Why no Roman industrial revolution?

https://rootsofprogress.org/why-no-roman-industrial-revolution

by jseliger • 3 years ago

65 79 3 years ago

coldtea• 3 years ago

Because they had better taste than that

qawwads• 3 years ago

An industrial revolution is not a single event but a journey. Somebody innovates, then somebody else get the innovation better, then yet somebody else innovates again using what previous people did, etc. Romans could have had their IR from their starting point but they didn't. I don't think it's because they didn't have roman numerals or cast iron. Those could have been part of their revolution. Needs is the prime factor for innovations and this is what they lacked: needs.

They didn't need to innovate because they had abondant and cheap labor in the form of slaves and whatever machine someone could come up with was more costly than slaves so the journey did not began. This is why the aeolipile stayed a novelty and the roman didn't have an IR: they didn't need it.

dkural• 3 years ago

The linked article dismisses Robert Allen's explanations, unfairly. I find Allen's work to be very clearly articulated and convincing. The question many economic historians ask is, why the British as opposed to the Dutch, or the previously-wealthy states in Italy? etc. The Dutch comparison is especially important, because prior to the Industrial Revolution the Dutch were actually more "advanced" on most metrics.

anthk2• 3 years ago

Or just, well... Spain.

detourdog• 3 years ago

I don’t understand the idea that the industrial revolution was any more critical than any other leap forward in our understanding.

The industrial revolution only existed because of successive progress.

mcv2• 3 years ago

The Dutch were advanced in lots of ways, but they weren't very industrialised. Flanders would have been more likely. But they weren't in a great position at the time, controlled first by Spain, then Austria, then France; their trade blocked by the Dutch.

Netherland was in fact rather late with the industrial revolution, especially the introduction of trains, because there wasn't a real need for them. Netherland already had an extensive transportation network with its rivers and canals, with towed barges transporting goods at reliable speeds.

isykt2• 3 years ago

One precursor to the Industrial Revolution was the bubonic plague. When the Black Death wiped out so much of Europe, labor became more expensive, and farming required the invention of tools. Did Rome have any similar events?

felipellrocha• 3 years ago

A ton. The Antonine plague comes to mind.

mitthrowaway2• 3 years ago

A bit later, after the fall of the western empire, but the Plague of Justinian is another significant one.

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

rjsw• 3 years ago

Rome had slaves, they didn't get the option to move jobs for better pay.

isykt2• 3 years ago

That was my intuition — that even if a plague came through and reduced the workforce, there were always new peoples to enslave. But I’m not sure about that.

dredmorbius• 3 years ago

Rome evolved its own plauges, which is the central thesis of Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome.

I've come to the view that any networked system will co-evolve pathologies which are fitted to that network's specific niche: cities, civilisations, transportation systems, communications systems, social networks, etc., etc.

One challenge is that the growth of such systems occurs in the absence of such pathologies. When they do emerge, things often become quite ugly.

karpierz• 3 years ago

tl;dr: The author starts with the assumption that the Industrial Revolution is inevitable, and uses that to conclude that the Industrial Revolution would've inevitably happened, while dismissing a bunch of other authors who put a lot more thought into their writing.

holoduke• 3 years ago

Because no steam engines. No steam engines means lots of labour work in the metal mines. Yield was therefor insufficient to produce large machinery needed to spark the industrial revolution.

smegger001• 3 years ago

sort of. they had Aeolipile which is a primitive steam engine but it was looked at as more a curiosity than as a practical tool.

seiferteric• 3 years ago

I was thinking about this, what really started the industrial revolution? I think the aeolipile, like other contraptions was just seen as a toy. Could it be that the Newcomen engine proved that real value and work could be done using machines in this way? Maybe just knowing that it was possible after being demonstrated by the Newcomen engine really kicked it off rather than some nebulous societal conditions.

monocasa• 3 years ago

And particular, the metal working lathe, which wasn't invented until the 1700s. A proper steam engine that actually performs useful work better than just having a dude stand there and move whatever you're trying to move requires very tight tolerances around the cylinders that were previously unobtainable.

wnissen• 3 years ago

It is still an interesting question. How can a society that created a 52-pipe musical organ in 228 BC fail to create, even by accident, high-leverage machinery like the steam engine? It reminds me of the Egyptians, who knew of the wheel but apparently only used it in toys.

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

kjeetgill• 3 years ago

I'm not sure if we're taking about different time periods, but weren't they at the forefront of chariot warfare during the bronze age?

