Postponing Industrialization

[Hermanubis]

How long do you think the Industrial Revolution could be postponed? Could the 21st century be pre-industrial in some ATLs? (but still somewhat recognizable, maybe no PODs before the 12th or 13th century?) What about Gunpowder?

Interested in the possible development of certain things, such as European Colonial Empires. How populated could North America become with out the steam engine?

 

[The Ubbergeek]

Maybe with a puritan-luddist counter-revolution in the budding industrial age?

 

[Kit]

All you have to do is change a few of the social, political or demographic features of the UK in the late 18th/early 19th centuries to stop the IR from ever happening, for good.

 

[Faeelin]

All you have to do is change a few of the social, political or demographic features of the UK in the late 18th/early 19th centuries to stop the IR from ever happening, for good.

Sorry, but I disagree completely.

The industrial revolution was the direct result of trends that had been going on for centuries in Europe. Increases in productivity, new technologies, etc. etc.

Heck, even if the UK didn't launch it, the US would have. Or Belgium. Or France. Etc.

 

[Kit]

Sorry, but I disagree completely.

The industrial revolution was the direct result of trends that had been going on for centuries in Europe. Increases in productivity, new technologies, etc. etc.

Heck, even if the UK didn't launch it, the US would have. Or Belgium. Or France. Etc.

Nope!

I also disagree completely with you!

Technological advance had been going on for centuries in Europe, as had certain types of productivity in relation to agriculture for example.

Industrial development of the sort seen in the industrial revolution is something quite different. It is about the use of widespread steam power in factories that are mass producing goods using mechanised production processes and relatively unskilled workers. It is about that trend spreading, so that the goods produced are not just consumer items, but capital production equipment, so the cycle of industry continues ever upward. It is about the reorganisation of all social and political systems around the requirements of industrial development.

Those things were only happing in the UK. In fact, they were only happening in certain parts of the UK for many decades.

If they hadn't happened in those places at that time it is doubtful if and when an industrial revolution would have happened.

As I've said before, the US didn't have an industrial revolution. Neither did France, or Germany, or Holland, or Russia. The 'industrial revolution' happened once. In the UK at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th century. No where else. All other countries developed their industries by importing a complete, basic, capital production infrastructure from Britain. Just add water and stir.

 

[Faeelin]

Industrial development of the sort seen in the industrial revolution is something quite different. It is about the use of widespread steam power in factories that are mass producing goods using mechanised production processes and relatively unskilled workers.

But this has been happening for decades; it happened in America as well, when textile mills were set up in the late 18th, early 19th century in New England.

This sort of thing happened in France to a lesser extent, and Belgium.

It is about that trend spreading, so that the goods produced are not just consumer items, but capital production equipment, so the cycle of industry continues ever upward. It is about the reorganisation of all social and political systems around the requirements of industrial development.

I don't follow. What political and social systems were altered in Britain there weren't altered elsewhere in the world?

As I've said before, the US didn't have an industrial revolution. Neither did France, or Germany, or Holland, or Russia. The 'industrial revolution' happened once. In the UK at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th century. No where else. All other countries developed their industries by importing a complete, basic, capital production infrastructure from Britain. Just add water and stir.

Mmm. If you're saying that these countries adopted British technology, sure. But that's not the same thing; and the industrial development in those countries wouldn't have occurred if the conditions hadn't been ripe for it.

Those conditions were the same ones that were necessary for the industrial revolution.

Addendum: Check this out:

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/search?q="east+meets+west"&start=60&scoring=d&

It's about an industrial revolution in the Song Dynasty of China, sort of. They get the steam engine, but are missing key parts of what was in OTL's revolution

 

[LordKalvan]

