Without demand, there is no supply. In highly unequal societies there is no motivation to improve production efficiency--rather the opposite.
An economics professor of mine put it as "markets are created by demand, not supply." That was nearly 20 years ago, but it's really stuck with me.
As the linked article notes, the precursors for technological innovations were present in many places, but many of those places lacked one or more components of demand flow to finance the required innovation. Only after demand for industrial innovation is present do gaps in the supply chain come into play.
They also invented gunpowder and paper money.
They were basically an early modern civilisation, when Europe was still in the middle ages.
What do you know about inequality during the Song dynasty?
In many ways pre-industrial economy was a zero sum game for someone to be rich and afford to have enough capital to invest into developing industrial production somebody had to be poor. This mean that 90%+ of all people in China and in every other relatively large country lived in extreme poverty.
European colonial powers were simply the first to outsource this dynamic into other continents. While most people in Europe did not directly benefit from native or African slaves in the Americas the transfer of wealth allowed them to import grain and other products from abroad which simultaneously freed up enough labor to develop mining and other industries and increased the purchasing power enough to create significant demand for manufactured goods.
No reforms in China or any ancient empire could have achieved this as long as 90% of their populations were confined to permanently remaining subsistence farmers. Also the Song created paper money because they did not have enough gold and silver it didn’t really offer any benefits besides that and had significant risks. Every attempt to institute paper money, not directly tied to gold or silver prior to the 20th century failed.
Is there any evidence to support this? I remember reading that exploitive practices like slavery added very little to Europe's GDP. There seems to be processes - like advancing textile production and coal mining technology and metallurgy - that began long before the age of colonialism, and thus would likely have continued even in the absence of the slave trade.
Portugal and Spain had huge colonial empires, but that did not drive any industrialization or really long term wealth explosion like the capitalism and the industrial revolution did.
Paper money was certainly adopted. There was a class of administrators who could see the advantages, and so there was demand.
In Britain the demand for coal was independent of social equality. In the sense that everybody needed it to stay alive, especially during the winter.
Ancient Rome was not just agrarian but tributary in nature: the social roles creating slaves and citizens were predefined through conquests. The empire had trade, and trade helped it prosper, but trade was not respected as a foundational ideology as was the case later with merchantalism.
The reason why Britain felt pressure to be an exporter was because this was where the dominant ideology ultimately led: put more assets on the national balance sheet, externalize the liabilities. That emerged from the struggle between the colonial powers of Europe over the course of centuries. The Crusades brought back new ideas, and later, so did the Spanish explorations. At first the dynamic was primarily derived from tribute, and the early conquests had a focus on bullionism: getting gold and silver. But it soon became clear that sugar, cotton, etc were more fundamental to prosperity, and by the 1700's, this had been refined by the utilitarian philosophers into a mode of thought about trade, ethics and invention that remains close to what we accept today.
In the prior societies, this wasn't a topic of discussion, and therefore new ideas were suspicious by default. So even if you had the idea to explore some topic, you needed to be close to, or part of, the nobility to have an opportunity to try. And a big part of early modern Europe was that the inventors and philosophers were always upsetting some noble and running away to the next country over.
So, while Britain got there first, continued emphasis on trade - both with the Americas and the East - would have eventually created the conditions for industry somewhere in Europe.
Maybe less clear to Spain, which did perhaps too well with the silver? Which may have been a contributing reason to the rise of the British (and Dutch) colonial empire(s), because not getting that huge influx of silver and gold, their merchants had more incentive to keep their eyes open for other ways to make money. (Just a WAG, not a historian.)
Potatoes and rice are roughly equivalent in terms of how many people they can feed. Potatoes was revolutionary to Europe because they didn't have rice, but would be nothing special to China.
They were, however, often processed into corn and potato starch, which is pretty common in Chinese cooking.
Chinese people took to peanuts (and chilis) rather eagerly. I think it took only 50 years between peanuts arriving in Eurasia for the first time, and them becoming a staple food in parts of China.
In fairness, the extent was largely unknown to Chinese of the time (the project began in the 1950s, it remains in process).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...
You can also read his 'How Taiwan Became Chinese' for free online: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/andrade/
> In 1600, Taiwan was a wild land, inhabited by headhunters and visited mainly by pirates and fishermen. A hundred years later it was a prefecture of the Chinese Empire, home to a hundred thousand Chinese colonists. What accounted for this transition? How did Taiwan become Chinese?
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Industrialization_of_China#/Hist...