RoryOMore

Apologies in advance if I've missed any of your intentions. A lot of what was written and pasted, to me, doesn't really seem to cohere.

That said, to me the original poster's point seemed be that the Industrial Revolution sat on a base of several centuries of steady economic progress. I'm not sure if cultural attitudes of the period would be relevant to whether such growth had actually occurred.

This whole notion fits quite easily into the original poster's argument, doesn't it, if the era of exploration and discovery is part of a more general era of growth? Without some sort of advancement, the New World would not have been discovered, correct? The only other possibilty would seem to be that the New World somehow got easier to discover, and that seems unlikely since it moves a couple of inches farther from Europe every year.

I don't know of anyone who even made a round trip between England and India in the 8th century, but the British visited and largely subjugated India by the end of the 18th.

Wouldn't 33-50% of the population employed in agriculture be a massive decrease from the eighth century? London held maybe 10,000 people after Rome fell, but the population was pushing 1 million by 1800.

Bart Dale

It depends what you mean "clearly defined". People didn't go to sleep one day in a pre-industrial society, and wake up the next day in an "industrial society". To that extent, all great social changes are continious.

However, if the changes occur rapidly enough, so that they occur within a single generation, then I think the work "discontinuity" is valid. In the case of the Industrial Revolution, a person could have been born at a time (1810) when the fastest any message could be sent was no faster than it had been in Roman times thousands of years before and die at time when a message coudl be sent around the world in far less than a day (1890) That same person, if they lived in England, would have lived through a time when the majority of the people lived in the country to a time when the majority of people lived in cities, and when the majority of people were associated with farming to a time when people involved in farming made only a minority of the population. That is a radical change to happen in so short a life span.


Some of the items listed above were, if not sufficient conditions, still were important for the encouragement of developing the "industrial revolution". The Romans, and the Song Dynasty China were in many ways at least as advanced as the early modern Europe (say 17th century), yet they did not invent the industrial revolution.


Actuallly, coal was widely used in the Briain long before the "industrial revolution", if only in limited quantities. Even the Romans used coal in Britain. The limitation in coal use was not some much desire as limitations in transporting it. As transporting it improved, the use of coal increase.



" Although coal cannot be used at all in iron smelting, it is very good as a fuel for a wrought-iron forge, such as a village smith would use. Coal burns almost as slowly as charcoal, and as lumps of coal burn they often "cake" into a mass, so that the bellows do not blow ash all over the place, or blow live coals out of the fire. The fumes are annoying, but they too blow away in the usual conditions of a village forge. So about 1200 AD, "black earth very similar to charcoal" was being used by smiths near Liège in Belgium, and from then on we find shipping records of a small-scale but widespread market in coal in Western Europe, because village smiths would use it in preference to charcoal if they could get it at a reasonable price.

Most English coalfields were being mined on a local scale in the 13th and 14th centuries, to supply this limited market, and occasionally to supply nearby towns. But coal is bulky, and was competing at the time with wood and charcoal as a fuel. Land transport costs were so high for bulk materials that coal was never carried or used more than a few miles from the outcrops in pre-Elizabethan England: the only long-distance transport that made any economic sense was by sea or river boat. The only growing demand for coal at this time was from places where wood was in very short supply: the largest cities and the most industrialized regions. In England, that meant London and the densely populated area around it.

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Mines on Tyneside began exporting coal as soon as it could be done at a profit. Small coastal ships could sail comparatively safely down the East Coast to London. Soon Londoners were using the term "sea-coal" to distinguish coal from charcoal, and there was a Sea Coal Lane in London by 1226. The seaborne coal trade out of Newcastle probably amounted to several thousand tonnes per year by 1300.
Once the trade was established, it was a natural extension to deliver coal over the short crossing to the wood-poor north coast of Europe, for use in burning lime, iron-working, and smoking and drying fish. By the 1370s, 84 coal-boats were plying down the east coast of England from Northumberland to ten different ports along the European coast between France and Denmark, carrying perhaps 7000 tons a year of coal, with iron, salt, cloth, and tiles being shipped the other way. " Chapter Ten: Coal


In a sense, though you are correct, in that it was the will and desire that first created the technology for the industrial revolution, such as steam enginers, rather than the other way around. The first profitable steam engines, for example, were used for pumping water out coal mines., and the coal at the time wasn't being used to power the machines of the industrial revolution, but as substitute for wood that became scarcer in more civilized socities. These earlier steam engines were not efficient, burning up to 1/3 of the coal that was dug out, but the 2/3 of the coal that was left was better than the nothing the owners would have gotten from flooded mines. I believe the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention" was coinded in the middle ages.

