Highest tech level possible without industrial revolution?

[TerranGames]

The question is in the title really. We live in an era of fast change, where exponential growth is the norm, where each new day brings massive new discoveries and advancements in science and industry.

As I understand it, this is because of the industrial and scientific revolutions right? This era of adoption of new production methods and technologies, of ever-growing productivity, in such a (relatively) short span of time. As opposed to most of human history, thousands of years, not stagnant, but change seems to have come far slower, technologically, economically, etc. If there was any economic growth at all that managed to outpace Malthus, it was slow, never the sort of rapid, exponential growth we take for granted today.

To us, it seems inevitable that the Industrial Revolution would happen someday, but AIUI, it wasn't. It was the outcome of a certain set of conditions, that were first met in the British Isles, and spread rapidly out from there as the decades passed. The Romans had a steam engine, and they never had a Industrial Revolution, the Song Dynasty produced more than a hundred thousand tons of iron a year, and made major advances in steelmaking and coal mining, but they never experienced the same sort of unstoppable, exponential growth that, say Britain did through the 19th century. Even the Venetians pioneered the moving assembly line centuries before Ford did it, with the Venetian Arsenal, employing 16,000 workers, capable of producing a ship almost every day at it's peak, existing for centuries. They never had one. People would keep on discovering things, theorizing, new physics, new inventions, even without the industrial or scientific revolutions.

Would it be possible to avoid the industrial revolution for tens of thousands of years? Civilization just chugging along, changing slowly, never truly exploding like we did? Or would complexity grow over time, and eventually the industrial revolution would become inevitable?

Would it be possible for an emperor to fly over his subjects in a steam-powered airship, broadcasting radio messages across his empire, but it having been built by small groups of craftsmen, without the mass-production methods and factories we associate with the industrial revolution?

How "high" could the tech level get, what kinds of technologies, inventions, et al, could be utilized in TTL, while maintaining that slow, steady, pre-industrial growth, without that great exponential rise the we have come to know as normal today?

----

I'm going to put two restrictions here:

1. No post-apocalypses, so no nuclear wars or volcanic winters sending civilization back to the stone age, because then it's still an industrial civilization. They already know about mass production and factories, etc. They already know too much, there will be too much leftover scientific and industrial knowledge in the world, even basic ideas like germ theory, or assembly lines, and they will rise from the ashes even faster than we did the first time.

2. No "uneven industrialization." I know that it took longer for some places to industrialize than others (and is still happening in many countries to this day), to shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial one but, even if say, the DRC's economy is still heavily agrarian and underdeveloped, places like the US, Germany, or Japan still exist. The industrial revolution has still happened, and I'm asking about the highest tech level possible in a world where it has not kicked off anywhere.

Thanks.

 

[Canuck Wingnut]

Well, the "Industrial Revolution" can be a pretty slippery term when you start trying to really nail down the specifics. That said, assuming by the Industrial Revolution you mean technical developments which OTL occurred primarily initially in the British Isles in the late 1700s/ early 1800s, then any technology developed before that time must be pre-industrial, and hence fair game. Some thoughts for how far that could go:

I'll start with a personal favorite, the Kalthoff repeater: a (crude) repeating firearm produced in Denmark in the 1600s. Presumably, with more craftsmen and effort invested, an even more elite such rifle could be built for the hypothetical pre-steam-punk Emperor's elite warriors.

Radio's debatable, given its connections to electrical developments, themselves related to but only arguably dependent on improved measuring capabilities of scientific instruments and repeatability of metallurgy, which may or may not have been dependent on the Industrial Revolution. Just to be safe, I'm going to recommend the Optical Telegraph for the discerning hand-crafted Empire.

Flight: Balloons seem comfortably achievable with pre-industrial technology. Airships (other than the Sky-Cycle) require a power source, and even the sky-cycle requires your society to have developed the propellor, which was a fairly late development OTL- but both the Steam Engine and the propellor have distant ancestors in Ancient Greece (the Aeolipile and the Archimedes Screw respectively) so perhaps something could be done? Gliders and particularly man-lifting kites may have been developed in Asia pre-Industrial Revolution, depending on who you ask. However, without an obvious power source with a sufficiently good power-to-weight ratio true heavier-than-air flight may be out of reach.

