Erm, that would be west.
In medieval Europe, you’d find a lot of talent in monasteries. In the society of the era, joining a religious order was virtually the only way for a person who was intelligent but wasn’t born into a good position to rise above their birth status.
Yes, the individual members of most ruling elites did compete within their system. But it’s very rare to find examples of these same individuals intentionally doing anything to upset the system itself. I’ll grant you there are exceptions in which someone in the ruling class either accidentally or deliberately overthrew his own society, but in the majority of cases you’ll find it’s outsiders making the big changes.
In a sense, the OP is asking the wrong question. The real question is what caused Europe to industrialize? The explosion in science and technology was a unique event. Forget Rome. Why didn’t it happen in China or Baghdad?
My guess it that there are several factors, each necessary but none sufficient by itself. The Romans had a stable and prosperous society coupled with enough external pressures to provide plenty of motivation for innovation. The Romans, however, were great at technology but lousy at science. The Chinese, I believe, had a similar problem. They had some great inventions, but they never seemed to have hit upon the scientific method. As a result, they never learned to “connect the dots” so to speak.
I believe that some Arab philosophers did hit upon a version of the scientific method. However, the power structure was not particularly friendly to the idea that nature could be investigated on its own terms. As a result, the idea never seems to have really gone anywhere.
You’ll recall that the scientific method had a tough time of it even in the West. Fortunately, because it produced results, and because there was a good deal of turmoil within the power structure, it was able to get a solid foothold. The rest, as they say, is history.
In summary, the Romans never developed an industrial society because they never developed the concept of science necessary to create such a society.
The plague. 1/3 of your society is killed off, and the other 2/3 is going to have to be that much more efficient. Also, it means a lot of land is up for grabs, and tenant farming isn’t as profitable as it once was.
Maeglin: Nice post. My understanding is that Western monasteries had only fragmented copies of the Ancient works. That appears to be your understanding as well.
My “third rate” line was overstated, somewhat. To be specific, Russell laments the fact that St. Augustine spends chapters and chapters contemplating a single piece of his youthful mischief, while completely ignoring the screwed up social conditions of his day. For example.
But on to the central point.
You might want to do another rethink.* To wit, why was technological innovation (in areas other than civil infrastructure) more pronounced in medieval times than in ancient times? I hypothesize that ancient slaves didn’t innovate because they lacked incentive and that the elites didn’t innovate because they weren’t involved in productive activities that they considered beneath them.
At the same time, there did exist free farmers in ancient Rome, (for a while, at least) so maybe this idea is flawed. (Or maybe I underestimate ancient material progress: the Romans used irrigation, yes?).
I wasn’t aware that the church arranged financing. Was it in the form of equity? How did they get around usury issues?
As an aside, it remains a bit of a puzzle why Holland didn’t industrialize before Britain.
Pulling more info from Cameron, I will note that modern (post 1700) industry has 3-4 features:
- Extensive use of mechanically powered machinery.
- Introduction of inanimate sources of power, especially fossil fuels.
- The widespread use of materials that do not normally occur in nature.
- Oh, and most industries have larger scale.
Cameron also notes that 18th century England possessed, “a willingness to experiment and innovate [which] penetrated all stratas of society…”, as well as a strong commercial, financial, agricultural and even political infrastructure.
- [sub]Or maybe not. Your framework is somewhat closer to the OP. [/sub]
The European plague occurred in the 1300s. Industrialization occurred during the 1700s - 1800s depending upon the location.
flowbark
Not quite. Monasteries had huge repositories of “ancient works,” just very few and fragmentary works of Greek science and philosophy. Much, much material on other subjects was better preserved, especially Roman literature and even Roman scientific inquiry.
I think the answers are probably more concrete than that. Smaller advances in material science tend to make greater technological advances possible. I think superior medieval domestication and metallurgical practice paved the way for greater overall innovation. I do not know a whole lot about this, to be honest.
Yes, there was a significant population of free farmers and yes, they employed rather sophisticated irrigation methods, particularly in Roman Egypt.
