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 ...
The Roman Empire in the west wound up under a series of non-Roman emperors, but the institutional memory and professional expertise that kept everything running didn't stick around, or was killed, enslaved, etc. The Roman Empire's continuity was in the eastern part of the Empire, and that may have something to do, also, with the fact that the Anatolian provinces and Egypt, with its trade with India, had for centuries generated a great deal of the imperial income.
The truth is, the Roman Empire did have an industrial revolution that fed from and led to the Roman military. The toldinstone guy discusses the pottery industry, but it wasn't just tableware, it was architectural prefabs, the aqueducts, the rest of the water and sewer systems, and probably stuff that slips my mind (that happens a lot).
There was also mining and processing, which again fed the needs of the military, but also the currency system, and metal was widely used for households and tools.
Defacto bribery was one of the methods used to keep the frontiers quiesent -- nothing like protection money, just providing goods to the backwoods rubes that elevated their rulers' status and were not available otherwise.
That book I'm still reading, "The Roman Empire in the Indian Ocean", is a good one btw. The scale of trade for stuff like various kinds of incense, spices (like pepper, which was shipped in the 10s or 100s of tons from the east), abrasive sand (that's how the Romans and the Egyptians before them shaped stones for construction), exotic animals, and other things that don't strike us as particularly industrial -- but the ships were numerous and had to be manufactured.
Gunnar Heinsohn also thinks the Harappan civilization is thousands of years younger and actually the remains of post-Alexandrian Hellenistic kingdoms.
“Gunnar Heinsohn holds a university diploma in sociology (1971) and doctorates in the social sciences (1973) and in economics (1982).”
Yeah, if they’d only used those numerals in inscriptions, it would have been a lot easier on them as they tottered on for over 1800 years.
https://www.google.com/search?q=roman+abacus
A while back, here in the hallowed virtual halls of FR, someone cited, or rather mentioned, that the Emperor Vespasian viewed a demonstration of a labor-saving method of moving large stones. It was remarkable, so he bought the whole works, but only to keep it from being employed, because he had a lot of people who needed to be kept employed dragging stones around. Vespasian and his two sons made up the Flavian Dynasty, which left us the Colosseum for example.
The Romans were no more corrupt or deviant than any other people in history.
The Roman Empire began during the so-called Republic period, with the conquest of Ostia, and went on until just 39 years before Columbus set sail into the west.
BTW, the Romans did have a wall in Germany and on other frontiers. They served the same purpose as Hadrian’s Wall, limiting access in and out, and collecting taxes on imports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_(Roman_Empire)
The culprit for the death of roman civilazation these days is widely thought to be the muslims. They completely destroyed the roman civilization and tech on the south side of mediterranian and spain. that generally known and accepted. recent research has shown that muslim raiders flattened every coastal city on the north side of the mediterranian between 700-1000 ad.
What the Muslim breakout did was destroy Mediterranean trade & trade links. Such as cut off Roman civilization from Middle Eastern and Asian\Indian ocean trade, grain from Egypt, etc.
It’s very difficult to imagine what things would be like today if the steam engine had been invented two thousand years earlier.
What people miss are is the moral revolution that occurred with the IR. Until quite recent history when people looked at these two scenarios:
1) Stealing 10 shillings from a village wagon maker
2) Opening a competing wagon maker that put the first one out of business
They would see #2 as a greater or equal crime to #1. That is what needed to change.
The ancients in Japan perfected the art of sword-making to a level that has never been equaled even in modern times. Now this is not mass production, but it still entails a carefully designed process, which is a valuable technology (or technique) in itself.
There's a presumption that machines and gadgets are what constitute "technology". But look at the rise of internet. Yes, it was enabled by computing and fiberoptic technology, but the key innovation enabling the net to take over the world was cooperation and language standardization on HTML, CSS, Javascript, search engines, etc.
In the chart below you'll notice that it took quite a number of years for the internet to evolve into what it is today.
Yes, the Hero steam engine is a good demonstration of the power of steam but to have real concentrate power a reciprocating steam engine is needed to produce instantaneous torque. Perhaps with personal intellectual property rights someone would have prefected the design during Roman times.
Compared to their peers at the time, Roman engineers did represent an industrial revolution. It is is facile and misleading to confuse technology with progress in industry.
Laziness is the true Mother of Invention.
You are, of course correct. But still, the Romans were really close in a technical sense, to the beginning of the 1700s. Gun powder, windmills, and the compass, and they’d have never fallen.
Yes, so God had to step in and slow things down a bit so we had 1000 years of the Dark Ages.
And then when technology started back up again, it was still too fast, so God brought in the Black Plague.
But it was still marching along at too brisk a pace, so God gave us The Hundred Years War.............
People are amazed that the Aztecs could have wheels on toys but never adapt the wheel to actual transportation in the adult world, but 1) they didn't have large animals to pull wagons and (more importantly) 2) in "Afroeurasia" inventions in one place made their way to other lands far away. That didn't happen in the Americas.
So the barbarian invasions happened, pagans killing Christians and pagans, overwhelming the Roman Empire, because humans have no free will.
That’s not the point, God wanted to slow down man’s accumulation of knowledge because it was proceeding too fast. From steam power to the Manhattan Project took only a little over a century. Imagine if the Medieval kings of Europe had access to nuclear weapons!.................
Yeah, the oxcart delivery system would be inefficient.
The complete lack of free will is indeed the point. The explanation isn't really an explanation, even in theology, it's a way to avoid responsibility and avoid examination.
Had the line of technology followed the same path upwards that it did from the late 1700’s to the mid 20th Century, they would also have had aircraft, steamships and other motor vehicles, somewhere around the time of the Vikings................
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