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I think there’s one flaw in the overall theory presented in the article: it was demand for coal for heating independent of the industrial revolution that really

I think there’s one flaw in the overall theory presented in the article: it was demand for coal for heating independent of the industrial revolution that really kickstarted things and the labor exploited for coal mining was the lowest of the socioeconomic classes. Before the industrial revolution England was already mining around five times more coal than the rest of the world combined just to survive winters. Once they exhausted the easy surface deposits they had to go deeper and deeper which required mechanized power to work against the water seeping in. The first engines were invented not when labor became too expensive but when it was impossible to do with human labor at all. After reading Coal - A Human History I’m of the opinion that the industrial revolution was a complete accident of circumstance on a tiny island that didn’t have enough trees to support its population’s energy needs and a surface supply of coal just big enough to get the industry started but not enough to supply the growing population without digging deeper.

moomin 2y ago
Yeah, the cost of labour amongst city dwellers seems very far from relevant when you’re stuck down a pit in Wales. I think it’s interesting to note that the original steam engines were specifically for coal mines. A lot of the cost of coal was transportation; at the source it was actually pretty cheap.
- vundercind 2y ago
  For a while it was the only place where burning coal to power an (early, inefficient) engine made any economic sense. There was an ACOUP piece linked on here recently that did a pretty convincing job of explaining that you needed the twin circumstances of (relatively) deep coal mining (which means you need existing substantial demand for coal unrelated to powering engines) and a lot of effort already being spent on developing pressure vessels (say… a long-running arms race for better and more-powerful cannon) to both get the Industrial Revolution at all, and to see it develop so remarkably fast as it did. Absent the former, it just doesn’t happen, and absent the latter, it’s a lot slower to get going.
DrScientist 2y ago
I like that idea. I also think there is always an element of chance. Sometimes looking back it's easy to think there was some special sauce - Britain was special etc, but sometimes it is a large part random chance. This is particularly the case for something like the Industrial revolution where there is a snowball effect - as you optimise the process at one point the shifting economics cascade ( something that was expensive is now cheap, that cheap thing can now be used in places it couldn't before ).
songeater 2y ago
this post is a great read on this topic/thesis as well: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
waihtis 2y ago
"Coal - A Human History" was written by a known environmentalist which bleeds far too much into the content, you shouldn't use it as a trustworthy source for making any conclusions
- throwup238 2y ago
  Do you have specific examples of inaccuracy or bias in the chapters covering the history of coal in England? If not for your comment, I wouldn't have known that Barbara Freese was an environmentalist.
  - waihtis 2y ago
    Please refer to this review by Joel M. Kauffman, Professor of Chemistry Emeritus. University of the Sciences in Philadelphia: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1Q4KDKM5SNDBA/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0738204005 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1Q4KDKM5SNDBA/re...
    - bowsamic 2y ago
      > There is no correlation of CO2 levels with [global] warming Do you really expect us to accept this review?
      - Jensson 2y ago
        Its from 2008, the case for global warming was much weaker then. Today it is very hard to argue against global warming being caused by Co2, we have 10% more CO2 in the atmosphere today than in 2008 and that is really noticeable.
        bowsamic 2y ago
        So the author of the book was right and the review turned out to be wrong
highfrequency 2y ago
It's more complicated than that. Mechanization of the textile industry (initially with hand power, then water power) was underway well before the steam engine's widespread adoption. Given the massive importance of textiles to Britain's economy and the substantial efficiency gains before the steam engine was used in textile factories, I don't think it's fair to say that the industrial revolution was entirely a coal/heating driven coincidence. These three non-coal factors were also at play in stimulating the automation of spinning and weaving: 1. High wages relative to capital costs (compare with India, the previous textile leader, where it was uneconomical to invest in machines to reduce human labor) 2. Relatively elastic input supply of cotton from American colonies, and relatively elastic output demand for textiles throughout Europe, India, Africa, Asia and America. 3. A parliamentary system that significantly prioritized commercial interests relative to monarchies like Spain, France, China. This was relatively unique in the world (exceptions include the Dutch Republic and Italian city-states like Venice), and certainly unique among states of Britain's size and defensibility. It's important to remember that kings don't really care whether GDP per capita goes up 1% per year or 0% per year; they care about glory from empire expansion and regime defense (and the latter is often manifestly counter to commercialization and automation, which simultaneously empowers a threatening merchant class and also leads to revolts and instability among the lower class.) Note that the first two largely stemmed from Britain's increasing domination of world trade, itself founded on a combination of naval hegemony, efficient capital markets, and shipping expertise (many of these inherited from the Dutch legacy following the Glorious Revolution). Outsized results are almost always caused by a confluence of many interacting factors rather than a single explanation like coal deposits.
- throwup238 2y ago
