WI / AHC Industrial Revolution Without Textiles

We've had this discussion, Jared, back in days half a decade ago or more in regard to Lands of Red and Gold, where you revealed an intention to have an IR but one that skipped textiles. Then I think I was more of a naysayer than a help, and now I am only going to repeat something I said then that is being overlooked here....

...a key aspect of the IR being a real revolution in how people live is the capitalist commodity sector revolutionizing the lives of the working classes by providing for their material needs at a lower cost than ever. In short an IR really reaches critical mass when consumer goods, necessary for the survival and reproduction of the working classes employed by capitalists, are themselves produced by more efficient industrial means. Reducing the price of a major segment of the needs of the workers enables capitalists to pay smaller wages and pocket larger profits, and it is these large profits that attract more investment into the capitalist-industrial sector and thus drive ongoing mechanization and other process changes relying more and more on elaborated capitalist institutions and driving down the necessary labor content of given items, thus lowering the cost of acquiring and consuming them.

In this context it seems textiles have an edge in being key, important materials for the market to evolve around. The high profit sectors of early textile industrialization may indeed have gone first, and examples such as Jacquard loom products which I presume were sold to well-off homes show that it starts in the luxury trade. But industrialized cloth production, especially of cottons, also reached down pretty early to the cheap end of the market, offering bolts of fabric of only moderate fineness but of great utility to the masses at prices far below what handcraft workers could offer. When this happened, it became possible for workers to cut their expenses in the dimension of clothing, blankets and so forth, and these savings soon propagated to employers who could offer lower wages and still expect adequately strong and teachable workers to apply for work, thus undercutting other workers who may have looked forward to spending their savings from using cheaper industrial made cloth and cloth products, but instead found themselves forced by falling wages to to choose the cheaper fabrics though they left them no savings, since old-fashioned hand made cloth was now out of reach for them. Lower wages for workers due to cheaper fabrics lower capital costs across the board and thus a surge of investment and production. The workers don't benefit from it, not right away anyway, but other classes do.

To the extent then that alternative ATL primary industrial products pass their lowered costs on to the working classes themselves, any of them can have the powerful feedback effect cheaper costs can cause. However, it is hard for me to imagine just how that would work with some other commodity class nearly as well as with fabrics. As you pointed out, food has a rather limited market day to day. Hardware made from either ceramics or metals has some potential, but since the major drive of an industrializing society is to remove people from miscellaneous craft work and put everyone to work on specialized tasks, commodification tends to focus on consumer goods that do not themselves enable production. A member of the desperate working poor classes is not going to acquire large inventories of cutlery or pottery--indeed they will want a fair amount of it, and the cheaper the better, offset by any desire to leverage better than average wages into social climbing where they would wish to display their use of a higher quality of goods. But I think such hardware, even allowing for the fact that pre-industrial families produced a lot of goods on a household basis and thus required more capital in the form of tools, was always a smaller and lower priority budget item than essential clothing and other fabric goods such as bedclothes. And so it goes.

The general pattern of the industrialization of an industry then may well be that first the luxury market is being attacked, since the rich have most of the disposable wealth. But expansion will take the form of middling classes wishing to appear more prosperous purchasing large amounts of pretty good quality goods--and it becomes really transformative of the society, locking itself in irrevocably and forcing really large numbers of workers into the industrial proletariat, when a category of goods becomes available, with modestly superior quality (or perhaps a bit inferior) at a lower price than craft work can produce it, and the cost of reproducing the working classes themselves is thereby lowered as they switch to buying these goods--and then the mass base for the craft producers collapses, and those workers are pauperized and forced onto the industrial labor market, further lowering prices and creating opportunities for industrial production for the masses.

Note that when British cloth was exported to India in the mid-19th century, ruining the native Indian textile craft industry, it was not reams of cloth for the maharajas or other rich Indian classes that choked the life out of small textile producers, but the millions of reams sold to the common working masses; despite the inherent costs of sourcing the fabric on one continent, processing it on a second continent and then shipping it to a third, these cottons were cheaper than what could be made domestically in India at the bottom of the market. So even if textile industrialization began as a toy of the rich, it very quickly developed into staples for the poor, and that globally.

Can something similar be done with woodwork, or ceramics, or iron, steel, or other metal workings as the basis? Maybe, but it looks tough to accomplish to me, and the final iteration of locking the society in by cheapening the working capability of the poor working class itself would be mitigated and delayed I'd think.

