We can point to the first industry to truly mechanize as the beginning of the revolution but the technologies that got us there were legion.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal
[0] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/was-the-steam-e...
[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chi...
Lathes go ever further back.
Whoever built the pyramids had sufficient precision to make flat surfaces similar to modern surface plates.
The machines have been around for a very long time, powering them with other machines was part of it.
There's a lot to untangle here.
you clearly are not giving enough credit to slavery which is the whole point of this exercise. How are we going to build a case for reparations with you talking like that? :)
I'm not defending anything about slavery, but just as impoverished working class Britons contributed little to the British industrial revolution, but did both suffer and benefit from it, the same goes for slaves. The industrialization of industry would not have been possible without the industrialization of agriculture which created an unemployed labor pool available for urban industrial revolutionary work, just as we saw play out in the recent history of China.
His central observation is that the Industrial Revolution involves "coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy", but that "each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact."
Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric steam engine from 1712 were so inefficient that it made only economic sense in circumstances where energy source is very, very cheap. That was inside of coal mines (not in any other kind of mine), because there coal was cheapest. So the Industrial Revolution required as a starting point that all other kinds of energy sources were so expensive that coal mines made sense, and not any kind of coal mines, but deep coal mines that required a lot of effort to pump water out of them. In other kinds of mines horses would have been cheaper than an atmospheric steam engine. In other words, intensive coal mining had to come first and then the Industrial Revolution followed, not the other way round.
It took over half a century, until 1776, that the steam engine in James Watt's desing had been improved so much that its use made economic sense outside of coal mines, namely in the textile industry. It was in the 1700s that looms and especially spinning machines had improved so much that their combination with Watt's steam engine made sense.
Then there was the combination of steam engines with new methods for drilling cannons. The cylinders needed for steam engines used technologies that had been improved over a long period of time in gun production. Then the steam engine itself was combined with the new invention of drilling cannon barrels (instead of casting them). This resulted in better cannons and also helped to further improve the cylinders for the steam engines.
So why not the Romans? -- Devereaux writes:
"_none_ of these precursors were in place. The Romans made some use of mineral coal as a heating element or fuel, but it was decidedly secondary to their use of wood and where necessary charcoal. The Romans used rotational energy via watermills to mill grain, but not to spin thread. Even if they had the spinning wheel (and they didn’t; they’re still spinning with drop spindles), the standard Mediterranean period loom, the warp-weighted loom, was roughly an order of magnitude less efficient than the flying shuttle loom, so the Roman economy couldn’t have handled all of the thread the spinning wheel could produce."
"And of course the Romans had put functionally no effort into figuring out how to make efficient pressure-cylinders, because they had absolutely no use for them. Remember that by the time Newcomen is designing his steam engine, the kings and parliaments of Europe have been effectively obsessed with who could build the best pressure-cylinder (and then plug it at one end, making a cannon) for three centuries because success in war depended in part on having the best cannon. If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to."
"All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent."
In other words there was a feedback loop: More coal meant more coal could be mined. A virtuous cycle, that kicked off the industrial revolution.
It's those major step changes that open up the doors to unforeseen opportunities and make previously unviable businesses economically possible.
Before that "research" wasn't really a thing. Discussions between intellectuals were scholastic and often implicitly about political status. The scientific tradition of hands-on experimentation and observation shifted the emphasis to building and trading rather than debating and conquering.
So effectively the UK invented the concept of invention. Other cultures were imperial, martial, and slave-owning, and ambitious men didn't concern themselves with hands-on work. That was for tradesmen and slaves. Although some invention happened, it was outside the main power hierarchy. It wasn't a tradition.
The UK - only partially, but enough - combined mercantile opportunism with practical invention. It took about a century, but invention became a recognisable tradition in its own right, and a credible high-reward career path for ambitious people. (Mostly men of course. But even so.)
As to slavery “no legislation was ever passed in England that legalised slavery. In the Somerset case of 1772, Lord Mansfield ruled that, as slavery was not recognised by English law, James Somerset, a slave who had been brought to England and then escaped, could not be forcibly sent to Jamaica for sale, and he was set free. In Scotland colliery slaves were still in use until 1799 where an act was passed which established their freedom and made this slavery and bondage illegal.” English merchants where happy to participate in the American slave trade, but that was pure capitalism at work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain
You're of course only talking about local slavery in the UK. They were among the primary slave traders outside of their home territory. The British Empire and its prominent subjects traded in millions of slaves between 1400 and 1800. Centuries of profit from that slave trade helped fuel investment into industrialization across the UK.
This is a common escape for European apologists of slavery (whether in North or South America). Europe has largely gotten to avoid the consequences of their slave trade (they properly owe many trillions of dollars in reparations). The US history of slavery has nothing on the scale of European slavery - 12+ million slaves across the Americas (and that's merely the first generation number).
