Lack of Industrialization in Greco-Roman Civilization

[Thanas]

Ward-Perkins isn't trying to argue against the notion that the Roman Empire was innovating - he's trying to argue against the claim that the change from the Roman Empire to medieval times was gradual and smooth, rather than a 'fall'. His thesis merely prompted me to wonder until when the Romans continued innovating technologically, and at what speed.

Until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

[Plushie]

The question may as well be titled, "Lack of Industrialization in Han China?", because many of the limitations mentioned here (slavery, social forces, etc) weren't present or weren't as dominant in contemporary China and yet China still did not industrialize. This switch highlights a few factors:

1. There's a lot more to industrialization than having access to a few technologies.
2. What exactly do we mean by industrialization, anyway?

These two points end up being very important. Industrialization really is a hugely complex process, with a multitude of important factors practically without number. But to really understand even some of those factors, we have to understand exactly what we're saying when we say industrialization.

I think a good starting point is to say that a civilization is industrializing when it becomes like an industrial society. This definition is good because it allows us to use historical examples of industrial societies to start drawing inferences about industrialization itself. Historical Britain, for instance, is the first such example of such a society. What happened in Britain between 1776 and 1820, the period of supposed industrialization?

What happened, if one pays attention to the demographics, was a huge population explosion. The population of England and Wales tripled between 1750 and 1800 (whereas from 1700 to 1750 it increased by a comparatively meager 20%). Cities like Liverpool quadrupled in size. Workers who, in previous generations, would have spent their lives working in fields on somebody else's land now moved to work in somebody else's factories. The technologies of manufacturing and power generation everybody here is so enamored with facilitated, to some extent, this growth, but I think the population explosion itself is the main event.

The very first thing this highlights is the importance of food production. If your civilization doesn't have the agricultural productivity to support 30, 40, or 50% of the population doing something other than growing to food, your civilization can never urbanize and industrialize. This is why the agricultural revolution of the late 17th and early 18th centuries was so important a precursor to the industrial revolution. The very first problem this highlights for the Romans and the Greeks is actually one that's already been brought up: Slave-worked latifunda produced grain for the state to distribute to urban dwellers. This breaks up one of the biggest agricultural markets in the Empire, markets vital to fostering and birthing a revolution in agricultural productivity. If the state decides how much you get paid for your grain, the incentives that normally guide increased productivity are distorted.

Another important point that people miss when they speak of industrial technology is that the existence of the technology isn't industrialization. As others have said, steam engines started being talked about and experimented with in the 1600s. What made London and other British cities unique in the late 18th century wasn't the presence of steam engines, it was the presence of so many. The existence of one state owned factory in Rome isn't industrialization, industrialization is the existence of thousands of privately owned factories in London or New York. This requires both a level of total factor productivity the Romans never achieved and the capital markets to sustain the entire operation. Remember, the very largest Roman mines were usually state owned, working to supply the army or the civic engineering projects that acted as the pork of the Roman urban governments. SOEs tend not to have the same incentives to innovate that market participants do.

In Britain, the steam engine was originally put to use draining mines. If most of your mining projects are massive strip mining efforts involving thousands of disposable slaves, where's the incentive to act like the British entrepreneurs who originally started ordering steam engines so that they could pump water out of their bell mines (a completely different type of mining from the Roman sort)? If there's no demand for working steam engines from mine operators, why would anyone ever bother developing one?

In a sedentary, mostly agricultural civilization like ancient Rome, you end up with toys and amusements, like Hero's engine. It's only in an enterprising, market oriented society where you get a vast multiplication of productive assets.

It took roughly 1500 years from when Hero built his engine for real steam engines to be invented. Part of that was the perverse incentives facing inventors and potential users of the engines, but another part was simple science. Nobody knew how to make steel strong enough to build an actual engine out of. Materials science is probably the most important limited factor in what you can do behind power. Metallurgy was something that advanced slowly, but steadily, during the entire period between antiquity and industrial modernity. Even if the incentives had been aligned correctly, even if there had been a market for steam engines, Hero simply would not have been able to build one which could attain a useful pressure because he didn't have access to materials which could fit into the tolerances necessary.

