The iron industry is a good one. Puddling dates back to 3rd century BC in China, and the Song dynasty produced 100 times more iron per year than Europe. But if what happened in China was not a true IR, then I'm not sure how much further it could've been taken without high demand for iron like ships and bridges of the 19th century.
The high nineteenth-century demand for iron from ships, bridges etc was largely a function of as iron became cheaper and more efficient to produce over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it became more cost-effective to use it in a greater variety of end-products, which in turn increased the market, encouraging further innovation, etct. It was its own kind of virtuous circle, the same general process which had made mechanising textiles worthwhile, but slower. Whether that would be possible in an ATL without the indirect benefits of textiles (capital, rising trade and thus wages, etc) is an open question.
I've seen various explanations of why Song China did not develop an analogue to the industrial revolution, such as the cost of labour being too low to encourage mechanisation, and even geographical barriers such as rapids on rivers between the ironworking locations and coal sources meaning that coal remained too expensive. I don't know if there's ever been a definitive answer to that one.
Coal and petroleum is another one. Heating them in a retort and repeated distillation would produce kerosene, as the Persians discovered in the 9th century. Kerosene would revolutionize heating, cooking, home and street lighting. They could also be made into paraffin wax candles. A truly bottomless market. Petroleum kerosene was apparently less smokey than coal kerosene during the 19th century and regarded superior.
Hmm. That would be really interesting in a country with the combination of access to petroleum and some of the other factors which are considered necessary for an industrial revolution. Okay, so everyone argues on which of those factors were actually essential - but at least somewhere with reasonable political stability and access to decent export markets.
Gutta Percha would be my think out of the box pick. It was originally used by Malays to make knife handles. Picked up in the 19th century by the British medical/vetenary community for making scaple handles, dental fillings and repairing horse hooves, it was soon made into golfballs, decorative items, and shoe soles. Gutta Percha was industrialized using extrusion machines based on pasta makers and was made into cups, jugs, pipes, everything we use plastics for now. It's place in OTL IR was short lived because it was replaced by synthetic polymers. A factory producing standardized shoe soles and cheap bottles would have products welcomed by the poor.
http://atlantic-cable.com/Article/GuttaPercha/
Very interesting find. My only question would be whether there was enough supply of the timber to permit industrialisation. Though perhaps cultivation/extraction of the supply would be part of the industrialisation process, via plantations or some such method?
My gut says there is definitely a minimum, but I couldn't guess what it might be.
My totally unscientific hunch is 1-2 million people and access to export markets several times larger than that, but it's not based on anything other than how it seemed that not all of the British population was directly involved in the industrial areas.
Tobacco would be an excellent candidate for this among intoxicants. Extremely high addictiveness, potential for mechanization, limited disruption to labor (as opposed to alcohol), and poisonous mostly on a longer timescale. One can imagine a state industrialized in its production forcibly opening colonial markets.
Perhaps. Although how you get the foundation laid is a question. Contact must be earlier, or textile industrialization greatly delayed, in order to permit the opportunity. A European-derived or mixed-race state with late-medieval technology, centered on the Delaware-North Carolina corridor?
Textile industrialisation can be delayed in a variety of ways. One is interfering with British sources of cotton, say by having them kept out of India by another colonial power. Cotton can be grown elsewhere, but it was access to Indian cotton which started the process which led to industrialisation, and if Britain wasn't getting that, then they wouldn't begin down that road. Another is by having a different British mercantile policy. In OTL Britain forbade imports of woven Indian cotton, but permitted the import of raw cotton. This was done to protect the local wool weaving industry. Say that the wool protectionists are even stronger, and
all cotton imports are prohibited for a while. That sort of policy won't last forever either, but would again slow down textile industrialisation.
Earlier contact with the Americas would also be interesting, though obviously requires an early PoD and an even more unrecognisable world. Norse in North America is fairly cliched and difficult though not impossible to achieve. It would be amusing if less probable if something like the legend of Prince Madoc was true in an ATL and there was a mixed culture developed in North America before Columbus arrived, and which then despite plagues and so forth, evolved into a tobacco exporting region.
