway has previously been tried out in Denmark or Sweden.
  • partycoder 10y ago
    World War 2 was one of the last major conflicts involving most of Europe. What happened after World War 2? Europe became dominated by the US and the Soviet Union. They ceased to be truly independent. Through the United Nations, the US made wars of aggression illegal. This is mostly to avoid another world war. You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_World_War_II
• fajr-rd 10y ago
  Europe had competition between states but it also had stability. The key seems to be balance between competition, that forces states to innovate and gives freedom to inventors, and stability, that brings wealth and allows academic/engineering traditions to take hold. Persia had many scientific discoveries and technological innovations during the so called Islamic golden age but whole cities have been destroyed including there libraries during the Mongol invasions that spared Europe. Meanwhile, Paris, London, and many Germanic cities had centuries without suffering from catastrophic destruction. Also, I think that the focus should be on a technical level more than on a cultural level. "Then one day, Europeans build a vacuum pump. [...] In 1573, a Danish astronomer called Tycho Brahe observes a supernova." I would rather know more about how they came up with pumps and telescopes than read a long dissertation on how Chinese elites were too conservative or on how Aristotle has been trashed. Why did Europeans came up with pumps and telescopes and not China? I feel that the answer has more to do with demands (from demographic growth), concentration of wealth and skilled craftsmen than with political systems. Did China also had available materials, skilled workers and demand for efficient production?
• tgarma1234 10y ago
  I can't wait to find out what the revolution that was possible in our time but that we failed to see is. We have computers. We have spaceships. We have fish farms. We have sequenced DNA and cloned sheep. Seems sort of like you should be able to put all of that together to make... SOMETHING. Oh well, I guess 1000 years from now we are going to look sort of primitive by comparison. I would like to officially note, for the historians among us, that I am not culturally opposed to any technological innovations in the production of Computerized Spaceship Fishfarm Clones. Not sure what's stopping me from innovating here. Yes, talking about the industrial revolution happening in Rome or China in the distance past is sort of like that in my opinion.
  • jwhitlark 10y ago
    Me too, although I'll point out we are searching both harder and more efficiently than at any point in the past.
• Theodores 10y ago
  In the West we had glass - glasses to see with and therefore people able to read/write into old age. This was an important advantage, we could learn from the writings of our elders and our old folk could still learn and research even if they had poor eyesight. Meanwhile, in China, they had 'china' instead of glass to make stuff with. The China that existed before the Communists took over had this absurd foot binding practice that took 50% of the working population off the 'job market'. Meanwhile, in the West, women did most of the harder work, with their children in cottage industries that pre-dated the full on Industrial Revolution. Selling opium to China probably didn't help with their economic development either.
• jwhitlark 10y ago
  Fukuyama's "The origin of political order" and "political order and political decay" I would recommend to anybody interested in this topic. They are, however, quite ... extensive.
• intrasight 10y ago
  The correct question to ask is why did it happen when and where it did. I believe that the common and correct answer is that the necessary confluence of ideas and social structures and incentives and wherewithal came together.
• dredmorbius 10y ago
  One element of the Industrial Revolution was the military power necessary to secure resources and land to develop it. Given a wood-fuel powered industry, this meant a lot of wood. I've been meaning to run the calculations as to how much a full first rate ship's fire would equate to in wood equivalents. I'm basing this off of the HMS Victory, a 104 gun first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy. Armament consisted of 30 x 32#, 28 * 24#, 30 * 12#, and 2 each 12# and 68# forecastle guns. A single round from all guns (unlikely -- a broadside would be half the armament) would then unleash 1.1 tons of iron shot. From Vaclav Smil, iron smelting requires an 80:1 ratio of source fuelwood to output iron, with the fuelwood first being converted to charcoal, a 4:1 reduction itself. Firing all guns of the Victory expends the smelting power of 92 tons of fuelwood -- about 30 cords. Canon could manage perhaps 2 rounds in a minute, with sustained rates of 20-40 rounds in an hour. At the upper bound, we're looking at 3,600 tons of wood in shot consumption. The Victory herself required 6,000 trees in construction, was refurbished after her first major engagement at a cost greater than her initial construction, but perhaps in compensation, remains to this day as the oldest commissioned warship, having first launched in 1768. I haven't done the calculation of gunpowder usage, though I've got a reference for 6# charge for a 24# gun. If that's proportionate to all guns, then a full round would be 1/3 ton of powder. If anyone has a source for UK or US arms manufacture (guns, shot, powder) for the 17th - 19th centuries, I'd be quite interested. -18th centuries, I'd be interested.
• noir-york 10y ago
  Superficial article that comes up with the only answer the author knows: "competition". I'm as pro free market as the next (liberal) economist but competition had little to do with why the IR didn't happen in China. One obvious counter example to the article: Europe had centuries of bloody competition before IR, so why did the IR take so long to come about? And the simple answer is that what enabled the IR to happen was the Enlightenment and the core of the Enlightenment is essentially, value pluralism. Before the Enlightenment, God or his representative on Earth, the monarch, was the sole source of truth. Science, or any other sources of truth were squashed. The Enlightenment broke that link, most obviously with Locke's argument for the separation of church and state. The lack of value pluralism also explains the lack of innovation and progress in other cultures through history. A footnote: Machiavelli is misunderstood in the popular culture. The reason he is so important is not because he was the originator of the idea that there are different moral frameworks for princes (rulers) and the ruled, but that it a necessary, indeed a good thing that there are different moral frameworks. Machiavelli wrote in the 16th century, and was one of the early value pluralists.