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Why no Roman industrial revolution?
- coldtea 3y agoBecause they had better taste than that
- qawwads 3y agoAn industrial revolution is not a single event but a journey. Somebody innovates, then somebody else get the innovation better, then yet somebody else innovates again using what previous people did, etc. Romans could have had their IR from their starting point but they didn't. I don't think it's because they didn't have roman numerals or cast iron. Those could have been part of their revolution. Needs is the prime factor for innovations and this is what they lacked: needs. They didn't need to innovate because they had abondant and cheap labor in the form of slaves and whatever machine someone could come up with was more costly than slaves so the journey did not began. This is why the aeolipile stayed a novelty and the roman didn't have an IR: they didn't need it.
- dkural 3y agoThe linked article dismisses Robert Allen's explanations, unfairly. I find Allen's work to be very clearly articulated and convincing. The question many economic historians ask is, why the British as opposed to the Dutch, or the previously-wealthy states in Italy? etc. The Dutch comparison is especially important, because prior to the Industrial Revolution the Dutch were actually more "advanced" on most metrics.
- anthk 3y agoOr just, well... Spain.
- detourdog 3y agoI don’t understand the idea that the industrial revolution was any more critical than any other leap forward in our understanding. The industrial revolution only existed because of successive progress.
- mcv 3y agoThe Dutch were advanced in lots of ways, but they weren't very industrialised. Flanders would have been more likely. But they weren't in a great position at the time, controlled first by Spain, then Austria, then France; their trade blocked by the Dutch. Netherland was in fact rather late with the industrial revolution, especially the introduction of trains, because there wasn't a real need for them. Netherland already had an extensive transportation network with its rivers and canals, with towed barges transporting goods at reliable speeds.
- isykt 3y agoOne precursor to the Industrial Revolution was the bubonic plague. When the Black Death wiped out so much of Europe, labor became more expensive, and farming required the invention of tools. Did Rome have any similar events?
- felipellrocha 3y agoA ton. The Antonine plague comes to mind.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoA bit later, after the fall of the western empire, but the Plague of Justinian is another significant one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian
- rjsw 3y agoRome had slaves, they didn't get the option to move jobs for better pay.
- isykt 3y agoThat was my intuition — that even if a plague came through and reduced the workforce, there were always new peoples to enslave. But I’m not sure about that.
- dredmorbius 3y agoRome evolved its own plauges, which is the central thesis of Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome. I've come to the view that any networked system will co-evolve pathologies which are fitted to that network's specific niche: cities, civilisations, transportation systems, communications systems, social networks, etc., etc. One challenge is that the growth of such systems occurs in the absence of such pathologies. When they do emerge, things often become quite ugly.
- karpierz 3y agotl;dr: The author starts with the assumption that the Industrial Revolution is inevitable, and uses that to conclude that the Industrial Revolution would've inevitably happened, while dismissing a bunch of other authors who put a lot more thought into their writing.
- holoduke 3y agoBecause no steam engines. No steam engines means lots of labour work in the metal mines. Yield was therefor insufficient to produce large machinery needed to spark the industrial revolution.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smegger001 3y agosort of. they had Aeolipile which is a primitive steam engine but it was looked at as more a curiosity than as a practical tool.
- seiferteric 3y agoI was thinking about this, what really started the industrial revolution? I think the aeolipile, like other contraptions was just seen as a toy. Could it be that the Newcomen engine proved that real value and work could be done using machines in this way? Maybe just knowing that it was possible after being demonstrated by the Newcomen engine really kicked it off rather than some nebulous societal conditions.
- toyg 3y agoNewcomen solved a real problem and created a virtuous loop: it helped pump water from coal mines, which made coal cheaper to extract, which helped keep the (quite inefficient) machine running long enough that it could be refined to the point that it could be used elsewhere.
- monocasa 3y agoAnd particular, the metal working lathe, which wasn't invented until the 1700s. A proper steam engine that actually performs useful work better than just having a dude stand there and move whatever you're trying to move requires very tight tolerances around the cylinders that were previously unobtainable.
- wnissen 3y ago
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- yakubin 3y agoThe collapse of mathematical thought that was the Middle Ages actually began with a huge slow-down in hellenistic (Roman) times, i.e. the Middle Ages was more of a continuation of a trend. I’m not convinced that Rome on its own would develop the necessary mathematics to drive progress forward.
- anthk 3y agoIf you think that, then you have no clue. The Church was phanatical but not dumb on math by any means. How do you think they built their churches? Their naval army? Accounting? Taxes on lesser classes? Heck, just by sailing boats and orienting yourself, you definitively needed trig as a matter of being alive and not get lost/drown in the oceans.