Now perhaps this is the whole point; you'd perhaps like to see an industrially capable society grow that isn't so starkly proletarianized?

I'm not sure if you've gotten more convincing or I've gotten more cynical about capitalism, but thank you for that. Good food for thought.

Striking to identify a pattern from modern economies (efficiency collapsing prices which collapses incomes which helps reduce prices which....) functioning recognizably at the outset of the IR.
 
Going by Angus Maddison's data Song China only had half the per capita GDP of 1700 England. Of course China was a big place. The Yangtze estuary was certainly wealthy. Then there's the matter of raising capital to build the factories. English banking and financing was far away more advanced than Song China. The schemes that hatched the giant South Sea Company stock bubble was as sophisticated as the financial innovations that caused the real estate bubble last decade.
Having the right financial systems in place certainly seems to be one of the prerequisites. Not necessarily as fully-fledged a system as the English financial industry, but something which permits decent investment without being too high a cost.

I think this is the most feasible, especially in the Middle East and Indonesia. 19th century oil drilling technology was actually very similar to, and some say borrowed from those in China. So somehow combine that with Muslim chemistry know how. Early wildcatters were often two guys and a mule train of supplies to build one rig. Labor was insanely low compared to coal mining.
This would quite entertaining if there's the right kind of ATL country to develop it. Possibly an Ottoman Empire which is spared the worst aspects of European interference? Or similarly an *Indonesia.

It would be like growing rubber or oil palm, though certainly more of an investment than pumping oil out of the ground.
Perhaps if this began happening a century or so earlier than gutta percha was exploited in OTL, there might be enough supply there to ramp up applications before synthetic materials destroyed the market.

In those circumstances, the state might plausibly double-down on tobacco. It might help if the tail were to start wagging the dog at some point, like the Portuguese exile in Brazil. The question then is how big a market can they generate? If it's an American, European, and Mediterranean luxury item that's one thing. If it can be made to take off in India, Southeast Asia, or China....that's another matter altogether.
There were two distinct kinds of market to consider for tobacco. There were those countries where tobacco couldn't be grown locally, for reasons of climate or insufficient cheap land/labour. Europe was the biggest market in this category, though there were others. The other was where tobacco could be grown locally. India and China fell into this category, and I think most of SE Asia too. There was still some market in China for imported tobacco, but it needed to be a premium product, so that the wealthier Chinese wanted to buy it. Portuguese snuff was such a product in OTL, but for reasons of their own the Portuguese imported only a small amount. Cantonese tobacco dealers were always mystified why the Portuguese didn't want to bring in a lot more, since it would have sold well.

So ATL, such a country would have a good market in Europe (barring various mercantile restrictions), but would need to have a reputation for premium quality to get much traction exporting into China or India.

People who buy fabric don't need convincing on the merits of a shirt. Hooking a percentage of mankind on an expensive habit is more of an uphill climb.
Tobacco spread without needing much in the way of marketing in OTL. A lot of the early spread was simply by sailors carrying it back. Of course, once they get addicted, people tend to keep buying and also, more importantly for these purposes, wanting to buy more of it.

It's a bit over simplistic but the IR to me was always steam engine time meets textile mechanisation and boom.
I can't think of one single thing that can replace textiles and give the same effect.
That probably means several things need to coincide - greater demand for ore and foodstuffs might do it depending on ease of cause.
It may well take a combination of industries. The market for foodstuffs is obviously limited, but perhaps the right foods can become premium foods. Rice managed that in OTL; lots of South Carolina planters got rich selling food (rice) to Europe. That's not the whole part of the puzzle, of course, but one element. It would need a country/region which had food access, coal/ore resources (iron ore? silver ore), and probably at least one other big (potentially mechanisable) valuable export industry. Tobacco has come up in this thread, together with other possibilities.

Depending on how you set the brightlines for the term industrial revolution or the first wave of industrialisation the Song Empire DID do this. I can explain more if you'd like.
Explain away, by all means.

Talking about the contribution of cotton textiles seems relatively simple. Check out - https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/04/26/mccloskey-cotton-ir/.

The data seems to show that, even under the assumption that, for the British IR, although cotton textiles were a star industry with outlying productivity growth, the contribution to the total productivity growth of the Industrial Revolution was low. The IR was a broad spectrum change in productivity and mechanization, not reliant on a particular star industry to hugely lead growth in productivity (even the most disproportionately improving). There may even be a stronger case than reckoned, once more industries are measured and accounted for (example in the link is candle making).
Interesting link; thanks. I'm aware at a broad level (though haven't read much recently) about the Crafts-Harley view of cotton textiles being crucial to the formative stages of the IR, and detractors such as McCloskeys and others who argue that there was nothing special.

