# How come Rome never entered the Industrial age? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 19, 2002, 11:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831 "2002-06-19T11:13:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2012, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/101 "2012-02-16T15:20:19Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > Jared Diamond said that natives of New Guinea were more intelligent on the average than whites in Europe. He presented no evidence for that what so ever. Now that’s the pot calling the kettle black if I’ve ever seen it. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2012, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/102 "2012-02-16T16:39:23Z")
> [@Galty\_Boy](#): > > Well it seems, Rome went off the Rails with regard to morals, and became very much involved in pleasure seeking outside the family and therefore the family structure fell apart, causing moral break down all over society, and system failed before it got up to steam. That really amusing, considering the time when Rome was at its peak was the worst time for fidelity in marriage (“plough my fields, and fuck my slaves”) while at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire\*, the Romans were far far more prudish. \*Be it 476 or 1453. ---
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2012, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/103 "2012-02-18T02:25:25Z")
> [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](#): > > Jared Diamond said that natives of New Guinea were more intelligent on the average than whites in Europe. He presented no evidence for that what so ever. Culture can change in a generation. Innate ability levels take hundreds and even thousands of years to change. > [@Sailboat](#): > > Now that’s the pot calling the kettle black if I’ve ever seen it. Here is evidence of racial intelligence differences: > **[Fast Facts: SAT scores (171)](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171)** > > The NCES Fast Facts Tool provides quick answers to many education questions (National Center for Education Statistics). Get answers on Early Childhood Education, Elementary and Secondary Education and Higher Education here. [http://sq.4mg.com/NationIQ.htm](http://sq.4mg.com/NationIQ.htm) > **[Who's No. 1? Finland, Japan and Korea, Says OECD Education Study - Site...](https://siteselection.com/ssinsider/snapshot/sf011210.htm)** > > Who's No. 1? Finland, Japan and Korea, Says OECD Education Study ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2012, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/104 "2012-02-18T03:06:12Z")
> [@FinnAgain](#): > > Am I the only one now who really wants to read a steampunk story set in ancient Rome? Try [this](http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/label.html?id=silvromaet) or [this.](http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/label.html?id=mitcprocur) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2012, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/105 "2012-02-18T03:12:25Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > Incidentally, did the fact that America, in its early decades, was a slave owning society prevent Americans from being innovative in technology and in other areas? I don’t think so. It certainly retarded the development of industry in the South. ---
**Author:** ![New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9d8465/32.png) [@New\_Deal\_Democrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/New_Deal_Democrat)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2012, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/106 "2012-02-18T10:44:13Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > It certainly retarded the development of industry in the South. Prior to the Civil War the great majority of immigrants went to the North because that is where the economic opportunities were. For non slave owners, any skill or profession earned more in the North than in the South. That is why the North had a higher population, and one of the reasons the North won the Civil War. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2012, 2:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/107 "2012-02-18T14:24:35Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > True, though Nicephorus never did. Unfortunately for the Byzantines and their notions of imperial dignity they were going through a low period right when the Carolingians were peaking. Michael had his hands full with the Bulgars and was hardly in a political position to sneer at those barbarian Franks ( though I’m sure he did 😃 ). Plus it netted him the minor concession of Venice et al over which Nicephorus and Charlemagne had been at violent loggerheads. True. Constantine Porphyrogenitus does mention that the Franks are the only people outside the Empire that the Imperial family can appropriately marry, also. ---
**Author:** ![Gagundathar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a183cd/32.png) [@Gagundathar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gagundathar)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2012, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/108 "2012-02-18T14:33:48Z")
I was going with ‘what was slavery’ for $1000, Alex. But I am apparently late to the game. Oh well. ---
**Author:** ![JoelUpchurch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f05b48/32.png) [@JoelUpchurch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JoelUpchurch)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2012, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/109 "2012-02-18T23:23:00Z")
I’m not sure if we have the causality reversed here. It seems more a matter that industrialization retards slavery rather than the other way around. It seems to me that England was well along on the industrial revolution before they started abolishing slavery. It appears that the utility of slaves and serfs drops remarkably when you move into a post-agricultural society. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/110 "2012-02-19T03:34:39Z")
> [@JoelUpchurch](#): > > I’m not sure if we have the causality reversed here. It seems more a matter that industrialization retards slavery rather than the other way around. It seems to me that England was well along on the industrial revolution before they started abolishing slavery. It appears that the utility of slaves and serfs drops remarkably when you move into a post-agricultural society. For what it’s worth, a recent and highly influential treatment of this subject argues something along these lines. Joseph Inikori compiles and analyzes a huge amount of data in [Africans in the Industrial Revolution in England](http://www.allbusiness.com/services/religious-grantmaking-civic-professional/736863-1.html) and shows that slavery and slave labor drove industrialization. ---
**Author:** ![JoelUpchurch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f05b48/32.png) [@JoelUpchurch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JoelUpchurch)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/111 "2012-02-19T06:03:47Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > For what it’s worth, a recent and highly influential treatment of this subject argues something along these lines. Joseph Inikori compiles and analyzes a huge amount of data in [Africans in the Industrial Revolution in England](http://www.allbusiness.com/services/religious-grantmaking-civic-professional/736863-1.html) and shows that slavery and slave labor drove industrialization. Actually Professor Inikori seems to to be arguing the opposite of what I said. I actually find his thesis rather dubious as does the reviewer you link to. ---
**Author:** ![Gagundathar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a183cd/32.png) [@Gagundathar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gagundathar)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/112 "2012-02-19T06:14:12Z")
Hmmmm… I haven’t read this yet, so I will comment afterwards. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 12:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/113 "2012-02-19T12:56:21Z")