So, because of this, even places which retained something more resembling a good market structure never industrialized. A good example is China of the Song dynasty, especially the Southern Song. In many ways, the Southern Song's society resembled that of 17th or 18th century Western Europe. A kind of capitalism emerged in Song China and it only took off into industrial revolution.

But the hard facts of what they had to build with ran China right into a wall. Sure, iron output vastly multiplied during the 12th century in China, but if none of that iron is of sufficient quality to build working engines out of, you're not going to be able to take that next step from water power to steam power.

Similarly, you not only need the metal, but also the capital to invest in these massive projects. Unfortunately, financial innovation in the Roman Empire, and especially in the late Empire, was slowing and stagnating. Egypt, of all places, was the center of finance in the ancient world, growing to that position especially under the. Ptolemies. The draftable check is actually an invention of Hellenistic Egypt.

The Romans, on the other hand, detested all things urban, including merchants, the proletariat, and especially money lenders. As more and more capital began flowing around in public hands during the period of the Empire, being used to create grand monuments and civic centers, less and less became available to lend and borrow. Financial markets in Rome were smothered in their cribs. Without the ability to make capital mobile and efficient, the Roman private sector lagged behind the state and eventually died over the course of the Crisis of the Third Century. Once that happened, the Empire's economy never really recovered.

So, the three main reasons I can highlight are, in summary:

1. Roman agricultural productivity was simply too low to support a large enough population not actively producing food. Han China did not industrialize for this reason.
2. Their culture, society, and government discouraged commercial participation and innovation. While the arrival of the Empire actually did lead to a huge economic boom, it was a contained, limited one that was overthrown during the Third Century Crisis. This is part of why Byzantium (the iteration of the Roman Empire contemporary with Song China) did not experience the proto-industrialization China did.
3. Materials technology just wasn't advanced enough to foster real industrialization like we experienced. Without the highly productive mines of Wales producing so much coal, England wouldn't have industrialized, either. This is also why Song China did not actually industrialize.

Well, that and the Mongols.

[Thanas]

The very first problem this highlights for the Romans and the Greeks is actually one that's already been brought up: Slave-worked latifunda produced grain for the state to distribute to urban dwellers. This breaks up one of the biggest agricultural markets in the Empire, markets vital to fostering and birthing a revolution in agricultural productivity. If the state decides how much you get paid for your grain, the incentives that normally guide increased productivity are distorted.

The Romans never controlled the price of grain, except if they were state-owned latifundia, which were never anything but a tiny minority except in Egypt. Any attempts to directly control the price of Grain failed miserably, see Diocletian and Julian.

The existence of one state owned factory in Rome isn't industrialization, industrialization is the existence of thousands of privately owned factories in London or New York. This requires both a level of total factor productivity the Romans never achieved and the capital markets to sustain the entire operation. Remember, the very largest Roman mines were usually state owned,

The Roman mines were actually very productive, due to being able to be strip mined (at least the largest in Spain were). Also, there were a lot more than just one state owned factory. Not disagreeing with your larger assertion, but you miss a lot of specifics about Rome.

working to supply the army or the civic engineering projects that acted as the pork of the Roman urban governments. SOEs tend not to have the same incentives to innovate that market participants do.

This is just plain wrong. Pork did not enter into any of this, as the Roman Empire never really cared about pork. Individual wealthy people made such buildings, but this again does not mean the Empire had pork in the way we understand it, as private companies did not do any of the construction.

In Britain, the steam engine was originally put to use draining mines. If most of your mining projects are massive strip mining efforts involving thousands of disposable slaves, where's the incentive to act like the British entrepreneurs who originally started ordering steam engines so that they could pump water out of their bell mines (a completely different type of mining from the Roman sort)? If there's no demand for working steam engines from mine operators, why would anyone ever bother developing one?

Demand would show up as quickly as the strip mines ran out.

It took roughly 1500 years from when Hero built his engine for real steam engines to be invented. Part of that was the perverse incentives facing inventors and potential users of the engines,

Which perverse incentives?

Similarly, you not only need the metal, but also the capital to invest in these massive projects. Unfortunately, financial innovation in the Roman Empire, and especially in the late Empire, was slowing and stagnating. Egypt, of all places, was the center of finance in the ancient world, growing to that position especially under the. Ptolemies. The draftable check is actually an invention of Hellenistic Egypt.

