Why did Europe industrialise first?

Yet Belgium was the first continental country to industrialise, despite having no empire.

Snip
Belgium was the second country to industrialize due to having foreign British industrialists invest in it. A topic which i covered when i said you need cash or foreign investment.
 
It's also why china took so long to industrialize, the Unequal treaties destroyed the states revenue. While high taxes,civil wars and opioids harmed the chances for individual Chinese civilians from building industry.
The first Unequal Treaty in 1842.
Which seems a bit late as an explanation unless it is assumed that China/not-Europe could only ever
industrialise after Britain-Belgium had done so and not, say, during the Song dynasty which is the
usual suspect/candidate.
(China, of course, also had decent infrastructure and a reasonably large consumer market during all those centuries when it
was Top Nation.)
 
The first Unequal Treaty in 1842.
Which seems a bit late as an explanation unless it is assumed that China/not-Europe could only ever
industrialise after Britain-Belgium had done so and not, say, during the Song dynasty which is the
usual suspect/candidate.
(China, of course, also had decent infrastructure and a reasonably large consumer market during all those centuries when it
was Top Nation.)

Metallurgy was not developed enough to industrialize during the song era.
 
It feels a bit weird when one is somehow able to disprove every single potential theory on why China did not remain ahead of Europe with intricate detail, and yet at the same time China still didn't industrialize first.

Either there is something big we're missing, some side is overstating or understating something, or it really was peas all along...
 
It feels a bit weird when one is somehow able to disprove every single potential theory on why China did not remain ahead of Europe with intricate detail, and yet at the same time China still didn't industrialize first.

Either there is something big we're missing, some side is overstating or understating something, or it really was peas all along...

I think the only thing left out might be metallurgy. At least, that wasn't addressed in detail. Certainly I'm not convinced by the implicit argument that Europe simply got lucky. Luck seems insufficient to explain a process that took decades or centuries to reach fruition.
 
It feels a bit weird when one is somehow able to disprove every single potential theory on why China did not remain ahead of Europe with intricate detail, and yet at the same time China still didn't industrialize first.

Either there is something big we're missing, some side is overstating or understating something, or it really was peas all along...
Personally what I think is inaccurate is talking about the industrial revolution being a "European" phenomenon. Realistically speaking, the spark for industrialisation came not from "Europe" as a whole, but from certain areas of the United Kingdom. The main problem when theorising about alternate industrial revolutions is that we only have one example in real life, and this spread around the world fast enough to preclude any alternate industrialisations. From my own limited reading around the area, it seems to me that technology was the "crucial" ingredient for the industrial revolution.

I think posters who are attacking the argument that China contained many of the elements commonly identified as enabling the Industrial Revolution are really missing the point in many ways. Surely if China contained elements such as higher wages (in certain areas), high literacy rates and so forth, then while these elements may have been important, they are not the causes, as Max Sinister pointed out previously.

I feel as if the causes aren't common to Europe, but only to the previously "semi-peripheral" areas of the United Kingdom, where the steam engine was perfected, the world's first modern mills were constructed, where the world's first industrial cities were built and where the railways were born. From this perspective, areas of Europe such as France and Germany played a role more similar to that of Japan, that is to say they were adopters of the revolution as opposed to the founders.
 
It feels a bit weird when one is somehow able to disprove every single potential theory on why China did not remain ahead of Europe with intricate detail, and yet at the same time China still didn't industrialize first.

Either there is something big we're missing, some side is overstating or understating something, or it really was peas all along...
When was the towel invented?

In all seriousness, it is OBVIOUSLY the ability to put peas in a glass that was the main driver as it allowed the protestants to visualize an economy made of various private companies, thus inventing the steam engine.
 
Personally what I think is inaccurate is talking about the industrial revolution being a "European" phenomenon. Realistically speaking, the spark for industrialisation came not from "Europe" as a whole, but from certain areas of the United Kingdom. The main problem when theorising about alternate industrial revolutions is that we only have one example in real life, and this spread around the world fast enough to preclude any alternate industrialisations. From my own limited reading around the area, it seems to me that technology was the "crucial" ingredient for the industrial revolution.

I think posters who are attacking the argument that China contained many of the elements commonly identified as enabling the Industrial Revolution are really missing the point in many ways. Surely if China contained elements such as higher wages (in certain areas), high literacy rates and so forth, then while these elements may have been important, they are not the causes, as Max Sinister pointed out previously.

