7 ms·

Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

54 points by stablemap 9y ago

QAPereo 9y ago
Rome was still primarily a slave/servant based economy, and one based on expansion and conquest. They lacked the mathematical and scientific foundations to radically change metallurgy, chemistry, and the other basics of industry. This article focuses a lot on economic possibilities and social change necessary for a revolution, while largely ignoring larger issues. You cant have an industrial revolution without then revolutionary power of modern industry. Good concrete and slaves fanning fires to heat water isn’t that.
- WaxProlix 9y ago
  It says there's a few key technological innovations that the novel posits.
- nwatson 9y ago
  In the three-segment documentary "Meet the Romans: Citizens of the Empire" (by Mary Beard, historian, available in Amazon Prime Video ... see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Romans_with_Mary_Beard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Romans_with_Mary_Bear...) I was struck by: + ... how frequently the enslavement of the remnants of conquered peoples (slavery wasn't so much race-based as what "naturally" happened to loser-nations/cultures) led to large numbers of those people eventually being emancipated by their owners and becoming full-fledged Roman citizens + ... how seemingly everyone in Rome defined themselves by their industry, by their profession. Most epitaphs on graves and tombs identified occupants by name, place of origin, some brief and sometimes humorous quip about their circumstances, where applicable mentioned their former owners pre-emancipation, and then >>> mentioned what they did for a living <<< ... people defined themselves by their work While not germane to the larger arguments that probably will happen in these threads here, I was struck by social mobility beyond slavery, and what was core to people's identity. (I'm sure you've heard people complaining about modern society and industry with " ... people are human BEings not human DOings " -- Romans were all about the DOing). While the Romans may not have had the conditions for a scientific/engineering/tinkering revolution to be a force multiplier in industry, they had a hard-working mindset. EDIT: added Wikipedia link, corrections based on OP
- brownbat 9y ago
  Are you arguing slavery prevents industrial resolutions? Didn't they coexist in some parts of the world? Or is it the way slaves were used? Can you clarify to contrast Roman and US experiences?
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    I’m saying that in Rome, slaves/servants were used the way we use machines and conveniences. A lot of their impressive “Tech” amounted to The Turk... brute force and a person working it all. They had hot baths because they had genuinely impressive concrete and because they had humans tending fires to heat them. There was no drive to move past that, there was no cotton gin, no real science to work with either.
  - glibgil 9y ago
    > Are you arguing slavery prevents industrial resolutions? > Didn't they coexist in some parts of the world? The American Civil War is an example of the two coexisting in the same country
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      The free states industrialized, and the slave states did not.
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        I mean... that ended with the devastation of the slave states.
- amorphid 9y ago
  Could such advances have been possible if fueled by an extremely wealthy family? It only takes one person w/ resources & ambition to say "I want <something>" to kickstart a movement. Say Marcus Licinius Crassus [1], Roman bajillionaire, dreams of a steam-powered engine in 73 BC, 20-ish years before his death. And instead of duking it out with Spartacus, Crassus decides to make building a steam engine his singular focus in life. In the best of cases, could he have meaningfully invested in R&D that would make meaningful progress towards building a steam engine? Was R&D even a thing in that era? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus
  - empath75 9y ago
    One guy building a steam engine isn’t a revolution. One guy building a steam engine and publishing a book on steam engines and having a university to train steam engine builders is.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      More than that. It took a while for the telegraph to take hold because Morse couldn't explain why fast communication was necessary, and people thought his demonstrations were a scam.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Possibly Crassus could have gotten a toy out of it. A steam engine working enough to start an industrial revolution? I doubt it. I think (but I am not a historian) that the Roman mind-set wasn't turned toward progress in the form of machines. I think that was because they didn't have real science. And I think that was because of their gods. Oppenheimer, in his history of science, said that science couldn't have begun outside of Christianity. The Christian perspective was that, because God is there, and God is someone who uses reason, and God created the universe, therefore the universe could be understood through reason. That was the soil in which the scientific revolution started. But the Roman gods were too arbitrary and capricious to give any certainty of a reasonable universe, and so the Romans never developed real science (despite knowing many of the facts that Europeans knew by 1500).
- nitwit005 9y ago
  Up until quite late, metallurgy was more experimentation and experience than scientific practice. If they'd decently understood their materials, there probably wouldn't have been so many people injured or killed by exploding boilers.