The point was slavery was economically and politically viable in the American south far longer than Europe. It’s a reasonable argument to suggest Europe outsourced and profited from slavery, but it also wasn’t in peoples faces just as few people consider the working conditions of the 3rd world today when they buy stuff.
Anyway, the slave trade wasn’t that profitable for England. Profits where mostly split between Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark with no country having a massive advantage. Divide 12.8 million people across 400 years and then further split profits between multiple countries and it was a tiny rounding error for the European countries involved. It wasn’t even that profitable for the merchants due to the long trips and high risks involved.
PS: I don’t mean this to be apologist, more pointing out how minimal the gains required before people would inflict horrific amount of suffering.
You didn't actually mention that slavery was legal in many British crown colonies including the American colonies, which wasn't just "happy participation by merchants", but was day to day life for many UK subjects. "Slavery ended in the British Empire after the Slavery Abolition Act came into play in 1833", about 30 years before it ended in the US, a former British Colony independent less than 100 years at that time, a short time by any standards.
“Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. They resettled many in Jamaica and the Bahamas” and no that’s not a euphemism for enslaving them in Jamaica and the Bahamas.
The UK didn’t exist before 1922. Or 1801, depending on how picky you want to be.
In Scotland it was still around till nearly 1800 (oddly, the last serfs were coal miners); in England it started its decline just before 1400 and was largely eliminated by 1500 and totally by 1600.
That's not what the article is saying.
England really industrialized via multiple waves transitioning cottage industry and water power driving drop hammers and other equipment to ever more industrial factories. It’s a surprisingly smooth transition where individual inventions like the spinning wheel just keep compounding and driving further increases in efficiency.
Steam power was only used at mines initially because mines where limited by geology. Unlike early factories you didn’t get to decide where the ideal place was you where stuck where the resources where located.
The first commercially successful engine that could transmit continuous power to a machine was the atmospheric engine, invented by Thomas Newcomen around 1712. It improved on Savery's steam pump, using a piston as proposed by Papin. Newcomen's engine was relatively inefficient, and mostly used for pumping water. It worked by creating a partial vacuum by condensing steam under a piston within a cylinder. It was employed for draining mine workings at depths originally impractical using traditional means, and for providing reusable water for driving waterwheels at factories sited away from a suitable "head".
This shows it wasn’t specifically the steam engine that kicked things off, but rather a wide range of factors which eventually caused people to say something different was going on. The stated start of the industrial revolution is really quite arbitrary, but linking it to the seam engine is really a misunderstanding what was going on.
If you want to point to a single invention Benjamin Huntsman developing the crucible technique for steel production in 1740 had a larger impact on the early years of the first industrial revolution. But again it wasn’t any single invention the transition was simply continuous.
I don't think that's correct. If you are looking for a one-sentence "how did the Industrial Revolution start" summary, I wouldn't use this.
My recollection was that things kicked off with the first mechanized mills, locating along streams which used hydraulic or steam power for their energy. Unfortunately I can't find or recall the book I was reading that tells this story, but that's my recollection.
Checking Wikipedia, that seems mostly accurate:
> Rapid industrialization first began in Britain, starting with mechanized spinning in the 1780s,[21] with high rates of growth in steam power and iron production occurring after 1800.
That goes back to 3BC where the ancient greeks invented it, so I don't think that's a good candidate for the beginning of the industrial revolution. I get the association though, because it is a mechanical system harnessing non-animal power to do useful work.
https://www.greekboston.com/culture/ancient-history/water-mi...
I didn't find the book I was thinking of, but I think I've identified one of the main characters I was thinking of, Richard Arkwright. You can see that his biography broadly tracks what I'm describing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright
And I think I found the line which you could call the 'origin story' of the Industrial Revolution - the invention of the Spinning Frame (a water powered automation machine, if you will).
> Arkwright and John Smalley of Preston set up a small horse-driven factory at Nottingham. To obtain capital for expansion, Arkwright formed a partnership with Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need, wealthy nonconformist hosiery manufacturers. In 1771, the partners built the world's first water-powered mill at Cromford, which covered both carding and spinning operations and employed 200 people.
This goes to u/qikInNdOutReply's point (cross-thread) about citizens with venture capital.
Knowing nothing about this, my hunch is there were many prerequisites.
Another interesting aspect (to me) is how some innovations (efforts) manage to avoid being snuff in their cribs. Everett's whole Diffusion of Innovation about the sociology of it all.
