Were the Romans close to an Industrial Revolution? (Part 1) | February 25, 2022 | toldinstone
Posted on 04/17/2022 9:37:55 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Were the Romans close to an Industrial Revolution? (Part 1) | February 25, 2022 | toldinstone
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Were the Romans close to an Industrial Revolution? (Part 2) | March 4, 2022 | toldinstone
The Romans were a couple of inventions away from an Industrial Revolution, yes.
Slaves stopped it. If there were no slaves mechanization would have been invented thousands of years ago.
Mechanization was cheaper than slavery.
16 wheels drove 16 mills. Enough to feed the entire region.
The Romans of antiquity did not achieve the achievements of the industrial revolution because of slavery. It made then lazy. It killed their initiative.
They had slaves, and didn’t feel the need for machines. The industrial revolution came about after plagues wiped out large segments of the population, plus people leaving for the new world left a personnel shortage.
There was natural climate change, a cooling, which (as such things had in the past) resulted in a pulse of migration out of central Asia, into the great kingdoms west, south, and east. And the Plague hit multiple times. Also, the Roman Empire (or so-called Republic before that) never had a public education system, a postal system, a banking system (other than private lending, which bankrolled everything), never got rid of slavery, and took far too long to devise a uniform system of succession (and when it did, it didn't last). If anything, corruption kept the Roman Empire alive until 1453, when the Turks took Constantinople.
https://www.youtube.com/c/toldinstone/search?query=greece
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“Mechanization was cheaper than slavery.”
The mistake people make is thinking that the Industrial Revolution was a technological change. It was not, it was an ideological change.
That change grew directly out of Calvinist Protestantism. Without that no modern world is possible.
You appear to define an Industrial Revolution based on cultural/society norms not technology. I disagree with most of your post because of that.
I will concede the plagues point, but had the Roman Administrators not been greedy & corrupt deviants, their Empire could have easily lasted until the Mongols came along eventually.
Whatever happened with “climate change” that caused Eurasian migration could have easily been dealt with had they built a wall (like Hadrian’s Wall) along the Prut or Danube River frontier and had viable armies (back to the corruption) to face them.
Public benefits such as a postal service, banking, education would have eventually morphed into Roman life had the continued with the mildly corrupt system they had in place in the middle third century.
Industrial Revolutions start with technology and Rome was light years ahead of everybody in their part of the world.
If you’ve ever been to Europe and have studied their buildings a lot of the technology they used doesn’t exist anymore and not because it’s obsolete, but because people lost that technology and the ability to replicate it.
Cement, door hinges, heating systems, construction styles to name just a few are examples.
It’s rather ironic that Roman aqueducts are still being used today. I guarantee you the same will not be said of anything our civilization currently uses, two thousand years from now. Well maybe pieces of Hoover Dam will still be around.
Our fall is mirroring Rome’s in more ways than one due to corruption.
Great thought experiment, thanks for posting!
Had they lasted another 200-300 years, maybe. And that is if you consider the fall of the Western Empire to be the fall of the Roman Empire.
“The mistake people make is thinking that the Industrial Revolution was a technological change. It was not, it was an ideological change.”
I go with technology.
I agree that manpower shortages helped trigger the Industrial Revolution. Look at our country at the time of the Southern secession. Almost all industry was based in the North, as was the capital sources needed to finance railroads and factories. The South did not have the ability to manufacture sufficient supplies of firearms, clothing, and other war materiel for a prolonged conflict. With the economy based on cash agriculture, principally cotton and secondarily tobacco, and a steady supply of slave labor, the plantation aristocracy had no motivation to industrialize the South. When the Southern states seceded, they had three hopes: (1) that the Federal government would let them go in peace; (2) that the Confederacy would score a quick victory; and (3) that England and France would intervene militarily. When none of these hopes came to fruition, the Confederate government faced a protracted war without the necessary industrial base to supply an army. No matter how good the Southern generals were, or the quality of the Southern soldiers, they were unable to sustain a long war against an industrial nation.
U. of Bremen prof. emeritus Dr. Gunnar Heinsohn finds evidence of a cometary catastrophe causing a wave of destruction in the Mediterranean around 300AD which spelled the end of the Roman Empire and left humanity in a dark age that only recovered during the Enlightenment which kicked off the Industrial Revolution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYuG8iFEVrc
Will watch, but I remember something about this in college years ago.
Rome was a slave state. So much so, we can’t comprehend it.
It distorted their economy to the point where “labor saving” devices were viewed as a problem since they had some much excess labor, if they weren’t used up they would get restless.
I wish I could find the book we were studying back then.
You try to do complex math with roman numerals....
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