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Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

featherlessbipeds.substack.com

421–428 of 428 posts

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

#421
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure it's hand-wavy "magic." The essay is talking about things that are different in Middle Earth that could have led to the lack of an industrial revolution by the Third Age. Lower population growth (and slower population recovery after plagues and wars) seem like a pretty plausible factor. It's also plausible that societal advancement was also just slower than with us when the author seems to assume it woul…

Uh, the humans of Gondor were descended from Numenoreans, who were descended from the Houses of Edain, men who morphed from Neolithic kit technology to High Medieval (pre-plate armour and gunpowder) by being uplifted by Noldorian elves in Beleriand.

Unlike the humans from a certain other famous series, we knew the background of Gondorians all the way to their earliest fathers around year... 300? 800? Of the first age of the Sun.

Now, discounting that... I agree, ME has really low population growth. Might be caused by Gondorians and Arnorians living to 200+, 300+ years old earlier, when their culture were established; when the blood grows thin and they live like normal humans, their cultures ossified already; 40 - 50 year old normal human grooms and brides aren't as productive as 80-100 year old Numenorian grooms and brides.

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

#422
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 produc…

You blame it all on the black death, however, Norway was on the front line of the little ice age , so those farms might have not been populated because the land itself was not able to sustain cultivation reliably. Tolkien mentions only one bad winter, but I can allow that he wasn't well versed in climate sciences and regional climate patterns. As a result we have something that can suppress population growth to a min…

There's as far as I know nothing to support that the little ice age had much influence on the rebound of the population after the Black Death in Norway's case - you'll find documentation of farms right next to each other where one was not cleared and the other was, and where we can tell from tax records etc. once they were finally populated again that production capacity was comparable. It took centuries before the population had rebounded to the point where lesser farms were cleared again. As such it was first towards the end of the 1600's that the population was large enough to start hitting limits where the little ice age caused famine in Norway.

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

#423
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You blame it all on the black death, however, Norway was on the front line of the little ice age , so those farms might have not been populated because the land itself was not able to sustain cultivation reliably. Tolkien mentions only one bad winter, but I can allow that he wasn't well versed in climate sciences and regional climate patterns. As a result we have something that can suppress population growth to a min…

There's as far as I know nothing to support that the little ice age had much influence on the rebound of the population after the Black Death in Norway's case - you'll find documentation of farms right next to each other where one was not cleared and the other was, and where we can tell from tax records etc. once they were finally populated again that production capacity was comparable. It took centuries before the p…

If the overall agricultural output is suppressed by LIA, then population recovery from the plague will be slowed down. From what I've found, most of Europe recovered population size before 1500. There is a Wikipedia article about medieval demography, but the data there is even more positive and I'm not linking it here.

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

#424
A fun piece of speculation so I'm trying not to take it too seriously. But it takes a giant leap of faith to say coal was not the primary driver of the Industrial Revolution. First, it introduced a massive energy surplus far greater than annual solar inputs for the first time in human history. You can't just brush off physics and claim this surplus, once discovered, is somehow substitutable on the open market as if human labor could compete in Watt-hours. The presence of ultra-concentrated forms of energy with a high ROI was the driving factor in investing in technology for their extraction. A perfect circle: coal gives us more energy, to build better machines, which let us access more coal, etc. Change the economics and there is no incentive to industrialize unless you've got an army of Orcs to bootstrap the energy budget. Even if a human society could industrialize without fossil carbon, why do we see literally no evidence of such a thing ever happening on earth?

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

#425
post #371

Modern science differs from Middle Earth knowledge in having the willingness to admit ignorance. No scientific law, concept, theory or idea is sacred. I don't think Middle Earth Christianity, Islam or whatever other premodern traditions of knowledge would agree in those two views. Everything that was important to know about the world was already known and written in the Bible, Qur'an or the Vedas. How on earth there…

Middle Earth doesn't have Christianity, and indeed the books really lack any real discussion of religion. God exists and so do angels, but there are no clergy or real religious rituals.

There are a lot of religious rituals... For Melkor and Sauron.

The Silmarrion in Finroth ad Adalabeth also mention Christianity in an allegorical form. Heh. Still, you're right.

