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As far as I know, the Industrial Revolution started with coal mining. As shafts got deeper there was a need to pump in water and air, and then to lift product o

As far as I know, the Industrial Revolution started with coal mining. As shafts got deeper there was a need to pump in water and air, and then to lift product out. These steam engines at the site could run on low quality coal allowing all of the good stuff to be sold. The Industrial Revolution really started with these mines in the UK. As regards slavery and other factors, once the steam engines were invented and began making the companies who owned them more productive, human labor was outcompeted. Slave labor is not free as humans are quite expensive in food, water, shelter, medical care, and support for these things. Humans also require rest, and restrooms. Given that humans prefer not be enslaved, there’s also a cost to capture. Once an economic replacement for slavery and/or indentured servitude is available, these practices tend to disappear. Even animal labor usually disappears when machines are available, as animals require the same basic care that machines do not. In the USA, slavery hung around longer than it did in Europe largely due to reward for the capture of runaways provided by government, as well as a late start to industrialization.

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perrygeo 4y ago
Exactly. We have plenty of examples of past civilizations experiencing similar economic conditions, slavery, etc. So why didn't e.g. the Romans have an industrial revolution of this scale? Coal (and exploitation of fossil fuels more generally) is the singular factor that differentiates the industrial revolution from everything before it.
- akiselev 4y ago
  The Romans had coal [1]. The Greeks had even come up with a design that (remotely) resembles a steam engine [2]. What they didn’t have was the rest of the “tech tree” leading up to a usable steam engine, mostly metallurgy and the physics of work/energy. We can point to the first industry to truly mechanize as the beginning of the revolution but the technologies that got us there were legion. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
  - goatlover 4y ago
    So did Ancient China, prior to the Romans.
    - runsWphotons 4y ago
      China had steam engines?
      - ska 4y ago
        Sort of; so did Egypt - but these were more steam devices not engines per se. I think the limiting factor was metallurgy & pressure vessel design before you can do something like Watt did.
        woolion 4y ago
        Do you have references? I'd be interested to learn about the subject. Quick search gave me [0] for Egypt and [1] for China, and both answers seem to be "not really". [0] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/was-the-steam-engine-really-known-in-ancient-egypt https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/was-the-steam-e... [1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chinese-develop-steam-engines-prior-to-the-17th-century https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chi...
  - marcusverus 4y ago
    The Aeolipile has got to be one of the greatest "what if" moments in human history. I can't help but look at it and feel like humanity was one serendipitous moment away from kicking off the industrial revolution 1700 years earlier. And what would the world look like if Egypt had been the first to industrialize?! It boggles the mind.
- sinuhe69 4y ago
  Industrial Revolution of course requires industrial machines. So as long as the machines are not invented, no revolution can start.
  - mikewarot 4y ago
    There was a workshop turning out the Antikythera mechanism, it wasn't a one-off device. It had a user manual. Lathes go ever further back. Whoever built the pyramids had sufficient precision to make flat surfaces similar to modern surface plates. The machines have been around for a very long time, powering them with other machines was part of it. There's a lot to untangle here.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    > Industrial Revolution of course requires industrial machines. So as long as the machines are not invented, no revolution can start. you clearly are not giving enough credit to slavery which is the whole point of this exercise. How are we going to build a case for reparations with you talking like that? :) I'm not defending anything about slavery, but just as impoverished working class Britons contributed little to the British industrial revolution, but did both suffer and benefit from it, the same goes for slaves. The industrialization of industry would not have been possible without the industrialization of agriculture which created an unemployed labor pool available for urban industrial revolutionary work, just as we saw play out in the recent history of China.
    - coremoff 4y ago
      analaguously, I got the impression from the article and the discussion here that slavery was a dead-end trap; a local maxima - without pain being experienced by people who had the ability to change things, there wasn't much incentive to make such change - "just buy more slaves"/"just work the slaves harder"
  - vixen99 4y ago
    https://sciencesensei.com/40-ancient-greek-technology-and-concepts-still-used-today/22/ https://sciencesensei.com/40-ancient-greek-technology-and-co...
- dhconnelly 4y ago
  from a previous HN submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187): https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
- Archelaos 4y ago
