
Why the Industrial Revolution Didn’t Happen in China - metafunctor
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/28/why-the-industrial-revolution-didnt-happen-in-china/
======
Animats
Worth asking: why didn't the Industrial Revolution happen in the Roman Empire?

Technologically, the Empire was close in one key way. They had weapons
factories turning out steel weapons. They knew steel, and could make it is
small quantities. But they never advanced to the Bessemer converter, which
made steel in bulk, fast and cheaply.[1] This invention was surprisingly late;
it was invented around 1855 and didn't work right for another 20 years. Yet
it's not complicated, just non-obvious. The Romans could have built and used a
Bessemer converter.

With steel, running carts on rails would have been an obvious next step, what
with all the heavy stuff needed in steelmaking. With coal and furnaces and
steel, someone would have figured out steam power. Railway mania could have
happened in 100AD.

There may have been something like the Bessemer process in 11th century China,
but it didn't result in volume production.

The Romans never invented the concept of the corporation. They never developed
common carriers or a commercial mail system. There was a huge empire, rich
individuals, and guilds, but few if any inter-city operating organizations. So
there was nothing in being ready and able to exploit new technology.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process)

~~~
dredmorbius
Well, there are lots of places the Industrial Revolution didn't happen, and
times.

And there's the case that when it _did_ finally happen, in England in 1800, it
was so utterly compelling that it spread around the world within a few years.

My view increasingly is that threading the industrialisation needle required a
pretty specific set of bootstrapping steps, any one of which out-of-sequence
could put the kibosh on the whole affair.

I've been looking at the genesis of the industrial revolution (and moreso, its
opposite, the potential conclusion of it and general collapse of
industrialised technological society) for the past five years. Joel Mokyr's
been studying the concept for rather longer, and has been editing a rather
attractive series through Princeton University Press on the subject, including
books by himself, Gregory Clark (UC Davis, _A Farewell to Alms_ ), Robert J.
Gordon (Northwestern, _The Rise and Fall of American Growth_ ), and others.
Recommended.

I've been looking at the _dynamics_ of technological mechanism, and am
settling on roughly nine:

1\. Fuels, energy storage, and prime movers.

2\. Materials, properties, and abundances.

3\. Power transmission and transformation.

4\. Specific process knowledge (what's conventionally seen as "technological
knowlege").

5\. General systemic knowledge (what's conventionally seen as "scientific
knowledge", to which I add history and geography).

6\. Information acquisition, processing, transmission, and storage.

7\. Organisational systems: governance, business organisation, financial
systems, military organisation, accountancy, courts & laws, religion, ethics,
and moral codes.

8\. Dendritic systems: Transport networks, communications networks, cities,
nations, trade and commercial networks, information systems, knowledge-as-web
(see James Burke), social networks.

9\. Sinks and unanticipated consequences. What Mokyr calls in another recent
piece (WSJ) "bite-back".

Looking at this, Rome had some elements (strong social structures, fairly
strong material systems), but was profoundly lacking in others -- Italy has
virtually no domestic coal, and had been stripped of much of its native wood
(Rome imported wood heavily, and there's a reason for the stone architecture),
and the empire lacked a positional numerical system and all the computational
capacity that entails.

From some of my recent reading, much of it Vaclav Smil's _Energy in History_
and Manfred Weissenbacher's _Sources of Power_ (which draws heavily on Smil,
though also others), a few points become clear:

1\. As Mokyr notes, Britain was not subject to successful foreign invasion
after 1066 -- in fact World War II was the first time _in nearly 900 years_
that London came under direct attack, and even then there was no actual
substantial foreign invasion. Whilst mainland Europe was discovering itself in
the 18th and 19th centuries, England was busily inventing commerce and
industry.

2\. Coal. There are four great coal beds throughout the world, with England
sitting atop the remnants of one. That continued through _parts_ of Europe,
most especially France, a small portion of northern Spain and Portugal,
Germany, and Silesia. The US has an absolutely massive deposit (about 1/4 the
global total), actually stemming from the same Carboniferous-era forest system
as the North American and European plates were joined some 300 million years
ago. The fourth is in China, and smaller deposits are found in Australia and
South Africa. _Industry required coal._ (Mokyr and Clark's comments
notwithstanding, from other references in this thread.)

3\. Geography. England's island status not only afforded it protection from
invaders, but access to trade, both from within the island and from the
Continent. With most significant settlements near the coast, goods could
generally move throughout the island. This was crucial, as until canals (hard
to create) and railroads (required iron, or better, Bessemer steel to avoid
split rails, and steam traction), overland transport was not viable (see
Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ for a comparison of ship and wagon transport from
Scotland to London, and realise that Smith himself travelled on horseback over
several weeks when he ventured to London for university).

4\. Colonies. England could count on its possessions for raw materials, food,
and as an opportunity to export its excess population. Imports included the
critical goods of lumber (short in England), food, sugar (dense carbs), tea
(whose heating provided purified water), pitch (for sealing ships), Irish
grain (which continued to be exported through the Irish Potato Famine of the
1850s, during which the island's population fell by half), and Indian
saltpeter (crucial for gunpowder). These proved to be an interlocking set of
pegs that provided England with key advantages.

5\. A set of strongly self-serving economic principles. A highly illuminating
insight to how "free trade" was viewed in 1870s England vs. the United States
is provided by way of the highly prescient Wikipedia Edit War of 1874: the
British publishers of _Chamber 's Encyclopaedia_ included an exceptionally
indignant EDITORIAL STATEMENT (busted capslock key included) concerning the
"extensive alterations" made by their American printing partners to certain
key articles, beginning with Free Trade (either "the most important and
fundamental truth in political economy" or "a dogma of modern growth,
industriously taught by British manufacturers and their commercial agents".
The British view was at odds not only with the American, but also the French
and German, nations which followed quite deliberate government policies of
industrialisation, similar to China's or Korea's of current times, as
expounded by Frederick List's "National System". For more:
[https://redd.it/4xe2k1](https://redd.it/4xe2k1)

England's lead didn't hold, however. By the late 19th century it was
challenged by both France and Germany, which had caught up quickly (thanks in
large part to their own native coal endowments), and rapidly began to fall
behind the United States, which had not just coal but the lubricant of the
second explosion of the Industrial Revolution: oil.

That's another story.

I Rome _had_ succeeded (or China, or Persia, or the Mayans), I suspect one
consequence might be we'd be now well into discovering the intracacies of
long-term remediation from industrial CO2-induced greenhouse warming of the
planet.