However, once developed, steam engines, and the other machines of the Industrial Revolution, had a radical effect on society. For the first time in history, with the rise of the steam powered railroads, transporting goods by land became as cheap as shipping them by water, and faster. Steam power ships also significantly improved the speed of shipping by water as well. The record time for a sailing packet ship between England and the US was something like 14 days, but depending on the weather could take several weeks longer. Not only could steam ships match the best time of sailing ships, but could do so far more reliably and repeatedly. The application of steam engines for powering all sorts of machinery, ships, trains, factories, also lead to a further increase in the demand of coal.

Guaporense

Also, it is not exactly true that the world today is universally richer than the world of 300 years ago.

The Netherlands of the 17th century was already a "industrialized society" in many senses: nearly half of the population was urban (while today half of the world's population is urban) and the majority of the working population did not work on agriculture. There were hundreds of thousands of people that traveled every year between the cities of the Dutch Republic. At only 2 million inhabitants the Netherlands had tax revenues equivalent to 60 million Qing Chinese, 30 million Ottomans and to 7 million French. It was already a full blown market economy.

Those painting are from the 17th century, well over a century before the "industrial revolution":




Compare with modern Africa:



Or with Bangladesh:



Market economies existed before the Industrial Revolution and self sufficient economies exist today.

Of course, the market economy spread across the planet over the last 200 years in a scale never before matched or imagined. But the market existed before it.

Iolo

Commercial societies, surely, are different from industrial ones. There were limited industrial undertakings for centuries before any 'revolution', but if I follow my own family back, they are working in (highly polluting) copper works founded by a Parliamentary Civil War soldier by the very early Eighteenth Century at the latest, and by half-way through the Nineteenth the majority of our population (previously small and made up of poverty-stricken peasants) were working in industry, making us, probably, the first industrial country on earth. It happened very fast, and I think 'revolution' is a fair description.

Guaporense

I am not saying that there wasn't a great social transformation in the UK from 1770 to 1850. I never said that: of course there was a great .

Try reading the essay.

The argument is that there wasn't anything really unique/special in the UK from 1770 to 1850. There wasn't anything that hadn't already happened before, in a smaller scale, of course.

Also, The distinction between a "commercial society" and an "industrial society" is artificial and misleading. I think that a good distinction is between a market economy and a self sufficient economy.

Guaporense

Thanks. I put some effort in formulating the arguments.

spellbanisher

It's not meant to cohere; I was providing different perspectives, something that Guaporense notably does not do (well, he knocks down straw man arguments). This is an area of history that deeply interests me, and that is why I am interested in a variety of perspectives, be it the world systems perspective of an Andre Gunder Frank, the coal and colonies thesis of Pomeranz, the coal and culture thesis of Goldstone, the economic conditions thesis of Robert C. Allen, the industrious revolution thesis of Jan De Vries, the Weberian rationality and Ubermensch thesis of Ricardo Duchesne, the geographical determinist thesis of an Jared Diamond, and a few more. Guaporense has never shown an interest in even superficially acquianting himself with any literature that doesn't confirm his ideology. He's not interested in discussion, but in promoting his ideology.

Actually, the title of the thread is "The Industrial Revolution Myth." He's not arguing that the Industrial Revolution sat on a base of several centuries of steady economic growth; he's arguing that there was no industrial revolution, no break in history, and at best only a slight uptick in the rate of growth after the early modern period.

Second, the centrality of his thesis is that the right culture and institutions will result in perpetual economic growth, and that Europe had the right culture and institutions.

Ironically, the discovery of the New World did not occur during a period of growth. It occurred during a period of stagnation (generally, Europe grew from 1000-1300, stagnated from 1300-1500, grew from 1500-1650, stagnated again from 1650 to 1820, and then has grew almost continuously since). Geopolitical events more than economic dynamism drove the discovery of the New World, such as the completion of the reconquista in 1492, a historical fact that Guaporense leaves out, as I guess it was just a coincidence that in the same year the Reconquista was completed Colombus sailed the ocean blue, and the and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It was said that as long as Muslims controlled the Mediterranean, "Europeans couldn't float a plank on it." In the 15th century the Venicians were able to secure a monopoly to Asian spices and textiles, who were able to keep other Europeans out of the Mediterranean. In the late 1300s, the overland route to China was no longer viable due to the collapse of the Mongol Empire. Thus, the only way for the competing nation states of western Europe to get access to the lucrative Indian Ocean trade was by sailing west. However, Columbus vastly underestimated the distance; it was sheer luck that there was a continent in-between, or Columbus would have died in the oceans.