  Bret C. Devereaux's wrote a very interesting article on this topic in his blog. See: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... His central observation is that the Industrial Revolution involves "coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy", but that "each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact." Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric steam engine from 1712 were so inefficient that it made only economic sense in circumstances where energy source is very, very cheap. That was inside of coal mines (not in any other kind of mine), because there coal was cheapest. So the Industrial Revolution required as a starting point that all other kinds of energy sources were so expensive that coal mines made sense, and not any kind of coal mines, but deep coal mines that required a lot of effort to pump water out of them. In other kinds of mines horses would have been cheaper than an atmospheric steam engine. In other words, intensive coal mining had to come first and then the Industrial Revolution followed, not the other way round. It took over half a century, until 1776, that the steam engine in James Watt's desing had been improved so much that its use made economic sense outside of coal mines, namely in the textile industry. It was in the 1700s that looms and especially spinning machines had improved so much that their combination with Watt's steam engine made sense. Then there was the combination of steam engines with new methods for drilling cannons. The cylinders needed for steam engines used technologies that had been improved over a long period of time in gun production. Then the steam engine itself was combined with the new invention of drilling cannon barrels (instead of casting them). This resulted in better cannons and also helped to further improve the cylinders for the steam engines. So why not the Romans? -- Devereaux writes: "_none_ of these precursors were in place. The Romans made some use of mineral coal as a heating element or fuel, but it was decidedly secondary to their use of wood and where necessary charcoal. The Romans used rotational energy via watermills to mill grain, but not to spin thread. Even if they had the spinning wheel (and they didn’t; they’re still spinning with drop spindles), the standard Mediterranean period loom, the warp-weighted loom, was roughly an order of magnitude less efficient than the flying shuttle loom, so the Roman economy couldn’t have handled all of the thread the spinning wheel could produce." "And of course the Romans had put functionally no effort into figuring out how to make efficient pressure-cylinders, because they had absolutely no use for them. Remember that by the time Newcomen is designing his steam engine, the kings and parliaments of Europe have been effectively obsessed with who could build the best pressure-cylinder (and then plug it at one end, making a cannon) for three centuries because success in war depended in part on having the best cannon. If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to." "All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent."
onos 4y ago
Agree. One comment though: a 30 year gap between uk and USA outlawing slavery doesn’t seem very significant on the 200k year timescale of human existence.
- Retric 4y ago
  We are talking about a much longer change than just 30 years. Serfdom was rare in the UK by 1400 long before the American revolution or steam power. As to slavery “no legislation was ever passed in England that legalised slavery. In the Somerset case of 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled that, as slavery was not recognised by English law, James Somerset, a slave who had been brought to England and then escaped, could not be forcibly sent to Jamaica for sale, and he was set free. In Scotland colliery slaves were still in use until 1799 where an act was passed which established their freedom and made this slavery and bondage illegal.” English merchants where happy to participate in the American slave trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain
  - adventured 4y ago
    > Serfdom was rare in the UK by 1400 You're of course only talking about local slavery in the UK. They were among the primary slave traders outside of their home territory. The British Empire and its prominent subjects traded in millions of slaves between 1400 and 1800. Centuries of profit from that slave trade helped fuel investment into industrialization across the UK. This is a common escape for European apologists of slavery (whether in North or South America). Europe has largely gotten to avoid the consequences of their slave trade (they properly owe many trillions of dollars in reparations). The US history of slavery has nothing on the scale of European slavery - 12+ million slaves across the Americas (and that's merely the first generation number).
    - Retric 4y ago
      I actually mentioned that: “English merchants where happy to participate in the American slave trade” The point was slavery was economically and politically viable in the American south far longer than Europe. It’s a reasonable argument to suggest Europe outsourced and profited from slavery, but it also wasn’t in peoples faces just as few people consider the working conditions of the 3rd world today when they buy stuff. Anyway, the slave trade wasn’t that profitable for England. Profits where mostly split between Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark with no country having a massive advantage. Divide 12.8 million people across 400 years and then further split profits between multiple countries and it was a tiny rounding error for the European countries involved. It wasn’t even that profitable for the merchants due to the long trips and high risks involved. PS: I don’t mean this to be apologist, more pointing out how minimal the gains required before people would inflict horrific amount of suffering.
viburnum 4y ago
It was the profits from the slave trade that financed the initial capital investments in mining, factory, railroads, etc.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Industrialization happened primarily in the free states, not the slave states.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    This didn't happen in a vacuum, wall street was full of slave-labor company shares. The speculators and financiers were closer to the financial center.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      There was a lot more to free states than wall street. The industrialization happened all over those states, but not the slave ones.