All of this does not apply to the Roman Empire.

The Romans, on the other hand, detested all things urban, including merchants, the proletariat, and especially money lenders.

This view was not applicable to the Empire or even the late Republic, because all of these things were flowering in Rome.

As more and more capital began flowing around in public hands during the period of the Empire, being used to create grand monuments and civic centers, less and less became available to lend and borrow. Financial markets in Rome were smothered in their cribs. Without the ability to make capital mobile and efficient, the Roman private sector lagged behind the state and eventually died over the course of the Crisis of the Third Century. Once that happened, the Empire's economy never really recovered.

This is completely unfounded, what are your primary sources for this? Cite them, please.

1. Roman agricultural productivity was simply too low to support a large enough population not actively producing food. Han China did not industrialize for this reason.

I would like you to show your numbers for productivity of Rome. What I have seen are numbers ranging anywhere from 60-80% of the population working in agriculture, which would still leave enough manpower for the start of a potential industrialization.

2. Their culture, society, and government discouraged commercial participation and innovation. While the arrival of the Empire actually did lead to a huge economic boom, it was a contained, limited one that was overthrown during the Third Century Crisis. This is part of why Byzantium (the iteration of the Roman Empire contemporary with Song China) did not experience the proto-industrialization China did.

As I said, completely unsupported.

3. Materials technology just wasn't advanced enough to foster real industrialization like we experienced. Without the highly productive mines of Wales producing so much coal, England wouldn't have industrialized, either. This is also why Song China did not actually industrialize.

On that we agree.

[Simon_Jester]

The question may as well be titled, "Lack of Industrialization in Han China?", because many of the limitations mentioned here (slavery, social forces, etc) weren't present or weren't as dominant in contemporary China and yet China still did not industrialize. This switch highlights a few factors:

I could certainly have titled the thread "Lack of Industrialization in Han China." But since I'm not as familiar with the Han Dynasty, I'm less confident in saying that to me they seem to have been relatively close to the preconditions for the emergence of an industrial society more or less as we know it.

Which, again, is not to gloss over the fact that there were very good reasons neither society wound up taking the road 18th century Europe did. I'm only interested in talking about what those reasons were.

What happened, if one pays attention to the demographics, was a huge population explosion. The population of England and Wales tripled between 1750 and 1800 (whereas from 1700 to 1750 it increased by a comparatively meager 20%). Cities like Liverpool quadrupled in size. Workers who, in previous generations, would have spent their lives working in fields on somebody else's land now moved to work in somebody else's factories. The technologies of manufacturing and power generation everybody here is so enamored with facilitated, to some extent, this growth, but I think the population explosion itself is the main event.

The very first thing this highlights is the importance of food production. If your civilization doesn't have the agricultural productivity to support 30, 40, or 50% of the population doing something other than growing to food, your civilization can never urbanize and industrialize. This is why the agricultural revolution of the late 17th and early 18th centuries was so important a precursor to the industrial revolution.

Now this is really something interesting...

The very first problem this highlights for the Romans and the Greeks is actually one that's already been brought up: Slave-worked latifunda produced grain for the state to distribute to urban dwellers. This breaks up one of the biggest agricultural markets in the Empire, markets vital to fostering and birthing a revolution in agricultural productivity. If the state decides how much you get paid for your grain, the incentives that normally guide increased productivity are distorted.

This... I will wait for other people to weigh in on this. On the one hand, it's certainly got high apparent plausibility to me. On the other, it reads like some of the self-congratulatory "capitalism is king!" history I've seen, so I'm not sure how much salt to take it with for that reason.

[Thanas]

^I suggest you actually read my post, Simon, before responding.

That said, Roman Europe was far more urbanized than most people realize. The Roman Empire had a whopping 40% urbanization, or 25% if people only count cities of upwards 10-15k.

[Iosef Cross]

^I suggest you actually read my post, Simon, before responding.

That said, Roman Europe was far more urbanized than most people realize. The Roman Empire had a whopping 40% urbanization, or 25% if people only count cities of upwards 10-15k.

That was the rate of Roman Italy, not the average of the Empire itself.