The Industrial revolution happened only once (maybe I should say better: was successful just once) in OTL. Compare with the Neolithic agricultural revolution, which happened - independently - 5 or 6 times.
Maybe we should not indulge too much into this kind of comparisons: while the rate of expansion of the agricultural revolution was really fast (it went from Mesopotamia to Spain in just a few hundred years), the Industrial Revolution has been around less than 250 years: it is conceivable that - given the same conditions of the neolithic world - the IR might be independently discovered in more than one place.
OTOH, the IR is a phenomenon much more complex than the AR, and requires many more favourable conditions to succeed.
Besides the obvious presence of natural resources - coal, iron, firing clay, water power - also the intellectual environment must be favorable for the IR to succeed. The IR is the daughter of Italian Renaissance, of the French Illuminism and of the great English thinkers of thr 17th and 18th century.
It requires also a demand for manufactured good, a surplus of manpower to work the factories, and a surplus of foodstuff to feed them. Plus an accumulation of capital which might be invested as venture capital (and, by that token, if the financial world were not already prepared to manage this, another necessary link would be gone).
Assume the Armada is successful: Britain is taken back - by force - into the catholic mainstream, and most of the conditions for the IR are nipped in the bud. I strongly doubt it might be possible to have an IR in a world where the Inquisition is checking every book and every new idea.

 

[Kit]

I still think you're confusing technology and industrial development.

They're quite different. Technology is just what it says on the can, purely technical, it gives no indication of how the technology is used.

Industrial development is just as much about social factors as it is about the invention of the steam press and the spinning jenny.

My undergrad degree was in economic and social history, and many of my courses dealt with the causes and effects of industry. Most of what I'm arguing comes directly from what I learnt then, these aren't my own thoughts, they're established as the dominant interpretation. There's considerable academic debate on these issues of course, but not much about the basic idea on the uniqueness and 'unrepeatability' (being an editor, I'm allowed to make up words ) of the industrial revolution (or evolution, to give it a more accurate description).

Most of the academic debate centres around the huge list of theories that have been put forward as to why the industrial revolution happened when it did, in the place it did. Most of those theories are actually social and political and economic in nature, with technical factors only being a relatively small number. (One of the more amusing ones relates to tea. Tea is a natural antiseptic. Britons, at around the time of the IR, started to drink a lot of it. The theory is that the antiseptic qualities of tea were the only thing that allowed the creation and maintainenece of the huge, dirty, industrial cities that were necessary for the revolution. Without tea, they would have collapsed from repeated plagues and high death rates).

Another factor to consider is that much of continental Europe was actually technically and scientifically more advanced than the UK before the IR. Not by much, (the UK had a very respectable record of scientific discovery and technical expertise of course), but advances in agriculture, astronomy, anatomy, and biology, as well as expertise in metallurgy, printing, and clockwork were all heavily concentrated on the continent. In many of them, the UK was a minor player, though it kept its hand in.

Yet, it was the UK where the IR happened, not continental Europe. When Europe did industrialise, they bought their industrial equipment from the UK and began copying British social and economic models to support it.

Like the link you supplied on China. China had the technical expertise to industrialise*. But they didn't have the social, political and economic factors to do it.

*Again, when I say 'industrialise', I mean having an industrial revolution all on your own with no example, no plan and no help from outside. Obviously, any country can industrialise if they want to import the equipment and the knowledge from nations that have already industrialised. But my point is that the UK was the only nation in history to have an industrial revolution. In fact, it can be argued that all industrialisation is a direct descendent of that one, single industrial revolution.

But this has been happening for decades; it happened in America as well, when textile mills were set up in the late 18th, early 19th century in New England.

This sort of thing happened in France to a lesser extent, and Belgium.



I don't follow. What political and social systems were altered in Britain there weren't altered elsewhere in the world?



Mmm. If you're saying that these countries adopted British technology, sure. But that's not the same thing; and the industrial development in those countries wouldn't have occurred if the conditions hadn't been ripe for it.

Those conditions were the same ones that were necessary for the industrial revolution.

Addendum: Check this out:

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/search?q="east+meets+west"&start=60&scoring=d&

It's about an industrial revolution in the Song Dynasty of China, sort of. They get the steam engine, but are missing key parts of what was in OTL's revolution

 

[Max Sinister]

If you take a POD early enough... I'm wondering whether an early death of Genghis might've delayed many developments that came with the Black Death, or when Europeans learned about East Asia.

 

[Earling]

Its likely that in the absence of an obvious British model to take and emulate there would still be something "similar" to the industrial revolution. It might be a significantly lesser revolution, such that it doesn't expand to be as inclusive as our revolution, but technology shall almost eventually bring about some social changes.

The labour available for agrarian activity is eventually going to outstrip demand as technology increases. At this point you will have unemployed and unemployable labourers who have to move somewhere, perhaps towards cities in order to find some sort of employment.