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

#426
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's as far as I know nothing to support that the little ice age had much influence on the rebound of the population after the Black Death in Norway's case - you'll find documentation of farms right next to each other where one was not cleared and the other was, and where we can tell from tax records etc. once they were finally populated again that production capacity was comparable. It took centuries before the p…

If the overall agricultural output is suppressed by LIA, then population recovery from the plague will be slowed down. From what I've found, most of Europe recovered population size before 1500. There is a Wikipedia article about medieval demography, but the data there is even more positive and I'm not linking it here.

My point was that overall agricultural output in Norway per capita did not constrain growth again until the 1600's. The Black Death is often in Norway in fact considered to have lifted a lot of the surviving poor people out of poverty, because people previously subsistence farming on tiny plots could suddenly take on far more or more productive land and produce an excess. As I pointed out, it was not until the late 1600's that Norway faced famines again. The Black Death significantly increased food safety for the survivors in Norway. Despite this it took that long to recover the population size.

> From what I've found, most of Europe recovered population size before 1500.

Hence the reason I pointed out that Norway did not, to show that the range of possible outcomes is substantial.

Differences for Norway included a harsher climate, and a landscape that in most of the country is not conducive to large scale farming in a constrained area (outside of a tiny part of the South East, even the "flat" parts are not particularly flat, and often rocky terrain), combined with a very low population density by European standards to start with. As a result, in a lot of places, while people had productive farms, the farm locations depends heavily on the terrain and are often spaced out, and a lot of focus was on e.g. raising sheep (which could, and still are, be let out to roam the mountain sides during the summer months). Recovery faced a lot of challenges, not least of which was simply that in parts of the country the next farm over might be many hours walk over tough terrain away, and during months of the year trying to go to the nearest village might be hazardous (winter months), or people might be up in the mountains far from people. There are still a few people living in places not reachable by road in Norway (and not just by the coast where they could compensate with access by boat). There are still large parts of the country where if it wasn't for cars getting from village to village might many places take days of walking (often horses or carts would not have been an option due to terrain).

Families could go the whole year without meeting any outsiders, and as a consequence marrying off your children and ensuring the family line survived, was a major ordeal in many parts of the country even when you had plenty of food, because the production of that food in Norway, even when the climate has been "good", has meant the farming part of the population has been spread out far more than many places.

There were no major cities. By the 1600's, Bergen, now Norways 2nd largest city, with 285k people, was by one source described as "definitely the largest city in the Nordics" with ca. 15000 people, as a result of being a major Hanseatic league trading port, but while it was larger than e.g. Copenhagen, Denmark (and Sweden) had many other cities of some note, Norway did not. The old capital, Trondheim, by then had reached 5000, and the other current cities in Norway had far fewer.

Even today there are parts of the country which if you avoided car travel would seem almost as desolate as in LOTR, and the population density today is more than 10x higher than before the Black Death. In the 150 years following the Black Death, you'd have walked through a landscape that would have appeared mostly untouched by man, with the very occasional farm, sometimes days apart, which half the time would be in ruins, and the very occasional small village.

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

#427
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them. > That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases. It happened in many prominent cases. Egypt, for example, was called "the breadbasket of Rome."

Yes but not because armies rampaged over Egypt over and over again. Rome was just another state taxing the farmers.

There's a lot of military conquest in Egyptian history. The Hyksos, the Kushites, the Saites, the Persians, the Ptolemies, and finally the Romans.

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

#428
post #412
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He does but you're still clicking through rather than casually glancing at the bottom of a page as you would be a book or paper. Footnotes (or endnotes) are fine on the web (or Kindle, etc.) for reference that most people won't read. They're less good for parenthetical text.

Oh, I had his sidenotes in mind. See https://www.gwern.net/Sidenotes Though for some reason, the sidenotes don't show up on my browser for his site at the moment?..

They should still be working as ever. You may have changed the zoom level or possibly we changed some dimension slightly and your screen is no longer wide enough to provide adequate space for sidenotes.

(And I'd point out that even when you don't have sidenotes, the footnotes are still better than usual because they pop up on hover - no click necessary unless you disabled JS entirely, at which point /shrug, you've indicated you don't want fancy frills so enjoy your old-fashioned 1995-style footnote hyperlinks.)

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