~~~
metafunctor
Thank you. I just spent 30 minutes reading some of your past comments, as well
as stuff on the subreddit on your profile. Must have been the best 30 minutes
I've spent in a long time.

~~~
dredmorbius
Thanks.

I'm always looking for insights, sources, and more than anything else,
criticisms of things which are incorrect, unclear, or don't stand to
inspection.

------
jernfrost
This is why I think the EU is a dangerous idea. It has become this truism that
we are stronger together. No, we are not. Europe conquered the world, because
we were divided. Our strength came from our division not our unity.

Random events always happen. Every country will always experience a random bad
leader. It will happen sooner or later. What is best then to have a land area
unified into one or split into 10 different countries? One bad leader among 10
occasionally will not pull the whole area down. One bad leader for the whole
area can pull the whole area into the dark ages.

Consider the Chinese emperor which banned all Chinese naval exploration and
trade? That could never happen in contemporary Europe, because if your country
got such a dumb leader your neighbors would quickly outcompete you and it
would become very obvious how stupid that decision was within short time.

Being political divided is thus a good insurance against doom. Imagine someone
like Hitler rising to power in a unified Europe? There would be no way to
counter his madness.

That is why I think that China's rise today will eventually end up being a
temporary thing. It will eventually stagnate, because China doesn't have
anything to clearly challenge it. I also think this will be America's downfall
in the end. We can already see an almost Chinese way of seeing the world in
America. Instead of Mandate of Heaven, we got American exceptionalism, which
means America is very poor at absorbing ideas from abroad. The thinking is
always that America is best and has nothing to learn from the foreigners. Not
all that different from the Chinese view when the British came knocking on
their door.

What is great about Europe is that we got this big playground for political
and society experiments. Different countries try out widely different models
for society. I see this among Nordic countries as a microcosmos. Each country
try out different ideas and then we copy what works from each other. Many of
the policies e.g. enacted in my home country Norway has previously been tried
out in Denmark or Sweden.

