I feel like singling out Rome is unnecessary here.
Why Rome specifically? Civilizations existed in the mediterranean (and elsewhere) for thousands of years before and alongside Rome. Why even assume that the industrial revolution had to emerge from a civilisation anyway. History suggests quite a lot of technology came from pastoralists, nomads, tribal agrarian societies, etc.
Alexandrian inventors were more likely to have recorded their patents and have those survive to modernity. My guess is that a prototype steam engine, or even functionally useful devices, probably were invented many times in many places.
The industrial revolution, seemingly, had a lot of chances to happen. Perhaps that's the answer. It was an unlikely occurrence, and that's why it didn't happen all those other times. Tracing back the specific path that led to steam engine prowess in England is interesting... but somewhat arbitrary... probably.
For example, the flying shuttle doesn't really need a steam engine. It could be powered by a water wheel, windmill or muscle power. Power isn't really the bottleneck.
I think what the flying shuttle actually needed from the steam engine was inspiration.
Rome is "singled out" precisely because a lot of (Western) people mistakenly assume that they were on the cusp of an industrial revolution, and just ran out of time or something before the barbarians and the Dark Ages snuffed it out. They were a powerful state, populous, technologically and politically sophisticated, and we see toy devices from time to time that _look_ like tech that helped bootstrap the Industrial Revolution. There are discussions of Chinese civilization that are equally fascinating. [1]
The author's point is that an Industrial Revolution requires a very precise set of conditions to occur. Those conditions didn't exist in Rome, and they weren't far enough along the tech tree to make it happen even if they did exist. [2]
He does acknowledge that we have one and only one example of an I.R. happening, and that it overspread the globe before we had a chance to observe another independent example. (This stands in contrast to agriculture, where we have several.) Perhaps you are right, and there are another set of conditions that could trigger a similar result among another civilization, or a nomadic society. (Deeply skeptical though.)
[1] China is probably a good argument for why the specific conditions need to exist. They were even deeper into the tech tree than the Romans, and it still didn't trigger. Maybe they just ran out of time though; we'll never know.
[2] You could do a similar study on Mesoamerican cultures and the wheel. We see toy wheels, why no "wheel revolution" there? Probably because of a very similar set of conclusions.
OK. I also didn't mean to come off harsh. The author uses Rome largely as a stand-in for "ancient world" in any case.
The reason I brought this up is because I want to push back against the frame which implies conditions made it impossible for Romans to have had an industrial revolution or that conditions made the revolution inevitable in England.
If you widen the frame to include many civilizations, even many eras of roman history... it becomes more plausible that England was a fluke.
To the first point, I don't see exactly where we disagree. "Rome" is effectively used by the author as a placeholder for "ancient world." He also notes that there is/was an ongoing discussion about being on the cusp of an industrial revolution.
I just pointed out that (a) Rome is not particularly unique. That's an anglocentric notion. Lots of civilization^ existed. Even Rome's empire (eg damasus) consisted of mostly ancient civilisations. Most territories across its borders (eg parthia) were also civilisations. Beyond that, more civilization (eg china). They're all candidates, even if we assume that kind of empire is necessary... though I don't see why we should.
>> The author's point is that an Industrial Revolution requires a very precise set of conditions to occur.
This is the point I am pushing back against. I mean, how do you distinguish between a conditional requirement and a post fact anecdote? Just because it happened a certain way, doesn't mean that it had to happen that way.
For example, the flying shuttle doesn't really require steam engines. It's just an automated loom. You could probably power one with a foot pedal. Meanwhile, textile (like steel) is an obviously valuable trade good. You could have probably gotten rich in the neolithic with a battery of flying shuttle equipped loom.
Trade goods, unlike steam power, have vast markets. You can sell as much as you can make.
I'm curious about why the flying shuttle was invented so soon after the modern steam engine. The availability of engines as a power source doesn't explain it, IMO, given how little power a loom requires. I suspect that steam engines' important contribution to weaving was not the engines. It was the engineers. It was engineering. It was a mindset.
Once the mindset exists, the machine is not that hard to invent. It's clever and amazing, but achievable. Motivate good engineers to automate the loom, and they will do it. The mentality to really try, hard, to invent an automated weaving machine... that's the secret sauce, IMO.
> "Rome" is effectively used by the author as a placeholder for "ancient world." ... Rome is not particularly unique. That's an anglocentric notion.
I'm not understanding your criticism of the author choosing Rome. The authors' expertise is in this region of the world & the Romans in particular. Would you have been happier if he'd picked Han China? Would the conclusions have been any different?
>> The author's point is that an Industrial Revolution requires a very precise set of conditions to occur.
>>> This is the point I am pushing back against. I mean, how do you distinguish between a conditional requirement and a post fact anecdote? Just because it happened a certain way, doesn't mean that it had to happen that way.
I didn't represent the authors point very well. He acknowledges in the article—
"Now all of that said I want to reiterate that the industrial revolution only happened once in one place so may well could have happened somewhere else in a different way with different preconditions; we’ll never really know because our one industrial revolution spread over the whole globe before any other industrial revolutions happened."
The only option we have is to look at all the other potentials that existed during the 1700s. Why didn't the IR trigger in Italy? Or Russia? Qing China had a lot of the same positive variables, including tech tree depth. So what was unique about Britain at that time? This is why historians zero in on things like coal, and textiles. But we can't know for sure because of the sample size of 1.
Ok... I think I must have worded the first comment regrettably. I didn't mean to rebut the author's points, quibble or criticise even. He writes well, interesting and I like it.
