Are you saying that the shift in thought occurred in the 1200s?
That was when Roger Bacon – at the request of the Pope – clearly set out the scientific method. He described a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and the need for independent verification… and illustrated this by an investigation into the nature and cause of the rainbow.
He was by no means the only one working on scientific and mathematical principles.
No… I just picked a rainbow as a common phenomenon out of thin air.
What I’m saying is that at about the same time as the Great Enrichment, there were three other things happening more or less concurrently (slightly earlier actually) - the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, with the Scientific Revolution kicking things off.
Just because Roger Bacon described the scientific method in the 1200s, doesn’t mean it was commonly used then- it took until the 16th century or so for that to become a common thing. (I’m not a fan of the continuity theory in case there was any doubt!)
In a wider sense, what I’m saying is that there were wide scale changes in the way people thought somewhere around the 16th-18th century, and the results of that was the industrial revolution and the Great Enrichment. Why those thought changes happened, I don’t really know- it was probably an outgrowth of the Renaissance if I had to speculate.
Yup, and I’ll see your Roger Bacon in the 1200s and raise you Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040). Al-Haytham (Alhazen) did numerous optical experiments and figured out the relation of chromatic dispersion in rainbows to refraction of sunlight by water droplets.
In fact, we can take the concept of “scientific method” in more limited contexts all the way back to Ptolemy and even Aristotle. Ancient astronomers were doing “experiments” on their orbital models pretty much from the get-go: it’s just that they had to wait patiently for their experimental “apparatus” to come back into the desired alignment before they could check the success of their predictions.
Prior to calculus and Newtonian physics, there were comparatively very few other natural phenomena for which sufficiently accurate quantitative predictive models existed to make use of the “scientific method” worthwhile.
And what really made the difference, as I said, was calculus and Newtonian physics, and eventually the more complicated applied mathematics of the 18th century in particular. That’s what made modern “scientific engineering” possible.
Exactly. Cheap fuel, vast reservoirs of natural resources, and better quantitative models all added up to massively expanded production.
Scientific knowledge has always had significant impact on material conditions. Think of the ancient Mediterranean mariners’ discovery of the monsoon patterns and the consequences for sea trade across the Indian Ocean, for example.
As the saying goes, every complex phenomenon has an explanation that is straightforward, simple, and wrong. It’s not realistic to try to pick out one strand of political thought as “the” sole necessary and sufficient factor in the early modern world responsible for the massive explosion in material production.
No that’s the difference. Science was rarely if ever applied to solving problems of the masses. It was strictly by and for the elite (nobility, clergy, military, etc). It was the shift in attitude Mccloskey has identified that put science to work for consumers.
I don’t agree that identifying a shift in rhetoric as the cause of enrichment is a simple explanation.
All of these pieces were laying around for centuries or even longer (fossil fuels). It makes sense to identify a root cause amongst the noise. If it was caused fossil fuels or science we would have seen capitalism come out of the ancient civilizations. We didn’t because there was no pro-bourgeois rhetoric.
It’s not just that there were ideas. It’s that there were specifically pro-bourgeois ideas.
If you dropped a self-contained modern industrial city off 1000 years ago or even 400 years ago, the nobility would have turned their noses up at it or simply consumed its contents. The masses would have had no desire to prosper independently and turn a buck off of it. To a certain extent, the reason Mccloskey’s explanation is being rejected here is because it is taken for granted that our ancestors shared our bourgeois values.
Nope. Accurate calendars, for example, were definitely applied to solving problems of the masses. Access to trade goods was a problem of the masses. Early techniques for, e.g., smallpox inoculation in Indian medicine definitely involved problems of the masses.
Scientific knowledge has been “put to work for consumers” throughout all of human history.
What you call “pro-bourgeois rhetoric” also appeared multiple times over centuries and millennia. Ideas of human equality, liberty and meritocracy weren’t first invented in 18th-c. Europe. The industrial revolution and late-modern world were caused by a whole raft of very complex and interlinked phenomena, none of which are adequately dealt with in the simplistic libertarian sloganeering of the OP’s linked article.
Nonsense. From freed slaves in ancient Rome to weavers’ guilds in medieval Kerala, and everywhere else, “the masses” have always had a strong desire to prosper independently and turn a buck off of economic opportunities. They haven’t always had the opportunity, but to say they haven’t had the desire is absurd.
The only way that a claim like McCloskey’s can sound even slightly credible is if one refrains from thinking about actual human history.
Are you saying that these were new ideas that hadn’t been expressed before this period? And that once they were expressed, they were so obviously true and valuable they were embraced and spread throughout society?
Was it one great thinker who had these ideas or was it several different individuals who happened to have them all in the same period?
There were social patterns that had existed for centuries or longer. How did these ideas break through and overturn these long-standing ways of doing things? Were the eventual benefits that would arise of the decades so obvious when the ideas were first expressed? Why did the people who held power under the existing system not more effectively resist the spread of these ideas that would overturn that system?
You reference curiosities of history that had no real impact on the 90%. 90% of people were scrounging around in mud 20000 years ago. 300 years ago, basically no improvement for the 90%.
Less than 300 years ago. Human beings in France had to hibernate. Yes they huddled together for months at a time. That is such a drastic change that can’t be explained by anything other than a change toward an ascendant bourgeoisie.
It specifically was the idea that entrepreneurial wealth is morally legitimate.
If making money by being a merchant or entrepreneur is considered dishonorable, you don’t get a lot of trade going on.
There was some sort of conflict going on in Holland at the time that has been identified as a catalyst if I recall the argument correctly. Anyway, I’ll look into that and get back to you.
It might be a good idea to read some actual history written by historians – rather than the ramblings of people who are pushing an agenda, and know nothing about history themselves.
I’ve seen popular “Today I Learned”-type articles repeating this, but it doesn’t seem to have an actual source (Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France has been rather thoroughly trashed as “ahistorical anti-modernism,” a recycling of long-discredited 19th-century myths about pre-modern France rather than actual historical research). Meanwhile, real historians of 18th-century France (see, e.g., Liana Vardi’s The Land and the Loom: Peasants and Profit in Northern France, 1680-1800) have established that in many areas, a form of proto-industrialization was already underway, as many peasant families had abandoned subsistence farming to become weavers in emerging commercial networks, while others spent the off-season working as hired laborers outside of their villages.
I see nothing suggesting any kind of dishonour in the earliest trade writing we’ve translated. Lots of letters, not a lot of shame going on. Why didn’t the Akkadians have this great enrichment, then?
I agree that the progress of the last 200 years has been unprecedented. It is remarkable how little material progress there has been for the average person in the entire span of human history. Malthus was largely right for almost all of history and technological improvements allowed for a greater population but did not dramatically improve the standard of living of the average person. Then in the 18th and 19th century something changed and mankind developed a set of institutions and ideas that produced progress generation after generation and are still going strong today.
I don’t know if I would agree on any mono-causal theory as to why that happened though. Ideas played a huge role including the ideas about “bourgeois dignity” that McCloskey talks about. However ideas also exist in a material context. For example the invention of the printing press played a huge role in the spread of literacy which then prepared the ground for rise of capitalism and democracy.
Please save me with the “real historian” stuff. There is no science or method to history and history that is considered “real” is chock full of value judgements and selection bias.