- rayiner 4y ago
  But those profits would have been bigger without slavery. Slavery persisted not because it made the south richer overall (it made the south poorer overall) but because it concentrated profits in a handful of political elites. Northern banks and industries, however, would have preferred a richer south with more potential customers. You can see the non-effect of slavery on overall American wealth by looking at the graph of GDP per capita over time: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/US_Gross_Domestic_Product_(GDP)_per_capita https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/US_Gross_Domestic_Product_(G.... If slavery made America richer, you’d see a drop in GDP per capita after the civil war. But you barely see even a blip.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    Slavery didn't really end, the same people worked on the same plantations... honestly, you wonder why they even started a civil war over it.
Retric 4y ago
Not really, the first steam engine was used in 1606 to drain a coal mine in Spain but they didn’t catch on til the early 1700’s. England really industrialized via multiple waves transitioning cottage industry and water power driving drop hammers and other equipment to ever more industrial factories. It’s a surprisingly smooth transition where individual inventions like the spinning wheel just keep compounding and driving further increases in efficiency. Steam power was only used at mines initially because mines where limited by geology. Unlike early factories you didn’t get to decide where the ideal place was you where stuck where the resources where located.
- shafyy 4y ago
  According to Wikipedia, steam engines did go "mainstream" with the coal mine use case, at least to an important part: The first commercially successful engine that could transmit continuous power to a machine was the atmospheric engine, invented by Thomas Newcomen around 1712. It improved on Savery's steam pump, using a piston as proposed by Papin. Newcomen's engine was relatively inefficient, and mostly used for pumping water. It worked by creating a partial vacuum by condensing steam under a piston within a cylinder. It was employed for draining mine workings at depths originally impractical using traditional means, and for providing reusable water for driving waterwheels at factories sited away from a suitable "head". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine#History
  - Retric 4y ago
    The industrial revolution is generally considered to have started around 1760. That’s 50 years after adoption of the Thomas Newcomen steam engine and 150 years after steam engines where in use. This shows it wasn’t specifically the steam engine that kicked things off, but rather a wide range of factors which eventually caused people to say something different was going on. The stated start of the industrial revolution is really quite arbitrary, but linking it to the seam engine is really a misunderstanding what was going on. If you want to point to a single invention Benjamin Huntsman developing the crucible technique for steel production in 1740 had a larger impact on the early years of the first industrial revolution. But again it wasn’t any single invention the transition was simply continuous.
julianeon 4y ago
> As far as I know, the Industrial Revolution started with coal mining. I don't think that's correct. If you are looking for a one-sentence "how did the Industrial Revolution start" summary, I wouldn't use this. My recollection was that things kicked off with the first mechanized mills, locating along streams which used hydraulic or steam power for their energy. EDIT: The book describing this is called Behemoth: The History of the Factory by Freeman. You can read read relevant pages in the book preview online. https://www.amazon.com/Behemoth-History-Factory-Making-Modern/dp/0393356620/ref=sr_1_5?crid=2RW733YPWV4JU&keywords=behemoth&qid=1674014193&s=books&sprefix=behemoth%2Cstripbooks%2C148&sr=1-5 https://www.amazon.com/Behemoth-History-Factory-Making-Moder... Checking Wikipedia, that seems mostly accurate: > Rapid industrialization first began in Britain, starting with mechanized spinning in the 1780s,[21] with high rates of growth in steam power and iron production occurring after 1800. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
- whatshisface 4y ago
  >My recollection was that things kicked off with the first mechanized mills, locating along streams which used hydraulic or steam power for their energy. That goes back to 3BC where the ancient greeks invented it, so I don't think that's a good candidate for the beginning of the industrial revolution. I get the association though, because it is a mechanical system harnessing non-animal power to do useful work. https://www.greekboston.com/culture/ancient-history/water-mill/ https://www.greekboston.com/culture/ancient-history/water-mi...
  - julianeon 4y ago
    No, that's true. But to add detail, this is how things kicked off in America particularly, in the late 1700s or early 1800's. The first American mills that could mass produce stuff were located along streams that used the turning of the waterwheels to do their work. This comes from the book Behemoth: The History of the Factory by Freeman (edit: added this later). One of the main characters is a man named Richard Arkwright. You can see that his biography broadly tracks what I'm describing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright You could call this line the 'origin story' of the Industrial Revolution - the invention of the Spinning Frame (a water powered automation machine, if you will). > Arkwright and John Smalley of Preston set up a small horse-driven factory at Nottingham. To obtain capital for expansion, Arkwright formed a partnership with Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need, wealthy nonconformist hosiery manufacturers. In 1771, the partners built the world's first water-powered mill at Cromford, which covered both carding and spinning operations and employed 200 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright
