That Europeans wanted to save money by producing stuff themselves and cutting out the middle man?
Best Non-England Location for Industrialization?
- Thread starter Band in China
- Start date
That Europeans wanted to save money by producing stuff themselves and cutting out the middle man?
Thought I'd follow up on this thread because of an interesting article I read on the French birth rate in the 18th century. France's average family size began declining precipitously, largely driven by societal secularization, in the 1760s--by the 19th century, England's average family size was twice that of France. While I don't know the average family size in Belgium, the fact that that country's population only doubled between 1800 and 1900, while England's tripled, suggests that Belgium also lagged (though not as much as France, whose population only increased by about 33%).
Obviously, the number of laborers a country has is advantageous to industrialization (though, as the performance of India vs. China shows, and China's lag behind Europe, not the only variable).
I think it's worth noting, then, that in addition to coal and iron, industrialization is aided by a population with a relatively high growth rate, particularly if it's also relatively highly urbanized. England, IOTL, benefited from this as well--the English Civil War, though fairly brutal, was still less damaging to the population than the French Wars of Religion or the Thirty Years War (the Hussite Wars, which devastated Bohemia, seem to tend toward the latter in scale).
So picking a good spot for industrialization would require one to find a place that is compact, urbanized, and with a growing population.
Obviously, the number of laborers a country has is advantageous to industrialization (though, as the performance of India vs. China shows, and China's lag behind Europe, not the only variable).
I think it's worth noting, then, that in addition to coal and iron, industrialization is aided by a population with a relatively high growth rate, particularly if it's also relatively highly urbanized. England, IOTL, benefited from this as well--the English Civil War, though fairly brutal, was still less damaging to the population than the French Wars of Religion or the Thirty Years War (the Hussite Wars, which devastated Bohemia, seem to tend toward the latter in scale).
So picking a good spot for industrialization would require one to find a place that is compact, urbanized, and with a growing population.
Fully agree. There's some analysis of the prerequisites for an industrial revolution in this article: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution
Although it's answering the question of 'why was there no Roman industrial revolution?' it does this by looking at what led to the OTL one.
This excerpt sums it up well (very similar to what I've quoted above):
Fundamentally this is a story about coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy. That’s not the whole story, by any means, but it is one of the most important through-lines and will serve to demonstrate the point.
The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact.
Fundamentally, there's no reason why in another timeline an industrial revolution couldn't happen somewhere other than the UK, but it would need all the various prerequisites to fall into place - which might need a PoD a long way back for some places. So, not impossible, just a sliding scale of plausibility depending on where and when.That analysis makes some interesting points, though somewhat limiting in their implications--like the remark that Indian cotton was important to get the textile industry demand for reciprocal motion going. That would seem to exclude any landlocked heartland for the IR (including my own dark horse of Bohemia, unless it turns into an empire that rules the whole Danube), and would seem to favor those who have argued here that it basically just leaves Belgium.
Is there another fabric that can substitute for cotton to enable the IR elsewhere?
Linen and wool are the other common fabrics in Europe (I'm discounting silk because it's always been a high-status thing, but maybe making it in bulk is somehow possible?). Could their cost of production be lowered in a society on the cusp of industrialization, such that a European society can supply their own without needing a colonial empire?
Or could cotton be grown sufficiently cheaply in Egypt that it could be imported in bulk to Europe to a coal-rich place? That coal was not exploited in the Ottoman Empire until after steamships were introduced implies that it's not easily mined in Anatolia with 18th-century tech; 10,000 years of deforestation would seem to favor a shift to coal in the Near East, but it seems it just wasn't available enough. Though the Donbass region of Ukraine seems like it might be able to get cotton from Egypt and combine it with local coal--if you could solve the steppe raider problem much sooner than IOTL.
Two things I had been thinking about:
If I am not mistaken we have not yet paid much attention to the scientific revolution; which is often regarded as a prerequisite for the industrial revolution.
This made me think about those scenarios which have been discussed here about Islamic scientists and/or the Kerala school of mathematics and astronomy discovering Calculus and/or Universal Gravitation, possibly leading to a scientific revolution and/or Enlightenment analogue. (During one of those discussions somebody had also put forward the idea of Archimedes discovering Universal Gravitation; however, I'm not sure that is plausible.)
However, I suppose that even if such a thing were possible, there still are lots of other things required for an industrial revolution like higher literacy/numeracy and institutions more favourable to productive innovations.
On another note, a problem in finding out which places might serve as alternative locations for an industrial revolution is that we do not really know which factors where important for the Industrial Revolution in Britain whit much certainty.
For example, I had once encountered the claim that one of the reasons for the Great Divergence between Europe and Asia was that rice agriculture was more labour intense than wheat agriculture; because the diminishing returns to labour are less pronounced, more labour intense agriculture leads not only to a larger population density but also to lower output per capita and a larger share of labour in agriculture.
Note: I do not know how plausible that theory is; I have not even read the paper (curiously the link was on another page) by lack of time. I just used it as an example of just another possible factor.
If I am not mistaken we have not yet paid much attention to the scientific revolution; which is often regarded as a prerequisite for the industrial revolution.
This made me think about those scenarios which have been discussed here about Islamic scientists and/or the Kerala school of mathematics and astronomy discovering Calculus and/or Universal Gravitation, possibly leading to a scientific revolution and/or Enlightenment analogue. (During one of those discussions somebody had also put forward the idea of Archimedes discovering Universal Gravitation; however, I'm not sure that is plausible.)
However, I suppose that even if such a thing were possible, there still are lots of other things required for an industrial revolution like higher literacy/numeracy and institutions more favourable to productive innovations.
On another note, a problem in finding out which places might serve as alternative locations for an industrial revolution is that we do not really know which factors where important for the Industrial Revolution in Britain whit much certainty.
