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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There’s a common misconception that technology stayed stagnant from pre-Roman times to Industrial Revolution because there wasn’t really a shift in the visual appearance of items during that time, but technology advanced substantially during that time.
Advances in agriculture included much better irrigation techniques, improvements in how crops were rotated, and the development of techniques to recycle waste as fertilizer. Additionally, humans selectively bred horses and cattle to be much larger and more docile during this time, both increasing the amount of food they generated and making them more useful for things like pulling plows.
These technological improvements didn’t change what wheat looks like, but they dramatically increased the amount of food that could be produced on a per capita basis. This increase in per capita food production allowed more people to shift into other professions, such as blacksmiths and miners.
Metallurgy also advanced significantly during this time, particularly in regards to the quality of steel. Steel did not exist during Roman times. Through the 1800’s, most of the iron that was mined was turned into what today would be considered very low quality pig iron. Slow advancements in blast furnace technology gradually improved the quality of that metal, with steel production only becoming possible at any meaningful scale in 1828 with the invention of the preheater.
Conceptually, the Romans had an understanding of many of the concepts that would have allowed them to begin industrializing. For example, the Romans were well aware of how to build a steam engine and produced at least one well documented example of one.
The reason that no one managed to take that steam engine and turn it into a locomotive prior to the 1800’s was because the best metal that could be produced was so low quality that it couldn’t withstand the steam pressure that would have been necessary to use it in a work performing engine.
On top of that, the vast majority of the population needed to be employed in agriculture to just feed everyone. That left only a handful of people to do “everything else.” Because so few people were engaged in “industrial” activates like mining or smithing, even low quality metal was extremely rare and impossibly expensive. The vast majority of it that was produced went into agricultural tools, and that investment into agricultural tooling represented a necessary expenditure of what little metal was available.
Because there was no excess metal available, investing that metal into large, industrial projects wasn’t possible.
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