I am taking this as a discussion piece and going into the other possibility your quote eludes to. 1-v-1 comparison to Rome is interesting, so is widening the field to "antiquity" or even pondering the possibility of non-urban industrial revolution.
I agree with your last points. I'm not even sure we have a sample size of 1. We're not even clear about what happened in 18th century England. Was it science? Engineering? Some set of specific inventions? Politics? "Financial machinery" perhaps, like the proliferation of trading paper like insurance notes, sovereign bonds, and stocks in early companies.
On HN, science and engineering seem like the main ingredients, maybe trade. When I studied economics, you might be surprised to hear, they was taught as economic history. They thought the main ingredient was stock/bond/insurance trading. Politics, resources and trade in the second tier. Technology and science was 2nd tier, at best. They thought of technology as emergent given the right conditions.. derivative basically.
I think a lot of Tories to this day are certain that Georgian politics, culture & tastes are what made England Great.
To me though... I have a bias/preference/opinion is to start downstream as possible. I think the IR's "killer feature" was mass production. The steam engine always seemed like the better symbol for the IR. So do trains and other engines. The humble flying shuttle though? An automated loom is an industrial powerhouse.
If I could go back in time and be some ancient King's investment advisor, I would be betting everything automated textile weaving. A water wheel would do me fine for power. We'd be the richest kingdom of any age, and I would finally be a guildmaster.
It isn't being singled out, Rome is the guy's expertise, and he tends to write articles drawn from his expertise.
"Bret is a historian of the broader ancient Mediterranean in general and of ancient Rome in particular. His primary research interests sit at the intersections of the Roman economy and the Roman military, "
Well, Bret Devereaux is a scholar of Rome, plus Rome had really a lot of resources under its control. The empire was huge, comparable to the modern EU, and had a good transport network both at sea and on land. Most of the other civilizations were dwarfed by Rome at its maximum extent, or at least didn't have as big internal market as Rome did.
Is Imperial hugeness a key factor? If so, why not the Achaemenids, the Chinese?
Why assume that a massive empire in necessary though? It doesn't take that empire-scale resources to build any of these. These aren't really more resource intensive than a Mill to invent or build. The steam engine, which Bret focuses on, is a pretty localized device... unlike textiles and metals which can be exported easily.
Even if export is a key driver, there were plenty of small or decentralized civilisations that could have easily leveraged massive economic zones. The Phoenicians, for example, could have conceivably built the export economy Britain ultimately built in the 18th century.
BTW, I didn't mean to neg on the author. I enjoyed the essay a lot. I felt it was a discussion piece, so discussing.
Personally, I'm inclined to think the "when" is more important that the "where," if it isn't mostly a matter of chance. IE, if England hadn't industrialised first, another country would have.
Once you have a widespread mentality that produces thoughts like: "I'm going to try building an automatic loom," I believe that many of the challenges early modern engineers overcame could have been overcome at many times.
The steam engine might have required symbioses with coal fuel and coal mining needs, but metallurgy (as others point out) and weaving (the flying shuttle) don't. If you are a well resourced blacksmith you can have a crack at metallurgy.
I think that in 18th century england, enough people were educated in engineering. In renaissance Italy, Da Vinci was pretty unique... and the only textbooks he had were Aristotle and such.
Why are there more startups in 2022 than in 1992? The culture had yet to develop.
We have very little understanding about how most other empires functioned. For instance we know were little about the Achaemenids and what we do know comes almost exclusively from Greek sources.
Rome is the most understood and researched ancient empire in the west which naturally makes it a primary candidate for such discussion.
> Why assume that a massive empire in necessary though?
I agree. Even Britain wasn’t exactly an empire in this sense during the late 18th century. And even if we go back to Rome, technological progress didn’t really stop after Rome “fell”. It might have even accelerated in some regions of Western Europe after the worst periods of the dark ages were over. By if we look at more practical fields like agriculture and metallurgy Europeans were already quite a bit more advanced than the Romans (who arguably had entered a period of stagnation several centuries before the fall of the Western Empire) ever were by ~900 AD.
Hugeness maybe not, but highly developed internal market always helps.
One of the overlooked factors that the author mentions briefly is metallurgy. Better metals translate to better machines. Even today, quite a lot of our technological effort is stymied by metallurgy. For example, China still struggles to develop a reliable jet engine for its fighters, and it took a lot of time for SpaceX to stop Raptor2 combustion chambers from melting in the heat. (IDK if this has been fully solved actually. But they are conducting static fires.)
A steam engine needs to tolerate a lot of pressure. Ancient metals couldn't do that.
Why Rome specifically? Civilizations existed in the mediterranean (and elsewhere) for thousands of years before and alongside Rome. Why even assume that the industrial revolution had to emerge from a civilisation anyway. History suggests quite a lot of technology came from pastoralists, nomads, tribal agrarian societies, etc.
Alexandrian inventors were more likely to have recorded their patents and have those survive to modernity. My guess is that a prototype steam engine, or even functionally useful devices, probably were invented many times in many places.
The industrial revolution, seemingly, had a lot of chances to happen. Perhaps that's the answer. It was an unlikely occurrence, and that's why it didn't happen all those other times. Tracing back the specific path that led to steam engine prowess in England is interesting... but somewhat arbitrary... probably.
For example, the flying shuttle doesn't really need a steam engine. It could be powered by a water wheel, windmill or muscle power. Power isn't really the bottleneck.
I think what the flying shuttle actually needed from the steam engine was inspiration.