Sewage options to help resolve some of the worst of the public sanitation issues that a densely urban population (to support all the craftsmen to build the Imperial wonders) also exist in sophisticated but not industrialized forms.

Finally, and dancing dangerously close to the disputed edge of what constitutes an industrial revolution, I'll mention in passing the Stangenkunst, a sophisticated method for distributing hydropower without requiring that pesky electricity. Whether used for mining purposes (as in OTL's 1500s Germany) or any other task the Emperor desires, it provides a preindustrial power-distribution network for the discerning proto-industrialist. Assuming that you have the glassmaking skills required for the Optical Telegraph mirrors should also be quite feasible, so Solar Power to generate heat is also within reach- whether reaching absurd peaks somewhere in the middle of a desert to forge steel (or whatever) or simply heating the Emperor's pleasure baths, solar power always adds a touch of class for the more decadent Imperiums.

 

[manitobot]

Great ideas.

 

[Eeloo]

A pre-industrial society that wants to develop will inevitably end up reaching the industrial revolution. You can't stop inventors from thinking "this resource [coal, oil] seems to be an overkill fuel, I'm going to do something great with it!"

 

[Aluma]

pre-industrial society that wants to develop will inevitably end up reaching the industrial revolution

Couldnt disagree more

You can't stop inventors from thinking "this resource [coal, oil] seems to be an overkill fuel, I'm going to do something great with it!

Actually you can, most of history they never thought that and while some places have good quality coal(such as Britain) most arent that good and to make oil into a fuel you already require the technology to refine it, its not intuitive at all

 

[Elfwine]

I don't think it's quite as straightforward as that any pre-industrial society that wants to develop will inevitably end up reaching the industrial revolution, but it's hard to picture something where no society does - even if it's later than OTL (if not "tens of thousands" or even "thousands" of years later - even "centuries" would require a world radically unlike our own even before the late 18th/early 19th century).

The tricky piece is that it's not so much that you couldn't have artisan made airships, for example, if we're just talking if you could build an airship (even hypothetically an airship with an internal combustion engine) without what we think of as "massive factories". But if there is something like the early steam engines of the industrial revolutions (which the Romans did not have), how do you keep anyone from thinking "Wow, this would be useful for other purposes!" for centuries? It's more like "bows do not become a weapon of war anywhere in the world", as opposed to "no one in this society uses bows in war".

 

[Jürgen]

The Industrial Revolution was a mix of two different factors; the Scientific Revolution and the rise of mass production. But this was not the first time mass production had arisen, we see plenty of example of it through time, but what the Scientific Revolution allowed was the scientific improvement in means of production, so instead of a slow almost evolutionary improvement in for example steam engines, instead engineer sat down and calculated improvements based on what they knew about the materials.

As such I think the Industrial Revolution became unavoidable after the Scientific Revolution, and without the later the development of technology becomes very limited.

 

[Salamander]

We pretty much achieved the highest level of technology just as the Industrial Revolution kicked off in Britain. The early Industrial Revolution was mainly water-powered, after all. Water-driven turbines, that powered either a belt-and-shaft or compressed air system for distributing that energy to the machinery within a factory, were being developed around the same time as steam engines as a motive & stationary power source were being introduced. Windmills and water mills had existed for millennia by then and had been refined to a fine degree. Gold mines used water-powered stamping mills to process ore and even to mine it. The Romans even had a few massive water-powered flour mills back in their day. Windmills were, and are, used to grind grain into flour & pump water, etc.
Long-distance communications, aside from messengers, couriers and post-riders, could be handled by the above mentioned optical telegraphs, signal lamps and Heliograph. All of these can be produced without steam power or electricity.

 

[da Racontor]

Avoid large scale adoption of modern economic practices.

