Likewise, the silicon valley boom happened via massive ecological damage to the surrounding environments.

The linked article seems to argue against itself in places, a surplus of labor is argued to be both good and bad.

I've seen arguments that the Roman empire never underwent an industrial revolution because they had slavery, and thus never needed to automate. The Romans did the resource extraction part right, but never iterated on it to the next step.

The Romans never had access to coal, which was the energy-dense fuel that made the Industrial Revolution possible.

Bret Devereaux has a (long) post on this, which I recommend:

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

It wasn't just access to coal, it was access to coal coupled with the heat engine: heat engines used coal, but led to the production of more coal and in turn created more demand for coal. This positive feedback loop created exponential growth.

The Chinese widely used coal in metallurgy, but did not have an effective heat engine.

Romans had access to coal, even mines. That acoup article says it's the demand for coal that made the difference.

Incredible post, thanks! I'll no repeated the incorrect assertion that the Romans could have had any hope of their own industrial revolution!

The Roman slave argument is one of those extremely shitty arguments with no evidence to back up that only gets airtime because it attempts to backport modern culture wars.

Romans didn't have access to vast quantities of coal. Its hard to do industry when you are energy limited

The British Raj in India came about roughly 100 years after the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

Even their rule in India starts after the revolutions in textile making starts getting kicked off.

The industrial revolution predates Indian colonization. In fact, you have the causality exactly backwards. The British empire could not have colonized India without their force of industry (ships & machine guns)

> The industrial revolution predates Indian colonization

The first British colony in India was established in 1608.

The only way you can argue that the Industrial revolution predates British colonization of India is to use the date that the colonies were nationalized as the starting point, which is incredibly misleading, as most of modern-day India was already under British control long before direct crown rule, and Britain was already reaping most of the economic benefits of colonization long before that date.

> The first British colony in India was established in 1608.

These were trading stations established by the East India Company. You can't really talk about colonization till much later - arguably Clive's successes in Bengal in the 1750's marks the start of real colonization.

The dynamic of colonization after that was very much caught up with the desire of English manufacturers and merchants to find export markets for finished goods, especially cotton.

They legally started setting up trade offices in 1608, the Indian rulers accepted them, they didn't conquer India until 1757.

There were some minor battles before 1757, but the major parts of the plundering happened after then, and at that point the industrial revolution had already begun rolling in England with the textile machinery. 40 years later they invented the steam engine, not sure what they could have gotten from India that would help them make that. Europe has plenty of Iron and Coal and extremely good metallurgy skill from making all those cannons, muskets and armours, those are the main ingredients for steam engines.

Without the East India Company maybe the Industrial revolution would have happened in Germany first or something, but it is pretty clear that it would happen in Europe first, nobody else had that extreme scale and quality of ironworking.

Spain had massive colonial profits from gold extracted from South America, but it did them little good.

India was ruled by foreign colonizers for the better part of a century before the British came. So it was clearly more than just that.

That would predict Germany being much richer than Austria-Hungary or Britain being much richer than Sweden, or Spain being much richer than Italy. Industrialisation led to enormous power imbalances that made colonisation possible. Northwest Europe was pulling away from the rest of Europe starting in the 1300s.

> This ‘Little Divergence’ is the process whereby the North Sea Area (the UK and the Low Countries) developed into the most prosperous and dynamic part of the Continent. Studies of real wages – the classic paper is by Robert Allen (2001) – and of GDP per capita (e.g. Broadberry et al 2011, Van Zanden and Van Leeuwen 2012, Alvarez-Nogal and Prados de la Escosura 2012) charting the various trajectories of the European countries in detail, demonstrated that the Low Countries and England witnessed almost continuous growth between the 14th and the 18th century, whereas in other parts of the continent real incomes went down in the long run (Italy and Spain), or stagnated at best (Portugal, Germany, Sweden and Poland). This ‘Little Divergence’ is also quite clear from data on levels of urbanization (De Vries 1981), book production and consumption (Buringh and Van Zanden 2009) and agricultural productivity (Slicher van Bath 1963a, Allen 2000).

http://www.cgeh.nl/sites/default/files/CGEHWP46_depleijtvanz...

The Industrial Revolution started in the mid-18th century in England. The steam engine was introduced before the Seven Years' War (1756-63), where England and its allies won and the former essentially became the sole European power in India, though it still only controlled a small fraction of the territory. The Industrial Revolution was well underway before the Anglo-Mysore and Anglo-Maratha wars where England gained control of most of India. The Scramble for Africa was 100 years later. The American colonies were confined on the east side of the Appalachians. The amount of revenue derived from control of that amount of territory couldn't possibly have driven the largest economic transformation in the history of the world. Many empires of similar size have come and gone with no similar jump in the world economy.

>In 1750 Britain imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton, most of which was spun and woven by cottage industry in Lancashire. The work was done by hand in workers' homes or occasionally in master weavers' shops. In 1787 raw cotton consumption was 22 million pounds, most of which was cleaned, carded, and spun on machines.

What could have contributed to the Industrial Revolution, however, is the technology of Bengal, the first region of India that England gained control of. The economy of early-18th-century Bengal has been described as proto-industrial. The lazy "anti-imperialist" critique of the Industrial Revolution in fact undersells India as merely a source of resources. In fact, in the Anglo-Mysore wars, it was the Indians who had superior artillery (though English tactics carried the day) — designs adapted from the "Mysore rockets" were used in the siege of Baltimore, which gave us the infamous line "the rockets' red glare" in that song where they almost seem like an anachronism.

It doesn’t sound like those rockets helped very much as that song only exists because the British failed to take Baltimore.