What Would a Bronze Age "Industrial Revolution" Look Like?

I was reading about the Indus Valley civilization, with their infrastructure and assembly-line style production, and I figured it would absolutely be possible for an industrial revolution of sorts in a bronze age culture assuming the population was relatively dense and urbanized.

I was wondering, while of course this wouldn't mean steam power and ironclads, my question is what is the limit of machinery and industry in the Bronze Age? How common could wind and waterpower be for milling and moving and machinery?
 
Small industrialized city states exporting refined products that could only be made using industrial technology to the surrounding areas, which would in turn send back food. You're gonna need to take the Bronze out of the Bronze Age pretty quick, since even OTL metallurgy was a big thing.

My advice? Get paper and printing into the Indus Valley as early as possible, along with having the PIE peoples not really make it into India, and you could get a kind of Industrialization, or at least have more information written down so that people later on can build new cities with as much intricacy as Mohenjo-Daro.
 

Kaze

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Take one look at the terracotta army - most of the weapons, statues, and the like was made on a massive scale. Some historians suggest it was done in an assembly line process, but only with the heads being interchangeable and distinct to each model.
 
My advice? Get paper and printing into the Indus Valley as early as possible, along with having the PIE peoples not really make it into India, and you could get a kind of Industrialization, or at least have more information written down so that people later on can build new cities with as much intricacy as Mohenjo-Daro.

What necessarily would that do, the printing and paper? Why that specifically?
 
I guess we need to know what Industrial Revolution is going to mean in these periods?

OTL there were several important factors - immediate access to raw materials and power, political stability, ready access to capital including loans

We know that loans were already a feature of Athens and Rome by the 3rd century BC, and earlier. In fact, loans in so far as they mean bonds would probably underlie a lot of trade a millennia before that.

Raw materials access - well if you look at the Luwians, their cities etc are built where these are

Power? You have to harness water properly, also coal or charcoal for fires

Political stability?
 
I guess we need to know what Industrial Revolution is going to mean in these periods?

OTL there were several important factors - immediate access to raw materials and power, political stability, ready access to capital including loans

We know that loans were already a feature of Athens and Rome by the 3rd century BC, and earlier. In fact, loans in so far as they mean bonds would probably underlie a lot of trade a millennia before that.

Raw materials access - well if you look at the Luwians, their cities etc are built where these are

Power? You have to harness water properly, also coal or charcoal for fires

Political stability?

What allows the development of a credit system? and political stability was definitely part of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean and other eras in other parts of the world
 
Is there anything stopping an earlier development of, for example, water and wind mills? or wind and water power for metallurgy or saws and such?
 
What necessarily would that do, the printing and paper? Why that specifically?
By far, the number one detrement that the IVC was a lack of written down knowledge. This meant that while they could live in, say, Mohenjo-daro, they could never build a new one. Have a large corpus of written work in the Harappan script, and you could preserve the knowledge the IVC had, and also allow said knowledge to spread.
 
The main prerequisite for an industrialization is continuous multi-industry specific growth, general economic growth, a strong food supply, and an expanding consumer market. Note that I didn't use the word revolution which implies a violent and abrupt process, rather something gradual and incremental over centuries. The traditional pre-industrial limits was that often some improvement comes along such as mills, irrigation, or whatever and the population and per-capita income booms only to be lost later as the initial improvements lose momentum due to diminish returns to scale, population stagnates, per income capita declines, and eventually the population starves.

The first condition was a good and expanding food supply to feed worker specialization (non-farmers), a large enough market, and population growth. IOTL the lead up to
agricultural surplus for industrialization in England was caused by social and market forces where dietary preferences changed from a predominately grain diet towards a meat heavy diet; the results of which was the expansion of agricultural land to sandy light soils for cattle that was previously considered marginal lands and a large increase in the availability of manure aka the earliest manufactured fertilizer allowing civilization to push their environmental carrying capacity.

The next condition was market conditions that gives machine power and capital more value than labour. As seen in the first few decades of innovations such as weaving loom and automated spinners that machines replacing humans was a gradual process over decades, people can always depress their own wages and given enough prosperity can grow at absurd rates of 6% or more negating all benefits of better technology and pushing closer towards overpopulation. The market conditions needed are high income, good market penetration, limited population increase helps but is a relative factor to growth, and high demand for products giving capitalists profits and incentives.

The next condition was industry specific growth and general economic growth, in a weird way growth is required for growth to speed up and this needs to happen within a narrow time period. IOTL the reason industrialization took off in the 18th century vs the growth of the 12th century was that there was general economic growth spurring demand and investment aided by a cascade of multiple industry specific advances that generated growth and profits within such a narrow time period that multiple industries were gaining and waning in momentum at the same time producing overall aggregate growth.

In the end a good deal of the conditions are equally technology, social, and political; technology just happens to be the most visible part.
 
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What allows the development of a credit system? and political stability was definitely part of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean and other eras in other parts of the world

Some of the more famous clay tablets of Mesopotamia show that credit, advanced payment, investment, and debt were all well known financial practices even by the late bronze age period.
 
