4 ms·

The Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD) was actually close to industrialization with high steel and coal productions, but apparently never took off due to the lack of a

by byw 4y ago

The Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD) was actually close to industrialization with high steel and coal productions, but apparently never took off due to the lack of a middle class to purchase the manufactured goods. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Industrialization_of_China#/Historical_precursors_of_industrialization https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Industrialization_of_China#/Hist...

tuatoru 4y ago
This is a key point that seems to be forever in the blind spot of many people who focus on production/supply and technologies. Without demand, there is no supply. In highly unequal societies there is no motivation to improve production efficiency--rather the opposite.
- eru 4y ago
  The Song were extremely advanced for their time. They also invented gunpowder and paper money. They were basically an early modern civilisation, when Europe was still in the middle ages. What do you know about inequality during the Song dynasty?
  - yywwbbn 4y ago
    Majority of people were still subsistence farmers. The massive transfer of wealth from the colonies and trade (particularly in England and the Netherlands) was what allowed Europe to jump ahead. In many ways pre-industrial economy was a zero sum game for someone to be rich and afford to have enough capital to invest into developing industrial production somebody had to be poor. This mean that 90%+ of all people in China and in every other relatively large country lived in extreme poverty. European colonial powers were simply the first to outsource this dynamic into other continents. While most people in Europe did not directly benefit from native or African slaves in the Americas the transfer of wealth allowed them to import grain and other products from abroad which simultaneously freed up enough labor to develop mining and other industries and increased the purchasing power enough to create significant demand for manufactured goods. No reforms in China or any ancient empire could have achieved this as long as 90% of their populations were confined to permanently remaining subsistence farmers. Also the Song created paper money because they did not have enough gold and silver it didn’t really offer any benefits besides that and had significant risks. Every attempt to institute paper money, not directly tied to gold or silver prior to the 20th century failed.
    - ETH_start 4y ago
      >>European colonial powers were simply the first to outsource this dynamic into other continents. While most people in Europe did not directly benefit from native or African slaves in the Americas the transfer of wealth allowed them to import grain and other products from abroad which simultaneously freed up enough labor to develop mining and other industries and increased the purchasing power enough to create significant demand for manufactured goods. Is there any evidence to support this? I remember reading that exploitive practices like slavery added very little to Europe's GDP. There seems to be processes - like advancing textile production and coal mining technology and metallurgy - that began long before the age of colonialism, and thus would likely have continued even in the absence of the slave trade.
      - eru 4y ago
        Yes, the Dutch and later the English mostly got rich off of capitalism and trade (and early industrialization) at home. Portugal and Spain had huge colonial empires, but that did not drive any industrialization or really long term wealth explosion like the capitalism and the industrial revolution did.
      - marsven_422 4y ago
  - tuatoru 4y ago
    The Song invented gunpowder, but did not put it into mass production. Paper money was certainly adopted. There was a class of administrators who could see the advantages, and so there was demand.
- frozenport 4y ago
  The article here talks about demand. In Britain the demand for coal was independent of social equality. In the sense that everybody needed it to stay alive, especially during the winter.
  - tuatoru 4y ago
    English society was much less unequal than those of the Yangtze Valley or Gujarat at the same time. Laborers' wages were over five times higher in England according to recent reconstructions.
- jsolson 4y ago
  > Without demand, there is no supply. An economics professor of mine put it as "markets are created by demand, not supply." That was nearly 20 years ago, but it's really stuck with me. As the linked article notes, the precursors for technological innovations were present in many places, but many of those places lacked one or more components of demand flow to finance the required innovation. Only after demand for industrial innovation is present do gaps in the supply chain come into play.
  - skybrian 4y ago
    Seems like a false dichotomy? It's of course both. Product-market fit is essential, but also, someone has to do the work, and supply constraints are important.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Look up Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China for an absolute mind-blowing realisation of the development of Chinese technology. In fairness, the extent was largely unknown to Chinese of the time (the project began in the 1950s, it remains in process). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...
- eru 4y ago
  Andrande's 'Gunpowder Age' is also worth reading. You can also read his 'How Taiwan Became Chinese' for free online: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/andrade/ http://www.gutenberg-e.org/andrade/ > In 1600, Taiwan was a wild land, inhabited by headhunters and visited mainly by pirates and fishermen. A hundred years later it was a prefecture of the Chinese Empire, home to a hundred thousand Chinese colonists. What accounted for this transition? How did Taiwan become Chinese?
_hypx 4y ago
I'm going to make a rather blunt argument that the difference was the arrival of New World foods, allowing for much larger populations than was possible in China at the time. We have had too many civilizations supposedly "came close" to industrialization but never did. Something more is holding them back. And since so much of civilization was the result of having a large enough population to develop the next stage of advancement, this could easily just be another case of that. Once huge populations became possibly in the 16th century onwards, the industrial revolution suddenly became possible in a way it never could before.
- Jensson 4y ago
  > I'm going to make a rather blunt argument that the difference was the arrival of New World foods, allowing for much larger populations than was possible in China at the time. Potatoes and rice are roughly equivalent in terms of how many people they can feed. Potatoes was revolutionary to Europe because they didn't have rice, but would be nothing special to China.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Corn and potato are important, but not necessarily as their whole form. They were, however, often processed into corn and potato starch, which is pretty common in Chinese cooking.
  - 7952 4y ago
    There could be a difference in labour required though and that is they key. Potatos made workers available who were not needed for farming.
  - _hypx 4y ago
    Potatoes are a lot more nutritious than rice though. Plus being easier to grow and in far more places. You also have to include things like maize, sweet potato, squash, etc.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  I would also contend that the New World had an impact, but a different one than just the natural resources. Rather, it's one of the pieces in the puzzle of "modernity", and modernity preceded industrialization as a philosophical end to which society coordinated its actions. Ancient Rome was not just agrarian but tributary in nature: the social roles creating slaves and citizens were predefined through conquests. The empire had trade, and trade helped it prosper, but trade was not respected as a foundational ideology as was the case later with merchantalism. The reason why Britain felt pressure to be an exporter was because this was where the dominant ideology ultimately led: put more assets on the national balance sheet, externalize the liabilities. That emerged from the struggle between the colonial powers of Europe over the course of centuries. The Crusades brought back new ideas, and later, so did the Spanish explorations. At first the dynamic was primarily derived from tribute, and the early conquests had a focus on bullionism: getting gold and silver. But it soon became clear that sugar, cotton, etc were more fundamental to prosperity, and by the 1700's, this had been refined by the utilitarian philosophers into a mode of thought about trade, ethics and invention that remains close to what we accept today. In the prior societies, this wasn't a topic of discussion, and therefore new ideas were suspicious by default. So even if you had the idea to explore some topic, you needed to be close to, or part of, the nobility to have an opportunity to try. And a big part of early modern Europe was that the inventors and philosophers were always upsetting some noble and running away to the next country over. So, while Britain got there first, continued emphasis on trade - both with the Americas and the East - would have eventually created the conditions for industry somewhere in Europe.