The crucial point which I haven't seen resolved is that the original view was that cotton textiles were crucial to getting things started, and once the benefits of mechanisation began in cotton, mechanisation began to spread elsewhere as the combination of inspiration, capital etc supported productivity growth elsewhere. That may be an incorrect view, of course. I don't pretend to have any expert knowledge on this subject. But McCloskey's data looked at 1780-1860, which runs too late to counter the Crafts-Harley view one way or the other. If cotton was crucial to getting things started, then any data past 1820 at the latest is largely irrelevant, because by then cotton had already started to demonstrate the benefits of mechanisation (and generated capital for reinvestment elsewhere, if that was relevant too). It's amusing that the (semi-facetiously chosen) example of candle-making shows the productivity jump starting around 1810.

Do you have any other references which address the productivity growth in the earlier stages of the industrial revolution?

So it shouldn't be a problem to imagine a British IR without much contribution from cotton, if raw cotton access was limited; by failures of colonial relationships in cotton producing regions, for example, or legal prohibitions.

But removing all textiles entirely from the British IR seems tough, as the worsted and woolen sector, at least, shows signs of high productivity growth. Or any IR if industrial revolutions are inevitably characterised by broad, cross sector improvements, and textiles production happens in the state in question at all. It depends on what we're looking for in "a meaningful part".

(Also worth a look: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/01/05/ca/ and https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/11/10/slavery_and_industrialism/).
In the context of "meaningful part", I'm meaning that productivity improvements in textiles shouldn't be a major cause of that formative part of the IR, i.e. the first industries where mechanisation/innovation really gets started.

Of course, if it turns out that these productivity improvements which McCloskey found were broadly present across many industries even in the first part of the IR (1760s-1810s, roughly), then the no-textile question becomes meaningless, and it becomes more of a question of 'what combination of factors permit a broad range of innovation such as Britain saw during this period?'

We've had this discussion, Jared, back in days half a decade ago or more in regard to Lands of Red and Gold, where you revealed an intention to have an IR but one that skipped textiles. Then I think I was more of a naysayer than a help, and now I am only going to repeat something I said then that is being overlooked here....
I have certainly discussed similar concepts before, though in the context of LoRaG I've mostly looked at two possible scenarios. Firstly whether it was possible to separate the different elements of the IR, i.e. the steam/iron/coal aspects happening in one place (and possibly time) and the textiles happening in another place (and possibly later in time). More recently I've looked at whether it was feasible without cotton textiles specifically, since cotton will be less available in that TL. And while it's mostly an aside, at least 2 of the 2.5 IRs I'm considering for that TL all include some mechanisation of textiles, though cotton is not a major component.

...a key aspect of the IR being a real revolution in how people live is the capitalist commodity sector revolutionizing the lives of the working classes by providing for their material needs at a lower cost than ever. In short an IR really reaches critical mass when consumer goods, necessary for the survival and reproduction of the working classes employed by capitalists, are themselves produced by more efficient industrial means. Reducing the price of a major segment of the needs of the workers enables capitalists to pay smaller wages and pocket larger profits, and it is these large profits that attract more investment into the capitalist-industrial sector and thus drive ongoing mechanization and other process changes relying more and more on elaborated capitalist institutions and driving down the necessary labor content of given items, thus lowering the cost of acquiring and consuming them.

In this context it seems textiles have an edge in being key, important materials for the market to evolve around. The high profit sectors of early textile industrialization may indeed have gone first, and examples such as Jacquard loom products which I presume were sold to well-off homes show that it starts in the luxury trade. But industrialized cloth production, especially of cottons, also reached down pretty early to the cheap end of the market, offering bolts of fabric of only moderate fineness but of great utility to the masses at prices far below what handcraft workers could offer. When this happened, it became possible for workers to cut their expenses in the dimension of clothing, blankets and so forth, and these savings soon propagated to employers who could offer lower wages and still expect adequately strong and teachable workers to apply for work, thus undercutting other workers who may have looked forward to spending their savings from using cheaper industrial made cloth and cloth products, but instead found themselves forced by falling wages to to choose the cheaper fabrics though they left them no savings, since old-fashioned hand made cloth was now out of reach for them. Lower wages for workers due to cheaper fabrics lower capital costs across the board and thus a surge of investment and production. The workers don't benefit from it, not right away anyway, but other classes do.
That's an excellent summary of an important aspect of the IR, and of why textiles have a natural advantage in this field. The traditional basic needs being food, clothing and shelter, and of those clothing (and ancillary uses) is the most amenable to a larger market.

