Why Did It Take So Long for the 'Industrial Revolution'?

Great Debates
1

Why did it take so long for the Industrial Revolution to start? As I understand it, humans have been around for about 200,000 years. Isn’t this “long enough” for an industrial revolution to begin?

Actually, I have to confess, this question is partly inspired by hearing Carl Sagan once muse what would happen if, e.g., the Greeks started the Industrial Revolution thousands of years ago. He said (presumably in an alternate quantum reality) there might be intergalactic ship, with a Greek geometric figure on it (I forget exactly what).

BTW, I have another question concerning this. What would have happened to human rights movements (like the anti-slavery movement of the 19th century) if the Industrial Revolution started earlier? Would we still have them?

:slight_smile:

2

200,000 years? We didn’t invent the WHEEL until about 10,000 years ago, the cart didn’t show up until something like 5000 years ago.

3

Like most everything else, we didn’t invent it until we needed it. People liked their agrarian lifestyles just fine (barbaric and miserable though they seem to us), and it wasn’t until pressure from population density (among other things) started to make that lifestyle slip away that industrialization really started. It’s no coincidence that it started on an island nation.

Of course, you also have to realize that the Industrial Revolution owes its existence to the equally important (but less history-book-page-taking-up) Agricultural Revolution, which came earlier and both allowed and forced the movement of people off the land which was one of the key ingredients of the Industrial Revolution.

I think the thing with the ancient Greeks is though they stumbled on many of the same scientific and technological ideas that would lead to industrialization, but there wasn’t any particularly pressing need from their society so it came to naught.

4

I think the Enlightenment played a role. Secular values like reason and individualism and happiness lend themselves to a more “inventive” society, as opposed to religious values that emphasize tradition.

5

:dubious:
Because secular philosophies like fascism, capitalism and communism are well known to have promoted reason and individualism and happiness and didn’t at all promote cookie cutter armies and assembly line slaves dedicated to trouncing the evil Commies/Imperialist running dogs/Nazis and the preservation of the traditional values of the land of the free?

In contrast not one of the world’s millions of religions has ever promoted reason and individualism and happiness, focusing instead on ensuring maximal economic productivity and military service.

Reason and individualism and happiness are all wonderful things, but it would take a hell of a lot of cherry picking to say that secular societies have better promoted them than religious societies. I doubt an industrial revolution child factory labourer working 14 hour days had much of any of those things. In contrast I imagine that the aristocracy of the dark ages had an awful lot of them all.

6

The recognition of individual property rights was crucially important.

Until there was a system of property rights that allowed people to benefit from innovation and accumulation of capital, industrial production was limited to the occasional device built for a king and then lost to history. The Hanseatic league in Europe won the right to property in the 13th century, and began an explosion of trade, which also caused an explosion of trade guilds which allowed for technical knowledge to be created, retained, and passed down through the generations.

Then there were the necessary precursor technologies, such as the printing press. The printing press made the retention and widespread dissemination of technical information possible, which allowed for specialization and the division of labor.

There were a number of other precursor requirements that had to happen before the industrial revolution could take off.

7

Wow, defensive? Much? I think Panache45 has a point, and he only suggests it ‘played a role’, not that it was the sole reason. Increasing secularisation in the UK amongst the ‘educated classes’ allowed exploration/interest in science, individualism and questioning of societal norms. Like it or not, religion (particularly Catholicism in Western Europe) had always played a controlling role. Free of that yoke, and society was free to change.

It’s a trigger, but not the only one.

8

No. Why are you being so aggressive? :rolleyes:

Are you sure you are not confusing cause and effect?

Once again, you are confusing cause and effect. Society changed which reduced the role of religion, not vice versa. People didn’t stop believing in God and then run our to discover truths about the cosmos and life to fill the void you know. They discovered such truths which led to them questioning both the authority of the Church and the nature of God.

9

Because you needed just the right mix of:

Money, and a decent banking system to lend capital,
A large demand for goods from a massive empire,
Social mobility in a society where the truly gifted aren’t going to be ignored because of their parent’s social class (go to Wikipedia and read up on some of the key players from the North, Midlands and Scotland in the Industrial Revolution — nearly all of them were from humble backgrounds, many outright poor, who succeeded through force of will)
Strong property rights and a government willing to grant patents to inventors
A society open to innovation
A climate suitable for the sorts of manufacturing amenable to mechanisation (see North West England and its perfect climate for cotton weaving)
A decent transportation network for moving goods around (canals, roads and the large merchant fleet)
A huge supply of reliable energy in coal from Wales, Scotland and Northern England

Apparently this was the case in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the right mix had never been found before.

10

Ridley’s list, plus more specifically the gradual refinement of the steam engine, allowing brute power to be concentrated and replace human labour.