Sure, you may still find a factory or two without a centralized banking system or some sort of rudimentary stock market, but I doubt many people would find the risk worth it.

Laborers would also, then, have a hard time finding factory work worth their salt (pun fully intended). If they are working in a factory, literally all day, then they will need to deal with the farmers to find food. And while subsistence farmers can make use of coin, it has no inherit value to them and without the economic system to support larger scale species transactions, they run out of use for it with only small amounts.
And paying your factory workers in product isn't going to go well. Sure, a village weaver can make a living bartering blankets all year, but when you have a factory full of workers with only blankets to barter with, the local market is going to get saturated very fast. (Not to mention that cuts into the factory s profits.)



The other thing to keep in mind is that while the actual technology level may be rather high, it would be very asymmetric. Sure some noble somewhere may be able to play around with a horseless carriage, but such advancements are going to be too rare for the common person to find affordable.

 

[Xel]

I have been reading up on the industrial revolution and it seems to have happened in stages across centuries/millennia:

Stage 1: Hey this is a neat novelty, totally useless.
Stage 2: Huh, this thing can pump water for fountains, that's pretty nifty.
Stage 3: Say if it can pump water, could it pump like, loads of water, say out of a mine?
Stage 4: OK so its pumps water out of a mine, but what if we removed the horses and added weights?
Stage 5: What if we added coal and made them like... Really big?
Stage 6: WOOOOOOOOOH!

Stage 2 is where plenty of societies got, with the shift to 3 seemingly being at least somewhat circumstantial and also taking ages to really get anywhere and them 3 to 4 coming not in rapid succession but within like a century of each other. Still, even that process was rather messy and the move to pure mechanisms and coal was not without fraught stages, IE boiler explosions and such. Basically, nothing happened fast enough that it couldn't be cut off by circumstances and just not go down that route, the discovery of steel was no more predetermined than bronze after all.

But yeah with that in mind I guess the 1600s-ish would be the cap off point, with maybe a handful of later things that didn't rely on coal ETC to work being slipped in?

 

[Workable Goblin]

Laborers would also, then, have a hard time finding factory work worth their salt (pun fully intended). If they are working in a factory, literally all day, then they will need to deal with the farmers to find food. And while subsistence farmers can make use of coin, it has no inherit value to them and without the economic system to support larger scale species transactions, they run out of use for it with only small amounts.

It's quite possible to have highly monetized economies without "modern economic policies," as we see with the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean (i.e., the Achaemenids, Greeks, etc.), Roman Empire, Han China, etc. These were able to support quite a large number of people who were dependent on rural farmers for food (as much as perhaps 1/3rd to 2/5ths of the population in urban environments, plus some proportion of the rural population who were not farmers). So there is nothing in particular to suggest that without modern economic policies trade between primary and secondary laborers would pose any significant problem. The issue would mainly be difficulties in collecting capital to invest in large facilities such as factories.

 

[da Racontor]

It's quite possible to have highly monetized economies without "modern economic policies," as we see with the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean (i.e., the Achaemenids, Greeks, etc.), Roman Empire, Han China, etc. These were able to support quite a large number of people who were dependent on rural farmers for food (as much as perhaps 1/3rd to 2/5ths of the population in urban environments, plus some proportion of the rural population who were not farmers). So there is nothing in particular to suggest that without modern economic policies trade between primary and secondary laborers would pose any significant problem. The issue would mainly be difficulties in collecting capital to invest in large facilities such as factories.

These were also not indefinitely stable situations (for lack of better term).

Transitions between these high urban populations and low urban populations time were fluid and happened somewhat frequently (relatively speaking) within the same time period. And they were also quite dependent on local conditions. Roman Italy had a comparatively vary urbanized population, but at the same exact time Roman Gaul could not support that.