Merrill 4y ago
Slaves/serfs make economic sense primarily on a plantation/manor where they can be given use of a small plot where they construct a shelter and raise their own food. They receive little or no subsidies from the planter/lord. The difference is that serfs are attached to the manor instead of being owned by the planter. Thus, serfs are not sold, but change lords by inheritance, marriage, or other changes in land rights. Europe was so densely populated that serfs probably had little or no cash value. If you had a manor, you already had serfs.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  >The difference is that serfs are attached to the manor instead of being owned by the planter just want to point out (though I'm not an expert) attaching serfs to the land was a step forward in serf rights. I think (particularly in eastern europe), serfs didn't necessarily have the right to stay on the land.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
eyelidlessness 4y ago
> Once an economic replacement for slavery and/or indentured servitude is available, these practices tend to disappear. Slavery is rampant in the world now. Quite a lot of it in service of the kinds of automation and productivity you describe, but in parts of the world where these discussions aren’t so casual. Slavery hasn’t been obsoleted, it’s been outsourced.
sdenton4 4y ago
I think the causality on slavery is backwards, and the article agrees... Shortages of low-skilled labor encourage automation, because then the (very expensive) automation process becomes cheap relative to labor. The article argues that labor shortages coinciding with excess capital paved the way for automation, which in turn reduced dependence on slavery in the long term. In this sense, cheap labor is cheap, but also a bit of a trap: it doesn't scale into undreamt of use-cases the way that truly scalable automation tends to.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  It also does not reward backpropagation from material sciences. My favourite example here is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrara_marble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrara_marble cause its something both fancied by romans and modern world alike and it was originally sourced by slaves with cludgels as stone masons. But now its done with industrial tooling, by free man (well free to do whatever the market demands).
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Why didn't the industrial revolution start in 1360 then?
deleted 4y ago
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Haga 4y ago
[dead]
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>In the USA, slavery hung around longer than it did in Europe largely due to reward for the capture of runaways provided by government, as well as a late start to industrialization. The story I was always told was that Eli Whitney's cotton gin made slavery economically viable for longer than it would have otherwise.
- bluGill 4y ago
  That is a factor too. Slavery is expensive because you have to feed the slave even when they are not working. Same problem applies to using horses, they eat even where the fields are plowed. Machines sitting idle do not cost additional capital (other than taxes) - of course machine sitting idle don't make their payments, but you can arrange those terms with the bank. Before the cotton gin, wool was more popular because it was less labor. (I'm not sure how silk and flax fit in, but all have their own labor intensive parts pre mechanization). By making cotton cheaper, the labor needed to separate the seed from the cotton was much less and so it was more competitive with others despite the high labor costs elsewhere.
skapa_flow 4y ago
I lately had an idea: Why did the industrial revolution start in the UK? Coal mining was probably a factor. But why in the UK? Coal deposits are abundant in other places as well. But the UK has cold, rainy winters. Coal is good for heating, not only for industrial purposes, like smelting metal. Trees have mostly been cut down by that time. I think they used them for ship building. So if you have the coal mining already there, the other steps are more likely to happen.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Surface coal had to first be depleted before there was a need to go deeper where a machine provided benefit
PestoDiRucola 4y ago
> as well as a late start to industrialization This is true for the more rural southern states, northern states industrialized way earlier (which goes to prove the rest of your argument about slavery).
phkahler 4y ago
IIRC one of the oldest remaining steam engines was built for exactly that purpose. It is on display at the (poorly named IMHO) Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. I say poorly named because it isn't about him, it's about the history of industrialisation.
pradn 4y ago
I'd say the following factors added up: 1. A reason to create coal-driven machines in the first place (to pump water from mines, when labor and other fuel sources like timer were low), to kick-start the process of mechanical innovation 2. Enough technical/scientific knowhow + conditions for entrepreneurialism (inventor gets to actually make a profit) leading to progressive mechanical innovations, spreading to other sectors like textile manufacturing 3. Easy access to coal (near the surface, in Britain itself) to provide energy for the new machines 4. Access to raw materials to drive textile factories, namely cotton produced by slaves in the Americas 5. An market for low-cost textiles produced using machines, to a great extent India (Indian textile imports were taxed, and exports were encouraged) 6. Capital for new machines/factories, often derived from excess capital from slave-plantations + re-invested profits from industry It's going to require quite a lot of expertise to tease out the relative importance of these factors, so us laymen should be okay with a general picture. It's okay to admit that.

