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I'm currently reading Clive Pointing's 'World History - A new perspective'. >800 pages of well researched history with a large Eurasian focus (due to the availa

I'm currently reading Clive Pointing's 'World History - A new perspective'. >800 pages of well researched history with a large Eurasian focus (due to the availability of sources, not bias). He repeatedly makes the point that some technology that Europe 'discovered' in the 13-19hundreds was in fact known in china 1000+ years earlier. Most of recorded history Europe basically played no role whatsoever. A few examples that struck me, taken from his snapshot pages 'The world in xxxx' which are scattered throughout the book: 5000BCE * first smelting of copper in Anatolia and Elam 2000BCE * glass produced in south west asia * development of the chariot in southwest Asia and china 600BCE * first production of cast iron in china * iron working in west Africa 150CE * First use of paper in china * compass in use in china 600CE * 1200 mile long canal built in china * iron cables for suspension bridges in china * horse collar used in china * paper used in china and korea 750CE * first wood block printing in China 1000CE * vikings reach north America * first gunpowder weapons in china * paper money in china * horse collar used in europe 1200CE * multi-,colour printing in china * European ships adopt Chinese stern-rudder and compass ...

sthnblllII 5y ago
With all these advantages, why did the industrial revolution happen in Europe instead of Asia?
- Hemospectrum 5y ago
  The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple. In fact, there's an argument to be made that it once did exactly that. Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty. Disclaimer: I don't know English history well enough to put together a better explanation, but I'm sure this has been the subject of a number of PhD theses. Maybe someone can point to a source that goes into better detail.
  - kiba 5y ago
    The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple. The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians. I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens. Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits. Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't. Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty. Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.
    - megameter 5y ago
      I've studied the causes of the Industrial Revolution a little(in undergrad classes) and one of the points that stuck with me is that early-modern machining had greatly improved. Roman-era lathes were of a different character[0] and their limitations in accuracy and power were a major dependency to the development of other machined parts. As well, the Romans had a pre-Newtonian physics and mathematics, limiting the percieved applications of their inventions. There really is a lot that 1000-2000 years of background development gives you. The early moderns are also interesting because of the wage issue, which is not quite what it seems. It is known that wages were high following the Black Death, and this created room for mercantile economics powered by double-entry bookkeeping, rather than tributary ones, to take over the political economy. Everything in the modern period becomes a bit more of a business. However, the political class then moved to lower wages and adopted such as part of early merchantalist theory - keep them lean and hungry so they work hard. This attitude encouraged the development of impressment, indentured servitude and chattel slavery: the easiest way to move a worker's wages off the books was to turn them into property. Thus by the mid 1600's, you already have a world where the populace has been disempowered and coerced into the project of colonial nation building(a means of putting more assets on the books - claim the rights), and the backlash to that powers an interest in developing liberalism in the 1700's, which coincides with the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Smith. There's a lot of history that coincides with "and then this philosopher published a very relevant work". The underlying political thing of early modern Europe, of course, was the disunification. The inventors and scholars in this period are always fleeing from a noble that they pissed off and finding refuge somewhere else. A unified Europe would have had more opportunities to surpress technologies, as occurred in China throughout its history. None of that forms a complete hypothesis, and it doesn't even touch on the "why Britain specifically" question, but it gets it away from being a "Europe so great" anaysis. [0] http://blog.mmi-direct.com/machining-history-lathe-the-mother-of-all-tools http://blog.mmi-direct.com/machining-history-lathe-the-mothe...
- fsckboy 5y ago
  I'm no expert, but China has much, much less arable land than Europe. Something needs to finance industrialization, and in preindustrial times, food was finance because that's what supported a growing population.
  - gota 5y ago
    Isn't that largely offset by cultivating a lot of rice, that being so much more efficient as a crop? What other things are at play, for example, in Japan's bonkers hight population across history?
- bigpumpkin 5y ago
  With all these advantages, why did the mobile revolution happen with Apple instead of Microsoft?
- Tuna-Fish 5y ago