- yakubin 3y agoUsing maths is not the same as inventing new maths.
- hughw 3y agoDidn't the Islamic world preserve and develop math during that time?
- yakubin 3y agoYes. Not just them. A lot of mathematics was done by Indians. But that’s not Rome.
- libraryofbabel 3y agoDon’t bother with this amateurish article and instead just read the work it’s responding to, which is Bret Devereaux’s fantastic essay on the topic https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... . Actually by a professional historian and expert on the Roman Empire, and a lovely piece of writing.
- throw0101a 3y ago> which is Bret Devereaux’s fantastic essay Discussion: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187
- bcrosby95 3y agoThis blog has been a treasure trove for building my RPG campaigns. I would pay lots of money for an "Idiot Worldbuilder's Guide to X" series of books based upon history. I'm probably in the minority though.
- libraryofbabel 3y agoMy personal favorites on his blog are the series on how people produced Bread, Clothing, and Iron in the premodern world. The depth there is amazing, going into all the raw materials and different skills and processes required to support agriculture, textile production, and metallurgy. It really gives you a deep sense of the material conditions that shaped life in the past, and how alien pre-modern economic existence would be to 21st century folks (clothing and food were really really expensive, like one new set of clothes a year expensive, whereas housing costs were proportionally low). Highly recommended.
- l33tbro 3y agoIs there a particular article or essay this is from? Would love to read about this.
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- pnathan 3y agoMy suspicion is that the Enlightenment's transvaluation of all values to valorize individuals, the material, change, and progress is what was required, excluding material conditions. A related question might be: why no Chinese or Indian (subcontinent) industrial revolution? Those societies are rightly called great civilizations, and they were _no_ fools. Why no industrial revolution?
- HarryHirsch 3y agoThere is the theory that in China and India labour was too cheap to encourage development of artificial sources of energy. Perhaps related: Amazon and the size of its firefighting team, and more recently Microsoft and its army of lawyers. Why invest in the advancement of distributed computing when you can just plug holes with armies of engineers, and why invest in computer security when you can flood the media with bullshit and discourage lawsuits with the size of your war chest?
- nonsense_stream 3y agoI don't know about India but that's probably not true in China. China was close to industrial revolution twice, once in the Song dynasty, once in the Ming dynasty (oil and natural gas application were documented), both disrupted by regime change from foreign invasions. Comparison with europe at the same time would suggest that the average Chinese enjoyed relatively better living conditions and intuitively would result in more expensive labor. It is unclear whether industrial revolution would start without the invasions, or were the falls of the dynasties inevitable, but the "cheap labor" theory is quite a bit off in quality in comparison to some other proposed theories, and even if present, could be a result of some other underlying cause than being the problem itself (which may seed a myriad of other problems that impede the progress).
- imbnwa 3y ago>My suspicion is that the Enlightenment's transvaluation of all values to valorize individuals, the material, change, and progress is what was required, excluding material conditions. The Ottomans couldn't block them from the Silk Road
- simonblack 3y agoThe Romans were no slouches, they put their resources to work in smart ways that modern cultures can't keep up to. One example: Roman concrete - still going strong after 2000 years. Modern concrete is lucky to last more than 150-200 years. Another example: Water and sewerage reticulation - Roman water supplies and sewerage systems are still at work after 2000 years. It's only about 140-150 years ago that New York reached a comparable level of water and sewerage works to those in Rome. One word: Priorities. Different peoples have different priorities as to what is important in a culture. Just because Roman priorities were different to ours doesn't mean their priorities were not as good as ours.
- matt3210 3y agoModern concrete is way better. It supports 80+ tons all day everyday. If you put an 80+ ton truck on brand new Roman concrete it wouldn’t last the weekend.
- worik 3y agoSteel reinforcement (tension strength) and Portland cement. Pure concrete can only be used for dome like structures as it only has compression strength.
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoAnd that steel reinforcement is why modern Portland cement concrete doesn't last as long. Eventually the steel rusts, which means it expands and cracks the concrete. We also use a lot of asphalt concrete. Even less durable than Portland cement concrete, but really fast for making roads, and extremely recyclable. Just melt the asphalt, maybe add some new aggregates, and lay down a new road surface.