> [@JoelUpchurch](#): > > Actually Professor Inikori seems to to be arguing the opposite of what I said. I actually find his thesis rather dubious as does the reviewer you link to. Then what you said was extremely unclear. England was indeed heavily industrialized before it began to unwind the slave trade. The utility of slavery does decline in a post-agricultural, industrial world. But slavery was instrumental in the process of industrialization. Everything is consistent with what you said. If you meant something else somehow, well, fine. That you are skeptical of Inikori’s argument without having read the book is neither here nor there. The reviewer is quite right that the data are limited, but he does not show why Inikori’s attempts to fill in the gaps with interpretation are somehow illogical with the facts as we do know them. History itself is making do with interpreting anecdotes, and Inikori is reasonably honest about this. So it really is a non-objection. I’m not trying to hang my hat on this book. I don’t even particularly love it. But it is a pretty serious causal argument that marshalls quite a lot of data. It would be pretty low-brow just to brush it aside in favor of our own uninformed biases. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/114 "2012-02-19T16:13:50Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > Then what you said was extremely unclear. England was indeed heavily industrialized before it began to unwind the slave trade. The utility of slavery does decline in a post-agricultural, industrial world. But slavery was instrumental in the process of industrialization. Everything is consistent with what you said. If you meant something else somehow, well, fine. I have not read his book, and I don’t claim to. But I have heard similar theses, and they tend to boil down to _post hoc, ergo prompter hoc_. There’s essentially no evidence linking the slave economies of the New World to industrialization, and a great deal separating them. At most, you can argue that increased commerce helped create wealth useful forindustrialization and allowed a cheaper food supply for city workers… but then you find you can’t show that early industrial capital came at all from the slave trade. Aside from which, the slave trade was abolished extremely _early_ in industrialization, which makes the link much more tenuous. Again, I haven’t read this book. But suffice it to say this view is not well-accepted among historians, precisely because industrialization has a long patterns of avoiding areas with lots of slave labor, or effective slave labor as in parts of China, and does not seem to be well correlated with the slave trade except to the extent that some heavily commercial cities were involved in both. Even if the thesis is at all true, it requires so many exceptions, qualifications, and compromises that it isn’t very useful. ---
**Author:** ![coremelt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@coremelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coremelt)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/115 "2012-02-19T16:18:11Z")
Related question, ok maybe there wasn’t a pressing need for steam engines because of cheap slave labour, but the Roman’s loved military innovation and adopted many things they ran into from enemies. If they had known about black power gunpowder, would Roman metallurgy been high enough quality to be capable of making canons? ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/116 "2012-02-19T16:36:58Z")
Diamond didn’t offer evidence of that claim, because it was not his point. He wasn’t literally saying that New Guineans are more intelligent than Westerners. His point was that the concept of intelligence is relative to the knowledge required to survive in the environment that you find yourself in. And after all these years to continuously assert the opposite of his point has hot to be an intentional misunderstanding. ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/117 "2012-02-19T17:15:20Z")
> [@coremelt](#): > > If they had known about black power gunpowder, would Roman metallurgy been high enough quality to be capable of making canons? One of the factors which led to improved metallurgy was infact the need to make better and more reliable cannon. If the Romans had discovered blackpowder, I really doubt that they would have progressed to cannons. It took several centuries to go from black powder to even basic muskets and cannons, initially you just had either exploding pottery jars (used at [Ayn Jalut](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ain_Jalut) by both sides) or propelled arrows. I suspect the Romans would never get past that before they fell. Blackpowder would have revolutionised Roman engineering and construction though, ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/118 "2012-02-19T17:26:45Z")
This is a topic that has always interested me. I think the Romans of the 1st century AD must have “almost” gotten to an industrial age. Take building materials (cement, bricks, tiles, pipe, etc.). With the vast amont of building going on (in Rome and large cities), the Romans mst have had some semblance of mass production. Why these factories never made the jump to machine aided production is a mystery. Suppose you were making decorative tiles (for those mosaic floors that the wealthy Romans had in their houses)-just by automating the process (moving belts), automated glazing/coating, you cold vastly increase your otput (and profits). Why didn’t they invent machines to do this? ---
**Author:** ![AK84](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/85e7bf/32.png) [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/119 "2012-02-19T17:40:06Z")
And how would they get the belts to move? Their was a BBC programme once which looked at what innovations were needed to get even the most low tecn stuff to be possible. It was quite illuminating and answered many querys of why something was not invented before. ---
**Author:** ![JoelUpchurch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f05b48/32.png) [@JoelUpchurch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JoelUpchurch)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831/120 "2012-02-19T18:21:33Z")
I think one of the prerequisites for mass production is mass transportation. You some way to get the raw materials to the factories and the manufactured goods to the customers. The English history of improving their natural waterways for transportation and building canals parallels the industrial revolution. A single horse can tow a 30 ton load on a boat which increases the capacity by an order of magnitude. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canals\_of\_the\_United\_Kingdom](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canals_of_the_United_Kingdom) A better question is why the Chinese didn’t have an industrial revolution, since they had an extensive canal system? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-come-rome-never-entered-the-industrial-age/114831.md?page=7)