~~~
supergarfield
This is a good point, but I am fairly sure there is a balance to reach here.
The EU is currently politically extremely weak, with national veto powers
widespread: see how Wallonia, only a part of a small country, was able to
significantly delay CETA ratification, and could probably have cancelled it;
how large EU economies (Germany, France, semi-formerly the UK, and probably
Italy and the Netherlands) all have veto power in practice; how some countries
(Poland and Hungary come to mind) pretty much ignore some rules with little
being done against it.

What would it even mean, in the current state of the EU, for "a Hitler to rise
to power in it"? First, he would have to be supported by a large number of
member states (in which case it would be likely that even without the
existence of the EU, that sort of leader would have become widespread in
Europe), and then, he would be president of the European Parliament? Of the
European Commission? I doubt he would be very harmful there, except possibly
to the EU as an institution.

I believe the EU can (and probably should) integrate quite a bit further
before the problems you raise can realistically happen. I think member states
should be given lots of freedom in non-foreign-policy, non-budgetary choices
(as they currently are), which leaves a lot of room for the experimentation
you describe, and less power to individually veto negotiations that are much
more effective when Europe acts as a block. No-one wants to have to certify
their cars or get an insurance license 27 times to service 20 million people
on average each time.

As a last resort against utterly stupid decisions or policies, of course,
member states are always free to leave.

~~~
jwhitlark
Actually, I think that a great deal of America's success is because member
states are NOT free to leave. Otherwise, they can abandon each other when it
becomes convenient.

Edit since I can't reply. It's hard to imagine, but it wasn't always so, and
rich states always have a net tax outflow to poorer states. It's the political
equivalent of burning your ships; you have to make it work, for no other
course is survivable. Slavery and economics forced the question, but the
American Civil War was first and foremost to answer the question: can a state
leave?

Note this is only about your last sentence, I agree with all the rest.

~~~
wtbob
> Actually, I think that a great deal of America's success is because member
> states are NOT free to leave.

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads, 'The
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited
by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the
people.'

No Article nor Amendment of the Constitution delegates authority over
secession to the United States, and thus that power is retained by the several
States, or to the people thereof. Thus it's pretty obvious that member states
_are_ free to leave any time they choose; it's the only reading of the supreme
law of the land which makes any sense.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_Thus it 's pretty obvious that member states are free to leave any time they
choose_

On this subject the late, great Antonin Scalia supposedly said, more or less:
"we settled that issue 150 years ago".