Oh yes, often in the form of equity. And there was not a lot of agreement on how usury could be reconciled with theology. Monasteries tended to lend especially to the local aristocracy, with which it had many kinship and social connections.
The usury debate was one of the great theological disputes of the 12th and 13th centuries, and I cannot do it justice here. I can suggest several excellent books, if you are interested.
Maeglin: Another great post. (Didn’t know about those Roman archives.)
Suggested reading:
Actually, I’d really be interested in a discussion of the hypothesis that, “Monasteries kept the spark of learning alive during the Medieval dark times”. Or maybe something on the social significance of the church during that time period. (Don’t dig too deep though.)
I understand that current thinking tends debunk characterizations of both the glorious Renaissance and the dark and ignorant Middle ages.
Well, and there were recurrant outbreaks in the 1400s. What the plague did do, though, especially in England, was make tenant farming unprofitable and encourage the fencing in of land and the development of the wool industry. It also (along with the Wars of the Roses) led to the shift in power from the nobility to the growing middle class. None of these things were, themselves, the industrial revolution, but they contributed to the reordering of society that made the industrial revolution possible.
I agree with the Captain, whose posts build on Little Nemo’s ideas about class mobility. Basically, the plague made the status quo unprofitable, transferred more power into the hands of the peasantry (whose labor, now that there were fewer people, was more valuable), and thereby created a middle class.
The middle class–which has enough resources to chance investing time/money in new ventures (i.e., they might not starve to death if their idea doesn’t pan out) as well as the opportunity to improve their social standing (they’re doing better than they had been, and can do better still)–is the key, IMO.
How can you have an industrial revolution if there’s nowhere to park your car?
I agree with the other posters who point out that a better way to ask the question is why Europe had an industrial age when it did, as opposed to other places (e.g. China) and other times (e.g. the Roman Empire).
Of interest to me is Cecil’s collumn on why Europeans came to dominate the world - http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a970620.html .
The main argument he puts forward was the Europe was heavily balkanized, which lead to a freer exchange of ideas, and more economic and military competition.
So perhaps, in general terms, the problem with the Roman Empire was that they were numero uno for too long. Perhaps the same thing is true with various the Chinese empires.
Interesting theories, but some aren’t central to the OP: Why didn’t Rome enter the industrial age?
Considering how long it took the West to get from a “pressure cooker” of 1679 to James Watt’s patent in 1769 to Stephenson’s rocket, the “first” railway locomotive in 1814, you start to get an inkling. That’s 135 years from inception to the beginning of the railway era.
Another factor, much trickier to validate without a good deal more study, is certain to be that in the world say, from 1500 onward, there we actually knew a great deal about the laws of nature and about the physical world than the Romans. (As a somewhat facetious example, we knew probably also knew about Chinese inventions.) Our physics and math were ahead of the Romans in a hundred ways.
But the most important reason, I guess, is that while conquering, and while the top dogs, they had no reason to innovate. Who’d change policies that had won wars for centuries? When they began to fail, it was more due to internal weakness, than more effective outside competition. In our industrial age it was pretty obvious to the Western countries that the invention of a major new machine could give them a decisive advantage over their neighbors (the ones who had just finished booting them out of a market, destroying their fleet, or routing their army). This is similar to Cecil’s comment, in part, but I’m saying that machines became to be looked on as the major tool of competition. (As aside about the collapse, this may be putting an inappropriate modern bias on it, but in Rome one can’t help shuddering at the lead piping coming straight into the imperial palaces. They polluted themselves, maybe so severely it affected their ability to create?)
That churches and monasteries played an important part seems unquestionable, given that churches founded many of the oldest important universities. I’m going to argue that the degree of importance is overrated, because some fair part of our inventions came from people with little education. As examples, Robert Stevenson, and the man who invented the seaworthy clock.(Considering the libraries an inventor could get their paws on in 1850, Isaac Newton even looks positively ill-read, but that’s an aside.) What mechanical knowledge people had was often in the form of a device, not a theoretical manual.