I feel as if the causes aren't common to Europe, but only to the previously "semi-peripheral" areas of the United Kingdom, where the steam engine was perfected, the world's first modern mills were constructed, where the world's first industrial cities were built and where the railways were born. From this perspective, areas of Europe such as France and Germany played a role more similar to that of Japan, that is to say they were adopters of the revolution as opposed to the founders.

I disagree Britain didn't industrialised in a vacuum, the relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe wasn't like the European relationship with the rest of the world, even with the religious split, Europe was a region which shared a intelligensia, where knowledge spread fast across the continent, where academy had contact with each others, the economic model which made the industrialisation viable was imported from Netherlands[1], the science build on a pan-European academia which connected it all. The fact that UK was peaceful, lacked internal customs, and had large coal and iron deposits allowed them to make some shortcut, but even if UK had collapsed in Somalian style warlordism in 1690 and the next centur, we would have seen continued manufacturing and agricultural improvements in Europe, which would have lead to the industrial age. But because UK found the shortcut any other such improvements was cut short.
 
Why did Europe industrialise before other parts of the world?

Why were there differences between when different parts of Europe industrialised? For example Britain was early while Russia was late.

What is the key characteristics driving industrialisation in early modern Europe?

Was industrialisation ineviteble?

EDIT: I think this thread should be in the before 1900 category. I must have swithched inside my head from after 1900 to before 1900, without doing do IRL.
And the alternate history topic is......?
 
In order to industrialize you need 5 things.

1: your society needs excess cash. To invest into starting industry's .Either the private civilian or the state intself.

It's why you never see impoverished states industrializing without foreign investment. It's also why china took so long to industrialize, the Unequal treaties destroyed the states revenue. While high taxes,civil wars and opioids harmed the chances for individual Chinese civilians from building industry.

Britain was loaded with cash due to the empire.

2: It needs infrastructure to transport industrial inputs to your industy.

North western Europe is like the flattest place in world, with the exception of the American midwest.
Thus building railroads isn't very difficult.

3: you need market access to said industrial inputs in the first place. Without which you industry's cant produce anything.

This where Britain ruling a significant part of of the planet and kick starting free trade comes in. It gave acces to goods that could not have been sourced locally.

4: this is an either or requirment. Now under normal conditions industrializing. Is going to out produce your previous cottage Industy driving it out the market. The resulting issue can be solved two ways. You can have a large enough consumer market to absorbing the increased production with out issue. Or your society is stable and militarized enough the deal with the incomeing unrest from all the now unemployed people

Britain had a large capitve market in the form of it's colony's which it could force to buy British goods.

5: an educated populace.

Once you setup your proto industy you need and educated populace to mange and supply it with skilled labor.

Britain was 50% literate in 1800 one of the highest rate in the world.

With these five elements combined you can industrialize. It has little to do with culture or manpower.
No mention of agricultural revolution and the enclosure of the land that preceded the industrial revolution. Astonishing.
No, it's all about Britain being imperialist. Spain had a big empire and is flat too.
 
You need a middle class and the UK was the first to have a sufficiently large middle class. A middle class has the time and money to purchase items in the mass that the poor do not and the wealthy buy customized. Its only when you need mass production that industrialization becomes a thing. To get a middle class you need agricultural productivity such that the middle class can be out of the fields and preferably in the city (easier distribution). Education and property rights are helpful, if not essential, features as well.
 
It feels a bit weird when one is somehow able to disprove every single potential theory on why China did not remain ahead of Europe with intricate detail, and yet at the same time China still didn't industrialize first.

Either there is something big we're missing, some side is overstating or understating something, or it really was peas all along...
History is soy-lent on the real reason.
 
I guess nobody here understood what you mean. Will you express yourself more clearly?

Capitalist relations of production and exchange were necessary in England for the putting out system which intensified handicraft textile production which allowed for mechanisation to be profitable. Correspondingly they were necessary for the deep pits which demanded mechanisation in pumping. The actual Luddites were quite on the ball: machines were tools to break down traditional productive relationships and empower the employer or putter-out over the employee or contracting handicraft family. To this extent, the drive to mechanise to break through social barriers to production needs to be sought out in new relationships to goods and money and production, relationships which were latent outside of production in China, Holland and England in terms of trade, but which manifest first in England inside the production process itself. Machines were first tools, according to the Luddite and Autonomist traditions, to break the working class' control in putting out type production relations.