- worik 3y agoI am not a chemist, I may have this completely wrong, but: Steel does not rust without cause. It needs something like a drip on to a part of it to wash away the layer of oxide and create more. Electrical effects then spread the decay. There are a lot of steel reinforced structures around from the 1920s that are doing very well with no visible signs of structural decay. Here is one close to me form the nineteenth century. Everything else decayed. It burnt at least once. And it stands, still. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill's_Castle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill's_Castle It will be interesting to see if continues for another few hundred years....
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zogrodea 3y agoThose interested in the history of scientific thought might enjoy a great book by Arthur Koestler called "The Sleepwalkers", accessible, readable and well-written. It's also endorsed by modern philosopher John Gray as a precursor to (and a better book than) Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoIt's an excellent book, I do agree.
- hughw 3y agoSeems to me only after Galileo introduced the idea that we could use mathematics to predict physical outcomes could modern engineering take hold.
- asdff 3y agoLong before Galileo. The Ancient Greeks had analog computers that could predict planetary movements.
- hughw 3y agoSure. But they didn’t have a model that understood f=ma or inverse square distance gravity. They didn’t have a causal model. So they couldn’t use techniques of predicting planetary motion to predict projectiles motion. Galileo and Newton tied it all together.
- mabbo 3y ago> If Rome hadn’t collapsed, they might, within a matter of centuries, have advanced to the stage of industrialization. But they would have done it by skipping the Dark Ages The very notion of "the Dark Ages" has long been debunked. It's a myth. The Roman Empire collapsed, but other nations rose in it's place and technological progress continued throughout. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
- yazantapuz 3y agoOnly the west half. The Roman Empire ceased to exist a thousand years later, when Constantinople fell.
- wudangmonk 3y agoDoesn't seem like a myth regardless of who debunks their interpretation of what 'dark ages' means. Things before and after the fall of the western empire seem quite different, maybe it wasn't the fall of the western empire alone but also the rise of christianity that caused this decline. After all it wasn't until religions lost their power that progress picked up speed and things started to get better.
- jasoncrawford 3y agoI disagree; this article makes a good case for the term “Dark Ages”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages
- dventimi 3y agoHow many revolutions was Rome supposed to have? Ok, it didn't have an industrial revolution or a computer revolution, but it obviously had dramatic advances in roads, warfare, law, and bureaucracy. Why isn't that enough? Related question: why aren't we having technological revolutions now that will eventually occur in the far future? Surely, these will happen, so why are we coming up short?
- The_Blade 3y agoand plumbing Rome's uptime was likely better than the downtown Denver building i lived in (that shall remain nameless) turning off the building's water IN COVID during working hours twice a month Diocletian had his issues but probably had 3 9's and his his team could shit shower and shave as they pleased
- robviren 3y agoI liked Dan Carlin's take on this. The incentive to develop labor saving devices is massively impacted by having hoards of slaves and a culture built on slaving. Slaves were the original labor saving devices capable of doing nearly as much as most of our modern machines en masse. Though of course that all came with incredible suffering and the occasional uprising.
- shalmanese 3y agoDan Carlin is not a professional historian and I've always found this explanation one of those layman, just so stories that is way too pat. I've found, for example, that there are people who know 8 things about China and can confidently tie every single Chinese social phenomena to one of those 8 things. As someone who knows 1000 things about China, many of the explanations are patently against the well accepted consensus (ie: change X didn't happen because China is collective vs the individualized West, it happened because there was a change in tax law in 2017 that altered how accrual accounting worked). Professional Historians are aware of the 8 things/1000 things divide and are careful to caveat the limits to their knowledge and not get too far over their skis. Professional storytellers have fewer compunctions and can confidently believe and assert things that aren't good history.
- robviren 3y agoLike anything else I am certain I am wrong in interesting ways. I can just personally understand the idea that if every need I had was catered to I probably wouldn't spend a lot of time wondering how I could go about innovating. A lot of the brilliance was spent on how they could keep poor people in check, get more slaves, and aquire more power. Hence why a lot of what was going on seemed to deal with exactly those needs. They seemed to spend a lot of time warring, entertaining the poor, and politicing competition to death. But I am also a layman, so I leave space to be wrong.
- defrost 3y agoHow would you reconcile The Industrial Revolution was the transition from creating goods by hand to using machines. Its start and end are widely debated by scholars, but the period generally spanned from about 1760 to 1840. and It was only after many failed attempts that, in 1807, the slave trade in the British Empire was abolished. However, slaves in the colonies (excluding areas ruled by the East India Company) were not freed until 1838 – and only after slave-owners, rather than the slaves themselves, received compensation. coupled with the knowledge that the early industrial revolution was very much driven by the mass scaling up of processing the raw materials of the slave trade (cotton, sugar, flax, etc) via power sources, driveshafts, and machines operated by people very much in slave like conditions (not technically slaves but effectively locked into dismal work conditions with no real options for many to leave).
