Has anyone read a good book on why the Industrial Revolution did happen? What were the necessary precursors, politically, economically, technologically, scientifically, culturally, before you start trying to automate all the things?
> Has anyone read a good book on why the Industrial Revolution did happen?
It will not answer your question 100% (imho there's no definitive answer for this question), but I pretty much enjoyed Carlo Cipolla's "Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700" (https://www.amazon.com/Before-Industrial-Revolution-European...) where he presents Europe's pre-industrial age economy. By comparing it with what followed after ~1780 you can make yourself a pretty good idea about what might have caused the industrial revolution, or, to put it in better terms, what were the differences between England and the rest of the countries in continental Europe.
As I remember it Italy might have had a good chance of achieving it in the 1500s-early 1600s if it weren't for the disastrous Italian Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Wars) and then the equally disastrous epidemics that had a huge adverse effect on Northern Italian cities in the first half of the 17th century. For example the 1630-1631 plague epidemics reduced Venice's population by 33% (46,000 deaths out of a total population of 140,000), Milan's by 47% (60,000 deaths out of a total of 130,000), Verona's by 61% (33,000 deaths out of a total of 54,000) and Cremona's by 38% (17,000 out of a total of 37,000). The nascent Northern Italian textile industry basically just collapsed after this, which freed the way for England's textile proto-industry to dominate.
There's so much history in between that it's easy to cherry pick your favorites:
* New economic and political philosophies(merchantilism, Machiavelli's works, Magna Carta)
* Theological developments(Islam, Protestantism) and the various resulting conflicts as motivators for modernity
* Access to New World flora and fauna(new crops and livestock) increasing the ability of the nascent industrial state to support large populations at a lower cost
* Refinements to math and science that built on or revised ideas from antiquity(e.g. Newtonian physics, cell theory)
* Advanced craftsmanship in certain crucial precursor technologies like lenses, gears, etc. A lot has been made of how the industrial world started operating on a fast-paced timetable, but the Romans had no pocketwatches.
One factor often overlooked is energy availability (the link touches it somewhat). EDIT: Wikipedia on coal, for instance, states "The development of the Industrial Revolution led to the large-scale use of coal" - rather than coal being the enabler what, with forests probably being exhausted at the time...
Important in automation is work done by a machine, enhancing or replacing labor. Machines require energy, both for running, and for construction and processing of the material in their constituent parts. Energy was present in the English Midlands in the form of coal. By burning this coal in a glorius steam engine, of which models were improved on from the 1600s and onwards, wonders arose.
I think that energy availability is overlooked because it doesn't seem to be an especially proximate cause of the Industrial Revolution. Many other countries have coal. People in the UK knew of the existence of coal for centuries (millennia?) before the IR. A lot of times and places had fossil energy stores available in the abstract. Why did it take so long before any people performed mechanical work with fossil fuels, and why did the first outbreak of industrialization occur in the UK instead of (e.g.) China or Germany?
Yeah, it is an ultimate cause I suppose, with other factors mentioned above my post as proximate causes. One needs to know how to utilize the resource, and to have the incentive to use it, economically and culturally. A lot of knowledge was lost after the Romans retreated, and coal is, even if more energy dense, more polluting than wood, for ordinary urban heating purposes and thus in less use.
Looking forward, Germany started industrializing some time after, and China is now reducing their coal-dependence. Now we are asking how India will industrialize without coal - underlining the importance of energy in industrialization.
I agree it's simplistic, but that's not particularly overly naive. The kickstart of the industrial revolution very much benefited from the disappearance of a large "free" labor source, and it was probably one of the primary social factors that worked in conjunction with the technological foundations at the time.
Serfdom was completely ended in England 200 years before the Industrial Revolution, and while slaves were still present in England, they were never a significant part of the labor pool. What other conditions had to be met, or is it simply a matter of waiting two centuries after eliminating slaves/serfs from the labor pool?
England, like many of the European powers, vastly benefited from the slavery in the Americas through trade. Former English territories such as South Carolina (it was theirs for a century leading up to the Revolutionary War) or Georgia, were aggressive slave states and England was heavily responsible for that condition. England was the largest slave trader in the 18th century, as such the foundations of slavery particularly in the colonies were overwhelmingly their responsibility. England's wealthy slave owners were still very active in the slave trade well into the 19th century (into the 1830s). Their direct role in the slave trade, as such, didn't cease until about 50-60 years prior to the industrial revolution (their indirect role, responsibility and benefit extends far longer than that).