 _it 's the only reading of the supreme law of the land which makes any sense_

Much to the frequent lament of Scalia, the supreme law of the land is no more
and no less than what a majority of the Supreme Court chooses to believe at
that particular time.

~~~
wtbob
> Much to the frequent lament of Scalia, the supreme law of the land is no
> more and no less than what a majority of the Supreme Court chooses to
> believe at that particular time.

Unfortunately that's true (and Justice Scalia was complicit in that: when he
was right, he was typically really right, but when he was wrong he was rally
wrong); that's why I've always respected Justice Thomas, who really does seem
to attempt to consider what the Constitution actually says, requires and is
silent on.

The one saving grace is that the Supreme Court is _not_ , despite what folks
think, a super-legislature: it only has the power to rule in specific cases.
There's nothing which prevents litigants bringing a similar case as one
already decided, and the Court is free to ignore a previous, erroneous ruling.
So there is some little hope that with the right justices it might ignore bad
precedent.

------
helloworld
Amid all the gloomy U.S. Presidential campaign rhetoric, this made me smile:

 _There 's a debate about the extent to which everything that can be invented
has been invented. Have we picked all the low hanging fruit, can we continue
to grow the way we did? I take a very optimistic view. I think if you want to
summarize the future of technology, the short summary is, "You ain’t seen
nothing yet."_

------
bane
It did, it just took a hundred years to kick off, by all reasonable
comparisons, China is in the middle of its part of the industrial revolution
and there are signs that its about to slide out of it into the next phase of
development.

If you consider that the "real" Industrial Revolution took about 60-80 years
to run through in the West, and the West was starting pretty much from
scratch, and if we pick a date of some sort, say 1976 (end of the Cultural
Revolution), China has been at it for about 40 years. In 20 years (about the
same length of time as the West's) it looks like huge parts of China will have
been elevated to standards of living that probably exceeded those in the West
when we came out of our own Industrial Revolution and will be entering into
the next major developmental stage.

If anything a better and more interesting argument is how China was able to
reproduce the Industrial Revolution in modern times as a model for economic
growth.

~~~
woodandsteel
China could industrialize much faster because all the needed science and
industrial inventions had already been developed by the West. The real
question for China is whether its present form of government can sustain
development over the long term.

~~~
bane
Yeah, China's situation is a bit different:

\- There's already a well developed, wealthy, stable of markets that will buy
the output of production along with the domestic development.

\- The technology to kick off the development has largely already been
developed, China just had to import it and get people to run the equipment and
work on the assembly lines.

What's just as interesting is the ways in which it's the same:

\- Powered by Coal - just like Britain, America and Wallonia

\- Rapid urbanization triggered by the rise of manufacturing jobs

------
ChuckMcM
I think this theory "fits the facts" as we know them but for me it fails for
me on South America. South America was much more like early Europe in that it
has both a diversity of groups, geographic features that make it hard to
conquer, and competition. So what was missing that left the empire of Brazil
falling behind when Europe was racing ahead?

~~~
sodafountan
I'd say climate played a factor in Brazil and South America's economic
progress. This article mentions nothing about climate, Europe during the
winter months would be the perfect time to sit by a fireplace and solve hard
problems. Notice how much of the countries and people living near the equator
fail to have built great civilizations, humans just aren't as productive in
the heat.

~~~
p333347
> Notice how much of the countries and people living near the equator fail to
> have built great civilizations, humans just aren't as productive in the
> heat.

I think Iraq, Egypt, Iran and India were all as hot as they are now and they
all had some of the greatest civilizations. Historically these "countries"
spread beyond current political borders which more or less encompasses a
continuous stretch of land and I am talking in that sense.

~~~
pipio21
"I think Iraq, Egypt, Iran and India were all as hot as they are now."

Not really, we are talking 3000 to 4000 years ago and certainly climate was
colder then.

When we talk about Egypt we know there were very fertile land and cities then
that are desert now. In Mesopotamia there were terrible deforestation done by
humans that is recorded on documents and salinization of fertile lands that
are now also desert but at the time supported millions of people.

We also know there has been at least two terrible changes in climate that
lasted at least years that made the Earth cold and dark linked to volcanic
eruptions.

------
garagemc2
As a follow on, one could ask the question: what where the circumstances that
led to China being unified and Europe not.

Something to do with culture? Something to do with population levels?
Something to do with the crops being grown?

~~~
girzel
One "explanation" you hear a lot is geography. China's central plain is... a
plain. It's easy to conquer and hold a plain. Europe has got mountains in the
middle, plus various odd bodies of water getting in the way. That makes it
much more difficult (given ancient/medieval modes of transport and warfare) to
unify politically. Hence the conditions of perpetual competition that the
article mentions.

China has mountains around the edges, and had a hell of a time conquering the
little kingdoms that were in them. In most cases, the best they managed was
tribute, and never really established real administrative control.