- jacques_chester 9y ago
  > Rome was still primarily a slave/servant based economy, and one based on expansion and conquest. They lacked the mathematical and scientific foundations to radically change metallurgy, chemistry, and the other basics of industry. The book the article is inspired by[0] is an alternate history set during the reign of Augustus. It takes as its point of departure the capture of Archimedes of Syracuse -- instead of being killed, he is brought back to Rome. Note that this is the mid-Republic period, before the dynamics of conquest and slavery completely dominated the Roman economy. The book is written by Helen Dale, who set out to write a legal alt-history, not an economics alt-history per se. She's got the background for it: she's an award-winning novelist, studied classics at Oxford and Roman law at Edinburgh. My gut feeling is that any objection you have, she's thought about already. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Wicked-Book-One-Rules/dp/0994384092 https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Wicked-Book-One-Rules/dp/0994...
saalweachter 9y ago
Has anyone read a good book on why the Industrial Revolution did happen? What were the necessary precursors, politically, economically, technologically, scientifically, culturally, before you start trying to automate all the things?
- glibgil 9y ago
  1) Outlaw slavery 2) There is no step two
  - empath75 9y ago
    I think the printing press and a patent system were both rather important. Otherwise it takes to long for advances to get well known.
  - caio1982 9y ago
    That's a very simplistic (bit naive IMHO) POV.
    - jychang 9y ago
      I agree it's simplistic, but that's not particularly overly naive. The kickstart of the industrial revolution very much benefited from the disappearance of a large "free" labor source, and it was probably one of the primary social factors that worked in conjunction with the technological foundations at the time.
      - saalweachter 9y ago
        When & where do you think the Industrial Revolution happened?
        orbat 9y ago
        Started late 18th century, after several decades of European countries and US states abolishing slavery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom#1701.E2.80.931799_.28Late_Modern.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...). Why, when do you think it happened?
exratione 9y ago
Related topic: could the Romans have usefully practiced public key encryption, say for very small key sizes?
WalterBright 9y ago
The article doesn't mention the printing press. The invention of the press fueled explosive growth, because printers printed handbooks on anything and everything, and so knowledge became cheap and widely available. My personal view is the IR started with the printing press. We're in the middle of a second IR caused by the internet, for analogous reasons.
- CapitalistCartr 9y ago
  Aling with easy distribution of ideas is an open enough political climate to foster such transference. Most governments from Rome to the Rennaisance were trying to lock down society to as little change as possible, such as routine wage & price controls, guilds ruling trades, many monopolies granted, etc. Luckily lots of wars kept shaking Europe up. Also, the wealth surplus to allow men of means to experiment, the tech of working metal to decent tolerances in bulk quantity, and the mass production of paper.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  I heard a great argument once, that I can no longer find on the internet. That it was the cannon that lead to the industrial revolution. The first cannons were awful. Short range, extraordinarily expensive to build, and just as likely to kill you as the enemy. There was an arms race in Europe to develop much stronger and cheaper metal. And once that exists, steam engines are much more practical.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Cannons developed from church bell technology. It's no coincidence that the first cannons were bell shaped. The printing press was invented in 1440, the steam engine in 1712.
  - mercer 9y ago
    I'm curious to hear if people can confirm this, but it sounds like a 'Gladwellian' type of argument, for lack of a better way of putting it.
- posterboy 9y ago
pmoriarty 9y ago
Ancient Rome could have had hot air balloons: https://web.archive.org/web/20110306091458/http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/07/67/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110306091458/http://chronopaus...
jacques_chester 9y ago
So to explain the background: 1. Helen Dale, a novelist, has written a novel, Kingdom of the Wicked, of which the first book has recently been released[0]. 2. It's set in an alternative history, during the time of Augustus. 3. Helen Dale believes an author's intepretation of her work is more meaningful, in a critical or literary sense, than a critic's. So she included an "Author's Note" in her novel, explaining the background leading to its creation. 4. The Author's Note was republished by the Cato Institute on their libertarianism.org website[1]. 5. This essay is a reply to the Author's Note. I've been hosting Helen's website for more than a decade. She is very, very, very smart and a damn good writer. She's also the right person for the right story. I think you're going to hear a lot about this book in the coming year. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Wicked-Book-One-Rules/dp/0994384092 https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Wicked-Book-One-Rules/dp/0994... [1] https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/authors-note-kingdom-wicked https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/authors-n...

