Were the Romans close to an Industrial Revolution? (Part 1)
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- Опубліковано 28 кві 2024
- This is the first part of a two-video series exploring why an industrial revolution never took place in the Roman Empire.
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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
2:29 Three Fables about the Roman economy
4:27 Surfshark
5:43 Mass production
7:37 Mining
8:30 Water power
9:06 Steam power
Thanks for watching!
“Rome are you having an industrial revolution?”
Rome: “no that’s just steam, from the steamed clams we’re having! Mmm, steamed clams!”
Underrated 😂
GOOD LORD, what is happening in THERE?
“Aurora Borealis.”
“Aurora Borealis? At this time of the year? In the Mediterranean?”
HAHAHA i'm dead. I probably woke up my neighbor by laughing.
"May I... see it?
A point often overlooked when talking about whether an industrial revolution based on the steam engine could have arisen elsewhere than Britain is that steam engines consume huge amounts of fuel to run. To the Romans it would seem much more efficient to run machines on water or muscle power than on costly steam for which fuel would need to be sourced from forests. What made Britain special was that they had already started to mine coal for heating homes due to a lack of firewood before the steam engine came about and when the British steam engine was developed it became viable first as a means to run the pumps that drained the coal mines of water and it was viable because the coal to run it was readily available in the mine. Afterwards the steam engine could then also be used to run the river barges bringing the coal to the British cities. Thus in Britain unlike everywhere else the chicken and the egg problem of the steam engine was solved, because what it was used for was making the very fuel that it ran on more available. Only because of this did the steam engine become viable.
Meh. Roman's burned dung in field.
@@fathertime9433 The Romans did not have any fuel source with as much energy by weight as coal has, so burning dung is not enough to run a steam engine in a sustainable way.
"huge amounts of fuel" immediately made me think "where would they have gotten that fuel from?" - one answer would have been "Germania - forest covered with vast reserves of coal and lignite". Never mind the then-unknown ecological consequences, once they chopped down the forests, they would have found the easy to mine lignite. With that you are talking serious power. Then the coal of the Ruhr area. So, alternate history time: had they conquered that area, would they have had the energy sources for an industrial revolution? (and irreversible climate change kicking in a thousand years earlier, what fun!). I recommend Kirk Mitchell's enjoyable trilogy in this context.
I don't have the expertise or information to do the the math to compare coal vs. charcoal for energy density, particularly when you consider harvesting trees with hand tools. But the Romans certainly would have been able to produce mass amounts of charcoal, which makes it an energy source worth considering. I don't mean to argue specifically for or against the idea that they "could" have reached a revolution, but it's something that may have had the potential to make it work. And as noted above, forests are as abundant as your ignorance of global climate patterns can make them.
odd. it's weird to think how different the direction humanity would have taken without that.
I lie awake at night wondering why Romans didn’t invent the printing press.
You had the screw press for grapes. It was right there!
Same reason why it wasn't invented 1 year earlier. There wasn't a strict need for it and no one implemented the idea. Even after it was made some people didn't see the need for it.
"He who ceases from zeal for writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures."
@@chickenn.waffles1558 Interesting!
Another example of Waffles' point -- In the late 70s and early 80s, personal computers were frequently derided as a "solution looking for a problem."
Yet another factor is that the printing press isn't the only way to mass-print things. To the best of my knowledge they _did_ use wood block and stone block cuts for printing, they just didn't use movable type. And frankly, without movable type, you both don't need the printing _press,_ and don't maximize your ability to print text.
So, it's _not_ the lack of a printing press that you should look at, it's the lack of movable type to _justify_ the printing press.
Something to keep in mind about scribes (hand copying books) vs printing press (mass producing books). Well, a couple things to keep in mind:
Firstly, with the earliest printing presses, setting up a page to print took about the same amount of time as writing it out by hand. This means that producing a single copy is actually more expensive with a press than a scribe, because while both use the same amount of ink and paper and time, the press also requires an expensive machine to purchase and maintain.
Secondly, the nature of book-copying is that scribes weren't Ye Olde Bookstores, with copies of books to try and entice people into buying. The scribe really only marketed themselves, and people came to them with the book they wanted a copy of and why/how they needed it copied. For example, while you have the obvious need for a second copy to give to a friend, you also have people needing replacement copies for older books, a more lavish version of a book they loved but only have a cheap copy of, a smaller or more portable version (eg a Christian farmer wanting a small copy of Luke and Acts that he can take out into the fields and read over lunch instead of lugging around a full bible), or even a 'large print' version for aging eyes.
In the face of all that, a printing press cannot compete with a scribe. Early presses are only economically superior to scribes when multiple copies are in play. Once the initial "first copy" time is spent in setting up the page, any copies beyond the first are extremely cheap and can be produced in minutes or even seconds compared to a scribe having to spend the same amount of time on copy 2 and copy 3 and so on as they did the first copy.
TL;DR - the printing press requires a change in business operations. A scribe cannot reasonably stock a bookstore-style setup, their time is entirely spent fulfilling customer requests. A printing press cannot survive off such requests, it has to generate an inventory of multiple copies and then get people to buy books they had no intention of buying. We're used to that in our day and age, to be constantly bombarded by marketing for things people are selling us, or to even willingly and knowing walk into a store with the intention of seeing what's available and if anything catches our eyes.