Anyway, if you really want to halt the IR ever happening, just have far more strident religions enforcing their beliefs on Usury. Investing with the intent on making money is effectively made illegal and as such no capital production and thus the bubble bursts.

 

[Wozza]

Although Faelin's culmination of long-term trends explanation is attractive the figures are indicative, there is dramatic economic and quality of life take off post 1750.
There are certain specific instutional strenghts to the British model, and the stimulation of external trade and war.

If something similar could have happened elsewhere why did it not? Maybe there are quite specific reasons and we cannot learn anything in general from the absence of a French/Dutch industrial revolution, or maybe not.

Certainly if one looks at the US it very quickly developes a very similar economic/demographic social dynamism to Britain e.g. 3%+ GDP growth year in year out for decades. Arguably the US retains this dynamism still - the benefits of space and immigration.

 

[Kit]

Its likely that in the absence of an obvious British model to take and emulate there would still be something "similar" to the industrial revolution. It might be a significantly lesser revolution, such that it doesn't expand to be as inclusive as our revolution, but technology shall almost eventually bring about some social changes.

The labour available for agrarian activity is eventually going to outstrip demand as technology increases. At this point you will have unemployed and unemployable labourers who have to move somewhere, perhaps towards cities in order to find some sort of employment.

Anyway, if you really want to halt the IR ever happening, just have far more strident religions enforcing their beliefs on Usury. Investing with the intent on making money is effectively made illegal and as such no capital production and thus the bubble bursts.

That would put you in opposition to the majority of economic historians who study and publish on this.

You're still confusing technology and industrial development. Industrial development relies just as much on social factors as it does on technical knowledge.

For the industrial revolution to take place, a large number of statistically unlikely social factors had to be in place to able to provide a self-sustainng chain reaction of development. As luck would have it, they occurred in the UK in the late 18th century.

When other countries started building their own industries they adjusted their own social, economic and political models to copy the UK, just as they imported the basic infrastructure from the UK.

There is no sense of historial determinsim surrounding industrial revolution. Societies do not reach a level of technical and scientific knowhow and then spontaneously combust into industrial development. It is not an automatic process.

If it was, it would have been far more likely to happen in continental Europe, quite some time earlier than in the UK.

 

[Kit]

Although Faelin's culmination of long-term trends explanation is attractive the figures are indicative, there is dramatic economic and quality of life take off post 1750.
There are certain specific instutional strenghts to the British model, and the stimulation of external trade and war.

If something similar could have happened elsewhere why did it not? Maybe there are quite specific reasons and we cannot learn anything in general from the absence of a French/Dutch industrial revolution, or maybe not.

Certainly if one looks at the US it very quickly developes a very similar economic/demographic social dynamism to Britain e.g. 3%+ GDP growth year in year out for decades. Arguably the US retains this dynamism still - the benefits of space and immigration.

Yes, the US industrialisation is telling. America established a political, social and economic model that was extremely industrialisation friendly, perhaps, in the long term, a better environment than Britain's. But it crucially still didn't have an industrial revolution separate from Britain's. Just like every other country, it imported the basic infrastructure from the UK.

Even though the US created the conditions in which industry could thrive, it never created the conditions in which industry spontaneously emerged, as in the UK.

 

[NapoleonXIV]

Nope!

I also disagree completely with you!

Technological advance had been going on for centuries in Europe, as had certain types of productivity in relation to agriculture for example.

Industrial development of the sort seen in the industrial revolution is something quite different. It is about the use of widespread steam power in factories that are mass producing goods using mechanised production processes and relatively unskilled workers. It is about that trend spreading, so that the goods produced are not just consumer items, but capital production equipment, so the cycle of industry continues ever upward. It is about the reorganisation of all social and political systems around the requirements of industrial development.

Those things were only happing in the UK. In fact, they were only happening in certain parts of the UK for many decades.

If they hadn't happened in those places at that time it is doubtful if and when an industrial revolution would have happened.

As I've said before, the US didn't have an industrial revolution. Neither did France, or Germany, or Holland, or Russia. The 'industrial revolution' happened once. In the UK at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th century. No where else. All other countries developed their industries by importing a complete, basic, capital production infrastructure from Britain. Just add water and stir.

