I disagree heavily with a technological perspective to the Industrial Revolution. For a few reasons:
It ignores how the Industrial Revolution wasn’t just late to and concurrent with the Scientific Revolution—it specifically fueled its existence. Without the surpluses enabled by the Industrial Revolution, you couldn’t support a large enough middle class to draw future waves of engineers and scientists from. Military officers and noblemen are overrepresented in pre-industrial sciences for a reason. The Scientific Revolution would straight up not have happened without a huge middle class. What allowed the creation of the Middle Class?
So, there’s a problem with your feedback loop right there. It has the relationship backwards in my opinion.
The technological prerequisites for an Industrial Revolution have been in place for centuries. Why didn’t it happen? You say it was a feedback loop, how could the feedback loop sustain itself to begin with? Or even get started? What was the nature of this trigger, and how could it be replicated?
I disagree heavily with a technological perspective to the Industrial Revolution. For a few reasons:
It ignores how the Industrial Revolution wasn’t just late to and concurrent with the Scientific Revolution—it specifically fueled its existence. Without the surpluses enabled by the Industrial Revolution, you couldn’t support a large enough middle class to draw future waves of engineers and scientists from. Military officers and noblemen are overrepresented in pre-industrial sciences for a reason. The Scientific Revolution would straight up not have happened without a huge middle class. What allowed the creation of the Middle Class?
So, there’s a problem with your feedback loop right there. It has the relationship backwards in my opinion.
The technological prerequisites for an Industrial Revolution have been in place for centuries. Why didn’t it happen? You say it was a feedback loop, how could the feedback loop sustain itself to begin with? Or even get started? What was the nature of this trigger, and how could it be replicated?