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As per the thread title, is there a way to have the Industrial Revolution - i.e. the first industrialisation - happen without textiles being a meaningful part of it.

This thread was inspired by some of the discussion in the Early Roman Industrialization thread, but I've raised it as a more general discussion topic since I'm interested in whether this can happen anywhere.

As was touched on in that thread, textiles have several features which makes them extremely appealing for mechanisation:

(i) High price elasticity of demand, i.e. a small decrease in the price allows many more of them to be sold, and thus creates a larger market. This meant that any small improvements in mechanisation allowed cheaper textiles, larger markets, and a virtuous circle of technological development. The high price elasticity of demand applied to cotton textiles most of all, but to a lesser degree woolen and linen textiles, too.

(ii) Textiles are valuable, light and non-perishable, meaning that they can be transported relatively cheaply and sold in markets around much of the world.

(iii) Textiles have many uses, in clothing, sails, other cloth purposes, etc. This makes the potential market even larger.

(iv) High demand for labour in several steps - carding, spinning, weaving - meaning that there's lots of scope for technological improvements which have great profitability. In turn, this fostered the development of many engineering techniques which could be applied to many other developing industries.

In OTL, textiles were an extremely important part of the Industrial Revolution, to the point where it has been seriously argued that textile mechanisation was the Industrial Revolution, or at least that it would have been impossible without textiles. But, this being about alternate history - is it possible to have an *Industrial Revolution where textiles are not involved, or at least an insignificant component?

It doesn't matter where this *Industrial Revolution happens. It could be in an *Britain where for some reason textiles haven't taken off. It could be elsewhere in Europe. It could be anywhere in the world, really. No doubt industrialisation will spread to textiles sooner or later. That's probably inevitable, given their nature. But for the formative stages of this *Industrial Revolution, textiles should not be a major driver.

Or, to put it another way, are there possible industries, or a combination on industries, where there is enough scope for early mechanisation, large market size, multiple uses, high price elasticity of demand, etc to foster an industrial revolution without textiles?
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