54 points by stablemap 9y ago

Rome was still primarily a slave/servant based economy, and one based on expansion and conquest. They lacked the mathematical and scientific foundations to radically change metallurgy, chemistry, and the other basics of industry. This article focuses a lot on economic possibilities and social change necessary for a revolution, while largely ignoring larger issues. You cant have an industrial revolution without then revolutionary power of modern industry. Good concrete and slaves fanning fires to heat water isn’t that.

WaxProlix 9y ago
It says there's a few key technological innovations that the novel posits.
nwatson 9y ago
In the three-segment documentary "Meet the Romans: Citizens of the Empire" (by Mary Beard, historian, available in Amazon Prime Video ... see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Romans_with_Mary_Beard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Romans_with_Mary_Bear...) I was struck by: + ... how frequently the enslavement of the remnants of conquered peoples (slavery wasn't so much race-based as what "naturally" happened to loser-nations/cultures) led to large numbers of those people eventually being emancipated by their owners and becoming full-fledged Roman citizens + ... how seemingly everyone in Rome defined themselves by their industry, by their profession. Most epitaphs on graves and tombs identified occupants by name, place of origin, some brief and sometimes humorous quip about their circumstances, where applicable mentioned their former owners pre-emancipation, and then >>> mentioned what they did for a living <<< ... people defined themselves by their work While not germane to the larger arguments that probably will happen in these threads here, I was struck by social mobility beyond slavery, and what was core to people's identity. (I'm sure you've heard people complaining about modern society and industry with " ... people are human BEings not human DOings " -- Romans were all about the DOing). While the Romans may not have had the conditions for a scientific/engineering/tinkering revolution to be a force multiplier in industry, they had a hard-working mindset. EDIT: added Wikipedia link, corrections based on OP
brownbat 9y ago
Are you arguing slavery prevents industrial resolutions? Didn't they coexist in some parts of the world? Or is it the way slaves were used? Can you clarify to contrast Roman and US experiences?
- QAPereo 9y ago
  I’m saying that in Rome, slaves/servants were used the way we use machines and conveniences. A lot of their impressive “Tech” amounted to The Turk... brute force and a person working it all. They had hot baths because they had genuinely impressive concrete and because they had humans tending fires to heat them. There was no drive to move past that, there was no cotton gin, no real science to work with either.
- glibgil 9y ago
  > Are you arguing slavery prevents industrial resolutions? > Didn't they coexist in some parts of the world? The American Civil War is an example of the two coexisting in the same country
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    The free states industrialized, and the slave states did not.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      I mean... that ended with the devastation of the slave states.
amorphid 9y ago
Could such advances have been possible if fueled by an extremely wealthy family? It only takes one person w/ resources & ambition to say "I want <something>" to kickstart a movement. Say Marcus Licinius Crassus [1], Roman bajillionaire, dreams of a steam-powered engine in 73 BC, 20-ish years before his death. And instead of duking it out with Spartacus, Crassus decides to make building a steam engine his singular focus in life. In the best of cases, could he have meaningfully invested in R&D that would make meaningful progress towards building a steam engine? Was R&D even a thing in that era? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus
- empath75 9y ago
  One guy building a steam engine isn’t a revolution. One guy building a steam engine and publishing a book on steam engines and having a university to train steam engine builders is.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    More than that. It took a while for the telegraph to take hold because Morse couldn't explain why fast communication was necessary, and people thought his demonstrations were a scam.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Possibly Crassus could have gotten a toy out of it. A steam engine working enough to start an industrial revolution? I doubt it. I think (but I am not a historian) that the Roman mind-set wasn't turned toward progress in the form of machines. I think that was because they didn't have real science. And I think that was because of their gods. Oppenheimer, in his history of science, said that science couldn't have begun outside of Christianity. The Christian perspective was that, because God is there, and God is someone who uses reason, and God created the universe, therefore the universe could be understood through reason. That was the soil in which the scientific revolution started. But the Roman gods were too arbitrary and capricious to give any certainty of a reasonable universe, and so the Romans never developed real science (despite knowing many of the facts that Europeans knew by 1500).
nitwit005 9y ago
Up until quite late, metallurgy was more experimentation and experience than scientific practice. If they'd decently understood their materials, there probably wouldn't have been so many people injured or killed by exploding boilers.
jacques_chester 9y ago
> Rome was still primarily a slave/servant based economy, and one based on expansion and conquest. They lacked the mathematical and scientific foundations to radically change metallurgy, chemistry, and the other basics of industry. The book the article is inspired by[0] is an alternate history set during the reign of Augustus. It takes as its point of departure the capture of Archimedes of Syracuse -- instead of being killed, he is brought back to Rome. Note that this is the mid-Republic period, before the dynamics of conquest and slavery completely dominated the Roman economy. The book is written by Helen Dale, who set out to write a legal alt-history, not an economics alt-history per se. She's got the background for it: she's an award-winning novelist, studied classics at Oxford and Roman law at Edinburgh. My gut feeling is that any objection you have, she's thought about already. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Wicked-Book-One-Rules/dp/0994384092 https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Wicked-Book-One-Rules/dp/0994...