~~~
selestify
But the Romans did manage to unify much of Europe for hundreds of years. Why
wasn't that feat ever replicated again?

~~~
jwdunne
That's an interesting question I've thought a lot about in the past (the rise
of the great empires in general, to be honest).

My best guess is that they were able to do this thanks to the advancement
required to face off the threads before their eventual rise. There wasn't
anybody who could really compete with what they had after those wars were won.
The Pax Romana held relative peace in Europe because of that strength.

I'd love someone with more knowledge on the subject to come and answer this -
really fascinating subject.

~~~
jwhitlark
A lot of Roman strength was organizational. In conquering, they spread that
knowledge. It would probably have been hard to do it again with the same
technique.

------
tgarma1234
I can't wait to find out what the revolution that was possible in our time but
that we failed to see is. We have computers. We have spaceships. We have fish
farms. We have sequenced DNA and cloned sheep. Seems sort of like you should
be able to put all of that together to make... SOMETHING. Oh well, I guess
1000 years from now we are going to look sort of primitive by comparison. I
would like to officially note, for the historians among us, that I am not
culturally opposed to any technological innovations in the production of
Computerized Spaceship Fishfarm Clones. Not sure what's stopping me from
innovating here.

Yes, talking about the industrial revolution happening in Rome or China in the
distance past is sort of like that in my opinion.

~~~
jwhitlark
Me too, although I'll point out we are searching both harder and more
efficiently than at any point in the past.

------
namlem
IMO, the author is being unfairly generous to the intentions of Europeans. He
has it right when he says it's about competition, but then he goes on to
credit Europeans for being more interested in progress and general welfare
than the Chinese. That interest in progress and public welfare did eventually
show up in the 19th century, but until then I'd say it was more about
competition for money and power. The elites of the European nation states
simply wanted anything that would give them a leg up on their neighbors.
Anything that could either benefit their military or create a trade surplus
was especially prized.

~~~
applecore
The Enlightenment has its roots in Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries.
The enormous progress of American capitalism in the 19th century sprang out of
the preceding European intellectual movement.

------
fajr-rd
Europe had competition between states but it also had stability. The key seems
to be balance between competition, that forces states to innovate and gives
freedom to inventors, and stability, that brings wealth and allows
academic/engineering traditions to take hold. Persia had many scientific
discoveries and technological innovations during the so called Islamic golden
age but whole cities have been destroyed including there libraries during the
Mongol invasions that spared Europe. Meanwhile, Paris, London, and many
Germanic cities had centuries without suffering from catastrophic destruction.
Also, I think that the focus should be on a technical level more than on a
cultural level. "Then one day, Europeans build a vacuum pump. [...] In 1573, a
Danish astronomer called Tycho Brahe observes a supernova." I would rather
know more about how they came up with pumps and telescopes than read a long
dissertation on how Chinese elites were too conservative or on how Aristotle
has been trashed. Why did Europeans came up with pumps and telescopes and not
China? I feel that the answer has more to do with demands (from demographic
growth), concentration of wealth and skilled craftsmen than with political
systems. Did China also had available materials, skilled workers and demand
for efficient production?

------
noir-york
Superficial article that comes up with the only answer the author knows:
"competition".

I'm as pro free market as the next (liberal) economist but competition had
little to do with why the IR didn't happen in China.

One obvious counter example to the article: Europe had centuries of bloody
competition before IR, so why did the IR take so long to come about?

And the simple answer is that what enabled the IR to happen was the
Enlightenment and the core of the Enlightenment is essentially, value
pluralism. Before the Enlightenment, God or his representative on Earth, the
monarch, was the sole source of truth. Science, or any other sources of truth
were squashed. The Enlightenment broke that link, most obviously with Locke's
argument for the separation of church and state.

The lack of value pluralism also explains the lack of innovation and progress
in other cultures through history.

A footnote: Machiavelli is misunderstood in the popular culture. The reason he
is so important is not because he was the originator of the idea that there
are different moral frameworks for princes (rulers) and the ruled, but that it
a necessary, indeed a _good_ thing that there are different moral frameworks.
Machiavelli wrote in the 16th century, and was one of the early value
pluralists.