Effectively, industrialization cannot really occur without some sort of capitalism developing first? Without a class in control that sought private profit the things wouldn't really line up?
It might not be completely necessary, but one does need enough levers to be pushed at once for long enough time. That can be done under any system theoretically; in practice it's been easiest under capitalism.
 
The first condition was a good and expanding food supply to feed worker specialization (non-farmers), a large enough market, and population growth. IOTL the lead up to
agricultural surplus for industrialization in England was caused by social and market forces where dietary preferences changed from a predominately grain diet towards a meat heavy diet; the results of which was the expansion of agricultural land to sandy light soils for cattle that was previously considered marginal lands and a large increase in the availability of manure aka the earliest manufactured fertilizer allowing civilization to push their environmental carrying capacity.

You cannot industrialization going if you need almost all your people farming.

The next condition was market conditions that gives machine power and capital more value than labour. As seen in the first few decades of innovations such as weaving loom and automated spinners that machines replacing humans was a gradual process over decades, people can always depress their own wages and given enough prosperity can grow at absurd rates of 6% or more negating all benefits of better technology and pushing closer towards overpopulation. The market conditions needed are high income, good market penetration, limited population increase helps but is a relative factor to growth, and high demand for products giving capitalists profits and incentives.

Transportation and in pre-railway times that meant boats and ship with either canals or ocean access.
 
Some of the more famous clay tablets of Mesopotamia show that credit, advanced payment, investment, and debt were all well known financial practices even by the late bronze age period.

It's really a question of faith, do enough people believe in that? The particular type of finance can worlds apart: IOTL Russian empire had finance, but it was usury with average rates of 1000% every few months meant more to entrap and confiscate than allocate capital towards productive enterprise. Paper money is okay, but it really depends just as any other currency upon the rulers; after all kings can just confiscate metals or print more bills. A rule of law, insurance companies, bankruptcy laws and more helps limits the risks of investments as well as encouraging them. You need all the trust, regulations, culture, and infrastructure of a decent investment environment which leads to the question of social advancement; do people in the society gain status from owning land as a noble, taking prestigious government positions, being born from blood, from how they serve the ruler(s), or from wealth itself? Even productive enterprises are worthless if all the proceeds goes towards buying oneself a lordship and washing oneself free of "lowly labour"

Effectively, industrialization cannot really occur without some sort of capitalism developing first? Without a class in control that sought private profit the things wouldn't really line up?

Well its not impossible, capitalism is flexible and adaptable but a centralized approach is possible as evident with the Ottomans and Mughals had decent and very different economies, the problem with a top-down approach is that it's very brittle and reliant on a series (2 centuries or so) of good leaders. The Ottomans did generate impressive growth as with the Mughals, the problem was when the common person was so poor when things faltered and more revenue was need the tax base was very narrow. Now if someone else already industrialized then its much easier to imitate than invent and implement.

Transportation and in pre-railway times that meant boats and ship with either canals or ocean access.

It is an often ignored factor of industrialization, steam engines and factories won't make sense without the original ability to gather and export materials.
 
Well its not impossible, capitalism is flexible and adaptable but a centralized approach is possible as evident with the Ottomans and Mughals had decent and very different economies, the problem with a top-down approach is that it's very brittle and reliant on a series (2 centuries or so) of good leaders. The Ottomans did generate impressive growth as with the Mughals, the problem was when the common person was so poor when things faltered and more revenue was need the tax base was very narrow. Now if someone else already industrialized then its much easier to imitate than invent and implement.
I meant more the initial development of industry, it's far easier for a nation that is behind to decide to catch up through state-capitalism but less so to invent it I imagine
 
It's really a question of faith, do enough people believe in that?.
afaik the majority of clay tablets we have untranslated deal with trade and accountancy. we'd need economists and professional accountants with a very deep knowledge of cuneiform to bring all this shebang together and actually make sense of the systems they had over the very,very long period people used cuneiform, and these are hard to come by i guess

also i'd kill to find again the articles i've read about fiat currency being used in city states as an emergency stopgap measure, so disregard this paragraph lmao
 
I think all this talk of finance, fiat money and borrowing rates is way off the mark.

You need a big, fundamental thing first. You need to be able to feed everyone without it taking 95% of your population. You need surplus people to think of things, people to find stuff, people to run your institutions. A big , well fed population served by a small number of farmers.

Have fun doing that without the Colombian Exchange.
 
I think all this talk of finance, fiat money and borrowing rates is way off the mark.

You need a big, fundamental thing first. You need to be able to feed everyone without it taking 95% of your population. You need surplus people to think of things, people to find stuff, people to run your institutions. A big , well fed population served by a small number of farmers.

Have fun doing that without the Colombian Exchange.

There were ancient societies where 10-20% of the population were not food-producing, and there could be some ways imo, potatoes and maize are fuckin amazing (a-maize-ing?) but so is three field rotation, intercropping with nitrogen fixers, mechanical mills, etc.
 
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