 

[chornedsnorkack]

The Industrial Revolution was a mix of two different factors; the Scientific Revolution and the rise of mass production. But this was not the first time mass production had arisen, we see plenty of example of it through time, but what the Scientific Revolution allowed was the scientific improvement in means of production, so instead of a slow almost evolutionary improvement in for example steam engines, instead engineer sat down and calculated improvements based on what they knew about the materials.

As such I think the Industrial Revolution became unavoidable after the Scientific Revolution, and without the later the development of technology becomes very limited.

But look at the concentration of early Industrial Revolution in Britain.
The Enlightenment Scientific Revolution was more widespread - the Republic of Letters spanned France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal... Which in late 18th century and early 19th century were much less successful in invention and actual mass implementation of new technologies.
Could you have had economic/political/military events screwing 18th century Britain? And if yes, what would have been the repercussions to the rest of Republic of Letters?

 

[Workable Goblin]

These were also not indefinitely stable situations (for lack of better term).

No situation is "indefinitely stable". The Industrial Revolution has only been around for about as long as the economies I mentioned...maybe less, when you consider that the Roman Empire was a more or less smooth transition from the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean states I mentioned.

 

[UniversalCommons]

You could technically have a biological revolution with mendelian genetics, build hot air balloons, create printing presses, have botany, chemistry, and optics without a machine focused revolution.

 

[Fabius Maximus]

How plausible would it be to have some big coal veins that were exploited IOTL not be exploited ITTL? OTL's Industrial Revolution was very fossil fuel intensive. Some combination of wind, water, biofuels, and muscle power could get a civilisation reasonably far, but perhaps not as far to qualify as a proper Revolution.

Alternatively, though it's a bit dystopian -- one of the factors behind the Industrial Revolution was that advances in agricultural production meant there was now a bigger potential labour force to work in the new factories. If you have some horrible new plague come along and keep the population low, you might be able to prevent the rise of the factory system and instead have more small-scale, artisan production.

The other thing to keep in mind is that while the actual technology level may be rather high, it would be very asymmetric. Sure some noble somewhere may be able to play around with a horseless carriage, but such advancements are going to be too rare for the common person to find affordable.

I think it would be a bit like The Hunger Games, where you have the elites living in their high-tech wonderland and the peasants living a much more technologically primitive existence.

 

[Fabius Maximus]

Could you have had economic/political/military events screwing 18th century Britain? And if yes, what would have been the repercussions to the rest of Republic of Letters?

I'm not sure you'd need to go that far. One of the factors behind Britain's industrialisation, AIUI, was that the country had a robust investment culture thanks to organisations like the East India Company, Virginia Company, etc., which encouraged people with spare cash to invest it rather than spending it on conspicuous consumption as happened in most places. If you butterfly away this culture somehow, Britain's standing on the world stage might be hampered somewhat due to finding it harder to raise money for colonial ventures, but the country itself would hardly be screwed.

 

[chornedsnorkack]

How plausible would it be to have some big coal veins that were exploited IOTL not be exploited ITTL? OTL's Industrial Revolution was very fossil fuel intensive. Some combination of wind, water, biofuels, and muscle power could get a civilisation reasonably far, but perhaps not as far to qualify as a proper Revolution.

There were many coal veins in and around Europe!
Not everywhere, large areas lacked fossil coal of significant amounts such as Scandinavia, Italy, Ireland... But the Industrial Revolution started in the coal basins of Britain - England, Wales, Scotland. The other coal basins... Belgium, Ruhr and Silesia followed suit noticeably later, with technologies introduced from Britain. Asturias, Zonguldak, Donbass even later. Steam engine was not invented in Donbass.

 

[brockroper]

You could technically have a biological revolution with mendelian genetics, build hot air balloons, create printing presses, have botany, chemistry, and optics without a machine focused revolution.

This is one I've been wondering about - how far could sewers and basic hygiene carry you? Sterilization of surgical tools, bandages, etc.

 

[UniversalCommons]

They cold extend the lifespan of your population considerably. They also represent public works projects and handling water with spinoff technologies like aqueducts, rainwater management, possibly fertilizer production. It also may represent early attempts at public health.