Your challenge, should you choose to take it, is to delay the Industrial Revolution as much as humanly possible with a POD after 1600. Go!
Hmmm... I suppose when large factories start becoming commonplace and when the largescale transition of the populace from the rural areas to the modern begins.How do we define the OTL start of the Industrial Revolution?
Well there isn't a set beginning point that is markable, but the goal would be to prevent the industrialisation (Defined as: Industrialisation is the process of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial one. Courtesy of Wikipedia) of any country for as long as possible. I suppose it is not about preventing a certain event per se, but rather, about delaying the end result of an industrialised economy.Yeah, if we can't pin down what counts as it starting OTL, finding out how to discourage those developments is easier said than done.
Its a good AHC, though.
1. Spain holds on to the Netherlands - the Dutch Revolt drags on for decades as OTL, but ultimately fails. Spain squeezes the place dry of capital and generally treats it as a colony. The Dutch Golden Age is strangled before it starts. This causes:
2. Spain and France intervene in the English Civil War, and a French-style absolute monarch ends up on the English throne. With Parliament crushed, the monarchy continues reneging on loans and generally styming development. Continental influence on English legal practices leads to:
3. The enclosure movement, in much of Britain, is abandoned in favor of Spanish-style "open range" laws about sheepherding. Wool exports outstrip crop agriculture far more than in OTL, and the Agricultural Revolution is deeply slowed.
For another possibility, what if the Ottomans built the Suez Canal in the 1600s and worked to recapture the trade with Asia from the Western Europeans? This could cause an earlier or later Industrial Revolution, but it would certainly cause a different one, IMO.
Have the Spanish Armada successful and put a Catholic on the throne, with England becoming a satellite state of Spain. Without English support, Spain takes back Holland. Both countries become run along absolutist lines, and their colonial empires get butterflied away.
This is a bit ASB - ENgland is too distant to be in the long run controlled... And Catholic could do it - France didnt so bad in history.,..
For me the Industrial Revolution was rooted first in the textile industry of the north of England, so to delay the process we would need to remove the need for cheap woolen clothing.
I would suggest that Indian textiles coming to the UK in bulk would do this (after all thats what killed the industry two centuries later). SO my POD would be:
That the East India Company was much more sucessful than in OTL (prehapse due to no competition from the French) and they where able to gain control of India by 1707 (when it became a joint-stock company) in stead of 1758 (Battle of Plessay). With control of the India textile industry the EIC started to mass produce cloth suitable for the English weather (much thicker than that needed for India). As India normally solved mass production problems by increasing the work force this would not have caused an industrial revolution in India.
This is a bit ASB - ENgland is too distant to be in the long run controlled... And Catholic could do it - France didnt so bad in history.,..
Easy, the Industrial Revolution was preceeded by the British Agricutural Revolution which prompted people to move off the land and into the cities. It also allowed Britain`s population to expand past 6.5 million without the collapse of the 1650s and 1350s when it hit 6.5 million. This provided both the domestic market for the mass produced goods of the IR and the workforce to fill the factories as people were no longer needed on the land.
So slow, delay and otherwise make the Agi revolution have less of an impact and the push factors for the IR will be considerably delayed.