  That is a damn good question that historians still argue over today. The short version is that the Song dynasty appeared to have all the precursor technology needed for industrialization by the 12th century, but then just didn't. The most commonly held view is probably that society and economics is as important than technology, and that while they at that point had the kind of metallurgy that Europeans could only dream of until the late 18th century, what they didn't have was labor shortages and capitalism, which were what made industrialization something people wanted to actually do. But this is by far not the only proposed explanation. In general, because of the recent history of the west appears like it, I think we are far too predisposed to view of development as a linear progression towards something, that history has a direction, and that direction is up. For most of history, for most societies, this hasn't really been true. As many societies have spent as long stagnating or even regressing as have advanced. It's just that so long as one advances, eventually it's going to influence it's neighbors, either by taking them over or by having them frantically play catch-up to not be taken over, and so the whole thing has a direction. This leads to my pet theory for why Europe: Because Europe has managed for almost the entirety of it's history to avoid being conquered by a single empire, so everyone was always afraid of their neighbors, yet there was a solid enough foundation of international law that everyone wasn't at war with all their neighbors all the time. This created both a backdrop that forced states to push to be more powerful, even over entrenched interests, and the conditions where the best way to do this often enough wasn't beating up your neighbors and taking their stuff.
- fallingfrog 5y ago
  It’s such a good question, and it wasn’t just the industrial revolution either, a whole bunch of stuff happened in Europe- the development of calculus and physics, new ways of organizing politically, the university system, the new economic system of capitalism, fractional reserve banking, it’s crazy how much Europe changed while the rest of the world didn’t. It’s hard to point to any one thing. Part of it may have been that the rest of the world was sacked and conquered by the mongols, but Europe was spared. If I had to pick one factor: I’d say the breakup of feudalism in Europe, in which a lot of hierarchies were thrown upside down, was probably the most important factor. If you read accounts of Chinese science, you often see things like “but then that fell out of favor in the court, and was abandoned.” In a society where everyone has a specific place, and roles and hierarchies are rigid, there isn’t much room for invention and change because it’s going to be seen as threatening rather than as an opportunity by the people one step above you. That would be my guess.
  - yongjik 5y ago
    I think it's a hard question because a lot of different things happened in different regions - you can't just point to things that happened in Europe and say "This is why!" As an example, China had imperial examination[1] for government jobs since 607 - a system not seen in the West until modern times. Ancient Rome built concrete buildings that their descendants couldn't replicate for centuries, yet they failed to start Industrial Revolution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
- aritmo 5y ago
  The Antikythera Mechanism is a computer and was created in Ancient Greece around 100BC. That was a period of time before the Roman conquest of the known world. When there is an empire in power, things do not progress. The knowledge of that device got lost in history. China has been an empire for much of her history. Being an empire does not help in the technological advancement. But fierce competition helps.
- lebuffon 5y ago
  Guns Germs and Steel, Diamond. From wikipedia synopsis: "Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of superior intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions." For example the mediterranean region had 5(6?) domesticated animals and had wheat,barley oats and spelt grains. Asia had rice. The North Americans in contrast, had no domesticated animals and didn't get maize until shortly before the Europeans arrived.
- socialdemocrat 5y ago
  Lots of reasons, climate, waterways, lack of glass making technology, understanding of astronomy etc. More detailed explanation: https://link.medium.com/fCP369iaCgb https://link.medium.com/fCP369iaCgb
- chewz 5y ago
  Because North Europe was more inhospitable place overall (for agriculture et all) and during Middle Ages Europeans started accepting and adopting technologies like their lives depend on it (and it often did). That has slowly over ages created culture that put premium on technological progress.
- ppsreejith 5y ago
  In the book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, Sir David MacKay says that the reason the industrial revolution happened in Britain might be due to the amount of coal Britain had. Equal (at that time) to the amount of oil under Saudi Arabia. Link: https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_6.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_6.shtml Relevant paragraph: "Something did happen, and it was called the Industrial Revolution. I’ve marked on the graph the year 1769, in which James Watt patented his steam engine. While the ﬁrst practical steam engine was invented in 1698, Watt’s more efﬁcient steam engine really got the Industrial Revolu- tion going. One of the steam engine’s main applications was the pumping of water out of coal mines. Figure 1.5 shows what happened to British coal production from 1769 onwards. The ﬁgure displays coal production in units of billions of tons of CO2 released when the coal was burned. In 1800, coal was used to make iron, to make ships, to heat buildings, to power locomotives and other machinery, and of course to power the pumps that enabled still more coal to be scraped up from inside the hills of England and Wales. Britain was terribly well endowed with coal: when the Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting in coal under Britain was roughly the same as the amount sitting in oil under Saudi Arabia."
singularity2001 5y ago
> development of the chariot in southwest Asia and china correction: horses and chariots where introduced to china, not developed there (as was likely early metallurgy)

