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The question only makes sense if you subscribe to the European centric idea that the Roman Empire fell with Rome and the medieval era was a set back. The truth

The question only makes sense if you subscribe to the European centric idea that the Roman Empire fell with Rome and the medieval era was a set back. The truth is things continued to progress in the Eastern Empire, the Abassid Caliphate and in imperial China. Once you reconsider, the answer becomes obvious. The Roman Empire didn't experience the Industrial Revolution because the necessary technological advancements were yet to be invented. Humanity needed one thousand more years to reach that point and during this thousand years what was the Roman Empire morphed into something different.

lynguist 4y ago
If you look at any global data in the scale of the past 2500 years, be it gases released to the atmosphere from human smelting, be it number of digits of pi that was known, a pattern emerges: There was an uptick during the Roman Empire, then the activity went down, and by the year 1400 the human activity was actually larger than the peak that was achieved during the Roman Empire. Something happened in the 1400s where all the human knowledge became global on a planetary scale instead of just the realm of an empire. Knowledge from the Americas and from Asia flooded into Europe and left the groundwork for more innovation. Humanity wasn’t there yet 2000 years ago, but it was there from the 1400s on. Europe, as we know it, started in the 1400s. Humanism and the printing press and global scale shipping started in the 1400s.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > There was an uptick during the Roman Empire, then the activity went down, and by the year 1400 the human actually was larger than the peak that was achieved during the Roman Empire. It's extremely easy to verify that this is not actually true. For your idea to hold, you have to entirely ignore how islam spread to South East Asia through the trade routes of the succeeding caliphates and the trade infrastructure put in place between the Eastern Romain Empire and China. Same for digits of pi, the approximation was improved significantly both in China and Persia during the medieval era. You can check the work of Al Khwarizmi or Zu Chongzhi. Regarding smelting, Rome did very little. Meanwhile, China had discovered cast iron in 513BC and by the fall of Rome was probably doing more metallurgy than the Roman ever did.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lynguist 4y ago
    Digits of pi: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/calculating-100-trillion-digits-of-pi-on-google-cloud https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/calculating-1... It shows the boom from 1400. The boom is actually the rediscovery of methods that were discovered in India. Lead deposits in 1100 BC until 800: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721818115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721818115 It shows the Roman Empire peak. Lead deposits in 0-1900: https://abload.de/img/8f70e5bd-bc6e-4756-8dbfzt.jpeg https://abload.de/img/8f70e5bd-bc6e-4756-8dbfzt.jpeg It shows the peak of the Roman Empire and the boom from the end of the 1400s on.
ghaff 4y ago
Overall the medieval era was something of a setback in the aggregate if you look at social development overall in the western core. (See Figure 3. https://aspeniaonline.it/why-the-west-rules-for-now/ https://aspeniaonline.it/why-the-west-rules-for-now/) However, you're absolutely correct that any explanation of why the Roman Empire didn't have an industrial revolution (without moving the goalposts around the technological advancements the Romans did make) has to account for why there wasn't an industrial revolution in the Eastern Roman Empire or China. And the reasonable explanation is that the technology tree wasn't developed enough.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > Overall the medieval era was something of a setback in the aggregate if you look at social development overall in the western core I'm not especially fond of the world system theory and I'm extremely wary of the concept of core countries but even if we accept for a minute that it makes sense, there is a very simple explanation to that in the theory: western countries which now form the core weren't part of it at the time.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The amount of technology that was developed in the Medieval times is quite long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology Romans had a similar list of accomplishments; but we're all too tempted to group them together and assume they were simple and easy. Once you actually start to dig into it you begin to realize how everything is connected together and that while perhaps you could jump start it with a time machine at just the right place; you might not be able to speed it up as much as you'd think. A "build the tools to build the tools to build the machines to build the tools to build the machines to build the tools" problem, if you will.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I basically agree. Arguably there are some innovations in health and science that the right knowledge in the hands of the right ruler/influential person could have advanced by centuries. But, in general, I'm not at all sure that technology overall could have been accelerated all that much even if a time traveler showed the right ruler a stack of modern how things work-style books.
jefftk 4y ago
> The question only makes sense if you subscribe to the European centric idea that the Roman Empire fell with Rome and the medieval era was a set back. The same author has a great series on whether and how we should think of Rome as falling: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fall-of-rome/ https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fall-of-rome/
kreig 4y ago
Let's not forget that a big part of these technological advancements was due to the invention of innovative ways of optimizing those devices and process, mainly by formulating and solving mathematical problems by using calculus, which coincidentally, was formulated during these times in Britain and Germany.

