AHC: Slow Roll the Industrial Revolution

OTL, the Industrial Revolution was a massive take-off in rates of growth, in technical development, and rates of change.

What if it had all happened much slower? In other words, what if the Industrial Revolution were not a revolution, but a slower process of development?

Make whatever changes you need to. Having the industrial revolution occur earlier and in different locations (Rome, China, e.g.) is acceptable.
 
Maybe slow colonialism down somehow? The growth of colonies gave Europe a huge amount of capital to play around with, and also provided huge markets to sell their industrial goods to. Without the colonies, the potential markets will be smaller, and there will be less consumer demand driving increases in productivity and efficiency.
 
Move the coal outside the most powerful European powers. IOTL, France was unable to industrialize well as it has no coal, and it lost the coal-rich Rhineland and Belgium post-Vienna, so when it industrialized, it went far worse than that of Britain or Germany, and the birth rate stagnated. If you take away the Rhineland from Prussia, neither Prussia nor France can industrialize. Have the Netherlands as a war-torn weak country, the Rhineland as independent of everyone, and England (not Britain) as a weak, backwards country. Then, when countries industrialize, they won't have the coal to industrialize quickly, resulting in France-esque slow growth.
 
Maybe slow colonialism down somehow? The growth of colonies gave Europe a huge amount of capital to play around with, and also provided huge markets to sell their industrial goods to. Without the colonies, the potential markets will be smaller, and there will be less consumer demand driving increases in productivity and efficiency.

The colonialism was more a result of the rapid industrialization than a cause, IMHO. Also I'm not sure that avoiding the actual colonies closes the market.
 
Move the coal outside the most powerful European powers. IOTL, France was unable to industrialize well as it has no coal, and it lost the coal-rich Rhineland and Belgium post-Vienna, so when it industrialized, it went far worse than that of Britain or Germany, and the birth rate stagnated. If you take away the Rhineland from Prussia, neither Prussia nor France can industrialize. Have the Netherlands as a war-torn weak country, the Rhineland as independent of everyone, and England (not Britain) as a weak, backwards country. Then, when countries industrialize, they won't have the coal to industrialize quickly, resulting in France-esque slow growth.

That's good. An industrialization that is more water and wind power dependent is going to creep more. I like it.
 
The colonialism was more a result of the rapid industrialization than a cause, IMHO. Also I'm not sure that avoiding the actual colonies closes the market.

American colonialism, and small amounts of colonialism in Asia and Africa, predate industrialization. Of course, the greater wealth drawn in from the colonies helped fuel industry, which helped fuel future colonies, in a positive feedback loop. If you can somehow avoid the early colonies, Europe won't have as much excess capital or as large markets to really feed early heavy industry.
 
Move the coal outside the most powerful European powers. IOTL, France was unable to industrialize well as it has no coal, and it lost the coal-rich Rhineland and Belgium post-Vienna, so when it industrialized, it went far worse than that of Britain or Germany, and the birth rate stagnated. If you take away the Rhineland from Prussia, neither Prussia nor France can industrialize. Have the Netherlands as a war-torn weak country, the Rhineland as independent of everyone, and England (not Britain) as a weak, backwards country. Then, when countries industrialize, they won't have the coal to industrialize quickly, resulting in France-esque slow growth.
This assumes mercantilism remains as it is. Otherwise, cross-border trade could still make industrialisation along OTL´s lines happen, couldn`t it?
 
American colonialism, and small amounts of colonialism in Asia and Africa, predate industrialization. Of course, the greater wealth drawn in from the colonies helped fuel industry, which helped fuel future colonies, in a positive feedback loop. If you can somehow avoid the early colonies, Europe won't have as much excess capital or as large markets to really feed early heavy industry.

OK, makes sense. Is this as simple a matter as having earlier contacts with the New World so the inhabitants don't experience a 90%+ massive die-off, or is more needed to avoid the Age of Exploration capital boost that western Europe received?
 
Coal transport would make it more expensive, wouldn't it?
Yes, but even IOTL, coal was shipped around a lot because it wasn`t necessarily where the ore was, and that was where a lot of it was needed.
Countries with both coal and ore might try to push free-trade policies. The Rhineland could have both, and so could Austria-Hungary and England. Btw, why would England be backwards?
 

Alcsentre Calanice

Gone Fishin'
IOTL, France was unable to industrialize well as it has no coal, and it lost the coal-rich Rhineland and Belgium post-Vienna, so when it industrialized, it went far worse than that of Britain or Germany

Really? IIRC, France has large coal deposits in the region of Lille, which stayed French after 1815. The late French industrial revolution was due not to the lack of coal, but to the structure of the Ancien Régime, to the troubles of the French Revolution, to the Continental System and to the large casualties of Napoléon's wars. All these factors delayed the French industrialization; France hadn't as much coal and iron as Britain, Belgium and Germany, but this IMHO only a marginal factor compared to the other reasons.
 