sthnblllII 5y ago

With all these advantages, why did the industrial revolution happen in Europe instead of Asia?

Hemospectrum 5y ago
The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple. In fact, there's an argument to be made that it once did exactly that. Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty. Disclaimer: I don't know English history well enough to put together a better explanation, but I'm sure this has been the subject of a number of PhD theses. Maybe someone can point to a source that goes into better detail.
- kiba 5y ago
  The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple. The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians. I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens. Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits. Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't. Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty. Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.
  - megameter 5y ago
    I've studied the causes of the Industrial Revolution a little(in undergrad classes) and one of the points that stuck with me is that early-modern machining had greatly improved. Roman-era lathes were of a different character[0] and their limitations in accuracy and power were a major dependency to the development of other machined parts. As well, the Romans had a pre-Newtonian physics and mathematics, limiting the percieved applications of their inventions. There really is a lot that 1000-2000 years of background development gives you. The early moderns are also interesting because of the wage issue, which is not quite what it seems. It is known that wages were high following the Black Death, and this created room for mercantile economics powered by double-entry bookkeeping, rather than tributary ones, to take over the political economy. Everything in the modern period becomes a bit more of a business. However, the political class then moved to lower wages and adopted such as part of early merchantalist theory - keep them lean and hungry so they work hard. This attitude encouraged the development of impressment, indentured servitude and chattel slavery: the easiest way to move a worker's wages off the books was to turn them into property. Thus by the mid 1600's, you already have a world where the populace has been disempowered and coerced into the project of colonial nation building(a means of putting more assets on the books - claim the rights), and the backlash to that powers an interest in developing liberalism in the 1700's, which coincides with the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Smith. There's a lot of history that coincides with "and then this philosopher published a very relevant work". The underlying political thing of early modern Europe, of course, was the disunification. The inventors and scholars in this period are always fleeing from a noble that they pissed off and finding refuge somewhere else. A unified Europe would have had more opportunities to surpress technologies, as occurred in China throughout its history. None of that forms a complete hypothesis, and it doesn't even touch on the "why Britain specifically" question, but it gets it away from being a "Europe so great" anaysis. [0] http://blog.mmi-direct.com/machining-history-lathe-the-mother-of-all-tools http://blog.mmi-direct.com/machining-history-lathe-the-mothe...
fsckboy 5y ago
I'm no expert, but China has much, much less arable land than Europe. Something needs to finance industrialization, and in preindustrial times, food was finance because that's what supported a growing population.
- gota 5y ago
  Isn't that largely offset by cultivating a lot of rice, that being so much more efficient as a crop? What other things are at play, for example, in Japan's bonkers hight population across history?
bigpumpkin 5y ago
With all these advantages, why did the mobile revolution happen with Apple instead of Microsoft?
Tuna-Fish 5y ago
That is a damn good question that historians still argue over today. The short version is that the Song dynasty appeared to have all the precursor technology needed for industrialization by the 12th century, but then just didn't. The most commonly held view is probably that society and economics is as important than technology, and that while they at that point had the kind of metallurgy that Europeans could only dream of until the late 18th century, what they didn't have was labor shortages and capitalism, which were what made industrialization something people wanted to actually do. But this is by far not the only proposed explanation. In general, because of the recent history of the west appears like it, I think we are far too predisposed to view of development as a linear progression towards something, that history has a direction, and that direction is up. For most of history, for most societies, this hasn't really been true. As many societies have spent as long stagnating or even regressing as have advanced. It's just that so long as one advances, eventually it's going to influence it's neighbors, either by taking them over or by having them frantically play catch-up to not be taken over, and so the whole thing has a direction. This leads to my pet theory for why Europe: Because Europe has managed for almost the entirety of it's history to avoid being conquered by a single empire, so everyone was always afraid of their neighbors, yet there was a solid enough foundation of international law that everyone wasn't at war with all their neighbors all the time. This created both a backdrop that forced states to push to be more powerful, even over entrenched interests, and the conditions where the best way to do this often enough wasn't beating up your neighbors and taking their stuff.