Instead of having pro-Mercantile institutions, the driving force of economic growth was actually nation-state competition. As a result of intense nation-state competition, such as between Venice and Genoa, European states began building huge warships and sending their merchant ships out in larger and larger convoys. This is not culture nor institutions driving economic growth. To pay for these convoys, governments created what we call public debt. Thus, this financial innovation was a response to geopolitical pressures, not superior European culture and attitudes. The Muslims, notably, had a stronger mercantile culture than what existed in Europe.

Finally, you have to take into account the way people actually lived; after all, the purpose of an economy is to provide the needs and wants of people. And what do we see in Europe? In 1750, the average worker still spent 70-80% of his income on agricultural goods. From 1650-1800, we see a noticeable decline in both quantity and quality of food consumed by European workers. In Germany, for instance, meat consumption declined 80% between 1400 and 1800. We see a shift in Europe towards higher consumption of maize, which has less vitamin content than meat. There is also a decline in the consumption of wine, beer, wheat, and meat throughout Europe. We see a decline in real wage rates of workers as well.

http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_...inchera%29.pdf

Additionaly, the urbanization rate did not grow significantly until the nineteenth century.



And it's not even the highest in the world, nor particularly telling


Note that the urbanization rate is relative stable until 1800, and then it takes off, nearly doubling from 1800 to 1870.

Working days actually increased, from 150 days a year in England in 1500 to 250 days in 1800. A long term rise in working time is not the trend of a dynamically growing economy. At best that is indicative of a growing Malthusian economy. Whereas it will increase with initial industrialization, over the long-term it should decline. Dynamic increases in productivity should lead to a long-term decline in working hours, as workers increasingly choose to substitute leisure for consumption, that is if you have an economy that produces a continuously rising standard of living for the average person, which is a trait of dynamic economies but not of Malthusian ones. Just take the United States, for instance. In the early phases of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century the average working week was about 80 hours (13-14 hours a day, 6 days a week). By the late nineteenth century, it had fallen to about 70 hours (12 hours a day, 6 days a week). By the early twentieth century, it had fallen to 60 hours (10 hours a day, 6 days a week). And by the mid-twentieth century it had fallen to 40 hours (8 hours a day, 5 days a week). That's dynamic economic growth. The most precious and scarce resource we have is time, and dynamic economic growth should be time-saving.

Travel between Europe and Asia did occur even in Ancient times. The overland routes were actually preferable; the only reason they started using oceanic routes was because of geopolitical events.

A change from 4/5 to 1/2 is not as significant as a change from 1/2 to 1/90. Furthermore, there was chronic high unemployment in Early Modern Europe, so it isn't as if most of those would-be agricultural workers went out and found great jobs in the cities. Most of that productivity growth occurred from the introduction of New World crops, the same reason there was a boom in population in Asia as well. But the increased urbanization resulted from a decline in the quality and quantity of food consumption in Europe. In other words, this is still a Malthusian economy where tradeoffs are in place. In a dynamic economy, you can have your cake and eat it too; continuously rising population along with continuously rising standards of living. The agricultural boon in Asia, however, did not result in a decline in living standards. We can see this with life expectancy. In England the average life expectancy was 31.6-34 years in 1780, in France 27.5 years, 24.7 in East and West Prussia, 29.8 in the Rhine province, and 31.3 in Westphalia. Meanwhile, in China it was 39.6 years. There's not enough evidence from Southeast Asia to make any estimations there. In terms of caloric consumption, the average was 2-2500 per adult male equivalent of non-farm laborers and 3,300 for rural farmers. In the Yangtze Delta, agricultural workers consumed at least 4,600 calories a day, and overall 2,650 per adult male.

I must add that all this data is tentative, as most of the data on Europe is about the wealthy, and in the case of both Asia and Europe much of the data sets are based on analysis of individual industries, villages, and towns. However, the massive increase in population in China, from 150 million in 1700 to 330 million in 1820, without the aid of modern medicine or industrial agriculture, would also confirm that quality of life (as measured by access to adequate quality calories) was better in China than in Europe.