------
dredmorbius
One element of the Industrial Revolution was the military power necessary to
secure resources and land to develop it. Given a wood-fuel powered industry,
this meant a _lot_ of wood.

I've been meaning to run the calculations as to how much a full first rate
ship's fire would equate to in wood equivalents. I'm basing this off of the
_HMS Victory_ , a 104 gun first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy.

Armament consisted of 30 x 32#, 28 * 24#, 30 * 12#, and 2 each 12# and 68#
forecastle guns.

A single round from all guns (unlikely -- a broadside would be half the
armament) would then unleash 1.1 tons of iron shot.

From Vaclav Smil, iron smelting requires an 80:1 ratio of source fuelwood to
output iron, with the fuelwood first being converted to charcoal, a 4:1
reduction itself.

Firing all guns of the _Victory_ expends the smelting power of 92 tons of
fuelwood -- about 30 cords.

Canon could manage perhaps 2 rounds in a minute, with sustained rates of 20-40
rounds in an hour. At the upper bound, we're looking at 3,600 _tons_ of wood
in shot consumption.

The _Victory_ herself required 6,000 trees in construction, was refurbished
after her first major engagement at a cost greater than her initial
construction, but perhaps in compensation, remains to this day as the oldest
commissioned warship, having first launched in 1768.

I haven't done the calculation of gunpowder usage, though I've got a reference
for 6# charge for a 24# gun. If that's proportionate to all guns, then a full
round would be 1/3 ton of powder.

If anyone has a source for UK or US arms manufacture (guns, shot, powder) for
the 17th - 19th centuries, I'd be quite interested. -18th centuries, I'd be
interested.

------
jostmey
If I understand the historian's viewpoint, the industrial revolution happened
in Europe because it wasn't too dogmatic. I wonder if research today has
become too dogmatic -- most big labs are run by older professors pushing their
ideas onto the next generation.

------
Theodores
In the West we had glass - glasses to see with and therefore people able to
read/write into old age. This was an important advantage, we could learn from
the writings of our elders and our old folk could still learn and research
even if they had poor eyesight. Meanwhile, in China, they had 'china' instead
of glass to make stuff with.

The China that existed before the Communists took over had this absurd foot
binding practice that took 50% of the working population off the 'job market'.
Meanwhile, in the West, women did most of the harder work, with their children
in cottage industries that pre-dated the full on Industrial Revolution.

Selling opium to China probably didn't help with their economic development
either.

------
Certhas
I have yet to read all of it, but I have liked what I have read of the
following overview article:

Why did the Industrial Revolution Start in Britain?

[https://orbi.ulg.ac.be/bitstream/2268/188592/1/Why%20Did%20t...](https://orbi.ulg.ac.be/bitstream/2268/188592/1/Why%20Did%20the%20Industrial%20Revolution%20Start%20in%20Britain.pdf)

It actually discusses several diverging schools of thought.

~~~
dredmorbius
Including Mokyr's earlier work. He's been tackling this since the 1970s.

------
soufron
The industrial revolution did happen in Japan though... and without any of the
key factors explained in the article.

~~~
jwhitlark
They had outside pressure driving it, though. I'd probably go so far as to say
that no society voluntarily chooses an industrial revolution, they have it
forced upon them by a variety of pressures.

------
intrasight
The correct question to ask is why did it happen when and where it did. I
believe that the common and correct answer is that the necessary confluence of
ideas and social structures and incentives and wherewithal came together.

------
jwhitlark
Fukuyama's "The origin of political order" and "political order and political
decay" I would recommend to anybody interested in this topic. They are,
however, quite ... extensive.

------
wojcech
"Why the West rules for now" has an interesting take on this

------
tomohawk
"The first of the unprovable premises on which science has been based is the
belief that the world is real and the human mind is capable of knowing its
real nature. The second and best-known postulate underlying the structure of
scientific knowledge is that of cause and effect. The third basic scientific
premise is that nature is unified."[1]

The above describes the Christian world view which was prevalent in Europe.