But, the rate of urbanization of Roman Italy was about the same as Britain in ~1800. While the Empire average was about the same as the average of Western Europe in 1820. And was higher than in Han China at the same time.

[Iosef Cross]

Plushie, I think that you made some very good arguments, but I disagree on some of your points.

1. Roman agricultural productivity was simply too low to support a large enough population not actively producing food. Han China did not industrialize for this reason.

It was high enough to support an urban population larger than any other civilization before the industrial revolution.

2. Their culture, society, and government discouraged commercial participation and innovation. While the arrival of the Empire actually did lead to a huge economic boom, it was a contained, limited one that was overthrown during the Third Century Crisis. This is part of why Byzantium (the iteration of the Roman Empire contemporary with Song China) did not experience the proto-industrialization China did.

There wasn't any stock markets in the Roman Empire, but there wasn't stock markets in Song China as well. And Song China probably wasn't more advanced than the Roman Empire.

The degree of development of trade was higher in the Roman Empire than in China, perhaps for geographic reasons: The Roman civilization was a civilization build around a great lake (the mediterranean). With facilitated trade, since trade before the invention of the railroad, it was only possible to transport bulk commodities through sea.

Britain, Netherlands, Rome and Ancient Greece were based on sea trade, and they were the most advanced pre industrial economies that existed.

3. Materials technology just wasn't advanced enough to foster real industrialization like we experienced. Without the highly productive mines of Wales producing so much coal, England wouldn't have industrialized, either. This is also why Song China did not actually industrialize.Well, that and the Mongols.

Materials technology are a product of social processes. Hence, the industrial revolution wasn't triggered by the steam engine, the industrial revolution that triggered the spread of the steam engine.

[Iosef Cross]

In a thread over in SLAM, Serafina remarked:

It has already been mentioned that the roman empire (and the greeks of the same era) had most of the technology we had at the start of the industrial revoltion.
It is debatable wether they did not go the next step due to social reasons or due to the few technologies they were lacking.
However, such discussion would warrant a thread on it's own.

Reflecting on this, I think it's an interesting question. We know that Hellenic culture had, in one place or another, many things we now think of as typical of early industrial technology:
-Precision gearing, the Antikythera mechanism being the favorite example.
-A grasp of pneumatic pressure and the concept of steam power, as demonstrated by Hero of Alexandria; I have encountered references to a steam-powered catapult designed by Archimedes as well.
-Large scale infrastructure projects; the Romans were famous for this.
-Water powered machinery, such as the Barbegal Mill

So what didn't they have? Or if it wasn't material technology that was lacking, why didn't the existing technologies merge into something like the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s?

What was the industrial revolution? The industrial revolution was the beginning of the now considered natural process of fast economic growth. Before the late 18th century, fast economic growth (at least for large countries) didn't exist.

Western Europe in 1800 had better conditions to trigger fast economic growth than the Romans had at their peak (1st and 2nd centuries). First, they had better institutions, specially Britain with implanted modern institutions in 1688, the first country to do so, and hence, the first country to industrialize. The Romans had developed their Roman law, with enabled their civilization to outperform other pre industrial civilizations, but they weren't still with modern institutions.

Also, the world of 1800 was much more complex than the Ancient Roman world, with a greater volume of scientific production and greater population. The population of western Europe was 180 million in 1800, while the estimated population of the Roman empire was only about 65 million (estimates range from 45 million to 100 million). The larger number of brains could produce a larger number of new technologies.

[JGregory32]

Trying to pinpoint what technologies are required for industrialization is very difficult, partly because we might not recognize a key technology or we we might give too much weight to a technology that wasn't actually very impressive.
It might be better to examine what pressures drove industrialization in Britain and Europe.
The BBC recently showed a four part documentary on the British navy called heart of Oak. One of the points the documentary made was that the needs of the royal navy was a powerful engine for the development of Britain.
Warfare, trade, and empire are massive pressures to develop technology and industrialization.
I would highly recommend people watch this documentary if they get a chance.

[Plushie]

The Romans never controlled the price of grain, except if they were state-owned latifundia, which were never anything but a tiny minority except in Egypt. Any attempts to directly control the price of Grain failed miserably, see Diocletian and Julian.