  I think you're confusing different engines: Newcomen's first practical engine used for pumping water out of mines predates Arkwright's water powered Cromford Mill by over 60 years and Watt's steam engine by 75. Watt's engine allowed other industries to mechanize without water power so that's the cutoff most people use for the industrial revolution, but coal miners were using a less efficient engine for over half a century by that point. > Outsized results are almost always caused by a confluence of many interacting factors rather than a single explanation like coal deposits. That's a complete strawman. I wasn't making that argument at all; quite the opposite! It was the confluence of factors that drove England to use coal that are responsible for the industrial revolution like the population boom, England's geography and dependence on pasture rather than more productive agricultural land leading to deforestation and a robust textile industry, and so on.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> it was demand for coal "...the industrial revolution was more than simply an increase in economic production. Modest increases in economic production are, after all, possible in agrarian economies. Instead, the industrial revolution was about accessing entirely new sources of energy for broad use in the economy, thus drastically increasing the amount of power available for human use. The industrial revolution thus represents not merely a change in quantity, but a change in kind from what we might call an ‘organic’ economy to a ‘mineral’ economy. Consequently, I’d argue, the industrial revolution represents probably just the second time in human history that as a species we’ve undergone a radical change in our production; the first being the development of agriculture in the Neolithic period." https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... Note: one of my favourite essays
dullcrisp 2y ago
If Great Britain is a tiny island I’d love to hear what regular-sized islands you’d recommend.
- ern 2y ago
  The "tiny island" schtick is part of the British mythos, I believe.
  - graemep 2y ago
    Yes, very much so. So is "overcrowded. I am British - Sri Lankan (dual nationality, have lived in both countries) and find it weird - Sri Lanka is smaller and has a higher population density (population a little less than Australia). I think part of it is that most of the population lives a few high density areas so it feels crowded. Another part is the tendency to compare to the US (which is culturally dominant in the English speaking world), rather than say The Netherlands or Honshu.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Looking for something more in a Madagascar, Baffin, or Sumatra size. kthx
- gumby 2y ago
  It’s a common turn of phrase which I’ve always taken to mean “limited in its expansion due to being an island”, said island being small in comparison to other powers, notably France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, and later Germany and Russia
Anotheroneagain 2y ago
The hypothesis in the article is false because of the simple fact that cheap labor also means cheap labor for making the machines. And vice versa it can't be more profitable to make machines because the wages are high, as high wages would make the machines more costly as well.
- Jensson 2y ago
  You are ignoring the raw resource costs. The raw resource costs of humans is very low, it is really hard for early machines to compete with that, burning wheat in a machine instead of feeding more humans is really wasteful. Its only when you put enforce minimum standards for all humans that humans starts to cost, and its only when you start to dig up fossil fuels that you start to have excess energy for your machines compared to feeding humans. Without those two the natural resource cost of machines is immense relative other things.
  - Anotheroneagain 2y ago
    Same thing. My point is that the cost of the digging up is proportional to the cost of the diggers. Cheap labor digs up the fossil fuels cheaply. It isn't that labor becomes expensive for everything else except for the machines, and the fuel for them.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > Cheap labor digs up the fossil fuels cheaply Only if you have fossil fuel to dig up though. To do that you need to have identified where it is and build the infrastructure and skills to be able to dig it up. Coal mines are far from everywhere, without them you would have to grow fuel and thus compete with human food.
    - jahewson 2y ago
      What makes the machines expensive is (as the article says) the capital cost. An investor must sink a considerable amount of money into producing or obtaining a machine before any money is made, that money is now locked up until the machine (with a limited lifespan) turns a profit, at the cost of not making better investments elsewhere.
otabdeveloper4 2y ago
There wasn't really an "industrial revolution". The term is just carefully doctored spin and propaganda from the British Empire. Europe has been manufacturing at scale with industrial processes for centuries before the "industrial revolution". (And industrial-scale mechanized mining dates back to the stone age.) Basically, it wasn't a "revolution", just a gradual slow development of more of the same.
- kortilla 2y ago
  >And industrial-scale mechanized mining dates back to the stone age. Citation needed. “Industrial scale” doesn’t just mean “a lot”.
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    "Industrial scale" as in mechanized, formalized processes and world-spanning supply chains. The stone age (as well as the bronze age) ended because the supply chains that spanned continents started to be untenable and something new needed to be done. Our mental model is wrong - industrial processes and global supply chains are not a recent invention. In fact, these things are some of the first things homo sapiens invented. (Many millennia before agriculture or the wheel, for example.) Homo sapiens has always been "modern", whatever characterizes our society isn't that.
    - kortilla 2y ago
      Mechanized how though? I don’t think a few cases of water or wind mills turning things meaningfully moves the needle. And it’s definitely not “a formalized process” because those existed long before the qualitative change that came with the Industrial Revolution, which was significant energy expansion into basically every industry, especially transportation. Moving away from depending on animals to move goods outside of waterways dramatically shifted the entire world because it completely changed what was viable (cities of any significant size off of water ways).
- Jensson 2y ago
  Production of most things started to grow exponentially, that is a revolution. We call it the industrial revolution since industrialization made that happen. The industrial processes you talked about were done, yes, but they weren't revolutionary and changing everything like the industrial revolution did. That is why the industrial revolution is called a revolution while the other things aren't.