And I vaguely recall that inventing bellows to melt iron took a long time too, so steam machinery seems pretty far off if all you have is bronze and stone.

wudangmonk2• 3 years ago

There are reliefs of Ramses II fighting on a chariot and he's from the 1200-1300 BC, so the wheel must have been used much earlier than that by Egyptians.

ch4s3• 3 years ago

The Egyptians had chariots, they definitely used wheels.

yakubin3• 3 years ago

The collapse of mathematical thought that was the Middle Ages actually began with a huge slow-down in hellenistic (Roman) times, i.e. the Middle Ages was more of a continuation of a trend. I’m not convinced that Rome on its own would develop the necessary mathematics to drive progress forward.

anthk2• 3 years ago

If you think that, then you have no clue. The Church was phanatical but not dumb on math by any means. How do you think they built their churches? Their naval army? Accounting? Taxes on lesser classes? Heck, just by sailing boats and orienting yourself, you definitively needed trig as a matter of being alive and not get lost/drown in the oceans.

yakubin3• 3 years ago

Using maths is not the same as inventing new maths.

hughw3• 3 years ago

Didn't the Islamic world preserve and develop math during that time?

yakubin3• 3 years ago

Yes. Not just them. A lot of mathematics was done by Indians. But that’s not Rome.

libraryofbabel3• 3 years ago

Don’t bother with this amateurish article and instead just read the work it’s responding to, which is Bret Devereaux’s fantastic essay on the topic https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... . Actually by a professional historian and expert on the Roman Empire, and a lovely piece of writing.

bcrosby95• 3 years ago

This blog has been a treasure trove for building my RPG campaigns. I would pay lots of money for an "Idiot Worldbuilder's Guide to X" series of books based upon history.

I'm probably in the minority though.

libraryofbabel3• 3 years ago

My personal favorites on his blog are the series on how people produced Bread, Clothing, and Iron in the premodern world. The depth there is amazing, going into all the raw materials and different skills and processes required to support agriculture, textile production, and metallurgy. It really gives you a deep sense of the material conditions that shaped life in the past, and how alien pre-modern economic existence would be to 21st century folks (clothing and food were really really expensive, like one new set of clothes a year expensive, whereas housing costs were proportionally low). Highly recommended.

roenxi• 3 years ago

Indeed. In particular the "I don’t believe that industrialization was so contingent on such very specific factors" part. Not exactly a strong motivator.

We can, literally today, see how society responded to an opportunity to bring energy costs down an order of magnitude. Nuclear plants were built, people got spooked from Chernobyl and the industry was basically shut down. It takes no imagination at all to think people in the Roman days looked at coal and just said no. Western civilisation arguably did just that in the 70s. There is even a large contingent recently who say that using coal is a terrible mistake and we should be willing to move to more expensive energies (the exact positions got a bit murky as we don't have enough fossil fuels per-capita and solar is getting cheaper, but back through the 80s, 90s, 00s the positions were clear). Thinking about the dynamics of debate someone in Roman times had known what we know now and started a scare campaign over climate change they could easily have made an argument for just forgoing the industrial revolution. Let alone whatever imaginary threats a pre-industrial civilisation would have come up with in practice. I've seen the weather reports out of China, the downsides of industrialising on the environment aren't exactly subtle.

The evidence of it taking specific conditions to trigger a step change is quite high. We know how important energy is because of the industrial revolution. The Romans didn't have that knowledge. Any resistance at all to the use of coal (like not having coal mines on hand) would have been a real obstacle.

throw0101a• 3 years ago

which is Bret Devereaux’s fantastic essay

Discussion:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187

dang• 3 years ago

Ah I missed that - thanks. Normally I'd swap the URLs but since there's a different essay by that author on the front page right now, I think we'll leave this thread alone; it just set off the flamewar detector anyhow.

The other thread:

How to Roman Republic 101 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36903149 - July 2023 (30 comments)

pnathan• 3 years ago

My suspicion is that the Enlightenment's transvaluation of all values to valorize individuals, the material, change, and progress is what was required, excluding material conditions.

A related question might be: why no Chinese or Indian (subcontinent) industrial revolution? Those societies are rightly called great civilizations, and they were _no_ fools. Why no industrial revolution?

HarryHirsch• 3 years ago

There is the theory that in China and India labour was too cheap to encourage development of artificial sources of energy.

