What would an early industrial revolution look like?

There have always been a lot of threads discussing earlier industrial revolutions, Song China, the Indus Valley River Civilization, Rome, but what would one actually discernibly look like. What would life be like for citizens after a early industrialization? People take the industrial revolution to be thee cause of the modern world, but I doubt the Indus Valley is going to be running with Wi-Fi a couple centuries after it industrializes.
 
Slaves in factories, horrible living conditions,the rise of a new wealthy class to challenge the nobility and an early birth of radical political thought.
 

missouribob

Banned
Song China's is the likeliest for a host of reasons that you can see if you look at the past threads on the subject. The only things that could really be taken from a First Industrial Revolution occurring in China are:

A. World history post-1400 is obviously butterflied along with the Mongols. B. The Chinese state for a host of reasons might not survive as the Song Empire. The instability that comes with the first Industrial Revolution is quite a lot for a state to deal with. Now you've got the Song Empire with a weak military, conservative government and no scientific revolution trying to wade forward into the unknown. C. The industrial revolution technologies would probably spread from beyond China which once again butterflies everything once again.

So it is hard to say basically.
 

samcster94

Banned
Song China's is the likeliest for a host of reasons that you can see if you look at the past threads on the subject. The only things that could really be taken from a First Industrial Revolution occurring in China are:

A. World history post-1400 is obviously butterflied along with the Mongols. B. The Chinese state for a host of reasons might not survive as the Song Empire. The instability that comes with the first Industrial Revolution is quite a lot for a state to deal with. Now you've got the Song Empire with a weak military, conservative government and no scientific revolution trying to wade forward into the unknown. C. The industrial revolution technologies would probably spread from beyond China which once again butterflies everything once again.

So it is hard to say basically.
I imagine this China would have some naval power, and I am not clear on colonization policies if pursued. I know Taiwan was settled OTL as a colony at the Ming/Qing border, an obviously later era. Everything else is up in the air, although Islamic civilizations may benefit indirectly{since the Baghdad siege would never happen}.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Of course there's not going to be wi-fi on short notice, but I'll tell you what: there can and plausibly will be wi-fi a few centuries after industrialisation. It's just that the whole frickin' premise of "ancient industrialisation" is flawed. It's not like we can say "oh, Rome now industrialises". That's not happening. Realistically, we can create a POD whereby Rome starts moving towards industrialisation, ad successively invents the heavy plough, the blast furnace, the printing press, paper, the concept of zero, a positional number system, etc. etc.

And then you get to around the point where we can expect useful steam enginges, railroads and thast sort of stuff. Industry. To be clear, by the time we get to that point, we'll be a few hundred years into the TL. So it's not like "year 100 AD: Rome industrialises", but more like "POD in 100 AD, and by 600 AD, given a lot of luck, we can start thinking about that industrial revolution coming around".

And then maybe 250 years after that, yeah, sure. I can see wi-fi. And that may sound ridiculous - wi-fi in 850 AD! - but in this ATL, the tech level around 600 would be roughly analogous to OTL's tech level of about 1750. I take 1750 as a benchmark for comparison, since it's pretty generally agreed that OTL's industrialisation got underway no sooner than that. So I'm marking that time as "the earliest years of the industrial revolution". And based on that general date, we can see that astounding progress and exponential growth of wealth are possible due to industrialisation. In OTL, 250 years after the very earliest beginnings of true industrialisation... we did have wi-fi.

So, yeah. An "ancient industrialisation" TL that has wi-fi, say, two centuries after the POD is utter nonsense. Because an ancient TL that just has industry showing up out of nowhere is utter nonsense to begin with. But a TL that has the ancient world gradually move towards industry... well, that kind of TL could (if it's on the optimistic side) plausibly give us wi-fi some 750 years after the initial POD. Mind you, that kind of timeframe still demands everything goes right, and inventions are just conveniently made etc. -- More realistically, an ancient POD could very plausibly see an industrial revolution maybe a thousand years after the POD, and wi-fi 250 years after that. Well. A POD of 100 AD would still give us wi-fi by c. 1350 AD. That's nothing to joke about, I'd say! ;)
 
As an alternative example: a medieval unified Italy (or perhaps, with a late medieval/early modern PoD, something like a successful Gian Galeazzo, or a Venice that unifies the north as in Irene's timeline) and/or a surviving Norman kingdom of Sicily subjugates Egypt, which ultimately becomes their version of the British Raj. The massive influx of wealth from oriental trade, and more importantly the grain and cotton from the Nile fuel the rise of a textile-based proto-industrialization centered on the rich, urbanized waters of the Po. Such a revolution is more gradual- incremental improvements based around the mass production of cotton fabrics and similar innovations (banking, printing, etc) atop the foundation of 15th century Italian industrial and commercial expertise. Add in the introduction of advanced Chinese metallurgy from an earlier contact due to the direct integration of eastern trade, which eventually spreads to the Rhineland and Low Countries and then to England along with the aforementioned industrial methods, following the traditonal north-south commercial axis. Expect Lyon, Flanders, Mersailles, Metz, Mainz, Cologne, Antwerp, London, Calais etc to swell alongside Venice, Milan, Turin, Genoa, Florence, Bologna etc. as North Italy eventually is eclipsed in whole or in part by her larger neighbors much as the Dutch were OTL.
 
Top