Still, getting back to the Industrial Revolution, how can we objectively measure something like Industrialization or economic growth? The basis of all economic activity is space, time, and bioenergetics. How we use our space, time, and bioenergy is culturally determined, but the quantity of and quality of space and time is dependent on our energy and technology. Just to give a few examples

The railroads made it possible to traverse continents within days or weeks. This allowed for a greater degree of economic interaction and integregation between rural areas and urban areas, and between different regions. It simultaneously expanded space (by making more land commercially viable), and compressed it (by allowing faster travel travel) and time (deliver more goods much faster). It enabled commodities to be transported relatively cheaply to metropoles, allowing for greater levels of urbanization. The expanding production of commodities due to their becoming commercially viable enables greater consumption of both finished goods and agricultural goods, resulting in a continuous rising standard of living, something that was not evident in the early modern period. Whereas there was an increase in the consumption of finished goods in Europe in the early modern period, it was offset by a decline in the quality and quantity of food consumed. In other words, they couldn't have their cake and eat it too. Not only do we see greater consumption of finished goods in the United States, for instance, but also an almost continuously rising life expectancy.

Industrial tools allowed a smaller and smaller percentage of the population to work in agriculture. Less time producing agricultural goods (i.e. less labor involved) freed up an exponentially larger percentage of the population to commit their time and energy towards pursuits which create cultural value, such as science, engineering, literature, public education, journalism, art, music, video games, movies, entrepreneurialship and so forth. We don't see a mass market for books or newspapers until the mid-nineteenth century, precisely because industrial tools of production, such as high speed rotary presses, automotic paper folders, linotype machines, news photography, railroads, and telephones, made cheap newspapers and low-priced books available to everyone. Thus, industrial technology transforms luxury goods into common items.

The telegraph also compressed time and space. Before the telegraph (and the steam engine) the world was a very big place, where communicating with anyone of any considerable distance could take days, weeks, or even months. With the telegraph, however, you could communicate with someone across the world instantly, allowing for the emergence of other kinds of attitudes. For instance, with steamships and the telegraph, you see a transformation of business attitudes. Suddenly, as Headrick writes, "the industrial elites, imbued with a sense of commanding the destiny of the world, demanded of events both speed and predictability." You see standardizing of time, running on strict schedules, and centralized coordination.

This is an important cultural aspect as well. Too often we read backwards from the industrial revolution when cultural attitudes have already changed. But it was very often a feedback loop, where attitudes led to innovation which in turn transformed attitudes leading to more innovation... Just to give one example, despite the obvious advantages of iron ships over wood ships, the military refused to adopt it all the way into the 1830s, because they were more comfortable with wood ships and believed (against all evidence) that they were more reliable than iron ships. In other words, tradition trumped innovation. The Nemesis was built against the wishes of the military by John Laird and Thomas Mcgregor, and only after its advantages were demonstrated against the Chinese did attitudes towards iron ships change. As Headrick notes in Tools of Empire, "technological innovation...had to sneak through the back door." This is not evidence of a culture or government that favors innovation. However, by the time steel technology came around, the military readily adopted it. What changed between the thirties and the sixties? In the thirties, the military had a preindustrial, even traditional mindset. But the defeat of China because of the nemesis changed their perspective towards change and new technologies. And I've already noted that the American system was not adopted in Europe until about half a century after it was invented.

Information is another area where we see tremendous transformations in space. A book is a very inefficient storage system. A massive tome like war and peace contains only about 2 MB's of information. Meanwhile, a 32 GB microsd card, which is about the size of my fingernail, can store 16,000 War and Peace's. Notably, this is an incredible time and space saver. If I wanted to look something up before the internet, I'd have to travel to a library (which takes time), and hope they have the information I want, as a library is very limited itself in its storage capacity. Today, the amount of information I could instantly look up on the internet is exponentially greater than the the amount of information I could store in my house with a personal library or find in a public library.

Just to give an example of dynamic growth, 15 years ago we all used floppy disks to store our information on computers, which could store about 5 MB of information, or 2.5 War and Peaces. Today, with a 2 Terabyte portable harddrive, which I can carry in my pocket, I can carry the equivalent of 400,000 floppy disks, or 1 million War and Peaces. That much change in about a decade.