1\. Henry M. Morris, Biblical Basis for Modern Science (Baker, 1991), p. 30.

~~~
Chinjut
This is a distinctively white Christian thing? Surely there have been, since
ancient times, people in every corner of the world who believe the world is
real (whatever it amounts to to believe this as opposed to not believing it)
and recognize cause and effect (again, I can't even fathom what it would
amount to to be a civilization which did not acknowledge cause and effect).

ETA: Looked up Henry M. Morris. Ah; he's a young Earth creationist, and "the
father of modern creation science". I see.

~~~
tomohawk
You seem to think that bringing race into this is somehow acceptable. It's
not.

If you have something specific against the quote other than innuendo, I'm sure
there are less offensive ways to make your point.

Looking at other world views prevalent at the time, the metaphysical was
inextricably tied up in the physical. Christianity asserts that the world is
real, and that it is worth studying.

~~~
tpeo
You mean your particular sect of christianity.

Christian Gnosticism and Catharism are just two historical christian sects who
denied the reality of sense-perception, and who were purged for that. Not to
mention christian mysticism, specially that of Meister Eckhart, or Spinozism,
or any Neoplantonist interpretation of christian tradition. Christianity isn't
a single theological or even metaphysical tradition, but a multitude of ones
pinned to a more or less single oral tradition embodied in the bible.
Specially, christianism doesn't entail physicalism.

Furthermore, I don't see what's exceptional about "the world" being "real".
Even the Eleatics and the Neoplatonists would've agreed to that, granted that
"the world" be their "One", even though they asserted that sense-perception is
illusory. If these words are taken in their most general sense, then this
proposition becomes a platitude. You might as well say that "whatever is, is".
And no one has ever seriously argued that nothing exists (Gorgias of Leontini
did only in jest).

------
WalterBright
"The Triumph of the West" by Roberts goes into considerable detail explaining
it.

------
reasonattlm
It has been argued that a big part of the picture leading up to the industrial
revolution is concurrent growth in life expectancy and wealth. The former and
the latter both drive one another, and the effect of small increases compounds
over time to generate sufficient capital and interest for technological
progress.

[http://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html](http://ideas.repec.org/p/cte/whrepe/wh016301.html)

"During the 17th and 18th century the English economy underwent a dramatic
transformation: its capacity to feed and increasing population increased
impressively. ... Perhaps for the first time in the history of any country
other than a land of recent settlement, rapid population growth took place
concurrently with rising living standands. ... The notion of life expectancy
provides the most important tool to examine the phenomenon of mortality,
taking into account the age structure of the population. Life expectancy at
age x is the average number of years that a person of age x will still survive
at a given date. The most commonly used indicator is e(0), life expectancy at
birth (or at age 0), but sometimes other statistics like e(1), e(5), e(20),
e(50), are also tabulated. Their main advantage is that they capture age-
specific mortality profiles: for instance, an increase in mortality
concentrated in the age-group between 20-25 (due, for instance, to a long war)
would affect e(0) but not e(30) because the probability of survival, given
that a person is already 30, does not change. Decisions about future capital
and consumption are not taken by the agent when he is born but, rather, when
he is twenty or twenty five years old. Therefore, the relevant survivial
profile for considering the influence of mortality over investment choices is
given by adult life expectancy. In fact, making the distinction between e(0)
and adult life expectancy is expecially important for our problem because
adult mortality behaves in a completely different way from infant and child
mortality in the first half of the 18th century: adult mortality rates
decreased very sharply from the end of the 17th century, while infant and
childhood mortality rates were unusually high between 1680 and 1750. ... If
life cycle inspiration was present in rural England in the 18th century,
farmers who were becoming aware that old people were gradually living for
longer periods must have been more concerned about their own means of
subsistence in the future. This may have been an important stimulus to reduce
consumption, increase savings and take into account longer horizons."

Which still leaves open the question of how and why the early parts of this
avalanche got started in England but not in Taiwan or Japan or Sardinia as
analogous islands, and why the actual timing as opposed to any other plausible
century.

------
pastProlog
One reason the Industrial Revolution happened in northern England is manor
lords began seizing the land that belonged in common to the peasants and
enclosing it. Newly impoverished peasants would then become cheap labor for
industrial factories. This is similar to what Deng Xiaoping and his successors
did in China over the past few decades.

