Alternate Pathways to the Industrial Revolution

Inspired by a truncation from a certain post-1900 thread.

Basically, what's the conceptual space defined by possible Industrial Revolutions? OTL featured water-powered textile mills and coal-powered water pumps, and then combining the power of the latter with the machinery (and nonagricultural workforce) of the former developed into what we recognize as industrialization. But are there viable pathways that yield a similar endpoint while differing in their origins?

I'm particularly interested in developments that don't favor Britain.
 
I seem to remember someone having the whole deal start from an earlier discovery of electricity, generated from water mills. It had some rather interesting follow-ons.

Other than that, Stirling's the only one I know of. A forgotten bit of the Draka is their decidedly weird path to industrialization. They started with the heavy industry and corporate concerns. I've not looked back at that part to judge plausibility since first reading it.
 
The problem with the British is that modern agriculture developed there, and modern transportation took off early there as well. People were redundant on farms which started using machinery and moved into cities to work in the new factories. And coal because useful because canals and waterways were developed to move the coal to nearby ironworks. Its all a happy coincidence, but I don't know if you can arrive at independant industrialisation without this.
 

archaeogeek

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The problem with the British is that modern agriculture developed there, and modern transportation took off early there as well. People were redundant on farms which started using machinery and moved into cities to work in the new factories. And coal because useful because canals and waterways were developed to move the coal to nearby ironworks. Its all a happy coincidence, but I don't know if you can arrive at independant industrialisation without this.

Actually modern agriculture in the form of the agricultural revolution developed in Flanders.
 
I seem to remember someone having the whole deal start from an earlier discovery of electricity, generated from water mills. It had some rather interesting follow-ons.


It also ignored reality in the form of wire manufacturing. Even without long distance transmission of electricity, useful motors and generators would require huge amounts of "electrically seamless" wire.

In the OTL, industrialized textile manufacturing initially created the demand for large amounts of wire, wire manufacturing was thus industrialized too, and the availability of wire in industrial quantities meant that wire was then available for other purposes.

Returning to the OP's often repeated question, I'll provide the often repeated answer. Because we've all of one industrial revolution to examine, actual professional historians have trouble agreeing on which events leading to that revolution were actually necessary, which were merely helpful, and which were simply happenstance.

If the pros cannot quite explain how the actual Industrial Revolution occurred, we amateurs aren't going to be able to do so and, more importantly, aren't going to be able to develop a sufficiently plausible alt-Industrial Revolution.

Leaving aside the extremely thorny questions regarding the cultural, economic, legal, governmental, and other societal issues swirling around the Industrial Revolution and looking only at a few of the technical issues - issues that many in our post-industrial world are either unaware of or cannot easily comprehend - historians have noted two technological trends which "grew together" to help spark the Industrial Revolution.

First, the production of what would become the Industrial Revolution's fuel source, coal, was slowly "industrialized" thanks to increased demand sparked by various economic and social issues and trends. With coal already being produced in industrial or near industrial quantities, coal and the mechanisms it fueled were easily available beyond the mines.

Second, textile manufacturing had been slowly "industrializing" since at least the Middle Ages. Cloth, perhaps humanity's first "consumer" good, was both universally used and it, and it's various precursor materials, had been traded both domestically and internationally for centuries. Production of cloth in all it's various stages had been both widespread, i.e. "homespun", and concentrated by specialty, i.e. fullers, dyers, etc., for almost as long.

Among other things, all this meant that textiles were a known money maker, that widespread textile trading networks already existed, that the various techniques required to produce textiles were known, and that certain production activities were already "concentrated". Textiles, unlike nearly everything else, were seemingly an industry just waiting to be industrialized.

It's very important to note that, well over a century after the initial industrial revolution, developing nations were still beginning their industrialization by manufacturing textiles.

Wrapping this all up, we can examine the "conceptual space" the OP mentioned all we want but we're not going to come to any firm conclusions or plausible alternatives.


P.S. A note to pedants, quibblers, and other deliberately obtuse chuckleheads. When I wrote "First" and "Second" when discussing coal production and textiles, I wasn't implying that the nascent industrialization of coal took place before before that of textiles. I was merely listing the order in which I discussed them.
 
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