It's not about direct wage and price controls (which, as you note, didn't work), it's about the structural distortion in the economy from having millions of slaves growing food for millions of only marginally productive proles, with the only manufacturing that goes on being to support trade amongst the slave owning elite or the state apparatus itself(especially the army). There's ways for the hand of the state to be felt even in an age of a technically or seemingly small state (as pretty much every state prior to the 20th century was by necessity). I mean, fuck, let's not forget the ]i]millions[/i] of slaves, chattel and otherwise, kept by the Romans. It's estimated that, during the 1st and second centuries, the population of Italy might have fluctuated as high as 40-50% slave.

Slavery itself is a huge barrier to industrialization. There's a reason what happened in Song China didn't happen in contemporary Byzantium, as I said.

It took Gaul centuries to recover from what the Romans did to it. In some, very limited sense, France is still dealing with some pathological problems sourced from Roman rule.

The Roman mines were actually very productive, due to being able to be strip mined (at least the largest in Spain were). Also, there were a lot more than just one state owned factory. Not disagreeing with your larger assertion, but you miss a lot of specifics about Rome.

The point is that industrialization isn't about just the factory system (which was invented in very early in the classical period, like has been mentioned), or just the steam engine (the first experiments beginning almost two thousand years before industrialization anywhere), or any other one or two factors. It's about a huge multitude of different factors all coming together in just the right way. The Romans (and the Chinese, and everybody before the British) didn't have an industrial revolution because they didn't have all the ingredients (even though they had some, or the precursors of others) and they didn't know how to put together those that they did.

I mean, it's worth mentioning that Hero's ideas (or the line of study he worked in) didn't die with him. The Romans kept his steam engine, or at least the general concept of mechanical steam power. They still had it in the 1100's! What'd they use it for? Opening church doors to fool the plebes into believing in miracles and powering mechanical animals in the Emperor's throne room.

Like I said, different culture, different priorities.

This is just plain wrong. Pork did not enter into any of this, as the Roman Empire never really cared about pork. Individual wealthy people made such buildings, but this again does not mean the Empire had pork in the way we understand it, as private companies did not do any of the construction.

It was the period equivalent. Wealthy individuals and urban and municipal governments engaged in public projects all the time. Of course, as time went on they became less and less public and more and more glorification of the person paying for it.

You have to understand, by the time of the Empire, the split between civil and public societies was thin and porous. People elected to serve in urban governments could often be expected to provide a chunk of the funding themselves, and tax collecting powers were often delegated to non-state parties, and a million other ways private wealth became public.

Demand would show up as quickly as the strip mines ran out.

What's going to cause the Romans to use so much coal they run out?

I do suppose you could say they had the access, though: They did control the same coal fields the British eventually

Which perverse incentives?

If I'm not going to gain anything from spending years and years tinkering with all this dirty, dangerous machinery, why would I ever do it?

All of this does not apply to the Roman Empire.

Yeah, what applied to the Roman Empire was a somewhat more anti-commercial culture (even though, as I said, the advent of the Empire led to one of the largest economic booms in history up to that point). Although the advances made in Egypt continued to be made throughout the Mediterranean world, they were slowed drastically by the absolute disaster that was the second half of the 3rd century. They eventually died over the course of the later Empire, only to really revive with the arrival of the Arabs.

This view was not applicable to the Empire or even the late Republic, because all of these things were flowering in Rome.

The main reason the post-Augustan period was such a prosperous one for the Roman economy was the proto-globalization of trade. Besides the fact that the 1st century BC brought about the solidifying of the Roman free trade area (probably the largest legal jurisdiction on the planet at the time), itself a guarantee of economic growth, China was actively forging the Silk Road at the time and the entire belt of civilization stretching from Britain to Vietnam was booming.

But that boom slowed and died over the course of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. China fell apart, Rome almost did, Parthia collapsed and was replaced by a new Iranian empire, the Kushans in India collapsed in the face of the same threat, and a half century of chaos gripped civilized Eurasia. What came out the other side was a destroyed remnant of its past self. The Romans clamped down, with Diocletian more or less driving the last nail into the coffin of the republic and instituting the first real Roman monarchy in a thousand years. The dynamism that had been a hall-mark of the contemporary global economy up until then slowed. In a way, the time we think of as 'the dark ages' (maybe 500-700AD) was really just the depth of a global economic recession that only really its way out going into the 10th century. The Tang rose in China, Middle Byzantium waxed across all of the old Eastern Roman European provinces, the Muslim world experienced its Golden Age, the Chola really opened up the Indian Ocean and Indonesia as the center of global trade, and the Eurasian North finally started playing a role in the global economy.