~~~
dredmorbius
The Enclosure acts and Poor Laws. Discussed in Smith. Possibly also Toynbe's
_Lectures on the Industrial Revolution_ , though I'd need to confirm.

------
maceo
This article ignores decades of scholarship about the roots of the industrial
revolution and capitalism.

The short answer is that the Europeans (maybe for some of the reasons given in
this article), were greedier than the Chinese.

It's likely that the Chinese empire reached the New World before Columbus.
[http://www.economist.com/node/5381851](http://www.economist.com/node/5381851).
But the thought of enslaving an entire population and stealing all their
natural resources didn't even occur to the Chinese explorers. Whereas the
Chinese expeditions were financed by the empire, the Europeans expeditions
were financed by debt, so the men needed to arrive on land and quickly acquire
wealth for themselves at all costs, or else they would return to Europe broke
or never return at all. And this led them to commit the horrendous acts in the
New World we know so much about.

Western Europe, now full of gold and silver stolen from the New World had
levels of wealth it had never experienced. This led to increased demands for
certain goods (like English wool), which forced the population off of the land
and into urban centers, thus creating the landless working class. This process
was called The Enclosure
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure).
An urban, landless working class, was a necessary condition for the industrial
revolution. The extraordinary wealth ready to be invested in industry, a
product of colonialism and the slave trade, was another necessary condition
for the industrial revolution.

~~~
briholt
This comment reflects a worrying trend I keep seeing, which I'll summarize as:
the answer to all history is that Europeans are evil. Whatever the question or
the circumstance or the evidence, we have to contort them to confirm our pre-
determined narrative that Europeans are evil. This, of course, is nonsense.
The Chinese were equally as greedy as everyone else at the time. The idea that
China didn't capitalize on its expeditions (to any location) for humanitarian
reasons is patently absurd and easily disproven. It begs the obvious question
- why did they finance expeditions if not for greed? Were the Chinese the pre-
TV model for Star Trek - boldly exploring the seas for the benefit of all
mankind? Get real. See Lim Hong[1], the 16th century Chinese pirate who
ruthlessly slaughtered half of Southeast Asia.

This comment reflects a highly selective and ethnically targeted historical
ignorance and misattribution.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lim_Hong_(pirate)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lim_Hong_\(pirate\))

~~~
maceo
I neither wrote not implied that Europeans are evil -- you assumed that. The
fact is that colonialism and the slave trade, despite creating massive amounts
of wealth for some, were horrific for its subjects. And Western Europeans were
the first to scale both colonialism and the slave trade globally. This isn't
debatable, it's plain fact.

Unfortunately, people like the interviewee explain away early western economic
domination by referring to Western European intellect and culture, and
ignoring the dark side. This has been the case since the beginning of economic
history. Adam Smith didn't even bother to discuss slavery in The Wealth of
Nations even though he knew how critical it was to the development of
capitalism.

It's time to be honest about how we got here. If the ugly truth offends you, I
don't know what to tell you.

~~~
briholt
> The short answer is that the Europeans...were greedier than the Chinese.
> It's likely that the Chinese empire reached the New World before
> Columbus...But the thought of enslaving an entire population and stealing
> all their natural resources didn't even occur to the Chinese explorers.

...

> I neither wrote not implied that Europeans are evil

~~~
maceo
I explained very clearly why the circumstances surrounding the expeditions
pushed the Europeans to be more greedy than their Chinese counterparts. The
fact is that the Europeans pillaged the New World and the Chinese didn't. I
believe mainly economic considerations led this to be the case. I don't know
what your explanation is.

~~~
woodandsteel
Your phrase "the short answer" seems to imply that this is the whole
explanation for why the industrial revolution happened in the West and not
China. Perhaps that is not what you meant.