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perrygeo 4y ago

Exactly. We have plenty of examples of past civilizations experiencing similar economic conditions, slavery, etc. So why didn't e.g. the Romans have an industrial revolution of this scale? Coal (and exploitation of fossil fuels more generally) is the singular factor that differentiates the industrial revolution from everything before it.

akiselev 4y ago
The Romans had coal [1]. The Greeks had even come up with a design that (remotely) resembles a steam engine [2]. What they didn’t have was the rest of the “tech tree” leading up to a usable steam engine, mostly metallurgy and the physics of work/energy. We can point to the first industry to truly mechanize as the beginning of the revolution but the technologies that got us there were legion. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
- goatlover 4y ago
  So did Ancient China, prior to the Romans.
  - runsWphotons 4y ago
    China had steam engines?
    - ska 4y ago
      Sort of; so did Egypt - but these were more steam devices not engines per se. I think the limiting factor was metallurgy & pressure vessel design before you can do something like Watt did.
      - woolion 4y ago
        Do you have references? I'd be interested to learn about the subject. Quick search gave me [0] for Egypt and [1] for China, and both answers seem to be "not really". [0] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/was-the-steam-engine-really-known-in-ancient-egypt https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/was-the-steam-e... [1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chinese-develop-steam-engines-prior-to-the-17th-century https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chi...
- marcusverus 4y ago
  The Aeolipile has got to be one of the greatest "what if" moments in human history. I can't help but look at it and feel like humanity was one serendipitous moment away from kicking off the industrial revolution 1700 years earlier. And what would the world look like if Egypt had been the first to industrialize?! It boggles the mind.
sinuhe69 4y ago
Industrial Revolution of course requires industrial machines. So as long as the machines are not invented, no revolution can start.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  There was a workshop turning out the Antikythera mechanism, it wasn't a one-off device. It had a user manual. Lathes go ever further back. Whoever built the pyramids had sufficient precision to make flat surfaces similar to modern surface plates. The machines have been around for a very long time, powering them with other machines was part of it. There's a lot to untangle here.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > Industrial Revolution of course requires industrial machines. So as long as the machines are not invented, no revolution can start. you clearly are not giving enough credit to slavery which is the whole point of this exercise. How are we going to build a case for reparations with you talking like that? :) I'm not defending anything about slavery, but just as impoverished working class Britons contributed little to the British industrial revolution, but did both suffer and benefit from it, the same goes for slaves. The industrialization of industry would not have been possible without the industrialization of agriculture which created an unemployed labor pool available for urban industrial revolutionary work, just as we saw play out in the recent history of China.
  - coremoff 4y ago
    analaguously, I got the impression from the article and the discussion here that slavery was a dead-end trap; a local maxima - without pain being experienced by people who had the ability to change things, there wasn't much incentive to make such change - "just buy more slaves"/"just work the slaves harder"
- vixen99 4y ago
  https://sciencesensei.com/40-ancient-greek-technology-and-concepts-still-used-today/22/ https://sciencesensei.com/40-ancient-greek-technology-and-co...
dhconnelly 4y ago
from a previous HN submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187): https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
Archelaos 4y ago
Bret C. Devereaux's wrote a very interesting article on this topic in his blog. See: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... His central observation is that the Industrial Revolution involves "coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy", but that "each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact." Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric steam engine from 1712 were so inefficient that it made only economic sense in circumstances where energy source is very, very cheap. That was inside of coal mines (not in any other kind of mine), because there coal was cheapest. So the Industrial Revolution required as a starting point that all other kinds of energy sources were so expensive that coal mines made sense, and not any kind of coal mines, but deep coal mines that required a lot of effort to pump water out of them. In other kinds of mines horses would have been cheaper than an atmospheric steam engine. In other words, intensive coal mining had to come first and then the Industrial Revolution followed, not the other way round. It took over half a century, until 1776, that the steam engine in James Watt's desing had been improved so much that its use made economic sense outside of coal mines, namely in the textile industry. It was in the 1700s that looms and especially spinning machines had improved so much that their combination with Watt's steam engine made sense. Then there was the combination of steam engines with new methods for drilling cannons. The cylinders needed for steam engines used technologies that had been improved over a long period of time in gun production. Then the steam engine itself was combined with the new invention of drilling cannon barrels (instead of casting them). This resulted in better cannons and also helped to further improve the cylinders for the steam engines. So why not the Romans? -- Devereaux writes: "_none_ of these precursors were in place. The Romans made some use of mineral coal as a heating element or fuel, but it was decidedly secondary to their use of wood and where necessary charcoal. The Romans used rotational energy via watermills to mill grain, but not to spin thread. Even if they had the spinning wheel (and they didn’t; they’re still spinning with drop spindles), the standard Mediterranean period loom, the warp-weighted loom, was roughly an order of magnitude less efficient than the flying shuttle loom, so the Roman economy couldn’t have handled all of the thread the spinning wheel could produce." "And of course the Romans had put functionally no effort into figuring out how to make efficient pressure-cylinders, because they had absolutely no use for them. Remember that by the time Newcomen is designing his steam engine, the kings and parliaments of Europe have been effectively obsessed with who could build the best pressure-cylinder (and then plug it at one end, making a cannon) for three centuries because success in war depended in part on having the best cannon. If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to." "All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent."