by byw 4y ago

tuatoru 4y ago

This is a key point that seems to be forever in the blind spot of many people who focus on production/supply and technologies. Without demand, there is no supply. In highly unequal societies there is no motivation to improve production efficiency--rather the opposite.

eru 4y ago
The Song were extremely advanced for their time. They also invented gunpowder and paper money. They were basically an early modern civilisation, when Europe was still in the middle ages. What do you know about inequality during the Song dynasty?
- yywwbbn 4y ago
  Majority of people were still subsistence farmers. The massive transfer of wealth from the colonies and trade (particularly in England and the Netherlands) was what allowed Europe to jump ahead. In many ways pre-industrial economy was a zero sum game for someone to be rich and afford to have enough capital to invest into developing industrial production somebody had to be poor. This mean that 90%+ of all people in China and in every other relatively large country lived in extreme poverty. European colonial powers were simply the first to outsource this dynamic into other continents. While most people in Europe did not directly benefit from native or African slaves in the Americas the transfer of wealth allowed them to import grain and other products from abroad which simultaneously freed up enough labor to develop mining and other industries and increased the purchasing power enough to create significant demand for manufactured goods. No reforms in China or any ancient empire could have achieved this as long as 90% of their populations were confined to permanently remaining subsistence farmers. Also the Song created paper money because they did not have enough gold and silver it didn’t really offer any benefits besides that and had significant risks. Every attempt to institute paper money, not directly tied to gold or silver prior to the 20th century failed.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    >>European colonial powers were simply the first to outsource this dynamic into other continents. While most people in Europe did not directly benefit from native or African slaves in the Americas the transfer of wealth allowed them to import grain and other products from abroad which simultaneously freed up enough labor to develop mining and other industries and increased the purchasing power enough to create significant demand for manufactured goods. Is there any evidence to support this? I remember reading that exploitive practices like slavery added very little to Europe's GDP. There seems to be processes - like advancing textile production and coal mining technology and metallurgy - that began long before the age of colonialism, and thus would likely have continued even in the absence of the slave trade.
    - eru 4y ago
      Yes, the Dutch and later the English mostly got rich off of capitalism and trade (and early industrialization) at home. Portugal and Spain had huge colonial empires, but that did not drive any industrialization or really long term wealth explosion like the capitalism and the industrial revolution did.
    - marsven_422 4y ago
- tuatoru 4y ago
  The Song invented gunpowder, but did not put it into mass production. Paper money was certainly adopted. There was a class of administrators who could see the advantages, and so there was demand.
frozenport 4y ago
The article here talks about demand. In Britain the demand for coal was independent of social equality. In the sense that everybody needed it to stay alive, especially during the winter.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  English society was much less unequal than those of the Yangtze Valley or Gujarat at the same time. Laborers' wages were over five times higher in England according to recent reconstructions.
jsolson 4y ago
> Without demand, there is no supply. An economics professor of mine put it as "markets are created by demand, not supply." That was nearly 20 years ago, but it's really stuck with me. As the linked article notes, the precursors for technological innovations were present in many places, but many of those places lacked one or more components of demand flow to finance the required innovation. Only after demand for industrial innovation is present do gaps in the supply chain come into play.
- skybrian 4y ago
  Seems like a false dichotomy? It's of course both. Product-market fit is essential, but also, someone has to do the work, and supply constraints are important.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Look up Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China for an absolute mind-blowing realisation of the development of Chinese technology. In fairness, the extent was largely unknown to Chinese of the time (the project began in the 1950s, it remains in process). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...

