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Comment by tus666 | Hacker News Reader

> However, unlike farming which developed independently in many places at different times, the industrial revolution happened largely in one place, once and then spread out from there

This. We can ask the same question about feudal Japan, Imperial China, Revolutionary France/Germany/Russia/etc.

Maybe it was just a fluke after all, with the benefit of the prior scientific revolution and all that.

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In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark says that Imperial China actually had an industrial revolution, in the 11th century. They produced 100,000 tons of iron. They were using the iron to improve productivity of other things. And then the imperial court ordered that everything be shut down because the wrong kind of people were getting rich.

Stark has sources for this, which he documents, but I can't cite them because I don't have the book with me at the moment.

But, presuming that Stark's sources are accurate, Imperial China did have an industrial revolution. The powers that be decided that it was causing too much disorder in their society, so they killed it.

So maybe that's a big part of the answer. When it happens, don't kill it with stupid politics.

Or maybe do? Maybe they were right that, from a societal rather than individual point of view, their industrial revolution was a disadvantage, at least at that stage.

I would imagine the motivation would simply be that Chinese aristocracy had zero leniency with the notion of a wealthy, non-aristocratic class. From the perspective of the power structure, I can only imagine that's what 'wrong people' would mean. There was a similar tension in Europe I think.

Worse in China, I think. I'm very much not an expert, but I think that Confucianism called for a more rigidly hierarchical society than Catholicism did. (And maybe for that reason, the Chinese imperial court was very committed to Chinese society rigidly following Confucianism.)

Also their shipbuilding was impressive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages - whole fleets reaching as far as the Red Sea and East Africa.

But then they turned inward.

Some have argued that the reason Europe's industrial revolution took off is that there was no central authority to shut down industrial development and exploration over the whole continent.

> wrong kind of people were getting rich

In Europe, the nobility wasn't powerful enough to shut down the merchants.

By a number of measures China was more advanced than most of the West after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Why the West Rules for Now goes into this in a fair bit of detail. But Europe spiked up again and, once the industrial revolution hit, the growth essentially made everything that went before look like a flatline by comparison.

Saw a chart a while ago, comparing wealth in India/Europe/China.

The three were pretty much in lockstep, Europe slightly ahead, except for the period 600 to 1200 CE, when Europe lagged behind.

Then came the Industrial Revolution, and that's why the West rules, . . . for now.

Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel, also explores this topic.

Europe's industrial revolution was also profitable, while Ming treasure voyages were expensive and resulted in no profit.

We, too, stopped flying to the Moon for 50 years because it was too expensive.

Not "too expensive", just not prepared to pay that expense.

Obviously the USA had the wealth to continue the Apollo program and follow ons if the will had been there.

This sounds like Warf saying Shakespeare sounds better in the original Klingon

Whoever wrote that line: it was genius.

Don't you come here with that Hebrew or Arameic or Greek gobbledygook -- we demand God's unadulterated word in the original King James version!

(Have actually seen something like that for real, fully seriously, on the Internet somewhere. Years ago, can't recall where.)

I don't see any reason to believe that industrial revolution wouldn't have been developed independently in multiple places if the movement of culture and ideas around the globe was as slow (or absent) as it was between all the places that independently developed agriculture.

It's kind of like asking why there isn't more than one fire in a pan of gasoline, even though you struck so many sparks over it.

I thought it all happened because of coal mining. Lumber was getting scarce and expensive in Britain so people started burning coal even though they didn’t have very good coal stoves at first. Demand for coal opened more coal mines. Mines need ground water to be pumped out of them. The first steam engine was a water pump run on coal because that was the cheapest fuel source. Better pumps => more coal => cheap energy => development of better machinery to use it => better pumps… There’s your virtuous cycle.

That is a super common explanation, but doesn’t square with the fact that steam power was a complete side note of the first half of the First Industrial Revolution, which used water power almost exclusively (wind, animal power as well).

Water power doesn't require advances in precision machinery.

Indeed, which is why water power was the main motive power for the FIRST industrial revolution which developed precision machining. Gotta bootstrap somehow.

We can, perhaps, hypothesize that lacking the interconnected maritime world of the 1700s, more independent industrial revolutions may have occurred. But it's a tricky hypothesis to support because those revolutions also breed transportation revolutions (especially if the condition of "isolated, unable to trade for enough survival resources" that the British Isles had is a significant incentivizer; isolated places that can put these engines to transportation have great reason to do so). So it would have needed to be some very close-in-time revolutions to happen in multiple places instead of one happening in one place and <70 years later has been transported everywhere by the engines of motion the revolution creates.

Earth itself is only so big.

Maybe without a large international market to sell to, mass production isn't very useful?

Because having an industrial revolution implies that transportation and navigation are widespread, it's kind of a given that an industrial revolution can only happen once.

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