That said, the same process of a product starting out as a luxury and then moving to a mass product as its production becomes more efficient is seen in a variety of textiles and in other areas, too. Silk textiles (Jacquard loom products) had been luxuries for millennia, but their manufacture and distribution became more efficient and mass-market during the nineteenth century, particularly the second half, in a process christened the "democratisation" of silk. (Albeit never quite as mass-market as cotton). Cotton itself was a luxury fibre for quite a while even within Britain, and only gradually moved down the socioeconomic scale. And although it eventually became marketed to the working classes across the globe - as you point out - that took a significant period of gradually improving efficiencies where cotton goods were sold to the upper classes, then the upper-middle classes, middle classes and so on down. They did not become truly global until very cheap, of course, but by then the IR was already in full swing in a variety of industries.

In other words, the end state of mass production of consumer goods for the global working classes will eventually involve a variety of fields, and inevitably those techniques will end up being applied to textiles. The aspect I'm trying to grapple with is whether those earlier stages of mechanisation of a product to upper classes, middle classes etc - including export to the wealthier classes in at least part of the world - can begin without textiles, and only spread to textiles once the process has already begun.

Can something similar be done with woodwork, or ceramics, or iron, steel, or other metal workings as the basis? Maybe, but it looks tough to accomplish to me, and the final iteration of locking the society in by cheapening the working capability of the poor working class itself would be mitigated and delayed I'd think.
Certainly the process won't be complete until it cuts into the capability of the working classes.s One thought, though, is that fuel for cooking and heating is an essential need too, and this feeds into the coal/iron/steel aspect of a potential IR without textiles. Coal, iron and steel feed off each other, both in coal-mining, iron manufacturing, better tools for mining techniques, etc. Mass-produced iron goods have some potential markets for attracting the spending of the working classes, particularly in cooking (a cast iron cooking range has very high appeal), agricultural implements etc. Coupled with the ongoing need for heating and fuel - and with deforestation being a big thing in some areas - then there may be some potential there.

Now perhaps this is the whole point; you'd perhaps like to see an industrially capable society grow that isn't so starkly proletarianized?
As with AH in general, the only aim I have in mind is one of interest in seeing something different. A different IR is an intriguing thought experiment.
 
According to this documentary:
, the industrial revolution started of in Coalbrookdale, England when it was discovered how to make wrought iron in large quantities.
 
This would quite entertaining if there's the right kind of ATL country to develop it. Possibly an Ottoman Empire which is spared the worst aspects of European interference? Or similarly an *Indonesia.

For reasons of population density and transportation, my money's on the East Indies.

And an Arab state or states, or Persian even, might fit better than the Ottomans. A massive empire centered on the Balkans and Aegean isn't as susceptible to incentives and feedback loops that will be taking place a thousand miles away by imperfect transport.

There were two distinct kinds of market to consider for tobacco. There were those countries where tobacco couldn't be grown locally, for reasons of climate or insufficient cheap land/labour. Europe was the biggest market in this category, though there were others. The other was where tobacco could be grown locally. India and China fell into this category, and I think most of SE Asia too. There was still some market in China for imported tobacco, but it needed to be a premium product, so that the wealthier Chinese wanted to buy it. Portuguese snuff was such a product in OTL, but for reasons of their own the Portuguese imported only a small amount. Cantonese tobacco dealers were always mystified why the Portuguese didn't want to bring in a lot more, since it would have sold well.

So ATL, such a country would have a good market in Europe (barring various mercantile restrictions), but would need to have a reputation for premium quality to get much traction exporting into China or India.

Yeah, that's more or less what I was afraid of.

Tobacco spread without needing much in the way of marketing in OTL. A lot of the early spread was simply by sailors carrying it back. Of course, once they get addicted, people tend to keep buying and also, more importantly for these purposes, wanting to buy more of it.

Indeed it did, but what I'm getting at is that it never seemed to approach the economies of cotton fabric or Chinese silver. Given that mechanization is far less central to tobacco than to cotton (potentially it's just curing and packing), any "IR" based on tobacco seems likely to be much slower and less dramatic. Demand for a finished product from a specific source might need to be extraordinarily high compared with OTL. No?
 