These underlying factors pretty much guaranteed prosperity in spite of the general Roman social pessimism about commercial culture.

This is completely unfounded, what are your primary sources for this? Cite them, please.

Phew, really? Do you have a few years? A lot of this is knowledge I've collected over the course of my adult life, from a million different sources. A good look at what Diocletian did can be gleaned from the first few sections of Treadgold's A History of Byzantine State and Society, a more detailed look can be found in Robert Schuettinger's Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls. I couldn't even begin to tell what articles to look for on the physical evidence about the Roman (and contemporary global) economy, I've had a casual interest in archeology for years and have spent many days in the library reading articles from journals I don't have access to anymore. The Economic History of Byzantium has a good overview of the late Roman economy and is the single best source on the Byzantine economy as a whole.

I would like you to show your numbers for productivity of Rome. What I have seen are numbers ranging anywhere from 60-80% of the population working in agriculture, which would still leave enough manpower for the start of a potential industrialization.

The only area that could possibly have had more than 20% of the population not working in agriculture would be in Italy, which could only sustain such a thing through actual ownership of an empire.

I'll admit I don't have numbers, but instead make this judgment based on the fact that no civilization had high enough agricultural productivity to support industrialization prior to the 17th and 18th centuries' agricultural revolution. This revolution was based around several techniques that were completely foreign to Roman agriculture. They were also dependent on a set of institutions that didn't exist in the Roman world.

As I said, completely unsupported.

Do we really need to get into a discussion about Roman dignitas?

The ideas of social liberty that drove the creation of institutions that supported and fostered commerce and industry and Britain in the 18th century were alien to the Roman mindset. Ideas of progress and innovation didn't make sense in a universe that moved in repeating cycles like all ancient historiography assumed it did from Han China to Roman Egypt, to Celtic Britain. Innovation and progress that was made in spite of this social attitude is just a sign of the strength of these draws, where Roman nobility would gladly lend their vast wealth, but never openly or in any way under the law. The cultural attitude eventually won out and, especially in later Byzantium, the Roman government always maintained a hand in private business because it seemed to simply be its natural right.

On that we agree.

[/quote]

Yes indeed.

[Plushie]

I could certainly have titled the thread "Lack of Industrialization in Han China." But since I'm not as familiar with the Han Dynasty, I'm less confident in saying that to me they seem to have been relatively close to the preconditions for the emergence of an industrial society more or less as we know it.

Which, again, is not to gloss over the fact that there were very good reasons neither society wound up taking the road 18th century Europe did. I'm only interested in talking about what those reasons were.

All I'm trying to point out is that seeming to have a lot of the preconditions and actually having a lot is a big jump. There's many, many preconditions that these societies didn't have, far more than they did.

Of course, I'm being somewhat lazy in diverging from my main and central contention: The industrial revolution was a demographic phenomenon. In this case, that means Rome didn't industrialize because it simply lacked the demographics. In early Industrial England was just under 9 million. The population of Roman England was just over 1 million. The factors to which this demographic phenomenon is path dependent become the factors necessary for an industrial revolution. If you start looking at what parts of the economic environment provided by pre-industrial British policy provided for this demographic growth, you start noticing that few of them are available in Rome. There are many predecessors, both in terms of precedent and in terms of inspiration, to British law in Roman law, but the institutional context is just too different to see them applied similarly. I mean, it's obvious that it wasn't a land factor, entirely -- the Romans controlled a large part of the same territory controlled by the UK in Europe -- it must be either a capital or labor problem. Ends up it's a multitude of both.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that the proper answer to, "Why didn't Antique Mediterranean civilization industrialize?", is, "Well, do you have a few weeks to sit and listen?" The demographic explanation is just a surface level analysis, a proper look at why ancient Rome or Greece never industrialized would involve weeks of study-time spent exploring the crevices of every subject from law to horticulture to physical mechanics to philosophy.