European powers outsourced their slavery to the Americas, directly funding, operating and protecting it, while feigning morality about it at home.
My point was that it sounds likely that something like the industrial revolution would happen after the abolishment of slavery, when there's more pressure on people to be inventive. Not that it has to happen immediately
The most obvious example of the negative influence of slavery on industrialization is the split of the early US into free and slave economies, and the near complete failure of the slave economy to industrialize.
I'm not saying the elimination of slavery/serfdom isn't a necessary precursor; I just don't think it was a sufficient condition. What is the complete set of necessary and sufficient preconditions to have an Industrial Revolution?
China certainly supports that premise. The before and after on their shift toward economic liberalization, is something beyond dramatic. A 50 fold expansion of their economy in a mere three decades after Deng Xiaoping began the liberalization.
It's also interesting to note that wealthier resource nations that heavily lack economic freedom such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela (formerly semi-wealthy in their case), also mostly lack modern industrialization and have routinely failed to develop their economies.
Russia is another example of this in action. Putin will continually fail to see high level economic development under his regime, as the nation almost entirely lacks economic freedom. The primary means by which Russia can expand its economy under his oppressive rule, is through natural resource prices moving higher (which accounted for most of Russia's economic gains from 2001-2013, leading up to the price of oil imploding in 2014 and sparking a terrible recession there). Russia's GDP in 1991 was $518 billion (when the price of oil was $20). It was $1.28 trillion for 2016. Inflation adjusted (much less further adjusting for the higher real oil prices today), they've made very little self-sustaining economic progress, while burning through vast energy resources.
The USSR is a powerful counterexample. In 1914, Russia was a backwards agrocentric economy that was one of the poorest of Europe. 25 years later, it's an industrial juggernaut on par with, or perhaps even (especially as feared by many at the time) better than the US.
It's not, it actually proves the point extremely well. The USSR's industrial base was built by foreign industrial firms, including from Germany and the US. The USSR then proceeded to nationalize most of it (see: the German Junkers aviation company; German manganese mining + US industrialist W. Averill Harriman; British and US gold mining firms in the 1920s; and dozens more, all victims of bait & switch Russian nationalizations). The Soviets would have foreign industrialists build what they could not, usually after running an industry into the ground, and then they would turn around and nationalize it back.
Or consider the largest hydro dam in the world at the time, built at Dnieprostroi by Americans (designed by Hugh Cooper). The turbines were supplied by America as well. That single dam increased Soviet power production five fold. The Soviets crowed about that achievement, and they had nothing to do with it.
Steel plants, tractor plants, the list goes on and on, built by American industrialists. Then either nationalized or otherwise proclaimed to be the great product of Soviet industrialization.
They did that frequently between 1914 and the 1930s. The Soviets also never repaid the US lend-lease transfers, which would be worth several hundred billion dollars today.
To make things even worse, during the 1920s, the US and Western European powers subsidized the USSR with vast food aid, as they starved their people and exported their grain production to countries such as Germany (so while the US and others were supplying aid, they were simultaneously profiting by selling their domestic crops into other markets). During that time millions of Russians starved to death.
The USSR was not even remotely close to the industrial scale of the US in 1940. The US had economic output greater than Germany + the UK + France + the USSR by 1940.
As a counterpoint, the cotton that fueled the textiles industry that drove early industrialization was entirely dependent on slavery. There is no doubt that the cotton gin was the primary economic factor in making slavery in the South profitable, and it's very arguable that, without the massive expansion of cotton cultivation, the textile industry in the early 1800s couldn't have grown as much and couldn't have driven industrialization.
This ignores the massive amounts of "free" labor that they were receiving from places like India and the Americas. That was a far larger pool than any amount of domestic slavery most of Europe had in previous generations.
And England didn't finally ban slave labor abroad until 1833 ... after the Industrial Revolution; arguably, they continued to benefit from the defacto slavery of colonialism until the 20th century.