"First" is the wrong way to go about it. Industrialization, as one historian has said, was a "peculiar path," and was by no means inevitable in Europe itself. The better question is "Why did Europe industrialize at all rather than succumb to Malthusian pressures like China did?," which is a very good question and which still has no clear answer.

But they did. As the final book on Harvard's series about Imperial China, The Great Qing: China's Last Empire by William T. Rowe, points out, eighteenth-century China was the single most commercially developed nation on earth. Historian Gilbert Rozman has also done important work on preindustrial urbanization patterns and market development, and that research, too, suggests that China was the first nation on earth to reach the most highly developed state of market integration possible without industrialization (this was achieved in China by around 1500, decades to a century earlier than the economic centers of Europe).

While I really like your post, and attempted your sources (I'm currently unaffiliated with any institution) there's an element of theoretical mismatch between Rowe and Rozman's social history revisionism which centres Qing societies as their own historical subjects, and my concern with relations of production. There's no denying that Chinese societies formed large, concentrated economic units. The question I'm putting bears on whether any of these social / productive units formed:
  1. Trade where goods took on the form of the commodity, ie, a bearer of abstract social value expressible through movement in a money form for the purpose of money profit; leading to
  2. The commodity form emerging as the object of social production for the purposes of expanded reproduction of value
These questions are separate to some kind of absolute malthusian limit, and to gross output productivity, but instead centre on the breaking down of traditional relations of production and property forms and their reconfiguration into capitalist ones. Most particularly in production.

yours,
Sam R.
 
It feels a bit weird when one is somehow able to disprove every single potential theory on why China did not remain ahead of Europe with intricate detail, and yet at the same time China still didn't industrialize first.

Either there is something big we're missing, some side is overstating or understating something, or it really was peas all along...

This is an issue that gave and will continue give rise numerous papers, conferences and PhDs. It would be surprising that an all-encompassing theory can be found.
 

Deleted member 97083

"First" is the wrong way to go about it. Industrialization, as one historian has said, was a "peculiar path," and was by no means inevitable in Europe itself. The better question is "Why did Europe industrialize at all rather than succumb to Malthusian pressures like China did?," which is a very good question and which still has no clear answer.

But they did. As the final book on Harvard's series about Imperial China, The Great Qing: China's Last Empire by William T. Rowe, points out, eighteenth-century China was the single most commercially developed nation on earth. Historian Gilbert Rozman has also done important work on preindustrial urbanization patterns and market development, and that research, too, suggests that China was the first nation on earth to reach the most highly developed state of market integration possible without industrialization (this was achieved in China by around 1500, decades to a century earlier than the economic centers of Europe).
As Nassirisimo noted, the industrial revolution began in Britain in particular, not universally across Europe. So the factors in question should be compared to Britain, not to all of Europe.
  • Did China produce Wootz steel, which Britain adopted from India?
  • Did it have funicular railways?
  • Did China mine coal as intensively as the periphery areas of northern England?
  • Did the Qing Dynasty import as many textiles as Britain did from its colonies in the Americas and then India?
 
@Achaemenid Rome: Your list of what I assume you think are requisites for industrialization are... peculiar.

  • Did China produce Wootz steel, which Britain adopted from India?
Wootz Steel was uncommon to extremely rare in eighteenth-century England, so it's a nonfactor.

  • Did it have funicular railways?
I don't think very many historians consider funicular railways that important for industrialization.

  • Did China mine coal as intensively as the periphery areas of northern England?
No, because the developed areas of China do not have a lot of natural coal deposits. This is one geographic factor I'm willing to concede.

  • Did the Qing Dynasty import as many textiles as Britain did from its colonies in the Americas and then India?
What textiles from the Americas? In any case, a direct comparison between British foreign trade and Qing foreign trade is misleading because of the Chinese empire's sheer size.

there's an element of theoretical mismatch between Rowe and Rozman's social history revisionism which centres Qing societies as their own historical subjects
Rowe and Rozman aren't much of a revisionist.

Rozman is primarily a historian of Russia, IIRC, and his schema was originally designed for Russian urban development over history. So I wouldn't say it "centers on Qing societies" in any particular way. In any case, what conceptual framework would you say was present in Early Modern Europe and not in Early Modern China? Both processes you mention are fully visible in Ming and High Qing economic history (even if they actively regressed as China fell into poverty in the nineteenth century, e.g. Chinese rural monetization declined with European involvement).
 
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