- arp242 3y agoHere's my theory, in addition to the "missing technology" from this article: Romans just weren't very good scientists – as a society they just didn't value knowledge for the sake of knowledge, which is essential for science. "Roman" covers a vast span of time and region with many differences, but by and large, Roman attitudes were highly pragmatic and favoured practicality above all else, having little time and patience for non-practical matters. People look at the colosseum, Roman roads, the size of the empire, and things like that and conclude the Romans were brilliant, and in some ways they were: they excelled at practical matters such as engineering, bureaucracy, organizing armies, committing genocides, you know, all those fun activities required to build an empire. But good science isn't exclusively about practical matters: if "how can we build better buildings, roads, swords, ..." is all you're focused on then you're going to hit a wall pretty quick. Did Einstein solve any sort of practical problem with special or general relativity? Not really; he was just exploring things for no other reason than the joy of figuring things out. It wasn't until much later that his work because practically relevant, in things like nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors, GPS, etc. The first water-pumping steam engines used a vacuum to pump up water. It's fairly straightforward, but ... you do need to know about vacuums and pressure – somewhat abstract concepts that don't really have any "obvious" practical applications in the same way that practical engineering improvements do. I bet at least some of the "missing technologies" mentioned in the article weren't invented by the Romans for the same reason. The industrial revolution happened when it did, at least in part, because knowledge for the sake of knowledge started being widely pursued.
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- Pixie_Dust 3y ago“Why no Roman industrial revolution?” The entire economy seem to have been based on invading somewhere, taking all the goods and people into slavery.
- mcv 3y ago> If Rome hadn’t collapsed, they might, within a matter of centuries, have advanced to the stage of industrialization. That betrays a deep misunderstanding of the Roman Empire. Because although Rome was sacked and conquered, the Roman Empire continued for another thousand years. The eastern Roman Empire, that is, which was arguably the more educated and advanced half. I know a lot of people love to see the Western Roman Empire as some pinnacle of ancient technology after which the world plummeted into a thousand years of backwardness, but it only looks that way from western Europe. And the real strength of the Romans didn't lie in its technology, but in its massive trade network and in its organisation. They were good engineers because they could organise big engineering projects. They maintained massive road networks. That helps a lot in the spread and use of technology. Of course the collapse of that trade network did slow the spread and therefore development of technology, but most of the technology was never lost (except underwater concrete, I believe), and the collapse of trade did create new problems which lead to other forms of technological progress, especially in agriculture.
- Archelaos 3y agoI also disagree with Devereaux's view that the industrial revolution would very likely only been possible in the specific English circumstances. In a specific sense, market pressures, high demand and the depletion of readily available resources have led to continuous pressure for energy- and labour-saving innovations in mining in general since at least the 1500s. The copper mines of Falun and Røros in Scandinavia (where large mining operations started in the mid 1600s) present examples of that trend. In a more general sense, one can observe a continuous improvement of mechanisation and material in production during the Middle Ages with an increase of innovations and technical understanding in the 1600s. This was a general trend that, even if it were following a different trajectory, would have meant an every increasing accumulation of technological knowledge. Perhaps the electric motor would have been invented before the steam engine or oil had been exploited before coal -- and everything would have taken a little longer. But with technical knowledge expanding further and faster, it would only have been a matter of time before economically viable applications for primitive heat engines emerged.
