Eli5 what is industrialization?

Question

So I initially understood it as technological development of the work industry but I heard someone say you can technologically advance without having to industrialize?

In: 0

Answer 1

>technologically advance without having to industrialize?

Up to the point of what people can make on their own, by hand, ie in the Neolithic people developed “technology” consisting of advanced stone tools, refined techniques for making them, and expanded usage of such devices while lacking anything resembling a manufacturing center.

Answer 2

Industrialization means technological progress that leads to replacement of manual labor with machines and through that the replacement of many smallscale producers with one large factory.

You can make technological progress without that, but many things tend to be simply more efficient at a huge scale. For example generating energy, a coal powerplant can’t work efficiently under ~300MW, wich means industrially produced electricity is cheaper than homemade electricity.

It’s definitely possible without industry, but there are a bunch of technologies aren’t feasible on the small scale. For example producing computer chips, the investment cost for the production line is huge, and using it to produce a single chip is just as expensive as producing a million (the material cost is neglectible, the machines are the expensive part)

Answer 3

Industrialisation is the conversion of an economy from agrarian to industrial, centred on mass production. One of its biggest characteristics is the shift from most people being farmers to most people working in factories (and later, offices), tasked with turning raw materials into useful products as efficiently as possible, rather than on the production of food.

You can absolutely have technological advancement without industrialisation. People were still inventing new things before the world shifted to factories. You just can’t mass produce things, so everything is very expensive because it has to be made by hand, and the cool new shit people invent is only really accessible to the wealthy.