For example, I had once encountered the claim that one of the reasons for the Great Divergence between Europe and Asia was that rice agriculture was more labour intense than wheat agriculture; because the diminishing returns to labour are less pronounced, more labour intense agriculture leads not only to a larger population density but also to lower output per capita and a larger share of labour in agriculture.
Note: I do not know how plausible that theory is; I have not even read the paper (curiously the link was on another page) by lack of time. I just used it as an example of just another possible factor.
They too would need governments which would are ready to invest industrialisation.
In the case of Silesia, I had the impression that the Hohenzollerns and Austrian Habsburgs were relatively decent governments, for the Early Modern Era at least.
So, I do not think that would be the largest problem in devising a scenario for that place.
To my mind the question that needs answering is why industrialisation happens.
We largely know why it occurred in England. Lack of other fuel sources, traditional use of surface coal leading to contemporary coal stores being below the water table, resulting in the possibility of installing a machine at source to draw more of the fuel it needed for minimal cost. From there, it made sense to make the machines more efficient, at which point they became cost effective to move to mines for other minerals.
We largely know why it occurred in England. Lack of other fuel sources, traditional use of surface coal leading to contemporary coal stores being below the water table, resulting in the possibility of installing a machine at source to draw more of the fuel it needed for minimal cost. From there, it made sense to make the machines more efficient, at which point they became cost effective to move to mines for other minerals.
At least in regards to mining and heavy industry I don't think France has any significant chances of starting it. The political-commercial situation during the ancient regime was far from ideal (for example, numerous internal customs barriers) and its geography had major drawbacks. The then-known coal fields (and with that I mean until the mid-19th century) were rather small, sporadic, and in many cases difficult to access (too deep, not near navigable rivers, etc.). French coal mines were also far less productive than both their British and Belgian counterparts.
Throughout the 19th century France was reliant of coal imports to fuel its industry, in the mid-19th century foreign coal represented roughly 40-50% of all coal used in France, of which the vast majority came from Belgium.
I believe Silesia has a better shot, at the very least it has accessible coal and iron deposits in close proximity to each other. I also don't think sea access would be all that important. Although I don't know about the specifics of the region's socio-economic situation.
Throughout the 19th century France was reliant of coal imports to fuel its industry, in the mid-19th century foreign coal represented roughly 40-50% of all coal used in France, of which the vast majority came from Belgium.
I believe Silesia has a better shot, at the very least it has accessible coal and iron deposits in close proximity to each other. I also don't think sea access would be all that important. Although I don't know about the specifics of the region's socio-economic situation.
Mongol invasion.
Song china had all of the signs of early industrialization, especially the often overlooked commercial revolution that was key to funding europe’s own industrial efforts. Paper money, joint stock companies, and fractional reserve banking were all widely used in the Song Dynasty by 1100, as was widespread foreign trade. The imperial government of the time was arguably the most free market of any point in chinese history, and had enacted policies of freedom of speech which allowed scholars to criticize the imperial government without fear of punishment.
Coal was being increasingly adopted as an energy source, especially in deforested north china, where it fueled kaifeng’s massive industrial complex, and, alongside water-powered machinery, led to a sixfold increase in iron production in a century. In the south, salt production occurred on an industrial scale, with natrual gas-powered industrial complexes springing up across sichuan.
The chinese economy grew exponentially during this period, and came to account for almost a third of the entire world economy.
The mongol invasions put a stop this progress, between the destruction of countless urban centers, and the genocide of over half china’s population. Paper money largely disappeared, as did joint stock companies. Wood again replaced coal, and the massive ironworks of kaifeng fell into ruin. It would take china over 700 years, in the late Qing dynasty, for the economy to recover to the levels it had achieved under the Song, and the free market conditions that allowed for the Song economic boom in the first place would arguably never return, allowing europe to catch up and begin its own Industrial Revolution.
?
I thought the Mongol Yuan dynasty had printed so much paper money that hyper-inflation ensued, with the result that near the end of the Yuan Dynasty paper money was close to worthless, and towns and cities were resorting to a barter economy.
Or were you referring to later when the Yuan Dynasty fell and was replaced by the Ming Dynasty?
Yeah, the latter.
Sorry, I didnt mean to imply that the mongols directly abolished paper money, rather that the economic devastation, and loss of financial sophistication that their invasion caused (alongside that of the earlier Jin-song wars) made paper currency largely untenable. Widespread over-printing by yuan authorities, combined with a massive decline in real economic activity led to extreme inflation, which caused large regions of china to regress into essentially a barter economy.
This led to a huge loss of faith in paper currency, and it eventually being almost entirely supplanted with silver coinage during the Ming, reversing the trend towards ever greater financial sophistication and fiat currency that had started as early as the sui, and culminated in the song.
This wasn’t helped by the fact that this underlying economic decline would in many cases be extremely long lasting. Most importantly, the central plains, which had long been china’s heartland and one of its most prosperous regions, and had been the heart of the song economic revolution, would have its hydrology permanently changed when the yellow river was diverted over 1000 miles to the south as a desperate military measure during the fall of the Song. The river would go on to deposit enormous quantities of silt in the huai river basin, clogging up the huai and preventing it from even reaching the ocean. This caused nearly perpetual flooding problems that salinated and devastated the once-developed region, preventing it from essentially ever recovering, and transforming it into a disaster prone backwater to this day (for the next 700 years, the yellow river would flood catastrophically in this area on average once every 1.1 years!)
A United Netherlands would be a very, very good candidate to beat England to the punch.
I'd say this sounds farfetched given the distance of 1100 and the 1800s, but you make a good case... I remember a statistic from an economic historian that the Song was literally the richest China had been on a per capita basis until like 1920 which is utterly insane to think about.