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Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

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Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#251

Post by vidarh »

gostsamo wrote: post #176
Amezarak wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Bilbo's youth, the Fell Winter took place, and "White Wolves" invaded Eriador. The Great Plague some time before and the Long Winter are explicitly said to have depopulated Eriador and left it "desolate." The Rangers were also not infallible. Obviously they did nothing to stop the Nazgul or large numbers of Saruman's agents in the time of the Lord of the Rings, nor did they stop the Orc-band that invaded the Shire…

See though that all of these disasters are spread over 1500 years. Most of them supposedly kill people, but they don't make the land uninhabitable and nothing stops from next generations repopulating them. Keep in mind that Europe suffers at least two big plagues, migration waves, a mini ice age and lots of other disasters. The main depopulation factors are hunger and food logistics collapse.

Norway took a several centuries to get back to ~1300 levels after the Black Death going from ~37k farms in 1300 to still only 16k farms by 1520, nation wide (and we're not talking large farms here, in most cases). Entire regions were entirely abandoned by the government. Many farms that were abandoned after the plague where not cleared until the 1800's.

If the population density was low to start with, and food production tough, recovery from even a single major enough event can take a very long time.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#252

Post by panick21_ »

Barrin92 wrote: post #16

The industrial revolution is in the book, it's the actual antagonist of the story. Tolkien was a devout Catholic distributist and Hobbingen was his ideal Catholic community of self reliant Hobbits who answer to wizards and kings, not to factory floor managers and administrators.

> who answer to wizards and kings

They don't 'answer' to either wizards or kings.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#253

Post by bumby »

danjac wrote: post #238
timoth3y wrote: post #190

The article presents an engineering answer to s sociological question. The reason technology did not advance in Middle Earth is because innovation was not rewarded. Innovation and experimentation were punished. Mine a little too deeply? You awaken a balrog that kills you an everyone you have ever known. Want to expand into that verdant area across the river? You didn't expect giant spiders, did you? Build a disruptiv…

How is that different from real world history? Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse. Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases.

It's relative. The competing risk only has to be a little greater to bias the decision. (Or, more accurately, the perceived risk).

Remember, risk is probability x severity. In your first example, the severity of not growing crops is starvation vs. the severity of wasted toil in agriculture. I'd imagine the probability is probably higher, too.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#254

Post by gostsamo »

ghaff wrote: post #227
gostsamo wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle Earth has no contraception (Tolkien is catholic) and the only way to stop multiplying is to stop doing... math. LOTR is famous for the women missing from social life, so there is no reason that such measures have been taken. So, you are expected to have high birthrate until you occupy all the good lands and then some. After that you either rediscover Malthus or you start innovating to get more out of what you…

That assumes homo sapiens levels of childbirth however. As a number of comments touch on, a lot of the lack of technological advance could be hand-waved away as a result of low birthrates and a generally low population. You could also perhaps factor in a general societal distaste for technology although human history suggests that societies which can't or won't create technology are overwhelmed by societies that do.

I mean, we can all say "magic" and not think about it, but the fun here is in thinking and the hand-waving is not in the spirit of it.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#255

Post by b112 »

gostsamo wrote: post #151
Maursault wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing explains the lack of development the previous few millemnia. What explains the lack of development in ancient Sumer or ancient Rome? Wait a hot minute, because we have no idea and could have no idea if there was a small industrial revolution 10K years before ancient Sumer was a suburb. There would be no way to know if something like actual stainless steel was forged 60K years ago and the technology was lost…

Actually, we know for at least one industrial revolution in sumerian times a.k.a the beginning of the iron age. And we have a way to find for civilizations with larger impact by checking the isotopes locked in ice. This is the method for dating volcano eruptions and for tracking the produce of lead in antiquity.

Yet look at today, with climate change.

How many areas are seeing reliable ice layer formation? Stuff at the top (most recent) is melting away, too!

So... if the same thing happened before, Industrialization, co2, eventual collapse after warming, ice records may be unreliable...

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#256

Post by b112 »

picsao wrote: post #99
gostsamo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, the industrial revolution did not start in Siberia and it is proving only that it can't start in a world with so far removed population centers. Waterways are the cheapest transport option and source of water for the crops, yet nobody lives next to the biggest river around. The only possible reason would be if there is nobody to live there.