Perhaps related: Amazon and the size of its firefighting team, and more recently Microsoft and its army of lawyers. Why invest in the advancement of distributed computing when you can just plug holes with armies of engineers, and why invest in computer security when you can flood the media with bullshit and discourage lawsuits with the size of your war chest?

nonsense_stream• 3 years ago

I don't know about India but that's probably not true in China. China was close to industrial revolution twice, once in the Song dynasty, once in the Ming dynasty (oil and natural gas application were documented), both disrupted by regime change from foreign invasions. Comparison with europe at the same time would suggest that the average Chinese enjoyed relatively better living conditions and intuitively would result in more expensive labor. It is unclear whether industrial revolution would start without the invasions, or were the falls of the dynasties inevitable, but the "cheap labor" theory is quite a bit off in quality in comparison to some other proposed theories, and even if present, could be a result of some other underlying cause than being the problem itself (which may seed a myriad of other problems that impede the progress).

imbnwa• 3 years ago

My suspicion is that the Enlightenment's transvaluation of all values to valorize individuals, the material, change, and progress is what was required, excluding material conditions.

The Ottomans couldn't block them from the Silk Road

alephnerd• 3 years ago

The Ming and Mughal dynasties were both at the precipice of industrialization in the 17th century as was the Song dynasty in the 11th-12th century, but they all collapsed around the period proto-industrialization was achieved.

The Ming Dynasty fell in the mid-1600s due to the political instability of the Manchus migrating southwards and southern Chinese satraps trying to make their own states, Mughal proto-industrialization in the late 1600 and early 1700s collapsed when Maratha raids in the Bengal Subha destroying manufacturing capacity in what's now Orissa and Bihar and Sikh, Jat, and Pakhtun rebellions against the Mughals in Punjab, KPK, and Eastern Afghanistan lead to the collapse of Mughal rule northwest of Delhi, and the Songs collapsed in the 1200s due to Chengiz Khan's conquests.

A similar story happened in Safavid Iran around the same time when Nadir Shah, a nomadic herder and coatmaker from Khorasan, lead his horde to sack both the Mughals and the Safavids.

China, South Asia, Central Asia, the Caucauses, and Iran were basically in a state of collapse in the 1600s-1700s similar to that of the Western Roman Empire, Han Empire, and Gupta Empire in the 4th-6th century, leaving their environs ripe for European intervention.

simonblack• 3 years ago

The Romans were no slouches, they put their resources to work in smart ways that modern cultures can't keep up to.

One example: Roman concrete - still going strong after 2000 years. Modern concrete is lucky to last more than 150-200 years.

Another example: Water and sewerage reticulation - Roman water supplies and sewerage systems are still at work after 2000 years. It's only about 140-150 years ago that New York reached a comparable level of water and sewerage works to those in Rome.

One word: Priorities. Different peoples have different priorities as to what is important in a culture. Just because Roman priorities were different to ours doesn't mean their priorities were not as good as ours.

matt3210• 3 years ago

Modern concrete is way better. It supports 80+ tons all day everyday. If you put an 80+ ton truck on brand new Roman concrete it wouldn’t last the weekend.

worik2• 3 years ago

Steel reinforcement (tension strength) and Portland cement.

Pure concrete can only be used for dome like structures as it only has compression strength.

doubleg72• 3 years ago

You should cite sources, Roman concrete is nowhere near what you make of it here in reality.

mabbo2• 3 years ago

The concept that Roman Concrete was somehow better is a strange idea.

First: 99% of Roman concrete has long since turned to dust. Through no intent of it's creators, that stuff did not last.

But the 1% that did last has two important qualities: it's incredibly thick, overbuilt; and through some fluke of chemistry, they unintentionally built it with some input chemicals that actually helped it be stronger.

But it wasn't intentional and it isn't some kind of magic.

zogrodea• 3 years ago

Those interested in the history of scientific thought might enjoy a great book by Arthur Koestler called "The Sleepwalkers", accessible, readable and well-written. It's also endorsed by modern philosopher John Gray as a precursor to (and a better book than) Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".

MattPalmer1086• 3 years ago

It's an excellent book, I do agree.

hughw3• 3 years ago

Seems to me only after Galileo introduced the idea that we could use mathematics to predict physical outcomes could modern engineering take hold.

asdff• 3 years ago

Long before Galileo. The Ancient Greeks had analog computers that could predict planetary movements.

hughw3• 3 years ago

Sure. But they didn’t have a model that understood f=ma or inverse square distance gravity. They didn’t have a causal model. So they couldn’t use techniques of predicting planetary motion to predict projectiles motion. Galileo and Newton tied it all together.

mabbo2• 3 years ago

If Rome hadn’t collapsed, they might, within a matter of centuries, have advanced to the stage of industrialization. But they would have done it by skipping the Dark Ages

The very notion of "the Dark Ages" has long been debunked. It's a myth. The Roman Empire collapsed, but other nations rose in it's place and technological progress continued throughout.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

yazantapuz• 3 years ago

Only the west half. The Roman Empire ceased to exist a thousand years later, when Constantinople fell.

