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Comment by rowanajmarshall | Hacker News Reader

> Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years, the living memory of a single life.

Industrialisation.

The UK began industrialising in the mid-to-late 1700s. Western Europe and North America got going in the early 1800s. Central Europe and Japan followed along, while Russia didn't really industrialise until the Soviet Union. China and Korea, by contrast, just started in the 1950s-70s, easily within a human life time. Their societies made the leap from subsistence farming to CPU design _so_ much faster than most of the developed world, it's unreal.

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Nitpick: industrialisation started in Belgium.

Pretty much everything I can find says it started in Britain with textiles. Everything from Wikipedia, National Geographic, to Encyclopedia Britannica all say the same thing.

You are citing a British-US founder's product, an US magazine, and Encyclopedia Britannica to assert it all started in Britain.

I'd wager we need a bit more geographically/culturally varied sources to have a fair guess at the truth.

This kind of dangerous logic is how you end up with anti-vax conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and mind control, about how one could trust Pfizer’s Phase 3 vaccine trial data they submitted for approval, etc.

On the one hand, yes of course: sources matter and you need to consider whether anyone has a motive to mislead, or even merely a motive to not dig too deeply into a claim they might wish to believe.

But on the other hand, a company merely merely being founded decades ago by a someone of a particular nationality does not on its own constitute strong evidence that any claims about that country are tainted or self-motivated. That connection is just too weak — you need to bring other evidence!

>This kind of dangerous logic...

Different or opposing opinions are neither dangerous or violent.

To be clear, the danger is not in differing opinions, it's in overindexing on imagined motives and using those to dismiss a claim.

Unpopular opinion, I guess.

Can you provide some of these sources for folks open to educating themselves?

You can look for M. Bairoch's research for instance ("Révolution Industrielle et Sous-Développement")

Some other put the "start" of industrialization way before, at the end of the Renaissance.

As I understand it, there was a progressive flow of industrialization that was clearly visible in Belgium/Netherland, and also started brewing in the other surrounding countries, but the "Industrial Revolution" term was coined by a British author for a specific point happening first in England, then in Belgium/France/the US etc. afterwards.

It kinda comes down to where you set the stake of what is meant by "industriailzed", a bit like where you set the beginning of the "space conquest" and thus decide who was first to reach the critical milestone.

Everything I can find says that it (industrial revolution) spread from the UK to continental Europe, which a massively oversized chunk of industrial tech coming from the UK. I'm happy to have my mind changed but the general consensus is that it did start in the UK. The book you cite is in French and appears to have very little in the way of reviews or anything? One book against the consensus of the field is certainly not without precedent but it's kind of difficult to evaluate.

The “industrial revolution” term was spread from Engels’s book about England (“The Condition of the Working Class in England“). So basically, the definition of “Industrial Revolution” is bound to the phenomenon that started in England.

“industrialization” is another thing, and was a more progressive thing that was already prominent earlier than that. That book I cited is widely studied and reviewed…but you’ll have guessed, you’d need to step a bit away from caring about only the (First) Industrial Revolution. And it also mattered mostly to french/duch speaking regions, so again fewer english results is the norm.

Think of it like the ‘Space Race’, it’s a term that is bound to a specific stream of events that was started by the US. Another country starting to “race” to reach “space” won’t be about that specific stream of event.

That's probably fair, I wouldn't make the claim that industrialisation itself was unique to the UK. You've piqued my interest though so I might attempt to read some more about that stuff in French with my rusty B1.5 level :-)

Wait, Bairoch's Belgian, though.

By your earlier logic, he shouldn't be trusted with this claim any more than Wikipedia or Britannica should be trusted with the claim of British origins.

Seems like we'd need a non-British, non-Belgian source to make any definitive claim, right? /s

You are totally right, why should we trust him more than any other single author ? There’s no reason to trust blindly and anyone who cares should totally get as many other sources and evidences that they can afford to.

That’s a different argument, my friend, a different argument.

I discovered that, while the pages seem to follow the exact same structure and I suspect were written by the same person, the Dutch and English pages differ in a significant way: the English page says Wallonia/Belgium was the first industrialzed country in mainland Europe, while the Dutch page does not mention that qualification [1]. Elsewhere I found thr claim that Wallonia was the first fully industrialized region, but without year or source.

Timeline seems to be on your side though.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sillon_industriel

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