- opportune 3y agoThis focused on technology, but I think there are a few misconceptions which causes people to overestimate how advanced the Romans were. We think they were super technologically advanced because of what they accomplished and their strong economy, but it overestimates their actual level of development. Most importantly, the Roman economy was built on two things that were simply unsustainable: conquest and slavery. Conquest gave the upper classes and state tons of loot to fund the government, capital expenditures, and further conquests. It also gave them tons of slaves, which I’ll expand on. Eventually Rome hit the limits of what it could feasibly conquer and hold - until that point it was in a unsustainable positive feedback loop that made it seem like a wealthier society (in the sense of the size and wealth of the upper classes, magnitude of cultural and prestige building projects) than it was. Second, slavery was a hugely important part of the Roman economy. Slavery was less sticky than US chattel slavery, so once Rome stopped conquering so much it began to decline (even though people could still enter slavery or slaves could be imported). Then with Christianity it declined even further. Slavery is what allowed the Roman industrial and manufacturing machine to work. Nobody would voluntarily choose to work in Roman minds considering the extremely dangerous conditions, and similarly the quality of life of people working in urban manufacturing (making clothes) was terrible because many cities were overcrowded (so also dangerous because of disease). Also, the reason the Roman upper class was so large and able to live such a lavish lifestyle was that they had many domestic slaves performing their household tasks, as well as educated slaves helping them with business. This IMO causes us to overestimate the productivity of the Roman economy because really they just had a way a highly unequal distribution of wealth and a way to force people to perform dangerous jobs. Also, Rome invested in infrastructure in its conquered territories. So their economic growth was driven for a long time by convergence (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_(economics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_(economics)) as they absorbed and developed poorer areas and created a more stable trading environment. This growth is also unsustainable, and when the empire starting felling apart it caused the economic regression. Even though some technologies like Roman concrete or some books were lost with the fall of the Roman Empire, most technology really wasn’t. It’s just that without slavery, a unified governing and military force, and a stable trade environment that the economy fell and priorities shifted. It was still just as hard to build big things as before, and big things like churches still got built. Arguably there was even more of a need for an Industrial Revolution because without slaves the economy couldn’t support a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction that it could before.
- dventimi 3y agoA version of this question is asked in the article, but I'll ask it again anyway: As a thought experiment suppose Britain lacked the necessary precursors to create an industrial revolution. How confident are you that an industrial revolution would not have occurred elsewhere within the last three hundred years?
- coliveira 3y agoThey just didn't have time. If Rome was still around it would have developed science and technology. They already did a lot of impressive things during their period.
- HocusLocus 3y agoI don't revel in politics and my latest go-to interest in Rome has been, to what extent did they actually experience lead poisoning and what would have been its lasting mental effects? Jerome Okon Nriagu is an environmental chemist who has studied metal toxicity in the environment in modern times. But his foray into history was a book, "Lead and Lead Poisoning in Antiquity" which was lambasted as a bit hasty and heavy on secondary sources. There was also some criticism on a pure chemical basis, for example he cites the lead pipes and lead lined aqueducts as possible major direct sources, but the plumbing of Rome suffered from the hardness of its water and its calcium carbonate buildups were 'legion' (is that a pun?) and are mentioned in ancient times. It would eventually serve as an an insulating barrier against water contacting lead directly. In this reexamination of Nriagu's work ( https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wi... ) "aelius stilo" provides sources that build on Nriagu's premise without discounting it, and suggests that the practice of boiling down unfermented grape juice (must) to syrup (defrutum and sapa) to flavor wine was almost certainly done in lead vessels, or copper vessels that had been coated in lead to avoid the bitter taste copper corrosion imparted into the mix. Lead was generally known as toxic as early as 2500 BC but what may not have been known was the transformative property of heat on chemistry. "stilo" gives some really mean estimates of lead toxicity in syrup and wine, which indeed suggest that wine (not so much water) was the delivery mechanism.
- binary132 3y ago“they would have done it by skipping the Dark Ages” well, yes, since the “Dark Age” was just the aftermath of the collapse of Roman Imperial projection of military power and law and order... this phrase is a tautology.
- credit_guy 3y agoHere's a question: what would have taken to have a Roman industrial revolution? Or just an industrial revolution prior to the actual industrial revolution. And here's a possible answer: I think there's a good chance that if Hannibal won the battle of Zama, we would have had a Roman industrial revolution. Why? Because competition is the mother of invention, and military competition doubly so. The industrial revolution was the outcome of a few hundred years of cutthroat military competition between Britain, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Sweden, the Ottomans, and maybe 10 or 20 other military powers in the theater. Sure, it was the coal and the steam engine that we associate with the industrial revolution, but there were thousands of innovations that preceded that, and many, if not most, were the product of the immense survival-of-the-fittest pressure generated by the perpetual tensions of living in such a bellicose area. After the Roman victory at the battle of Zama, Rome was left without any significant military competition. They defeated and sometimes conquered almost anyone they encountered. The ones that they couldn't just outright defeat (the Germans and the Parthians) were only able to withstand the Roman onslaught, but not to pose any threat to Rome themselves. But in an alternative history where Hannibal wins at Zama, we might have Carthage as a counterweight to Rome, maybe for a century or more. That would have kept the Greeks in the game too. And the Greeks were actually 3 powers (Macedonia proper, the Seleucid empire, and Ptolemaic Egypt). So at least 5 strong and quite evenly matched military actors around the Mediterranean. It is not inconceivable that a few hundred years of competition between these 5 actors could have resulted in an industrial revolution one millennium prior to the one we had.