Really? IIRC, France has large coal deposits in the region of Lille, which stayed French after 1815.

Indeed.

france_resources_1972.jpg
 
I'm surprised. The industrialization of France used very little coal, and was electricity-based, rather than steam-based. What would you say is the reason behind that, then?

You weren't asking me, but as someone said a little higher up, I'd argue it was down to the structure of the French state, huge demographic problems due to the revolution and subsequent wars, and instability because of said revolution.
 
You weren't asking me, but as someone said a little higher up, I'd argue it was down to the structure of the French state, huge demographic problems due to the revolution and subsequent wars, and instability because of said revolution.

That's not what I was asking. I was asking why France didn't use much coal. After all, even a slower industrialization would surely use coal, would it not?
 
OK, makes sense. Is this as simple a matter as having earlier contacts with the New World so the inhabitants don't experience a 90%+ massive die-off, or is more needed to avoid the Age of Exploration capital boost that western Europe received?

To be honest, I don't know what it would take. Europeans will eventually find America trying to reach Asia, and once they do there will still be devastating plagues, even if there was earlier contact (since the continent would still be very isolated). Probably the best chance is prevent Spain from conquering the Aztec and Inca, the two biggest sources of income from the New World. Both conquests required a fair amount of blind luck, so if things had gone a little differently it's easy to imagine both civilizations would have held out for longer.
 
My impression was that the major source of income from the Aztec and the Inca was precious metals, which means it didn't actually create wealth in Europe, just shifted it towards Spain.

The Columbian exchange created lots of wealth, but that would probably happen even with a delayed Spanish conquest.
 

Alcsentre Calanice

Gone Fishin'
I'm surprised. The industrialization of France used very little coal, and was electricity-based, rather than steam-based. What would you say is the reason behind that, then?

I once watched a French documentary about the electrification of the French railway network. It claimed that they used a lot of water power because water power was abundant in southern France, while the French coal deposits were much to close to the Belgian border. This had been a great problem during WWI, when the Germans occupied the industrialized north between 1914 and 1918. So after the war, the French government encouraged the use of water power to prevent a shortage of energy in a following war.
 
That's not what I was asking. I was asking why France didn't use much coal. After all, even a slower industrialization would surely use coal, would it not?

OH. I'm truly an idiot. Well, being no economic historian, I'm not entirely sure the reason as to why France relied so little on coal, but I would hazard a guess that it had something to do with comparatively concentrated nature of French coal deposits; they seem to be largely in the east, near the border, and the ones at Lille were only actually exploited after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. There was a lot of industry around those deposits, but comparatively little further west, likely due to the expense of coal transport. That's just an idea, though.
 
How you 'slow roll' the industrial revolution does depend on where you stand on the cliometric debate regarding coal. Some argue that coal was necessary for the IR (one scholar says that the map of British industrialization was essentially a map of it's coalfields), while others posit the coal issue was easily alleviated by transport or that coal-based industries were less important than textiles.

Several points to make here:

1) The transport costs of coal were not really that cheap. Before containerization and mechanization transport of coal over water would still likely have meant a 2x increase in the price of coal. By land the price increase could be 4x from Belgian coalfields to the nearby French border. OTL, coal cartels developed in England and Germany OTL as well, adding more cost. Improvements in the steam engine in 1870s reduced cost of transport significantly but price differentials were still there.

2) Substitutability of coal. Anti-coal cliometricians such as Clark argue that there were many substitutes for coal. Peat in the Netherlands was one of them and fuelled Dutch industrialization in the 17-18thC. Charcoal was also a substitute and in fact was the proto-coal, used in Germany and France well into the 19thC. Charcoal required a lot of wood, but again with transport (wood from Baltic) this could have been ameliorated, though environmentally destructive.

We should also note the substitutability of energy with labor. One potential reasons for France's slower growth (and remember that even that was way higher than non-IR countries) was that it had a large pool of low skilled workers, so even in textiles it was initially cheaper to just hire more hands rather than buy equipment and coal. Same for China and India etc.

3) Lastly, incentives to use coal tended to be self-reinforcing. Britain had high labor cost to fuel cost ratio, and so innovators focused on pushing cost further down... Steam engines were initially used to drain coal mines. This inturn pushed down the cost of coal further.

[Edited away the obnoxious font size - fault of the mobile phone]
 
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