The challenge is that reproducing the transition from bronze to silver centuries earlier entails a fairly complete rewrite of several centuries of Chinese history. And because the Mongols are involved of Eurasian history. All that before you really get started! It's not a subplot; it's a major project in and of itself.

I can't see it, I don't think. How on earth does demand for one sort of brass spike far past OTL? Currency sure wouldn't do it. Currency choices represent a mix of top-down and bottom-up decisions, but neither seems like it would seek out quite that choice. A very large economy choosing a currency would be very unlikely to put all its eggs in an obscure Australian basket.
Brass had a variety of uses in the premodern world, including a wide range of decorative applications, low-friction applications such as locks, surgical instruments, mechanical gears, corrosion-resistant applications such as around the sea, etc. It was also important for the pre-industrial woollen industry in England (brass wires and pins needed to work the wool). It was used as currency in a few areas in ancient (e.g. Phrygia) and medieval (e.g. Northumbria) times, though it would need an usual scenario to be used as wide-scale currency. Tragically enough, it was also highly desired in West Africa and so became an important export in exchange for slaves to take to the New World.

However, demand for brass was limited by availability/cost of zinc. People could not make it cheaply enough for wide-scale use because no-one outside of India/SE Asia had figured out how to smelt it (since zinc vaporises at too low a temperature, it needs a special smelter to collect the vaporised zinc). Europe was importing zinc from India by 1600 onward, which is a sign of considerable demand, but transportation costs meant that its use was limited to expensive applications. Europeans didn't figure out how to extract elemental zinc until the mid-eighteenth century, and the smelting techniques didn't get really good until around the turn of the nineteenth century, much too late to be the primary driver of any kind of primary industrial revolution.

That said, I'm not suggesting brass alone could drive an IR. Just there's a process of extraction of lead-silver-zinc ore whereby extraction of each could be developed in parallel, with silver the initial ore of interest and then spin-off techniques developing for zinc and maybe lead. And it would need silver-lead-zinc deposits somewhere more suitable than Australia.

I was thinking of gold as the most likely candidate. The incredible global economic incentives the Ming created demonstrated that there would always be a new mine somewhere in the world with silver to fund half dozen wars, if only those prices kept up. The end of silver as a global currency and the weird populism of Gilded Age America are both attributable to the absurd scale of the Nevada silver deposits exploited circa 1870. By the modern day, the price of silver remains hopelessly and permanently depressed.

Gold though, has proven able to conserve value to a far greater degree. Which is to say that until we properly exploit asteroid mining, gold remains plausible currency, whatever it's inconvenience. IOTL, most New World gold seems to have ended up parked in Hindu and Buddhist temples in South and SE Asia due to a smaller but significant price disparity. Had the Ming ended up relying on gold instead, it might have been quite a different story.

There are probably other metals that could have worked in the premodern era (or might someday), but I'm not qualified to speculate. I am somewhat skeptical that a particular alloy could play the role, rather than a particular element.
Gold certainly makes sense if a country with the right deposits and other circumstances for an IR. Other metals are speculative, and likewise I don't have any detailed knowledge to suggest one in particular.

Or why wait till 1792? If the proof of concept had been done, and a few enthusiastic proponents had been kicking around since the early '80s, working out the kinks.... Maybe if a niche commercial market already existed in 1792....
That would make an interesting ATL with French Revolutionary Wars/Napoleonic Wars driving their own form of industrialisation with food storage an integral part...

Indeed it did, but what I'm getting at is that it never seemed to approach the economies of cotton fabric or Chinese silver. Given that mechanization is far less central to tobacco than to cotton (potentially it's just curing and packing), any "IR" based on tobacco seems likely to be much slower and less dramatic. Demand for a finished product from a specific source might need to be extraordinarily high compared with OTL. No?
Certainly it's easier to get an oversupply of tobacco than of cotton fabric or silver. The catch with tobacco is a bit like silk - the cost of producing the raw product is higher than for cotton, so a greater proportion of the value is in the raw product rather than in the manufactured product. There's still clearly value in processed tobacco - for while it was possible just to chew it, there was and remained a significant demand for expensive processed tobacco products such as snuff and cigars, and later cigarettes. What it may take is more greater innovations in producing tobacco through less labour-intensive methods, and/or a scenario where European wages have generally risen enough due to growing global trade, but for some reason industrialisation hasn't kicked off with textiles (yet).
 
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