Doesn't your last sentence indicate that those areas were ready for an IR and might have developed one on their own if the British model had not already been available? If conditions had not been favorable, then wouldn't an imported model have failed? You're saying that because it didn't happen on it's own in those countries it couldn't; but then how could it have happened there at all?

 

[Wozza]

Yes, the US industrialisation is telling. America established a political, social and economic model that was extremely industrialisation friendly, perhaps, in the long term, a better environment than Britain's. But it crucially still didn't have an industrial revolution separate from Britain's. Just like every other country, it imported the basic infrastructure from the UK.

Even though the US created the conditions in which industry could thrive, it never created the conditions in which industry spontaneously emerged, as in the UK.

Are we sure it did not spontaneously emerge in the US case?

 

[Kit]

Doesn't your last sentence indicate that those areas were ready for an IR and might have developed one on their own if the British model had not already been available? If conditions had not been favorable, then wouldn't an imported model have failed? You're saying that because it didn't happen on it's own in those countries it couldn't; but then how could it have happened there at all?

By 'happened' you are referring to the building of factories, the establishment of companies, the reform of the legal enviroment to support them, and the policies of government to protect them and control the population to work in them.

But when I say 'happened' I mean the emergence, spontaneously, of factories, of companies, of willing workers and the absence of laws and policies that seriously impeded them.

In the first, what is happening is planned. Government and various movers and shakers are working together with a plan in mind, following the example of Britain.

In the second, there was no plan, no example, it just...happened...because against all the odds everthing was in place to allow it to happen.

In short, when France, Germany, the US etc, industrialised, they were doing it consciously. When the UK did it, it happened by accident. Without the accident to provide the example, there could have been no consious plan of industrialisation in other countries.

 

[Kit]

Are we sure it did not spontaneously emerge in the US case?

Yes, the UK actually provided the majority of the seed capital investment for industrialisation in the US, as well as the basic infrastructure, training and knowledge.

 

[Wozza]

Is that view accepted overwhelmingly?
Is their a case that this view comes from focussing too much on certain sectors of the economy?

Consider these examples of distorted perspectives, are we looking for the wrong thing when we look for IRs in non-British societies?

18th C Russia
Often described as backwards, but in fact it had a subsantial amount of industry (by pre-IR standards) However this tended to be rural rather than urban, and so often ignored by historians

Napoleonic Wars Britain
There is still debate about whether the British economy grew or shrunk during this period, depending which sectors you look at - there are no overall figures

Is there a British industrial revolution?

In most places very little changes, for quite a long while, there are changes in certain industries in certain places, should we generalise this to British society?

 

[NapoleonXIV]

Without the accident to provide the example, there could have been no consious plan of industrialisation in other countries.

But that's my whole point. There was no conscious plan in England and it happened there, so why couldn't it have happened without a conscious plan in other places as well? Doesn't the success of the consciously planned revolution indicate that conditions were also right for the accidental IR in those areas too?

 

[Hendryk]

This is a fascinating debate, and in fact it's such a central issue of AH, considering the effects of the industrial revolution on world history, I'm surprised we didn't have it long ago (on the old board perhaps?).
Both Faeelin and kitjed make very good and convincing points. And I agree with both of you guys: the IR was the result of a very precise set of conditions (economic, political, societal, technological) being met in one place at one moment in time, Britain at the turn of the 19th century. But I tend to think that, if they hadn't been met then, there's at least a reasonable chance that they would have at some later time in another European country, with fairly similar long-term consequences, including probably the advent of the US as an economic powerhouse a century or so later (because once the "recipe" of industrialization had been perfected by trial and error in whatever European country, it would then be applied on a much larger scale in the New World). Of course it may have been decades later, or even longer.

Most of the academic debate centres around the huge list of theories that have been put forward as to why the industrial revolution happened when it did, in the place it did. Most of those theories are actually social and political and economic in nature, with technical factors only being a relatively small number. (One of the more amusing ones relates to tea. Tea is a natural antiseptic. Britons, at around the time of the IR, started to drink a lot of it. The theory is that the antiseptic qualities of tea were the only thing that allowed the creation and maintainenece of the huge, dirty, industrial cities that were necessary for the revolution. Without tea, they would have collapsed from repeated plagues and high death rates).

So if we just butterfly away Britain's acquired taste for tea, the IR is no longer possible? Yet another way China influenced European history...