The Empire was the forefront, after greece was conquered, of technological advancement and development so why didn’t it develop things such as making machinery at such a faster rate or use steam driven engines etc?
I know there was a slave society in progress in the Roman Empire and they valued slaves over new ideas, were they afraid of change or was it something else that hindred their progress?
Try “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” by David Landes for an answer
Overdependence on slavery.
And the cultural idea that “gentlemen were not mechanics or businessmen”. All of Rome’s “best” people were supposed to be intrested in war, farming, law, or government; not machines or “grubby money”.
Actually in the civilization of rome by written by donald r dudley
It says that rome had no innovations in farming tools or farming which was one of the impetus of the modren day industrial revolution
In fact did rome really have any scientific innovations of their own other than water works ?
And perhaps a bit of chance, too.
It may seem strange to the Dopers who insist Christianity is troglodytic bass-ackwards cavemen society (you know who you are, though its not as bad as at Darwin Awards, for obvious reasons) , but Christianity was heavily involved in bringing about the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Catholic monks preserved knowledge and writing in the west after the barbarian Germanic tribes began to settle and produce new cultures. They taught schools and formed the core of learning. The Church also paid for many of the great works of art, too, when Italy once again became the center of culture in the West.
In my humble opinion, in order to have an industrial revolution, you need a society in which people who have the assets to support new ideas also have the motivation to do so. Looking back through history, you’ll find that most societies consist of a small elite who have no interest in changing the status quo that’s put them on top and a large mass of peasants who have no ability to change things. Western Europe at the close of the medieval era was one of the few exceptions to this rule.
In a Roman history class we touched on this topic. There was an anecdotal story about an inventor who approached one of the “Good Emperors” (the story said which, but I’ve forgotten) and showed them plans for a mechanical device that would reduce the manpower needed for a project to a fraction of what it currently was. The Emperor is supposed to have responded in a exasperated way, “Are you aware of how many unemployed citizens are currently in the Empire? And you now propose to increase that amount?” I guess that was the end of that.
Imperial Rome did after all have a dole to the poor in Rome, so there was a desire to reduce unemployment since that reduced the amount of free food given to the poor. Inventions tend to come when there are not enough people to to perform tasks.
As an aside, this is one of the reasons the US has focused on military technology, it didn’t have the numbers of the Soviet Union and needed “force multipliers” in order to gain even an equal footing.
Little Nemo wrote:
Actually, if you take a little closer look back through history, you’ll notice that the members of each “small elite” were continually jockeying for power over one another. If any one of them had had the tools to gain the upper hand – say, a gizmo that increased crop yields on their land, which they could then sell to neighboring lands – they would have jumped upon those tools in a heartbeat.
In fact, innovation in farming technology was going on through the middle ages. Witness the development of the tack-and-harness, which allowed each horse or ox on a cart or plow team to pull a lot more weight.
…however, the Romans never invented these very simple inventions:
-the horse-collar (allowed a farmer to plow much more land than using the very slow oxen (that the Romans used)
-the stirrup:this innnovation made it possible for a cavalryman to charge thre enemy with a heavy lance, and STAY on top of his horse. The Romans never had this-so their cavalry was inneffective
-geared windlasses: this would have made large sailing ships pracyicale-which the Romans never had in antiquity
I guess there was just about zero interest in innovations in the late Roman empire. Of course, by then their main worry was in being overwhelmed by barbarian invaders
Well, the Roman army was land and infantry based, and the Romans were indifferent horsemen. (Most of the time, there wasn’t any actual Roman cavalry…just auxilliary cavalry) The Romans just wouldn’t have much use for stirrups. As for geared windlasses, most Roman ships were on the Mediterranean, which is relatively calm, without much wind and, in which, rowers can be used.
Volumes 1-6 of ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ just came in from Amazon today. I will get back to you in, oh, 2 years, with a good answer!
I vote for cheap labor: at the end of the day, it is easier to have your slave haul your dishes two miles to the river to wash them than it is to load a dishwasher.
Lots of good answers.
I’m not sure about the “monks as a depository of knowledge” story. Seems to me that the Arab world stored a lot of that knowledge. And Russell has pointed out how a number of first-rate minds regrettably wasted their efforts on third-rate ecclesiastic philosophy (my characterization).
That said.
There were a large number of medieval tinkers. To them we owe the development and adoption* of the waterwheel, windmill, clock, knitting, tanning, leatherworking and assorted other technologies alluded to above. As far as this non-specialist can tell, many (most? all?) of these efforts occurred outside of the monastery.
Why were not the ancients more creative? A standard answer is that most were slaves without the incentive to innovate. And the elite lacked both the experience and inclination to invent, as such activity carried the stigma associated with manual labor.
Within this context, St. Paul was less than helpful when he wrote that, “Masters and slaves must accept their present stations, for the earthly kingdom could not survive unless some were masters and some were slaves.” Which is only to say the Paul was a man of his time.
(Thanks to Rondo Cameron A Concise Economic History of the World)
It’s also interesting that even after the Industrial Era was born elsewhere, Italy couldn’t fully join the club because it hadn’t the coal; so they concentrated on craftsmanship over quantity. But I’ve read that now that it’s the post-industrial era, the average Italian is doing better than the average Englishman.
I think that Rome was heading towards more technological advances, but didn’t get there because they cared more about conquering everyone else than improving themselves.