lynguist 4y ago

If you look at any global data in the scale of the past 2500 years, be it gases released to the atmosphere from human smelting, be it number of digits of pi that was known, a pattern emerges: There was an uptick during the Roman Empire, then the activity went down, and by the year 1400 the human activity was actually larger than the peak that was achieved during the Roman Empire. Something happened in the 1400s where all the human knowledge became global on a planetary scale instead of just the realm of an empire. Knowledge from the Americas and from Asia flooded into Europe and left the groundwork for more innovation. Humanity wasn’t there yet 2000 years ago, but it was there from the 1400s on. Europe, as we know it, started in the 1400s. Humanism and the printing press and global scale shipping started in the 1400s.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> There was an uptick during the Roman Empire, then the activity went down, and by the year 1400 the human actually was larger than the peak that was achieved during the Roman Empire. It's extremely easy to verify that this is not actually true. For your idea to hold, you have to entirely ignore how islam spread to South East Asia through the trade routes of the succeeding caliphates and the trade infrastructure put in place between the Eastern Romain Empire and China. Same for digits of pi, the approximation was improved significantly both in China and Persia during the medieval era. You can check the work of Al Khwarizmi or Zu Chongzhi. Regarding smelting, Rome did very little. Meanwhile, China had discovered cast iron in 513BC and by the fall of Rome was probably doing more metallurgy than the Roman ever did.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lynguist 4y ago
  Digits of pi: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/calculating-100-trillion-digits-of-pi-on-google-cloud https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/calculating-1... It shows the boom from 1400. The boom is actually the rediscovery of methods that were discovered in India. Lead deposits in 1100 BC until 800: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721818115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721818115 It shows the Roman Empire peak. Lead deposits in 0-1900: https://abload.de/img/8f70e5bd-bc6e-4756-8dbfzt.jpeg https://abload.de/img/8f70e5bd-bc6e-4756-8dbfzt.jpeg It shows the peak of the Roman Empire and the boom from the end of the 1400s on.

ghaff 4y ago

Overall the medieval era was something of a setback in the aggregate if you look at social development overall in the western core. (See Figure 3. https://aspeniaonline.it/why-the-west-rules-for-now/ https://aspeniaonline.it/why-the-west-rules-for-now/) However, you're absolutely correct that any explanation of why the Roman Empire didn't have an industrial revolution (without moving the goalposts around the technological advancements the Romans did make) has to account for why there wasn't an industrial revolution in the Eastern Roman Empire or China. And the reasonable explanation is that the technology tree wasn't developed enough.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
> Overall the medieval era was something of a setback in the aggregate if you look at social development overall in the western core I'm not especially fond of the world system theory and I'm extremely wary of the concept of core countries but even if we accept for a minute that it makes sense, there is a very simple explanation to that in the theory: western countries which now form the core weren't part of it at the time.
bombcar 4y ago
The amount of technology that was developed in the Medieval times is quite long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology Romans had a similar list of accomplishments; but we're all too tempted to group them together and assume they were simple and easy. Once you actually start to dig into it you begin to realize how everything is connected together and that while perhaps you could jump start it with a time machine at just the right place; you might not be able to speed it up as much as you'd think. A "build the tools to build the tools to build the machines to build the tools to build the machines to build the tools" problem, if you will.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I basically agree. Arguably there are some innovations in health and science that the right knowledge in the hands of the right ruler/influential person could have advanced by centuries. But, in general, I'm not at all sure that technology overall could have been accelerated all that much even if a time traveler showed the right ruler a stack of modern how things work-style books.

jefftk 4y ago

> The question only makes sense if you subscribe to the European centric idea that the Roman Empire fell with Rome and the medieval era was a set back. The same author has a great series on whether and how we should think of Rome as falling: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fall-of-rome/ https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fall-of-rome/

kreig 4y ago

Let's not forget that a big part of these technological advancements was due to the invention of innovative ways of optimizing those devices and process, mainly by formulating and solving mathematical problems by using calculus, which coincidentally, was formulated during these times in Britain and Germany.