Class mobility had nothing to do with it whatsoever. These arguments are holdovers from socialist/communist history. There were rich inventors, and there were poor ones. Since many of these inventions required little capital to develop, and could be introduced gradually, there’s no need to hypothecate some “upstart commoner” who wasn’t afraid to get their hands dirty in a great business venture. This era wasn’t the exclusive domain of VC and “going public”.
I’m not sure about the slavery argument, but I can’t think of any way that slavery would encourage innovation.
Another factor in the West’s success was our belief that there was a God, and that he governed the universe by knowable laws. The Romans were all over the map on theology, and as we know, were quite prepared to pray to a dozen different gods than take responsibility for being ignorant.
I would suggest THe End of the Past by Aldo Schiavone as a good scholarly book that tries to answer this question from an economic point of view.
Thanks for the cite, but I like it better when folks tell me why I should look at something.
I found this site with a review of the book:
http://www.largeprintreviews.com/HIRendpast.chtml
First of all, this book deals with the reasons for the fall of the empire, which is overlaps somewhat with our question, but mostly doesn’t.
A quote: “…the Roman economy was based upon slavery to extent never seen before or since. This affected not only their philosophical outlook, giving rise to the Roman abhorrence of manual labor, but also caused a form of technological stagnation. Since they had a glut of labor, they had no need for labor-saving devices and therefore did not invent them.”
The author may explain himself better, but this argument doesn’t answer much. Why would slavery cause stagnation in some areas, but not in others? A glut of labor causes some kinds of innovation, surely. Example: Hoover Dam.
From what I remember from a class where we read The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, one of the primary causes of the industrial revolution was the law of diminishing marginal returns of wood in Englad. It was just too expensive to continue extracting wood for energy use, so folks had to completely overhaul their infrastructure to use coal instead. The collapse of the Roman empire was also the result of diminishing marginal returns, but their problems weren’t energy based - although I’ll be darned if I can remember what Tainter said it was. I’ll have a look once I get home from work.
Anyway, my point is much the same as everybody else has said. Rome had more energy than they knew what to do with (in the form of labor), so there was no need for them to make the drastic jump to industry.
Here’s another scholarly review from the BMCR. Having read the book myself, I feel it contributes to this debate because Schiavone’s main preoccupation in the book is why the Roman Empire had to fall at all. Why, he asks, couldn’t it have continued on and evolved into Modern Europe? The answers he provides are mostly economic, and thus tie in to the question of industrialization. As many in this thread have, he suggests that when a society has slaves to do all the “dirty work” there’s no real incentive to improve the means of production. A similar phenomenon can be seen in how much less industrialized the American South was than the north at the time of the Civil War.
[size=1]Thanks for the condescension. I guess “Because it’s a good scholarly work that deals with this question from an economic point of view” just isn’t a good enough reason to read anything, eh? I wasn’t trying to bring any new arguments from the book into the debate here, just suggest a book that I thought might interest someone who was interested in this debate. You’ll notice that the Amazon link provides sample pages, publisher’s descriptions AND reader reviews, but next time I’ll try and provide even more information.
Melandry, it was meant neutrally. I realize you aren’t the only person to post a URL with no further information, I just couldn’t think of any graceful way to suggest to the community that our opinions are what’s important, here. Citations are fine, but we’re the authorities, in a sense.
On a different tack. There’s a difference between the question “Why didn’t the Roman Empire last forever and discover everything?” and the original OP. I’m NOT being rude, mind you. The original question was “Why didn’t the Romans enter the Industrial Age?” Entering the Industrial Age is not = to being a successful civilization. The OP asks a technological question, not one about the longevity of the Roman Empire.
Fine. Having read the book, I think it’s completely relevant, you don’t based on reading review(s), and we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
I will say this. The dope was quite more interesting 10 years ago. Yes this is a zombie thread, but its quite fascinating. I think what many posters above have missed is that the Romans diod not have access to or indeed the basis of many of the technologys and sciences which created the Industrial Revolution. Metallurgy of the Romans was quite poor and it was no way enough to create the basis for such a revolution. There was little understanding of complex gears (yes I know there are exceptions). The Industrial Revolution needed these as perquisites.