Yes, Arabic sources did take a lot of classical works, and eventually it was the crusades that revived interest in learning. Yet the Monastaries kept reading and culture alive in a time when there weren’t any schools and universities elsewhere, when wealthy nobles often couldn’t sign their own names, and even the wisest and most nowledgable men across the planet had laughably simplistic, if not downright wrong, ideas about how the world worked. For centuries, the Catholic church bound Europe from slipping further into the Dark Ages. In any vent, it was often the same information and works in both Arabia and Europe. Until the crusades’ time, few Europeans had the wealth or leisure to study it - the Arabian state/s had an enormous money advantage from the trade routes and valuable items flowing across their borders. Monasteries were the one place people could routinely study works of history, philosophy, art, and religion.
THE fact that the Romans were bad at horsemanship had some serious consequences for the late Empire. It was impossible for the Roman army (mostly infantry) to halt the barbarians , who were mounted. In battels against mounted foes, the Roman infantry was often severely mauled. Once word got around (of the infantry’s vulnerability) the doom of the empire was assured.For example, the Romans abandoned Britain (in the 4th century), becuase stationing enough soldiers there (to gaurd against the Picts) became financially impossible.
As I say, the Romans just about ceased innovation ca 200AD-why this happened is a mystery. Look at the West since about 1700-invention after invention, and no end to progress as yet!
This is a broad question indeed. I think it is more useful to turn it on its head, however, and ask “why should the Romans have made more technological progress?” There are a myriad of economic and social preconditions upon which technological development rests. Rome lacked virtually all of them.
In order to improve farming technology, sufficient surplus crop is required. If you are going to tool around with your fields, you had better make sure there would still be enough food to go around. This was virtually never the case in either the Republic or the Empire. One bad year could have devastating effects. The 18th century English “Gentleman Farmers” had relatively considerable insulation against catastrophe, hence they were able to take many more risks than the average Roman landowner.
Furthermore, Roman currency wasn’t exactly known for its stability. This made financing particularly risky ventures to be very unattractive to the landed aristocracy, the only class that possessed sufficient capital and resources to invest in such advancement. While knights and merchants certainly had money, they rarely had enough property to institute certain agricultural innovations even if they had wanted to.
Rome was also a fundamentally traditional society, and the farmer, especially after the conservative moral program instituted by Augustus, was considered Rome’s bulwark. It was essential to the survival of the Roman state that he practice his landcraft just the way his fathers did. Vergil’s didactic epic, the Georgics, is a paean to Roman agricultural traditions.
Manufactories, as it were, did exist in both Greek and Roman cities. The rhetor Demosthenes owned a large shield factory that employed some 50 slaves, and weaving “factories” were not unknown in Rome as well. But such crafts tended to be cottage industries: even your average Roman aristocrat did not have access to international markets to peddle his cloth, and local markets were unprofitable since everyone spun their own textiles already. Due to complications of transporting goods and money even over so calm a sea as the Mediterannean, there was simply less demand for imported industrial products. This is markedly different, of course, from the economic situation of colonial Europe.
Rome made fantastic technological advances in building and siegecraft, of course. Aquaeducts, roads, fortresses, war machines, you name it.
I dunno about that, monica. The British were pretty interested in conquering everyone else and that certainly didn’t stop them from experiencing the Industrial Revolution.
Just a few remarks on monastic learning.
Why are these two ideas mutually exclusive? Both monastic and Arabic libraries were full of classical learning. And of course, the fact that you (and Russell) consider this ecclesiastic philosophy “third rate” reveals more about your own biases than the quality of the learning. 
This is certainly true, but to an extent. Surprisingly, monasteries with corporate property were on the forefront of economic institutional advancements, many of which were directly responsible for the financing of these new inventions. While the designers probably weren’t monks, you see that windmill up there? Jack Miller built it with money he borrowed from St. Giles’.
smiling bandit
This is empirically false, though I suppose it depends on just what you mean by “revive.” There was never a time when interest in learning actually ceased. There is also a tremendous and demonstrable consonance between the political self-consciousness of western europe that was a prerequisite for the crusades and such learning.
I suppose this is partially true, but I will spare you a quibble on a lot of the details.
This is also demonstrably false. Only a handful of Greek texts survived in the east.
Boethius’ partial translation and commentary on Aristotle’s de Anima.
Boethius partial translation and commentary of Plato’s Timaeus
Some of Porphyry’s Questions
Part of Aristotle’s Categories
And a few other works which I rather pathetically have forgotten offhand.
But you get the idea. The west essentially reconstructed Aristotle and Plato from only fragmentary sources, and, all things considered, did a damned good job of it.
The Arab world, on the other hand, had access to many, many more texts. Hence the contributions of Avicenna and Averroes to western monastic scholarship cannot be overestimated. Without these titans of Islamic scholarship, Aquinas would not have been the earthshaker that he was.
You make it sound like every rich Arab was sitting on the shores of the Euphrates with a martini and a Greek text. While I am hardly an expert on medieval Arabic culture, I have a hunch that this was not exactly the case.
MR
This is a rather old and heavily discredited theory, ralph. Roman infantry was ideally suited to repel cavalry, especially the lightly armed and armored cavalry of the so-called barbarians. While it is often asserted that Adrianople in 387 was a cavalry victory, this is usually asserted by people who read too much Vegetius and not enough Ammianus Marcellinus.
The problems in the Roman army ran much, much deeper than its lack of reliance on cavalry.
Excellent posts Maeglin. I’ll just add on the calvary front, that while it could be argued that Rome’s relatively weaker calvary arm ( it was never nonexistant ) occasionally contributed to a few battlefield defeats ( say against Hannibal a couple of times ), the deciding factor was almost always bad generalship. The Roman military system at its peak was the most effective in the world and did just fine against armies like those of the Hellenistic kingdoms that had stronger calvary components. Battles like Carrhae were real aberrations.
As Maeglin suggests, the Late Roman army had far more serious flaws than just a lack of calvary. The entire instituition was badly decayed.