Why no Roman Industrial Revolution?

Why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?

Bret Devereaux has an essay addressing that query, which a number of folks have pointed me to at varied occasions. Briefly, Devereaux says that Britain industrialized by way of a really particular path, involving coal mines, steam engines, and textile manufacturing. The Roman Empire didn’t have these particular preconditions, and it’s not clear to him that another path might have created an Industrial Revolution. So Rome didn’t have an IR as a result of they didn’t have coal mines that they wanted to pump water out of, they didn’t have a textile business that was able to make use of steam energy, and so on. (Though he says he can’t rule out different paths to industrialization, he doesn’t appear to offer any weight to that chance.)

I discover this clarification clever, knowledgeable, and fascinating—but unsatisfying, in the identical approach and for a similar causes as I discover Robert Allen’s explanation unsatisfying: I don’t imagine that industrialization was so contingent on such very particular components. When you think about the breadth of problems being solved and advances being made in so many alternative areas, the progress of that period seems to be much less like a lucky break, and extra like a basic problem-solving potential getting utilized to the problem of human existence. (I tried to get Devereaux’s thoughts on this, however I assume he was too busy to offer a lot of a solution.)

As a thought experiment: Suppose that British geology had been completely different, and it hadn’t had a lot coal. Would we nonetheless be dwelling in a pre-industrial world, 300 years later? What about in 1000 years? This appears implausible to me.

Or, suppose there’s an clever alien civilization that has been round for for much longer than people. Would you anticipate that they’ve undoubtedly industrialized in some type? Or wouldn’t it depend upon the actual geology of their planet? Are fossil fuels the Great Filter? Once more, implausible. I anticipate that given sufficient time, any sufficiently clever species would attain a excessive stage of know-how on the overwhelming majority of liveable planets.

Devereaux asserts that there’s a “deeply contingent nature of historic occasions … that knowledge (just like the charts of world GDP over centuries) can typically fail to seize.” I see this in reverse: the chart of world GDP over centuries is, to my thoughts, proof that progress is not so contingent on random historic flukes, that there’s a deeper underlying course of driving it.

So why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?

Think about a associated query: why didn’t the Roman Empire have an data revolution? Why didn’t they create the pc? Presumably the reply is apparent: they had been lacking too many preconditions, akin to electrical energy, to not point out math (for those who assume ENIAC’s decimal-based arithmetic was inefficient, think about a pc making an attempt to make use of Roman numerals). Even conceiving the pc, not to mention inventing one, requires reaching a sure stage of technological improvement first, and the Romans had been nowhere close to that.

I believe the reply is roughly the identical for why no Roman IR, it’s only a bit much less apparent. Listed below are a couple of of the issues the traditional Romans didn’t have:

• The spinning wheel
• The windmill
• The horse collar
• Solid iron
• Latex rubber
• The movable-type printing press
• The mechanical clock
• The compass
• Arabic numerals

And some different key innovations, such because the moldboard plow and the crank-and-connecting-rod, confirmed up solely within the third century or later, properly previous the height of the Empire.

How are you going to industrialize while you don’t have forged iron to construct machines out of, or primary mechanical linkages to make use of in them? How might a society enhance labor productiveness by way of automation when it hasn’t even approached the frontier of what’s potential with easy wood instruments? Why even give attention to bettering labor productiveness in manufacturing when productiveness remains to be very low in agriculture, which is extra elementary? Why ought to it exploit coal when it has barely begun to use wind, water, and animal energy? How are engineers to do experiments and calculations with none idea of the experimental methodology, and with out something near the mathematical instruments which might be obtainable as we speak to any fifth-grader? And if something was found or invented, how might the information unfold extensively when most data was hand-written on parchment?

The entire flywheels of progress—surplus wealth, supplies and manufacturing potential, scientific information and strategies, giant markets, communication networks, monetary establishments, company and IP legislation—had been turning very slowly. There may be not a single, slim path to industrialization, however it’s a must to get there by way of some path, and historical Rome was merely nowhere shut. You possibly can’t leapfrog over the spinning wheel to get to the spinning mule, and (that is one factor we study from Allen’s analysis) it’s not clear that it even makes financial sense to take action.

In a way, I’m saying the identical factor as Devereaux: Rome couldn’t have had an IR as a result of they didn’t have the preconditions. However quite than conceiving of these preconditions as very slim and seeing the IR as extremely contingent, I’m taking a much wider view of the preconditions.

If Rome hadn’t collapsed, they may, inside a matter of centuries, have superior to the stage of industrialization. However they might have finished it by skipping the Darkish Ages and following an incremental course of technological and financial development that, if not an identical to ours, would in all probability be not unrecognizable, and maybe fairly acquainted.

Remark: Progress Forum, LessWrong, Reddit