The Industrial Revolution is the most important event in economic history, and naturally it gets a lot of attention. While James Watt’s steam engine, invented in 1776, was by far the most important invention of this era, there was an explosion of technology both before and after Watt’s engine that together transformed the world more profoundly than anything since the adoption of agriculture. Few questions are more important than why and how all this happened.
Steam power has some circular dependencies. You need large amounts of coal to run a bunch of steam engines, but you also need steamships and steam locomotives to deliver the coal. This requires very sophisticated steam engines that are tricky to bootstrap into. Most pre-industrial cultures didn’t even use that much coal; wood and charcoal were the typical fuels. So how did the British bootstrap into steam power?
The earliest practical steam engines were uses to pump water from coal mines. But why would you mine for coal in the first place if you didn’t have steam power? In Britain’s case, it was because deforestation had already made them dependent on coal as a fuel source. Britain also had a sophisticated textile industry that allowed for more early applications of steam power. Another limiting factor for efficient steam power is the ability to construct metal cylinders capable of containing high levels of gas pressure, a problem that early modern Europe had spent centuries refining already in the form of cannon.
It’s possible that there could have been other development paths that led to steam; it’s hard to generalize from a sample size of one. Unlike industrialization, multiple cultures did all invent agriculture independently of each other, so we can compare them to find the common factors. But you can’t really do this with industrialization, which makes the question all the more interesting.
This is related to your section political economy but it seems like one of the essential ingredients for *the* Industrial Revolution is the Enlightenment, in particular the ideals of pursuing societal progress through the faculty of pure reason that was nurtured in the Enlightenment. If the French Revolution was the working out of those ideals in a social setting, the Industrial Revolution was a working out in a socio-economic setting.
Does it seem like an incredible coincidence that Georgian England just so happened to have all five of these critical components, whereas no other society had more than two?
Bret Deveraux covered this question in significant technical detail, but I’ll summarize a bit: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
Steam power has some circular dependencies. You need large amounts of coal to run a bunch of steam engines, but you also need steamships and steam locomotives to deliver the coal. This requires very sophisticated steam engines that are tricky to bootstrap into. Most pre-industrial cultures didn’t even use that much coal; wood and charcoal were the typical fuels. So how did the British bootstrap into steam power?
The earliest practical steam engines were uses to pump water from coal mines. But why would you mine for coal in the first place if you didn’t have steam power? In Britain’s case, it was because deforestation had already made them dependent on coal as a fuel source. Britain also had a sophisticated textile industry that allowed for more early applications of steam power. Another limiting factor for efficient steam power is the ability to construct metal cylinders capable of containing high levels of gas pressure, a problem that early modern Europe had spent centuries refining already in the form of cannon.
It’s possible that there could have been other development paths that led to steam; it’s hard to generalize from a sample size of one. Unlike industrialization, multiple cultures did all invent agriculture independently of each other, so we can compare them to find the common factors. But you can’t really do this with industrialization, which makes the question all the more interesting.
This is related to your section political economy but it seems like one of the essential ingredients for *the* Industrial Revolution is the Enlightenment, in particular the ideals of pursuing societal progress through the faculty of pure reason that was nurtured in the Enlightenment. If the French Revolution was the working out of those ideals in a social setting, the Industrial Revolution was a working out in a socio-economic setting.
Does it seem like an incredible coincidence that Georgian England just so happened to have all five of these critical components, whereas no other society had more than two?
> wrong half dozen natural philosophers
Who’s on your list?