moomin 2y ago

Yeah, the cost of labour amongst city dwellers seems very far from relevant when you’re stuck down a pit in Wales. I think it’s interesting to note that the original steam engines were specifically for coal mines. A lot of the cost of coal was transportation; at the source it was actually pretty cheap.

vundercind 2y ago
For a while it was the only place where burning coal to power an (early, inefficient) engine made any economic sense. There was an ACOUP piece linked on here recently that did a pretty convincing job of explaining that you needed the twin circumstances of (relatively) deep coal mining (which means you need existing substantial demand for coal unrelated to powering engines) and a lot of effort already being spent on developing pressure vessels (say… a long-running arms race for better and more-powerful cannon) to both get the Industrial Revolution at all, and to see it develop so remarkably fast as it did. Absent the former, it just doesn’t happen, and absent the latter, it’s a lot slower to get going.

DrScientist 2y ago

I like that idea. I also think there is always an element of chance. Sometimes looking back it's easy to think there was some special sauce - Britain was special etc, but sometimes it is a large part random chance. This is particularly the case for something like the Industrial revolution where there is a snowball effect - as you optimise the process at one point the shifting economics cascade ( something that was expensive is now cheap, that cheap thing can now be used in places it couldn't before ).

songeater 2y ago

this post is a great read on this topic/thesis as well: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

waihtis 2y ago

"Coal - A Human History" was written by a known environmentalist which bleeds far too much into the content, you shouldn't use it as a trustworthy source for making any conclusions

throwup238 2y ago
Do you have specific examples of inaccuracy or bias in the chapters covering the history of coal in England? If not for your comment, I wouldn't have known that Barbara Freese was an environmentalist.
- waihtis 2y ago
  Please refer to this review by Joel M. Kauffman, Professor of Chemistry Emeritus. University of the Sciences in Philadelphia: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1Q4KDKM5SNDBA/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0738204005 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1Q4KDKM5SNDBA/re...
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    > There is no correlation of CO2 levels with [global] warming Do you really expect us to accept this review?
    - Jensson 2y ago
      Its from 2008, the case for global warming was much weaker then. Today it is very hard to argue against global warming being caused by Co2, we have 10% more CO2 in the atmosphere today than in 2008 and that is really noticeable.
      - bowsamic 2y ago
        So the author of the book was right and the review turned out to be wrong

highfrequency 2y ago

It's more complicated than that. Mechanization of the textile industry (initially with hand power, then water power) was underway well before the steam engine's widespread adoption. Given the massive importance of textiles to Britain's economy and the substantial efficiency gains before the steam engine was used in textile factories, I don't think it's fair to say that the industrial revolution was entirely a coal/heating driven coincidence. These three non-coal factors were also at play in stimulating the automation of spinning and weaving: 1. High wages relative to capital costs (compare with India, the previous textile leader, where it was uneconomical to invest in machines to reduce human labor) 2. Relatively elastic input supply of cotton from American colonies, and relatively elastic output demand for textiles throughout Europe, India, Africa, Asia and America. 3. A parliamentary system that significantly prioritized commercial interests relative to monarchies like Spain, France, China. This was relatively unique in the world (exceptions include the Dutch Republic and Italian city-states like Venice), and certainly unique among states of Britain's size and defensibility. It's important to remember that kings don't really care whether GDP per capita goes up 1% per year or 0% per year; they care about glory from empire expansion and regime defense (and the latter is often manifestly counter to commercialization and automation, which simultaneously empowers a threatening merchant class and also leads to revolts and instability among the lower class.) Note that the first two largely stemmed from Britain's increasing domination of world trade, itself founded on a combination of naval hegemony, efficient capital markets, and shipping expertise (many of these inherited from the Dutch legacy following the Glorious Revolution). Outsized results are almost always caused by a confluence of many interacting factors rather than a single explanation like coal deposits.