War with ents is my most likely explanation, most of middle earth is the frontiers in inter species warfare.

Ah yes, the ents seem to dislike mankind and their axes. Maybe so!

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#257

Post by gostsamo »

mcv wrote: post #236
gostsamo wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle Earth has no contraception (Tolkien is catholic) and the only way to stop multiplying is to stop doing... math. LOTR is famous for the women missing from social life, so there is no reason that such measures have been taken. So, you are expected to have high birthrate until you occupy all the good lands and then some. After that you either rediscover Malthus or you start innovating to get more out of what you…

> LOTR is famous for the women missing from social life, so there is no reason that such measures have been taken. Maybe the women are missing from not just from social life, but from the world. Not just the entwives[0] and the rarely seen dwarven women, but even human women are surprisingly rare. How many of all those many men making an appearance were married? Only hobbits seem to have actual families, but still no…

The rohinims don't have that issue for example. Nor it is mentioned as an issue for the other human societies. That's why the situation of the ents is considered such an anomaly.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#258

Post by bumby »

oDot wrote: post #194
timoth3y wrote: post #190

The article presents an engineering answer to s sociological question. The reason technology did not advance in Middle Earth is because innovation was not rewarded. Innovation and experimentation were punished. Mine a little too deeply? You awaken a balrog that kills you an everyone you have ever known. Want to expand into that verdant area across the river? You didn't expect giant spiders, did you? Build a disruptiv…

Compared to the very lucrative job of digging for coal...

It's similar to manufacturing jobs from the past. Compared to other options, it was lucrative.

The reason why Henry Ford started paying people $5 was not out of generosity or to help them buy his vehicles. It's because the job was monotonous and people would constantly walk off the assembly line. People stayed because it provided a reasonable pathway to middle class when there weren't a lot of other viable options.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#259

Post by DoughnutHole »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #108
peyton wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kinda implied that Sauron’s rings make individuals of the various races more interested in sticking around longer than in producing offspring. Hobbits were relatively unaffected and had lots of children.

But somehow, despite the fecundity of the Rosie Cotton-Gangees, with 13 children, the Shire had a total population of about 100k, the size of a small (edit: but not that small) town (or the UK population in 3000BC). So either pre-reproductive mortality is through the roof, but never mentioned, they haven't been there long[1], or something bad happened recently (before the events in the LoTR)[2]. [1] Except Hobbits se…

> So either pre-reproductive mortality is through the roof, but never mentioned

Well if we're in this framework of assuming middle earth functions (more-or-less) like our own pre-modern world, then pre-reproductive mortality is enormous. If the Gamgees had their children in Europe in the Middle Ages, then only 6-7 of their children would survive to the age of 10.

Considering that a Hobbit male is only considered an adult at 33 years old, I'd assume that hobbits in general reach sexual maturity later than humans as well, giving any particular hobbit a higher chance of dying before their first child than any particular human.

Plus we don't know if Rosie is an outlier or not - plenty of real-life women have had 10+ children, especially in pre-industrial societies. The average woman in pre-industrial Europe had 6-7 children but effective fertility was barely more than 2 due to pre-reproductive mortality - we didn't see a population explosion in Europe until the 18th century, rather the population very slowly ticked up over centuries and crashed back down in various calamities.

100,000 is still pretty low, but as far as I know there are events that would have caused population shocks, including major crop failures due to bad winters in Frodo's memory, and a few generations previously there were both plagues and even a mass migration of the entire Hobbit population to Hobbitton due to attacks by Orc bands.

Re: Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

#260

Post by PeterisP »

smallerfish wrote: post #204

> But uh, prehistoric biomass, raises a bit of an issue. We have the entire history of Middle Earth written down and I… didn’t notice the part where Tolkien mentioned dinosaurs? Misconception. Coal doesn't come from dinosaurs; primarily it comes from plants (algae, trees) and plankton. It was formed in the carboniferous period, during which the evolution of plants had preceded the evolution of microbes that were able…

The point made a bit further in article is that in Middle Earth, unlike our world, there is no carboniferous period of millions of years before the ascent of intelligent hominids. The events of Lord of the Rings happen ~50k years after the creation of the world.
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