On a similar note, the Romans built quite a few canals, but "Canal Mania" in the UK involving a lot of capitalist ventures building extended transit networks across the UK is an arguable starting point for the Industrial Revolution
For me the industrial revolution started with the "familys" taking hold in the netherlands, england, germany - backing ventures, banking, becoming a powerhouse outside of the hierarchical power houses of olden times (king, serf) and not relying on militias, but lawyers, contracts and sometimes even rule of law (free cities).
Its the end of hierarchical anarchy (and yes, rome in some ways was just as anarchic if you fell out of grace with the emperor)..
https://www.britannica.com/place/Venice/The-commune
Which by deduction means, that you need a trade supporting eco-system, without taxation on the moving of goods. Oceans prefered. Which means, that hermit kingdoms waylaying is the biggest innovation embargo.
I have a vague idea what you're trying to describe but this phrase is completely self-contradictory.
Anarchy is the absence of hierarchies. I think you're using "anarchy" in its pejorative sense, roughly meaning "chaos" or "law of the jungle" but using it like this in a discussion about social structures is confusing at best.
The difference is that serfs are attached to the manor instead of being owned by the planter. Thus, serfs are not sold, but change lords by inheritance, marriage, or other changes in land rights. Europe was so densely populated that serfs probably had little or no cash value. If you had a manor, you already had serfs.
just want to point out (though I'm not an expert) attaching serfs to the land was a step forward in serf rights. I think (particularly in eastern europe), serfs didn't necessarily have the right to stay on the land.
Somewhat related, chattel slavery remained a thing in the Ottoman Empire well into the 20th century, albeit substantially diminished; and not completely outlawed until mid century. And I guess this is where a lot of white slavery hysteria in the U.S. originated[1], as in the Middle East owning Circassian slaves had long been a status symbol, so much so that over the centuries they significantly effected the genetics of ruling elite families through their popularity in harems. Circassians were literally the archetype for "white" in Hitler's Aryan racial system, so the trade in Circassians represented the epitome of white slavery. Though, perhaps the real horror regarding the Circassians is the Circassian Genocide at the hands of the Russians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide Sadly, when you delve into the history of ethnic cleaning by Russians, there are sadly many more stories like that.
[1] As opposed to the capture and sale of white Americans and Europeans by North African pirates. That's where I used to think the hysteria came from, but reading about the history of the Circassians, I suspect that's the real origin, or at least the more important dimension.
Slavery is rampant in the world now. Quite a lot of it in service of the kinds of automation and productivity you describe, but in parts of the world where these discussions aren’t so casual. Slavery hasn’t been obsoleted, it’s been outsourced.
In this sense, cheap labor is cheap, but also a bit of a trap: it doesn't scale into undreamt of use-cases the way that truly scalable automation tends to.
My favourite example here is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrara_marble cause its something both fancied by romans and modern world alike and it was originally sourced by slaves with cludgels as stone masons.
But now its done with industrial tooling, by free man (well free to do whatever the market demands).
The story I was always told was that Eli Whitney's cotton gin made slavery economically viable for longer than it would have otherwise.
Before the cotton gin, wool was more popular because it was less labor. (I'm not sure how silk and flax fit in, but all have their own labor intensive parts pre mechanization). By making cotton cheaper, the labor needed to separate the seed from the cotton was much less and so it was more competitive with others despite the high labor costs elsewhere.
This is true for the more rural southern states, northern states industrialized way earlier (which goes to prove the rest of your argument about slavery).
1. A reason to create coal-driven machines in the first place (to pump water from mines, when labor and other fuel sources like timer were low), to kick-start the process of mechanical innovation
2. Enough technical/scientific knowhow + conditions for entrepreneurialism (inventor gets to actually make a profit) leading to progressive mechanical innovations, spreading to other sectors like textile manufacturing
3. Easy access to coal (near the surface, in Britain itself) to provide energy for the new machines
4. Access to raw materials to drive textile factories, namely cotton produced by slaves in the Americas
5. An market for low-cost textiles produced using machines, to a great extent India (Indian textile imports were taxed, and exports were encouraged)
6. Capital for new machines/factories, often derived from excess capital from slave-plantations + re-invested profits from industry
It's going to require quite a lot of expertise to tease out the relative importance of these factors, so us laymen should be okay with a general picture. It's okay to admit that.
As regards slavery and other factors, once the steam engines were invented and began making the companies who owned them more productive, human labor was outcompeted. Slave labor is not free as humans are quite expensive in food, water, shelter, medical care, and support for these things. Humans also require rest, and restrooms. Given that humans prefer not be enslaved, there’s also a cost to capture. Once an economic replacement for slavery and/or indentured servitude is available, these practices tend to disappear. Even animal labor usually disappears when machines are available, as animals require the same basic care that machines do not. In the USA, slavery hung around longer than it did in Europe largely due to reward for the capture of runaways provided by government, as well as a late start to industrialization.