onos 4y ago

Agree. One comment though: a 30 year gap between uk and USA outlawing slavery doesn’t seem very significant on the 200k year timescale of human existence.

Retric 4y ago
We are talking about a much longer change than just 30 years. Serfdom was rare in the UK by 1400 long before the American revolution or steam power. As to slavery “no legislation was ever passed in England that legalised slavery. In the Somerset case of 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled that, as slavery was not recognised by English law, James Somerset, a slave who had been brought to England and then escaped, could not be forcibly sent to Jamaica for sale, and he was set free. In Scotland colliery slaves were still in use until 1799 where an act was passed which established their freedom and made this slavery and bondage illegal.” English merchants where happy to participate in the American slave trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain
- adventured 4y ago
  > Serfdom was rare in the UK by 1400 You're of course only talking about local slavery in the UK. They were among the primary slave traders outside of their home territory. The British Empire and its prominent subjects traded in millions of slaves between 1400 and 1800. Centuries of profit from that slave trade helped fuel investment into industrialization across the UK. This is a common escape for European apologists of slavery (whether in North or South America). Europe has largely gotten to avoid the consequences of their slave trade (they properly owe many trillions of dollars in reparations). The US history of slavery has nothing on the scale of European slavery - 12+ million slaves across the Americas (and that's merely the first generation number).
  - Retric 4y ago
    I actually mentioned that: “English merchants where happy to participate in the American slave trade” The point was slavery was economically and politically viable in the American south far longer than Europe. It’s a reasonable argument to suggest Europe outsourced and profited from slavery, but it also wasn’t in peoples faces just as few people consider the working conditions of the 3rd world today when they buy stuff. Anyway, the slave trade wasn’t that profitable for England. Profits where mostly split between Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark with no country having a massive advantage. Divide 12.8 million people across 400 years and then further split profits between multiple countries and it was a tiny rounding error for the European countries involved. It wasn’t even that profitable for the merchants due to the long trips and high risks involved. PS: I don’t mean this to be apologist, more pointing out how minimal the gains required before people would inflict horrific amount of suffering.

viburnum 4y ago

It was the profits from the slave trade that financed the initial capital investments in mining, factory, railroads, etc.

WalterBright 4y ago
Industrialization happened primarily in the free states, not the slave states.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  This didn't happen in a vacuum, wall street was full of slave-labor company shares. The speculators and financiers were closer to the financial center.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    There was a lot more to free states than wall street. The industrialization happened all over those states, but not the slave ones.
rayiner 4y ago
But those profits would have been bigger without slavery. Slavery persisted not because it made the south richer overall (it made the south poorer overall) but because it concentrated profits in a handful of political elites. Northern banks and industries, however, would have preferred a richer south with more potential customers. You can see the non-effect of slavery on overall American wealth by looking at the graph of GDP per capita over time: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/US_Gross_Domestic_Product_(GDP)_per_capita https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/US_Gross_Domestic_Product_(G.... If slavery made America richer, you’d see a drop in GDP per capita after the civil war. But you barely see even a blip.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  Slavery didn't really end, the same people worked on the same plantations... honestly, you wonder why they even started a civil war over it.

