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Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

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Re: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

#51

Post by CapitalistCartr »

WalterBright wrote: post #34

The article doesn't mention the printing press. The invention of the press fueled explosive growth, because printers printed handbooks on anything and everything, and so knowledge became cheap and widely available. My personal view is the IR started with the printing press. We're in the middle of a second IR caused by the internet, for analogous reasons.

Aling with easy distribution of ideas is an open enough political climate to foster such transference. Most governments from Rome to the Rennaisance were trying to lock down society to as little change as possible, such as routine wage & price controls, guilds ruling trades, many monopolies granted, etc. Luckily lots of wars kept shaking Europe up.

Also, the wealth surplus to allow men of means to experiment, the tech of working metal to decent tolerances in bulk quantity, and the mass production of paper.

Re: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

#52

Post by saalweachter »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #43
jychang wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it's simplistic, but that's not particularly overly naive. The kickstart of the industrial revolution very much benefited from the disappearance of a large "free" labor source, and it was probably one of the primary social factors that worked in conjunction with the technological foundations at the time.

This ignores the massive amounts of "free" labor that they were receiving from places like India and the Americas. That was a far larger pool than any amount of domestic slavery most of Europe had in previous generations.

And England didn't finally ban slave labor abroad until 1833 ... after the Industrial Revolution; arguably, they continued to benefit from the defacto slavery of colonialism until the 20th century.

Re: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

#53

Post by WalterBright »

jcranmer wrote: post #48
adventured wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> economic freedom China certainly supports that premise. The before and after on their shift toward economic liberalization, is something beyond dramatic. A 50 fold expansion of their economy in a mere three decades after Deng Xiaoping began the liberalization. It's also interesting to note that wealthier resource nations that heavily lack economic freedom such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela (formerly semi-wealthy in…

The USSR is a powerful counterexample. In 1914, Russia was a backwards agrocentric economy that was one of the poorest of Europe. 25 years later, it's an industrial juggernaut on par with, or perhaps even (especially as feared by many at the time) better than the US.

Since the US heavily supplied the USSR in WW2, I don't think they were industrially on par with the US.

Re: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

#54

Post by adventured »

jcranmer wrote: post #48
adventured wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> economic freedom China certainly supports that premise. The before and after on their shift toward economic liberalization, is something beyond dramatic. A 50 fold expansion of their economy in a mere three decades after Deng Xiaoping began the liberalization. It's also interesting to note that wealthier resource nations that heavily lack economic freedom such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela (formerly semi-wealthy in…

The USSR is a powerful counterexample. In 1914, Russia was a backwards agrocentric economy that was one of the poorest of Europe. 25 years later, it's an industrial juggernaut on par with, or perhaps even (especially as feared by many at the time) better than the US.

It's not, it actually proves the point extremely well. The USSR's industrial base was built by foreign industrial firms, including from Germany and the US. The USSR then proceeded to nationalize most of it (see: the German Junkers aviation company; German manganese mining + US industrialist W. Averill Harriman; British and US gold mining firms in the 1920s; and dozens more, all victims of bait & switch Russian nationalizations). The Soviets would have foreign industrialists build what they could not, usually after running an industry into the ground, and then they would turn around and nationalize it back.

Or consider the largest hydro dam in the world at the time, built at Dnieprostroi by Americans (designed by Hugh Cooper). The turbines were supplied by America as well. That single dam increased Soviet power production five fold. The Soviets crowed about that achievement, and they had nothing to do with it.

Steel plants, tractor plants, the list goes on and on, built by American industrialists. Then either nationalized or otherwise proclaimed to be the great product of Soviet industrialization.

They did that frequently between 1914 and the 1930s. The Soviets also never repaid the US lend-lease transfers, which would be worth several hundred billion dollars today.

To make things even worse, during the 1920s, the US and Western European powers subsidized the USSR with vast food aid, as they starved their people and exported their grain production to countries such as Germany (so while the US and others were supplying aid, they were simultaneously profiting by selling their domestic crops into other markets). During that time millions of Russians starved to death.

The USSR was not even remotely close to the industrial scale of the US in 1940. The US had economic output greater than Germany + the UK + France + the USSR by 1940.

This is a good article on it from 1988:

"How America Helped Build The Soviet Machine"

http://www.americanheritage.com/content/how-america-helped-b...