saalweachter 9y ago

Has anyone read a good book on why the Industrial Revolution did happen? What were the necessary precursors, politically, economically, technologically, scientifically, culturally, before you start trying to automate all the things?

glibgil 9y ago
1) Outlaw slavery 2) There is no step two
- empath75 9y ago
  I think the printing press and a patent system were both rather important. Otherwise it takes to long for advances to get well known.
- caio1982 9y ago
  That's a very simplistic (bit naive IMHO) POV.
  - jychang 9y ago
    I agree it's simplistic, but that's not particularly overly naive. The kickstart of the industrial revolution very much benefited from the disappearance of a large "free" labor source, and it was probably one of the primary social factors that worked in conjunction with the technological foundations at the time.
    - saalweachter 9y ago
      When & where do you think the Industrial Revolution happened?
      - orbat 9y ago
        Started late 18th century, after several decades of European countries and US states abolishing slavery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom#1701.E2.80.931799_.28Late_Modern.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...). Why, when do you think it happened?

exratione 9y ago

Related topic: could the Romans have usefully practiced public key encryption, say for very small key sizes?

WalterBright 9y ago

The article doesn't mention the printing press. The invention of the press fueled explosive growth, because printers printed handbooks on anything and everything, and so knowledge became cheap and widely available. My personal view is the IR started with the printing press. We're in the middle of a second IR caused by the internet, for analogous reasons.

CapitalistCartr 9y ago
Aling with easy distribution of ideas is an open enough political climate to foster such transference. Most governments from Rome to the Rennaisance were trying to lock down society to as little change as possible, such as routine wage & price controls, guilds ruling trades, many monopolies granted, etc. Luckily lots of wars kept shaking Europe up. Also, the wealth surplus to allow men of means to experiment, the tech of working metal to decent tolerances in bulk quantity, and the mass production of paper.
Houshalter 9y ago
I heard a great argument once, that I can no longer find on the internet. That it was the cannon that lead to the industrial revolution. The first cannons were awful. Short range, extraordinarily expensive to build, and just as likely to kill you as the enemy. There was an arms race in Europe to develop much stronger and cheaper metal. And once that exists, steam engines are much more practical.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Cannons developed from church bell technology. It's no coincidence that the first cannons were bell shaped. The printing press was invented in 1440, the steam engine in 1712.
- mercer 9y ago
  I'm curious to hear if people can confirm this, but it sounds like a 'Gladwellian' type of argument, for lack of a better way of putting it.
posterboy 9y ago

pmoriarty 9y ago

Ancient Rome could have had hot air balloons: https://web.archive.org/web/20110306091458/http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/07/67/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110306091458/http://chronopaus...

jacques_chester 9y ago

So to explain the background: 1. Helen Dale, a novelist, has written a novel, Kingdom of the Wicked, of which the first book has recently been released[0]. 2. It's set in an alternative history, during the time of Augustus. 3. Helen Dale believes an author's intepretation of her work is more meaningful, in a critical or literary sense, than a critic's. So she included an "Author's Note" in her novel, explaining the background leading to its creation. 4. The Author's Note was republished by the Cato Institute on their libertarianism.org website[1]. 5. This essay is a reply to the Author's Note. I've been hosting Helen's website for more than a decade. She is very, very, very smart and a damn good writer. She's also the right person for the right story. I think you're going to hear a lot about this book in the coming year. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Wicked-Book-One-Rules/dp/0994384092 https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Wicked-Book-One-Rules/dp/0994... [1] https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/authors-note-kingdom-wicked https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/authors-n...