eru 4y ago
Andrande's 'Gunpowder Age' is also worth reading. You can also read his 'How Taiwan Became Chinese' for free online: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/andrade/ http://www.gutenberg-e.org/andrade/ > In 1600, Taiwan was a wild land, inhabited by headhunters and visited mainly by pirates and fishermen. A hundred years later it was a prefecture of the Chinese Empire, home to a hundred thousand Chinese colonists. What accounted for this transition? How did Taiwan become Chinese?

_hypx 4y ago

I'm going to make a rather blunt argument that the difference was the arrival of New World foods, allowing for much larger populations than was possible in China at the time. We have had too many civilizations supposedly "came close" to industrialization but never did. Something more is holding them back. And since so much of civilization was the result of having a large enough population to develop the next stage of advancement, this could easily just be another case of that. Once huge populations became possibly in the 16th century onwards, the industrial revolution suddenly became possible in a way it never could before.

Jensson 4y ago
> I'm going to make a rather blunt argument that the difference was the arrival of New World foods, allowing for much larger populations than was possible in China at the time. Potatoes and rice are roughly equivalent in terms of how many people they can feed. Potatoes was revolutionary to Europe because they didn't have rice, but would be nothing special to China.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Corn and potato are important, but not necessarily as their whole form. They were, however, often processed into corn and potato starch, which is pretty common in Chinese cooking.
- 7952 4y ago
  There could be a difference in labour required though and that is they key. Potatos made workers available who were not needed for farming.
- _hypx 4y ago
  Potatoes are a lot more nutritious than rice though. Plus being easier to grow and in far more places. You also have to include things like maize, sweet potato, squash, etc.
syntheweave 4y ago
I would also contend that the New World had an impact, but a different one than just the natural resources. Rather, it's one of the pieces in the puzzle of "modernity", and modernity preceded industrialization as a philosophical end to which society coordinated its actions. Ancient Rome was not just agrarian but tributary in nature: the social roles creating slaves and citizens were predefined through conquests. The empire had trade, and trade helped it prosper, but trade was not respected as a foundational ideology as was the case later with merchantalism. The reason why Britain felt pressure to be an exporter was because this was where the dominant ideology ultimately led: put more assets on the national balance sheet, externalize the liabilities. That emerged from the struggle between the colonial powers of Europe over the course of centuries. The Crusades brought back new ideas, and later, so did the Spanish explorations. At first the dynamic was primarily derived from tribute, and the early conquests had a focus on bullionism: getting gold and silver. But it soon became clear that sugar, cotton, etc were more fundamental to prosperity, and by the 1700's, this had been refined by the utilitarian philosophers into a mode of thought about trade, ethics and invention that remains close to what we accept today. In the prior societies, this wasn't a topic of discussion, and therefore new ideas were suspicious by default. So even if you had the idea to explore some topic, you needed to be close to, or part of, the nobility to have an opportunity to try. And a big part of early modern Europe was that the inventors and philosophers were always upsetting some noble and running away to the next country over. So, while Britain got there first, continued emphasis on trade - both with the Americas and the East - would have eventually created the conditions for industry somewhere in Europe.