Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

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.

Read "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", which is exactly this. The Boss, before being sent into the past, ran an arms factory. He gets some 19th century technology going and builds weapons in quantity.

Steel came late. Not until the Bessemer process in the 1880s was steel produced in volume. Steel as an exotic material, about as rare as titanium today, dates back to the Roman Empire at least. Early blast furnaces were seen in medieval Spain and 5th century China. But good steel could only be produced in small quantity by those processes. For the longest time, nobody got the heating, the ingredients (mostly iron ore, coal, and limestone) and the air injection right, so they could not get mild steel in quantity.

A medieval society could have built a Bessemer converter if they knew how and the right minerals were available. It's the metallurgy that's hard; the thing itself is simple.

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.

The premise of the rather fascinating "Last Ringbearer" is that Mordor and the orcs were on the verge of a successful industrial revolution, only to be thwarted by the racist, imperialist alliance of the Fellowship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer

Funnily enough, this is also a myth. You are quoting Letter #131. But you are likely quoting secondary or tertiary sources and forgot the rest.

Here's what you quote:

> Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion

And here's what you missed:

> Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. (…) I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Indeed it was long ago when that attempt was aborted: it was the Book Of Lost Tales which would have been the missing Anglo-Saxon mythology but that has been abandoned around 1920. Christopher Tolkien clearly stated most elements defining and peculiar to BOLT are not present in later works. There are many versions of the Silmarillion but there's only one version of BOLT.