The enormous storage capacity enables me to carry music, movies, television shows, books, and newspapers wherever I go. I am not time or space bounded by when I can consume these things. THis increased consumption also allows for a greater number of people to work in the production of cultural goods. Just to give an example, more books were published in any single decade of the twentieth century than in all previous centuries combined.

Another area where the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have transformed our lives is in community. I presume we are all history buffs here, except those promoting an ideology. Without industrial technology, we would not all be able to own or access computers. Before computers and the internet, if I wanted to have a history discussion, I'd have to find someone in my local area of maybe a few hundred thousand, or if I live in a metropole, a few million people, instead of the billions of potential participants the internet provides. It would take time to advertise and set up a club, provided that people are comfortable joining a club of a stranger. We could only have discussions in our free time, and our free time would have to be synchronized. Then we'd have to travel to a single place to have a discussion, and hope we have something interesting to say during the brief period of discussion. With the internet, all I have to do is google history forum, saving a lot of time (oh, and set up an account as well). I can post whenever I am ready, thus compressing and distorting time, with anyone around the world, thus compressing space.

Fossil fuels, most importantly, transformed both space and time. Fossil fuel energy for industrial machines meant that you didn't have to devote more land to growing wood for charcoal. More energy and more land, you could have your cake and eat it too. It exponentially increased the productivity of machines, requiring less labor, thus increasing time.

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Guaporense

I see, here comes the offenses and the socialistic ideology: the idea that individual human design caused economic growth. No, economic growth is too complex a process to have been caused by designed policies, only after some countries became rich that other tried to force economic growth though artificial measures (like the USSR), they failed, of course.

Few serious economists today believe that centralized planning is the cause of economic development, much less the main driving force in economic growth. A single individual in the government trying to plan society is in the same position as the subsistence farmer and as the subsistence farmer he has bounded information processing capabilities.

Modern society works analogous though parallel processing: millions of different individuals each make their own plans of production and consumption and these plans are integrated by the price system.

I would advise you to read the essay trying to understand it.

Tuthmosis III

Well, isn't there a difference between "centralized planning" (say, the misguided interventions of Stalin or Mao) and the kind of navy-maintaining or financial institution-chartering of the early modern state that even Adam Smith saw a role for?

Guaporense

My argument was that the great increase in the speed of economic transformation from the 19th century onwards was caused by endogenous institutional and cultural transformations.

Cultural attitudes are supremely important in understand the process of economic change.

I don't think that the economic growth of the early modern period was a necessary condition for the take-off. I view all pre-modern economies as economies operating under their full potential of growth. I think that a "take-off" like those of Western Europe after 1800 AD is caused by 3 factors:

1 - Institutions: one needs a country that has a descent laws and administration of justice

2 - Culture: one needs a culture that fully accepts bourgeois activity

3 - Scale: one needs a large number of individuals to produce a large flow of innovations that drives economic progress

This means that if you implemented all these elements in a previous civilization with a large population, let's say, Tang China, an "industrial revolution" would have happened almost instantly. Classical Greece with their 8-9 million inhabitants was not capable of attaining high rates of economic growth by itself simply because it was too small in scale to produce the continuous stream of new ideas required.

Europe in 1800 AD had 180 million inhabitants while our modern market economies in the developed world have a total combined population of 1.2 billion people. Economic growth in the 20th century was in many ways faster than in the 19th also because a greater population was integrated into the market.

So one can understand the developments in the early modern period, as the continuous increase in the size of markets and trade, as creating a continuously larger market that had continuously increasing potential for growth. Though this potential was only "activated" in the turn of the 19th century.

Indeed. The discovery of the New World was a symptom of the economic growth of Western Europe in the late middle ages. Like during the Roman period, the elites in Europe became wealthy enough to justify the costs of transporting pepper all the way from India to Europe. And the fact that alternative trade routes to India were (practically) blocked by the Islamic countries. As result the Europeans had to discovery alternative route to reach India (the Romans had no such necessity). They hit America by accident. That's why native Americans are called Indians.

Well, living standards in the Netherlands improved beyond imagination between the 8th and the 17th centuries.

While today there are many regions in the world were living standards are still not different from the 8th century. Subsistence economies still exist and there are still around 2-3 billion people living in these societies.

London had way less than 10,000 people in the 8th century. In Western Europe in the 8th century the largest city was less than 10,000 inhabitants, by 1500 AD Paris had 225,000 inhabitants and 300 years later London had 950,000 inhabitants.

The urban population in Europe increased greatly from 1500 AD to 1800 AD: