Was it a lack of manpower? Was it geographic circumstances? Why couldn’t civilizations like, say, Babylon or Rome have an Industrial Revolution?
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So two of the top comments are basically arguing “tech was growing steadily before the industrial revolution” and another is arguing “the industrial revolution couldn’t have happened without the enlightenment.”
Both of these are over complicating matters unnecessarily and missing the real point.
The industrial revolution did not start as a continent wide eruption of advanced technology, but instead started in a small backwater town in England. If it was not for this tiny, dinky coal mine in the middle of nowhere, the industrial revolution would never have happened. No amount of Enlightenment philosophy or minor advances in agriculture would have changed that.
So what happened here that was so special? The invention of the steam engine. Before the Industrial Revolution, Coal was basically useless. Nobody bothered mining it. Except the British. Why?
The scarcity of trees in England led to the prevailing use of coal instead of charcoal, which was far more common on the continent. In order to effectively pump water out of these mines, one man named Newcomen invented the first efficient coal powered steam engine, making him single-handedly responsible for the entire modern world.
There is no industrial revolution without this tiny village in England which just so happened to have the perfect circumstances necessary to incentivize the invention of the steam engine.
Now, of course, Newcomen was drawing on the scientific advancements in physics and our understanding of vacuums which, arguably, was caused by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. So that’s a fair point.
Here’s the thing though, Newcomen did not simply invent the steam engine first because it was impossible for anybody to think of it on their own until his time. The steam engine certainly could have been invented earlier and many civilizations throughout time have reached the necessary understanding of physics required, and never invented it.
It’s comforting to think of history like the top commenter does, as just one big long technological climb towards the Modern Day, but the sort of disturbing reality is that a lot of what makes history is really just luck and happenstance.
The truth is that if Britain had done a better job not cutting down all of their trees so they wouldn’t have needed to bother mining for coal, it’s entirely possible the steam engine could’ve gone centuries without being invented
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