The key problem is the New World. So far as I can tell, American plants enabled the greater part of Chinese population growth. China could be expected to double her population after the Mongols' defeat, returning to peak Song numbers. Perhaps we can handwave it tripling. But OTL a historically somewhat-stable population grew by a factor of 7 in four and a half centuries. So you need New World crops to have the effect at that extreme.
But the New World has far, far too much silver, too easily accessible. There's labor, initially, and even if populations decline more labor can be imported. We want crazy prices to return mining to tapped out or less-ideal deposits, because that's what will drive innovation, mechanization, et al. So this might work best if New World contact hasn't occurred at all when silver prices spike.
Tricky.
Perhaps a different period would make it work. Perhaps a different metal. Perhaps both.
So two possibilities are either to introduce New World crops before European New World contact, or find a way to stop or at least limit New World silver production.
For the first, perhaps the OTL Polynesian contact with South America - which got sweet potatoes to central Polynesia by ~AD 700 - managed to pick up potatoes as well. If those two spread to China together, that could make for a considerable population boom even earlier than OTL, with or without the Mongols. For the second... the only thing I can think of is a PoD which means that some of the New World silver resources are much less known by the indigenous peoples, which means in turn that the Spanish don't know to exploit them. Perhaps the Andean silver reserves in Cerro Rico de Potosí are unknown because of <handwave>, leading to much more reduced (though not zero) silver available from the Spanish colonies in the New World, and the Chinese demand is unsatiated?
If looking at other metals, one possibility is that lead, silver and zinc often occur together in deposits. Say if there was a higher demand for zinc in brass, due to an earlier spread of elemental zinc extraction techniques? (Started in OTL ~AD 1300 in India, but not known in Europe until about the mid-eighteenth century). That would give an incentive for extraction of both, and development of techniques.
I'm not sure what the best deposits for that would be, though. The largest silver-zinc-lead deposits I know of are in Australia, but in locations which are hard to reach even if there's earlier contact with Australia (Broken Hill and Mt Isa, both in desert regions far from the coast).
Can canning develop at scale from preindustrial methods?
Depends on whether they have the right pre-requisites, but potentially yes. It needs either glass bottles (which would be valuable enough to be reused) or metal cans, probably iron. Which in turn presupposes some kind of ironworking industry, not necessarily as advanced as in OTL, but not insignificant, either.
From that, it would take a couple of decades at least of military demand to drive innovation. This process kinda-sorted started in OTL under Napoleon, with a large reward being offered for anyone who could find a viable food preservation method, but it took until 1809 before someone realised that food heated in sealed jars did not go off unless the seal was broken. There were some efforts to exploit that, but things did not move fast enough to matter until 1815.
An *Napoleonic Wars where someone had the same realisation in 1792 might have developed in interesting ways.
To me, looking at the Industrial Revolution starts not with technology but with demand, and demand comes from rising wages. Lowering the price on commodity through mechanization wont get very far without it. Even Da Vinci was working on mechanizing textiles, but what paid his bills was promising new weapons to his patron.
I think we're overlooking the effect of rising wealth from the spice trade, the sugar and slave trade on increasing wages in England, and the limitations of what money can buy in the old economy. Tea you can buy with New World silver. Sugar you can make by throwing away the lives of slaves. But wealthy people demanding textiles for clothes and upholstries you can only meet with industry.
Demand for textiles is certainly important, in the sense that there needs to be enough people around who have the wealth to buy them to make it worth investing in improvements in mechanisation etc. High wages are also important in that they increase incentives to mechanise. There is certainly a school of thought that high wages in Britain were what made the Industrial Revolution possible, because it made more sense to invest in machines when wages were high, since there were greater savings. (Which is why early textile machines did not sell well in say, France, since it was cheaper just to hire more weavers than buy a spinning jenny.)
That said, the most useful part of textiles was not so much selling them to wealthy people per se, as being able to generate an excellent export market. During the Industrial Revolution, Britain was exporting two-thirds of its cotton textiles and one-third of its woolen textiles. So high domestic wages are probably part of the requirement for mechanisation, but there still needs to be a good export market for whatever product is chosen. Textiles did it very well, without doubt. The question is whether something else can also do so well in exportability.