throwup238 2y ago
I think you're confusing different engines: Newcomen's first practical engine used for pumping water out of mines predates Arkwright's water powered Cromford Mill by over 60 years and Watt's steam engine by 75. Watt's engine allowed other industries to mechanize without water power so that's the cutoff most people use for the industrial revolution, but coal miners were using a less efficient engine for over half a century by that point. > Outsized results are almost always caused by a confluence of many interacting factors rather than a single explanation like coal deposits. That's a complete strawman. I wasn't making that argument at all; quite the opposite! It was the confluence of factors that drove England to use coal that are responsible for the industrial revolution like the population boom, England's geography and dependence on pasture rather than more productive agricultural land leading to deforestation and a robust textile industry, and so on.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> it was demand for coal "...the industrial revolution was more than simply an increase in economic production. Modest increases in economic production are, after all, possible in agrarian economies. Instead, the industrial revolution was about accessing entirely new sources of energy for broad use in the economy, thus drastically increasing the amount of power available for human use. The industrial revolution thus represents not merely a change in quantity, but a change in kind from what we might call an ‘organic’ economy to a ‘mineral’ economy. Consequently, I’d argue, the industrial revolution represents probably just the second time in human history that as a species we’ve undergone a radical change in our production; the first being the development of agriculture in the Neolithic period." https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... Note: one of my favourite essays

dullcrisp 2y ago

If Great Britain is a tiny island I’d love to hear what regular-sized islands you’d recommend.

ern 2y ago
The "tiny island" schtick is part of the British mythos, I believe.
- graemep 2y ago
  Yes, very much so. So is "overcrowded. I am British - Sri Lankan (dual nationality, have lived in both countries) and find it weird - Sri Lanka is smaller and has a higher population density (population a little less than Australia). I think part of it is that most of the population lives a few high density areas so it feels crowded. Another part is the tendency to compare to the US (which is culturally dominant in the English speaking world), rather than say The Netherlands or Honshu.
fragmede 2y ago
Looking for something more in a Madagascar, Baffin, or Sumatra size. kthx
gumby 2y ago
It’s a common turn of phrase which I’ve always taken to mean “limited in its expansion due to being an island”, said island being small in comparison to other powers, notably France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, and later Germany and Russia

Anotheroneagain 2y ago

The hypothesis in the article is false because of the simple fact that cheap labor also means cheap labor for making the machines. And vice versa it can't be more profitable to make machines because the wages are high, as high wages would make the machines more costly as well.

Jensson 2y ago
You are ignoring the raw resource costs. The raw resource costs of humans is very low, it is really hard for early machines to compete with that, burning wheat in a machine instead of feeding more humans is really wasteful. Its only when you put enforce minimum standards for all humans that humans starts to cost, and its only when you start to dig up fossil fuels that you start to have excess energy for your machines compared to feeding humans. Without those two the natural resource cost of machines is immense relative other things.
- Anotheroneagain 2y ago
  Same thing. My point is that the cost of the digging up is proportional to the cost of the diggers. Cheap labor digs up the fossil fuels cheaply. It isn't that labor becomes expensive for everything else except for the machines, and the fuel for them.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > Cheap labor digs up the fossil fuels cheaply Only if you have fossil fuel to dig up though. To do that you need to have identified where it is and build the infrastructure and skills to be able to dig it up. Coal mines are far from everywhere, without them you would have to grow fuel and thus compete with human food.
  - jahewson 2y ago
    What makes the machines expensive is (as the article says) the capital cost. An investor must sink a considerable amount of money into producing or obtaining a machine before any money is made, that money is now locked up until the machine (with a limited lifespan) turns a profit, at the cost of not making better investments elsewhere.

otabdeveloper4 2y ago

There wasn't really an "industrial revolution". The term is just carefully doctored spin and propaganda from the British Empire. Europe has been manufacturing at scale with industrial processes for centuries before the "industrial revolution". (And industrial-scale mechanized mining dates back to the stone age.) Basically, it wasn't a "revolution", just a gradual slow development of more of the same.

kortilla 2y ago
>And industrial-scale mechanized mining dates back to the stone age. Citation needed. “Industrial scale” doesn’t just mean “a lot”.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  "Industrial scale" as in mechanized, formalized processes and world-spanning supply chains. The stone age (as well as the bronze age) ended because the supply chains that spanned continents started to be untenable and something new needed to be done. Our mental model is wrong - industrial processes and global supply chains are not a recent invention. In fact, these things are some of the first things homo sapiens invented. (Many millennia before agriculture or the wheel, for example.) Homo sapiens has always been "modern", whatever characterizes our society isn't that.
  - kortilla 2y ago
    Mechanized how though? I don’t think a few cases of water or wind mills turning things meaningfully moves the needle. And it’s definitely not “a formalized process” because those existed long before the qualitative change that came with the Industrial Revolution, which was significant energy expansion into basically every industry, especially transportation. Moving away from depending on animals to move goods outside of waterways dramatically shifted the entire world because it completely changed what was viable (cities of any significant size off of water ways).
Jensson 2y ago
Production of most things started to grow exponentially, that is a revolution. We call it the industrial revolution since industrialization made that happen. The industrial processes you talked about were done, yes, but they weren't revolutionary and changing everything like the industrial revolution did. That is why the industrial revolution is called a revolution while the other things aren't.