The most fascinating questions are often also the most horrifyingly complicated ones.

Now this is really something interesting...

I, for one, think it's the most important part of the puzzle.

This... I will wait for other people to weigh in on this. On the one hand, it's certainly got high apparent plausibility to me. On the other, it reads like some of the self-congratulatory "capitalism is king!" history I've seen, so I'm not sure how much salt to take it with for that reason.

It's not so much about 'capitalism is king!' as much as 'some kind of capital market is a necessary condition for a real industrial revolution'. It's not meant to be political, but historical. Hell, even the Marxists agree capitalism needed for the move from an agricultural, feudal society to a modern one ready for the People's Revolution.

[Thanas]

It's not about direct wage and price controls (which, as you note, didn't work), it's about the structural distortion in the economy from having millions of slaves growing food for millions of only marginally productive proles, with the only manufacturing that goes on being to support trade amongst the slave owning elite or the state apparatus itself(especially the army).

If you really believe that trade was solely centered on the army, then your knowledge of the Roman Empire is pretty low. The massive trade in foodstuffs and daily accessories is pretty much saying the opposite.

There's ways for the hand of the state to be felt even in an age of a technically or seemingly small state (as pretty much every state prior to the 20th century was by necessity). I mean, fuck, let's not forget the ]i]millions[/i] of slaves, chattel and otherwise, kept by the Romans. It's estimated that, during the 1st and second centuries, the population of Italy might have fluctuated as high as 40-50% slave.

So what?

Slavery itself is a huge barrier to industrialization. There's a reason what happened in Song China didn't happen in contemporary Byzantium, as I said.

You have yet to explain a mechanism that is based on anything else than your say-so.

It took Gaul centuries to recover from what the Romans did to it.

Evidence, please.

In some, very limited sense, France is still dealing with some pathological problems sourced from Roman rule.

Evidence, please.

The point is that industrialization isn't about just the factory system (which was invented in very early in the classical period, like has been mentioned), or just the steam engine (the first experiments beginning almost two thousand years before industrialization anywhere), or any other one or two factors. It's about a huge multitude of different factors all coming together in just the right way. The Romans (and the Chinese, and everybody before the British) didn't have an industrial revolution because they didn't have all the ingredients (even though they had some, or the precursors of others) and they didn't know how to put together those that they did.

Yes, as has been said numerous times in this thread.

I mean, it's worth mentioning that Hero's ideas (or the line of study he worked in) didn't die with him. The Romans kept his steam engine, or at least the general concept of mechanical steam power. They still had it in the 1100's! What'd they use it for? Opening church doors to fool the plebes into believing in miracles and powering mechanical animals in the Emperor's throne room.

Like I said, different culture, different priorities.

Culture got nothing to do with it. The first mechanical inventions in the west were also used to amuse rich people.

This is just plain wrong. Pork did not enter into any of this, as the Roman Empire never really cared about pork. Individual wealthy people made such buildings, but this again does not mean the Empire had pork in the way we understand it, as private companies did not do any of the construction.

It was the period equivalent. Wealthy individuals and urban and municipal governments engaged in public projects all the time. Of course, as time went on they became less and less public and more and more glorification of the person paying for it.

You have to understand, by the time of the Empire, the split between civil and public societies was thin and porous. People elected to serve in urban governments could often be expected to provide a chunk of the funding themselves, and tax collecting powers were often delegated to non-state parties, and a million other ways private wealth became public.

Dude, do you think you are talking to an amateur here? What you are describing is not pork, nor have you addressed how this is in any way harmful to industrialization.

Demand would show up as quickly as the strip mines ran out.

What's going to cause the Romans to use so much coal they run out?

I do suppose you could say they had the access, though: They did control the same coal fields the British eventually

The Romans never used coal extensively, in fact I do not know any indication they ever used coal. They certainly did not do so in regions where they had coal and needed it, for example the thermes. Point is, until somebody forced them to, people did not care at all about coal mining. This is not the fault of the Romans, though, nor any indication on their society.

Which perverse incentives?

If I'm not going to gain anything from spending years and years tinkering with all this dirty, dangerous machinery, why would I ever do it?

And how was this the case in Rome?