wudangmonk2• 3 years ago

Doesn't seem like a myth regardless of who debunks their interpretation of what 'dark ages' means. Things before and after the fall of the western empire seem quite different, maybe it wasn't the fall of the western empire alone but also the rise of christianity that caused this decline. After all it wasn't until religions lost their power that progress picked up speed and things started to get better.

jasoncrawford• 3 years ago

I disagree; this article makes a good case for the term “Dark Ages”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages

robviren5• 3 years ago

I liked Dan Carlin's take on this. The incentive to develop labor saving devices is massively impacted by having hoards of slaves and a culture built on slaving. Slaves were the original labor saving devices capable of doing nearly as much as most of our modern machines en masse. Though of course that all came with incredible suffering and the occasional uprising.

shalmanese• 3 years ago

Dan Carlin is not a professional historian and I've always found this explanation one of those layman, just so stories that is way too pat. I've found, for example, that there are people who know 8 things about China and can confidently tie every single Chinese social phenomena to one of those 8 things. As someone who knows 1000 things about China, many of the explanations are patently against the well accepted consensus (ie: change X didn't happen because China is collective vs the individualized West, it happened because there was a change in tax law in 2017 that altered how accrual accounting worked).

Professional Historians are aware of the 8 things/1000 things divide and are careful to caveat the limits to their knowledge and not get too far over their skis. Professional storytellers have fewer compunctions and can confidently believe and assert things that aren't good history.

robviren5• 3 years ago

Like anything else I am certain I am wrong in interesting ways. I can just personally understand the idea that if every need I had was catered to I probably wouldn't spend a lot of time wondering how I could go about innovating. A lot of the brilliance was spent on how they could keep poor people in check, get more slaves, and aquire more power. Hence why a lot of what was going on seemed to deal with exactly those needs. They seemed to spend a lot of time warring, entertaining the poor, and politicing competition to death. But I am also a layman, so I leave space to be wrong.

injb• 3 years ago

Well said. Ever since I started reading Taleb and Harari I have become really skeptical of anything that sounds like a story.

If your theory of some historical development sounds like a nice complete satisfying story with no weird loose ends then it's probably not what happened.

esafak• 3 years ago

I don't see slavery as a necessary development towards industrialization. It is more of a consequence of an the absence of a moral philosophy that valued individual rights. It just so happened that moral philosophy (the Enlightenment) and industrialization developed concomitantly in the West.

robviren5• 3 years ago

Nor do I. I was mainly stating that I think the absence of slavery is needed. You need the motivation to get more efficient labor and the laborers themselves can earn money and innovative. A slave with innovative ideas probably had the idea whipped out of them for trying to work less hard. Obviously not the only factor, but it would seem a logical story to me.

dventimi2• 3 years ago

How many revolutions was Rome supposed to have? Ok, it didn't have an industrial revolution or a computer revolution, but it obviously had dramatic advances in roads, warfare, law, and bureaucracy. Why isn't that enough?

Related question: why aren't we having technological revolutions now that will eventually occur in the far future? Surely, these will happen, so why are we coming up short?

The_Blade• 3 years ago

and plumbing

Rome's uptime was likely better than the downtown Denver building i lived in (that shall remain nameless) turning off the building's water IN COVID during working hours twice a month

Diocletian had his issues but probably had 3 9's and his his team could shit shower and shave as they pleased

arp242• 3 years ago

Here's my theory, in addition to the "missing technology" from this article: Romans just weren't very good scientists – as a society they just didn't value knowledge for the sake of knowledge, which is essential for science. "Roman" covers a vast span of time and region with many differences, but by and large, Roman attitudes were highly pragmatic and favoured practicality above all else, having little time and patience for non-practical matters.

People look at the colosseum, Roman roads, the size of the empire, and things like that and conclude the Romans were brilliant, and in some ways they were: they excelled at practical matters such as engineering, bureaucracy, organizing armies, committing genocides, you know, all those fun activities required to build an empire.

But good science isn't exclusively about practical matters: if "how can we build better buildings, roads, swords, ..." is all you're focused on then you're going to hit a wall pretty quick.

Did Einstein solve any sort of practical problem with special or general relativity? Not really; he was just exploring things for no other reason than the joy of figuring things out. It wasn't until much later that his work because practically relevant, in things like nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors, GPS, etc.

The first water-pumping steam engines used a vacuum to pump up water. It's fairly straightforward, but ... you do need to know about vacuums and pressure – somewhat abstract concepts that don't really have any "obvious" practical applications in the same way that practical engineering improvements do.

I bet at least some of the "missing technologies" mentioned in the article weren't invented by the Romans for the same reason.

The industrial revolution happened when it did, at least in part, because knowledge for the sake of knowledge started being widely pursued.