Re: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

#55

Post by valuearb »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #26
eropple wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of thoroughly reasoned and empirical fields such as architecture (and is implementation with regards to civic engineering) in the Roman world is an obvious disproof with regards to this sort of Christian-centric worldview being a necessary factor. If they as a thinking culture believed the universe was not consistent and reliable, there is little reason to believe that the lessons learned that made Roma…

Why then did Oppenheimer (not a Christian, BTW) say that science could not have begun without Christianity? How much of your example is survivor bias? How many roman aqueducts didn't stand to this day (and in fact failed in use)? Well, we'd only know if someone made a record of it, and the record survived, or if we found the remains in an archaelogical exploration. Did they have the science to build aqueducts (and br…

Not sure why Oppie would say that, given how much more Muslim scientists contributed to science during the dark ages and the inquisition.

Re: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

#56

Post by boomboomsubban »

megaman22 wrote: post #50
jcranmer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The USSR is a powerful counterexample. In 1914, Russia was a backwards agrocentric economy that was one of the poorest of Europe. 25 years later, it's an industrial juggernaut on par with, or perhaps even (especially as feared by many at the time) better than the US.

Who cares if you have to starve a few tens of millions of peasants to death to drag them into the industrial age?

The British certainly didn't, roughly thirty million Indians starved during their industrial revolution.

Re: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

#57

Post by Houshalter »

WalterBright wrote: post #34

The article doesn't mention the printing press. The invention of the press fueled explosive growth, because printers printed handbooks on anything and everything, and so knowledge became cheap and widely available. My personal view is the IR started with the printing press. We're in the middle of a second IR caused by the internet, for analogous reasons.

I heard a great argument once, that I can no longer find on the internet. That it was the cannon that lead to the industrial revolution. The first cannons were awful. Short range, extraordinarily expensive to build, and just as likely to kill you as the enemy. There was an arms race in Europe to develop much stronger and cheaper metal. And once that exists, steam engines are much more practical.

Re: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

#58

Post by posterboy »

WalterBright wrote: post #34

The article doesn't mention the printing press. The invention of the press fueled explosive growth, because printers printed handbooks on anything and everything, and so knowledge became cheap and widely available. My personal view is the IR started with the printing press. We're in the middle of a second IR caused by the internet, for analogous reasons.

Analog to the ancient times would be the libraries of Alexandria, Pergamon, Constantinopel and later the Vatican, and probably many smaller ones before. The name Byblos is pretty significant, too. But even today, word of mouth is going strong. In terms of language, riding on horse and camel has had an exponential effect over river shipping on the areal expansion and consequent interchanges.

Re: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

#59

Post by WalterBright »

posterboy wrote: post #58
WalterBright wrote: post #34

The article doesn't mention the printing press. The invention of the press fueled explosive growth, because printers printed handbooks on anything and everything, and so knowledge became cheap and widely available. My personal view is the IR started with the printing press. We're in the middle of a second IR caused by the internet, for analogous reasons.

Analog to the ancient times would be the libraries of Alexandria, Pergamon, Constantinopel and later the Vatican, and probably many smaller ones before. The name Byblos is pretty significant, too. But even today, word of mouth is going strong. In terms of language, riding on horse and camel has had an exponential effect over river shipping on the areal expansion and consequent interchanges.

Libraries don't hold a candle to the printing press for dissemination of knowledge. It's hard to overstate the importance of the press.

Re: Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

#60

Post by WalterBright »

Houshalter wrote: post #57
WalterBright wrote: post #34

The article doesn't mention the printing press. The invention of the press fueled explosive growth, because printers printed handbooks on anything and everything, and so knowledge became cheap and widely available. My personal view is the IR started with the printing press. We're in the middle of a second IR caused by the internet, for analogous reasons.

I heard a great argument once, that I can no longer find on the internet. That it was the cannon that lead to the industrial revolution. The first cannons were awful. Short range, extraordinarily expensive to build, and just as likely to kill you as the enemy. There was an arms race in Europe to develop much stronger and cheaper metal. And once that exists, steam engines are much more practical.

Cannons developed from church bell technology. It's no coincidence that the first cannons were bell shaped.

The printing press was invented in 1440, the steam engine in 1712.

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