Retric 4y ago

Not really, the first steam engine was used in 1606 to drain a coal mine in Spain but they didn’t catch on til the early 1700’s. England really industrialized via multiple waves transitioning cottage industry and water power driving drop hammers and other equipment to ever more industrial factories. It’s a surprisingly smooth transition where individual inventions like the spinning wheel just keep compounding and driving further increases in efficiency. Steam power was only used at mines initially because mines where limited by geology. Unlike early factories you didn’t get to decide where the ideal place was you where stuck where the resources where located.

shafyy 4y ago
According to Wikipedia, steam engines did go "mainstream" with the coal mine use case, at least to an important part: The first commercially successful engine that could transmit continuous power to a machine was the atmospheric engine, invented by Thomas Newcomen around 1712. It improved on Savery's steam pump, using a piston as proposed by Papin. Newcomen's engine was relatively inefficient, and mostly used for pumping water. It worked by creating a partial vacuum by condensing steam under a piston within a cylinder. It was employed for draining mine workings at depths originally impractical using traditional means, and for providing reusable water for driving waterwheels at factories sited away from a suitable "head". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine#History
- Retric 4y ago
  The industrial revolution is generally considered to have started around 1760. That’s 50 years after adoption of the Thomas Newcomen steam engine and 150 years after steam engines where in use. This shows it wasn’t specifically the steam engine that kicked things off, but rather a wide range of factors which eventually caused people to say something different was going on. The stated start of the industrial revolution is really quite arbitrary, but linking it to the seam engine is really a misunderstanding what was going on. If you want to point to a single invention Benjamin Huntsman developing the crucible technique for steel production in 1740 had a larger impact on the early years of the first industrial revolution. But again it wasn’t any single invention the transition was simply continuous.

julianeon 4y ago

> As far as I know, the Industrial Revolution started with coal mining. I don't think that's correct. If you are looking for a one-sentence "how did the Industrial Revolution start" summary, I wouldn't use this. My recollection was that things kicked off with the first mechanized mills, locating along streams which used hydraulic or steam power for their energy. EDIT: The book describing this is called Behemoth: The History of the Factory by Freeman. You can read read relevant pages in the book preview online. https://www.amazon.com/Behemoth-History-Factory-Making-Modern/dp/0393356620/ref=sr_1_5?crid=2RW733YPWV4JU&keywords=behemoth&qid=1674014193&s=books&sprefix=behemoth%2Cstripbooks%2C148&sr=1-5 https://www.amazon.com/Behemoth-History-Factory-Making-Moder... Checking Wikipedia, that seems mostly accurate: > Rapid industrialization first began in Britain, starting with mechanized spinning in the 1780s,[21] with high rates of growth in steam power and iron production occurring after 1800. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

whatshisface 4y ago
>My recollection was that things kicked off with the first mechanized mills, locating along streams which used hydraulic or steam power for their energy. That goes back to 3BC where the ancient greeks invented it, so I don't think that's a good candidate for the beginning of the industrial revolution. I get the association though, because it is a mechanical system harnessing non-animal power to do useful work. https://www.greekboston.com/culture/ancient-history/water-mill/ https://www.greekboston.com/culture/ancient-history/water-mi...
- julianeon 4y ago
  No, that's true. But to add detail, this is how things kicked off in America particularly, in the late 1700s or early 1800's. The first American mills that could mass produce stuff were located along streams that used the turning of the waterwheels to do their work. This comes from the book Behemoth: The History of the Factory by Freeman (edit: added this later). One of the main characters is a man named Richard Arkwright. You can see that his biography broadly tracks what I'm describing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright You could call this line the 'origin story' of the Industrial Revolution - the invention of the Spinning Frame (a water powered automation machine, if you will). > Arkwright and John Smalley of Preston set up a small horse-driven factory at Nottingham. To obtain capital for expansion, Arkwright formed a partnership with Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need, wealthy nonconformist hosiery manufacturers. In 1771, the partners built the world's first water-powered mill at Cromford, which covered both carding and spinning operations and employed 200 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright

Merrill 4y ago

Slaves/serfs make economic sense primarily on a plantation/manor where they can be given use of a small plot where they construct a shelter and raise their own food. They receive little or no subsidies from the planter/lord. The difference is that serfs are attached to the manor instead of being owned by the planter. Thus, serfs are not sold, but change lords by inheritance, marriage, or other changes in land rights. Europe was so densely populated that serfs probably had little or no cash value. If you had a manor, you already had serfs.

fsckboy 4y ago
>The difference is that serfs are attached to the manor instead of being owned by the planter just want to point out (though I'm not an expert) attaching serfs to the land was a step forward in serf rights. I think (particularly in eastern europe), serfs didn't necessarily have the right to stay on the land.
- deleted 4y ago
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eyelidlessness 4y ago

> Once an economic replacement for slavery and/or indentured servitude is available, these practices tend to disappear. Slavery is rampant in the world now. Quite a lot of it in service of the kinds of automation and productivity you describe, but in parts of the world where these discussions aren’t so casual. Slavery hasn’t been obsoleted, it’s been outsourced.

sdenton4 4y ago

I think the causality on slavery is backwards, and the article agrees... Shortages of low-skilled labor encourage automation, because then the (very expensive) automation process becomes cheap relative to labor. The article argues that labor shortages coinciding with excess capital paved the way for automation, which in turn reduced dependence on slavery in the long term. In this sense, cheap labor is cheap, but also a bit of a trap: it doesn't scale into undreamt of use-cases the way that truly scalable automation tends to.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
It also does not reward backpropagation from material sciences. My favourite example here is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrara_marble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrara_marble cause its something both fancied by romans and modern world alike and it was originally sourced by slaves with cludgels as stone masons. But now its done with industrial tooling, by free man (well free to do whatever the market demands).
throwaway4aday 4y ago
Why didn't the industrial revolution start in 1360 then?

deleted 4y ago

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Haga 4y ago

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bryanrasmussen 4y ago

>In the USA, slavery hung around longer than it did in Europe largely due to reward for the capture of runaways provided by government, as well as a late start to industrialization. The story I was always told was that Eli Whitney's cotton gin made slavery economically viable for longer than it would have otherwise.

bluGill 4y ago
That is a factor too. Slavery is expensive because you have to feed the slave even when they are not working. Same problem applies to using horses, they eat even where the fields are plowed. Machines sitting idle do not cost additional capital (other than taxes) - of course machine sitting idle don't make their payments, but you can arrange those terms with the bank. Before the cotton gin, wool was more popular because it was less labor. (I'm not sure how silk and flax fit in, but all have their own labor intensive parts pre mechanization). By making cotton cheaper, the labor needed to separate the seed from the cotton was much less and so it was more competitive with others despite the high labor costs elsewhere.

skapa_flow 4y ago

I lately had an idea: Why did the industrial revolution start in the UK? Coal mining was probably a factor. But why in the UK? Coal deposits are abundant in other places as well. But the UK has cold, rainy winters. Coal is good for heating, not only for industrial purposes, like smelting metal. Trees have mostly been cut down by that time. I think they used them for ship building. So if you have the coal mining already there, the other steps are more likely to happen.

BirAdam 4y ago
Surface coal had to first be depleted before there was a need to go deeper where a machine provided benefit

PestoDiRucola 4y ago

> as well as a late start to industrialization This is true for the more rural southern states, northern states industrialized way earlier (which goes to prove the rest of your argument about slavery).

phkahler 4y ago

IIRC one of the oldest remaining steam engines was built for exactly that purpose. It is on display at the (poorly named IMHO) Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. I say poorly named because it isn't about him, it's about the history of industrialisation.

pradn 4y ago

I'd say the following factors added up: 1. A reason to create coal-driven machines in the first place (to pump water from mines, when labor and other fuel sources like timer were low), to kick-start the process of mechanical innovation 2. Enough technical/scientific knowhow + conditions for entrepreneurialism (inventor gets to actually make a profit) leading to progressive mechanical innovations, spreading to other sectors like textile manufacturing 3. Easy access to coal (near the surface, in Britain itself) to provide energy for the new machines 4. Access to raw materials to drive textile factories, namely cotton produced by slaves in the Americas 5. An market for low-cost textiles produced using machines, to a great extent India (Indian textile imports were taxed, and exports were encouraged) 6. Capital for new machines/factories, often derived from excess capital from slave-plantations + re-invested profits from industry It's going to require quite a lot of expertise to tease out the relative importance of these factors, so us laymen should be okay with a general picture. It's okay to admit that.