fallingfrog 5y ago
It’s such a good question, and it wasn’t just the industrial revolution either, a whole bunch of stuff happened in Europe- the development of calculus and physics, new ways of organizing politically, the university system, the new economic system of capitalism, fractional reserve banking, it’s crazy how much Europe changed while the rest of the world didn’t. It’s hard to point to any one thing. Part of it may have been that the rest of the world was sacked and conquered by the mongols, but Europe was spared. If I had to pick one factor: I’d say the breakup of feudalism in Europe, in which a lot of hierarchies were thrown upside down, was probably the most important factor. If you read accounts of Chinese science, you often see things like “but then that fell out of favor in the court, and was abandoned.” In a society where everyone has a specific place, and roles and hierarchies are rigid, there isn’t much room for invention and change because it’s going to be seen as threatening rather than as an opportunity by the people one step above you. That would be my guess.
- yongjik 5y ago
  I think it's a hard question because a lot of different things happened in different regions - you can't just point to things that happened in Europe and say "This is why!" As an example, China had imperial examination[1] for government jobs since 607 - a system not seen in the West until modern times. Ancient Rome built concrete buildings that their descendants couldn't replicate for centuries, yet they failed to start Industrial Revolution. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
aritmo 5y ago
The Antikythera Mechanism is a computer and was created in Ancient Greece around 100BC. That was a period of time before the Roman conquest of the known world. When there is an empire in power, things do not progress. The knowledge of that device got lost in history. China has been an empire for much of her history. Being an empire does not help in the technological advancement. But fierce competition helps.
lebuffon 5y ago
Guns Germs and Steel, Diamond. From wikipedia synopsis: "Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of superior intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions." For example the mediterranean region had 5(6?) domesticated animals and had wheat,barley oats and spelt grains. Asia had rice. The North Americans in contrast, had no domesticated animals and didn't get maize until shortly before the Europeans arrived.
socialdemocrat 5y ago
Lots of reasons, climate, waterways, lack of glass making technology, understanding of astronomy etc. More detailed explanation: https://link.medium.com/fCP369iaCgb https://link.medium.com/fCP369iaCgb
chewz 5y ago
Because North Europe was more inhospitable place overall (for agriculture et all) and during Middle Ages Europeans started accepting and adopting technologies like their lives depend on it (and it often did). That has slowly over ages created culture that put premium on technological progress.
ppsreejith 5y ago
In the book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, Sir David MacKay says that the reason the industrial revolution happened in Britain might be due to the amount of coal Britain had. Equal (at that time) to the amount of oil under Saudi Arabia. Link: https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_6.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_6.shtml Relevant paragraph: "Something did happen, and it was called the Industrial Revolution. I’ve marked on the graph the year 1769, in which James Watt patented his steam engine. While the ﬁrst practical steam engine was invented in 1698, Watt’s more efﬁcient steam engine really got the Industrial Revolu- tion going. One of the steam engine’s main applications was the pumping of water out of coal mines. Figure 1.5 shows what happened to British coal production from 1769 onwards. The ﬁgure displays coal production in units of billions of tons of CO2 released when the coal was burned. In 1800, coal was used to make iron, to make ships, to heat buildings, to power locomotives and other machinery, and of course to power the pumps that enabled still more coal to be scraped up from inside the hills of England and Wales. Britain was terribly well endowed with coal: when the Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting in coal under Britain was roughly the same as the amount sitting in oil under Saudi Arabia."

singularity2001 5y ago

> development of the chariot in southwest Asia and china correction: horses and chariots where introduced to china, not developed there (as was likely early metallurgy)