11

Given that the Industrial Revolution occured 250 years ago, it is not in the least surprising that it happened 250 years ago. It’s not like it’s a spooky coincidence.

If there had been an industrial revolution in ancient Greece instead of the Peloponnesian* War, then 250 years’ later people would have been posting on internet forums asking why it happened then and not some other time. But at least we would have been spared all the threads on Christianity…

Sandwich

  • can’t be arsed checking spelling, it’s not as if I’ll write Peloponnesian again for another decade…
12

<insert hilarious Civilization tech tree joke here>

13

I would point out that quite a large number of the leading lights of the Industrial Revolution in the UK were Baptists and Dissenters. Not the least religious people around. It would also seem that Belgium, a Catholic country, was an early adopter of the Industrial Revolution.

It bears noting that religion need not always mean an abhorrence of science and technology, no matter that it may seem that way in modern American politics. Many Christians believed (and still do) that the world works on a systems of natural laws that can be understood. Science is how you understand those natural laws. The fact that they believe that God set those laws in motion does not mean that the workings of the world cannot be understood. Indeed, many thought that understanding the workings of the world was a way to better understand and worship the divine.

Just sayin’.

14

Aye, the self-congratulatory “Protestant Work Ethic” is not Protestant at all. It was simply the culture of certain places and times which got mixed up with some theology some of the time. Handy, perhaps, but not limited to Protestants and not present in all, or perhaps even most Protestant-majority societies.

However, for the larger view:

Honestly, I think almost all rpevious posters are a little too certain about things. The basic fact is that we don’t have any clue. It might be a one-in-a-million chance. Or it might be just what happens as a matter of course. Or it could be that the steam engine with an adequate power supply was exactly what the doctor ordered, and could have appeared in most places had it worked out like that.

What we can probably say:

Northern Europe had a strong property-rights system in place, which surely helped.

It had a strong industrial focus. This may or may not be important, because the financial systems of Southern Europe were better developed and perhaps would have supported things equally or better if it had gotten started in Italy or something.

Britain in particular had a social system which produced excess and mobile free labor, unlike China.

England was relatively war-free, and when it did make war it was abroad, not at home.

There were useful and useable compact energy supplies waiting to be tapped.

The transportation system was pretty well-developed. Note that just before the Industrial Revolution a very different Transportation Revolution was very much present in America, and to a slightly lesser extent in Britain and France and the germanic lands. Transportation costs even before the invention of railroads were falling by orders of magnitude. As improved shipbuilding, macademized roads, and canals may have made the Ind. Rev. possible and profitable.

15

My impression was the agricultural revolution which occured a few decades before the industrial revolution. Supposedly that resulted in a higher population and fewer laborers in farming, which basically meant more demand for manufactured goods and more idle hands. So that eventually led to advances in mechanical productivity.

Thus spake wikipedia

16

Haven’t read through everyone’s replies, so sorry if someone already answered this but:

Depending on how you define ‘human’ we’ve been around even longer than that, actually. However, much of our existence we were basically hunters and gatherers or simple agrarian folk. It takes a certain level of civilization to even have the infrastructure to consider industrialization.

So…why did it take several thousand years to come up with it? I think that there wasn’t a great need for it is the answer. The Greeks COULD have come up with water powered industrial processes (hell…they had all the pieces for steam power if they just took it to the next logical level), but they simply didn’t need them…they had human labor (slave labor) to do stuff for them, so there just wasn’t a huge demand for industrial process. The Romans were on the verge of a water powered industrial revolution (in fact, they had ramped up to large scale industrial water powered industry), but it happened over time, and they basically collapsed before the processes reached critical mass. The Europeans that inherited Europe after the Roman Empire went tits up certainly didn’t need large scale industry…not until they needed it, and then we had our industrial revolution. China. India. The New World civilizations. Africa. The Middle East. They were all in the same boat…they had plenty of human labor and there just wasn’t an over riding need for industrial manufacturing on the scale that required something like the Industrial Revolution.

-XT

17

England also had an ever increasing middle class which demanded goods. That was created by their foray into international trade and imperialism. Two of the first industries to become - well, industries - were textiles and printing - feeding the demands on that middle class which couldn’t be met with traditional craft labor.

18

The English seemed to think so. They argued that Popery was antithetical to everything that being English stood for. Freedom, the ability to reason, etc., etc. Of course they were saying this more than a century before the Age of Enlightenment. So things like happiness, individualism, etc. were around in some European cultures before the 18th century.

19

Money
Paper
Interest
Property
The Scientific Method

These things all needed to exist in at least some form before industry could begin. Once you have them all, coming up with new and interesting ways to do stuff is pretty easy. But it takes a while and special circumstances to come up with these five items to begin with.

20

Sorry! We were busy, what with the black plague and whatnot…