All of this does not apply to the Roman Empire.

Yeah, what applied to the Roman Empire was a somewhat more anti-commercial culture (even though, as I said, the advent of the Empire led to one of the largest economic booms in history up to that point).

How was the Roman Empire anti-commercial?

Although the advances made in Egypt continued to be made throughout the Mediterranean world, they were slowed drastically by the absolute disaster that was the second half of the 3rd century.

Your knowledge really is lacking if you think the second half of the 3rd century is an absolute disaster.

The main reason the post-Augustan period was such a prosperous one for the Roman economy was the proto-globalization of trade. Besides the fact that the 1st century BC brought about the solidifying of the Roman free trade area (probably the largest legal jurisdiction on the planet at the time), itself a guarantee of economic growth, China was actively forging the Silk Road at the time and the entire belt of civilization stretching from Britain to Vietnam was booming.

But that boom slowed and died over the course of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. China fell apart, Rome almost did, Parthia collapsed and was replaced by a new Iranian empire, the Kushans in India collapsed in the face of the same threat, and a half century of chaos gripped civilized Eurasia. What came out the other side was a destroyed remnant of its past self. The Romans clamped down, with Diocletian more or less driving the last nail into the coffin of the republic and instituting the first real Roman monarchy in a thousand years. The dynamism that had been a hall-mark of the contemporary global economy up until then slowed. In a way, the time we think of as 'the dark ages' (maybe 500-700AD) was really just the depth of a global economic recession that only really its way out going into the 10th century. The Tang rose in China, Middle Byzantium waxed across all of the old Eastern Roman European provinces, the Muslim world experienced its Golden Age, the Chola really opened up the Indian Ocean and Indonesia as the center of global trade, and the Eurasian North finally started playing a role in the global economy.

These underlying factors pretty much guaranteed prosperity in spite of the general Roman social pessimism about commercial culture.

Wow, I never saw such a collection of outdated views.

Phew, really? Do you have a few years? A lot of this is knowledge I've collected over the course of my adult life, from a million different sources. A good look at what Diocletian did can be gleaned from the first few sections of Treadgold's A History of Byzantine State and Society, a more detailed look can be found in Robert Schuettinger's Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls. I couldn't even begin to tell what articles to look for on the physical evidence about the Roman (and contemporary global) economy, I've had a casual interest in archeology for years and have spent many days in the library reading articles from journals I don't have access to anymore. The Economic History of Byzantium has a good overview of the late Roman economy and is the single best source on the Byzantine economy as a whole.

Cite your sources. Do so now, I am not inclined to take your answers at face value. Direct quotes of a few paragraphs will do.

As I said, completely unsupported.

Do we really need to get into a discussion about Roman dignitas?

Apparently we do.

The ideas of social liberty that drove the creation of institutions that supported and fostered commerce and industry and Britain in the 18th century were alien to the Roman mindset.

How so? Social liberty was very much widespread in Rome, for example you get people who rise from the sons of farmers to Emperors, or to Consuls. Or you have people who become knights in one generation, senators and consuls in the next etc. I have a very hard time believing that you think the British Empire some model of social liberty when it was the very definition of a class society.

Ideas of progress and innovation didn't make sense in a universe that moved in repeating cycles like all ancient historiography assumed it did from Han China to Roman Egypt, to Celtic Britain. Innovation and progress that was made in spite of this social attitude is just a sign of the strength of these draws, where Roman nobility would gladly lend their vast wealth, but never openly or in any way under the law. The cultural attitude eventually won out and, especially in later Byzantium, the Roman government always maintained a hand in private business because it seemed to simply be its natural right.

Ah, so according to you, all innovations were made despite the Roman Empire, not because of it. Right. Your evidence?

[CJvR]

I think the lack of gunpowder have a fairly significant impact. Cannons would force the development of the metal working skills further but mainly it would also put more pressure on metal production and many of the early efforts of industrialization are connected to mines and pumps. However I think there would be some social obstructions as well, IIRC the Roman wealth was centered on the landed aristocracy and money like that tends to be the most conservative and unwilling to innovate. Also the Empire was to big and powerful, for Rome history in some sense ended at Actium. There were no rivals and competition to drive development, the Germans were to primitive and the Persians to remote.