With scribes, that kind of market simply didn't exist. So inventing the printing press isn't just about the mechanical invention itself, and all the complexity and trial and error and such that that takes. It also requires figuring out how to change people's relationship with the product so that they're open to buying things without themselves being the ones to request it.
A good example is the Christian bible. Mass producing a book in a society that's mostly illiterate and where if the average person owns a book, it's already going to be the Bible, meant that printers had to come up with ways to get people to buy a book they couldn't read and/or already owned a copy of. Not exactly an immediate impulse buy, as it were. In some cases, they focused on specialized bibles, such as scholarly or academic editions that would appeal to clergy and university staff. In other cases, they marketed their editions as the most accurate and would insinuate that the hand-copied versions being handed down generation to generation were riddled with errors (which, admittedly, was often true).
With estimates that roughly 90% of the Roman world being illiterate, I imagine there just wasn't the kind of potential customer base that would have made a printing press operation successful, even if one had been invented. In fact, it's not entirely implausible to imagine that such a press may have been invented at some point, but remains unknown because it essentially bombed economically and was thus immediately forgotten about.
Everyone gangsta until Industrial Rome arrives 😳😳
Haha
Veritas
Real and true
Recte
*Teutoburg forest joins the chat*
There's a very odd alternate timeline where everything lines up perfectly and the Romans invented the internet.
I started to draw a comic once where the Romans in 2006 have the technology we'd have in 2806, they test out a teleporter and "switch" a soldier with some people from our world. It didn't get far.
They did, their roads are the walls of the empire and allow rapid communication between all parts
That would be pog
@@worldcomicsreview354 I would read that comic
This is how the Civ games were born
The Romans were superb civil engineers for their time. The fact that they were not able to completely master mechanics should not be held against them.
Seriously. Aqueducts a hundred miles in length.
Also funny how we define master.
In the future, what inventions will be obvious missed opportunities we just skated on by, with all the parts in place just no one right person person put them all together?
Rome falling set humanity back 1000 years
@@CastledCard I've wondered about that, but it is hard to say. Same could probably be said of many historic civilizations. Just look where the world is at now.
There are real examples where the Greeks discovered scientific principles, that were in turn rejected by the Romans. An example is that the Greeks determined flow in a pipe was more related to the area, for the Romans they estimated it by diameter. Many hold Roman science/technology a pretty big step back from the Greeks. And Rome should have been able to assimilate Greek science fairly easily.
There's a tiny island just 100m off my local beach here in southern Spain(visible from my roof terrace) and the remains of the Roman garum factory are still there. I'm right next to the main town square and this is the exact same square that was the local Roman forum. It fascinates me as I sit in the square and imagine that Roman citizens sat in the exact same spot 2,000 years ago.
As an Australian stories like yours depress me. Australia is a great modern nation & you are stupidly lucky to be born here, but the history compared with Europe (& most of the rest of the world) is so lacking.
We have a pub here feted for its historical value to the nation. It’s only been here since the 1830’s!
@@ddc2957 Funnily enough, I lived in Australia for 10 years for work purposes, but I always felt empty being away from Europe, and especially the Mediterranean. A Portuguese friend over there joked that the house he grew up in was older than the founding of Australia. :D I also worked in the U.S for a few years when I was younger and felt the very same. There was always something missing that can never be replaced. a yearning to be surrounded by ancient history.
Not to depress you any more, but my local city of Cartagena was founded by Hasdrubal himself(brother-in-law to Hannibal) and conquered by none other than Scipio Africanus. We are truly spoiled here in Iberia for the wealth of history.
You should visit the Mediterranean. There is no other place on earth that has its magic.
I console myself with the fact that 230+ years of peace does not a romantic story make, but it has been one of the key foundations to Australian prosperity. As has been said, “Since Australia’s federation, Europe has been pasted flat twice by war, Africa & the Middle East decimated by regional conflicts & global interference, Asia struck by genocide & famine, & South America in permanent turmoil.”
Sometimes boring ain’t all that bad LOL.
Curious to know what the tiny island is??
@@Imladris-lm3bo It's called Isla del Fraile(monk/friar) named for the monk's hood silhouette of the island.
“The higher ups weren’t interested in technologies unless they could make money off of it”
Ah people never change
Yeah how is that different to today 😂
because if you don't make money that presumes no one wants it. Profit is a signal that allows you to keep producing for people, If there is no profit, there is no demand for that product or else that'd be making money
Humans are an idiot species... They want to cool down the planet, when an ice age is coming, haha!
@@sdaniel9129 what are you talking about
@@fctucycy8v8yvy67 he thinks he's a scientist 😭 an ice age is probably thousands or hundreds of years away. We need to cool the planet RN
Even columns were produced in an standardized way in multiple sizes.
When some of the Pantheon’s columns had to be replaced in modern times (18th century?), replacements could still be found among the surviving Roman structures with the correct length.
The Pantheon columns are original. But they're too short for the building. The theory is that the columns meant for the Pantheon's porch were lost at sea on their way over from Egypt, and that shorter columns from another project were substituted. You can see the outline of where the porch roof was intended to be on the facade of the buliding, above the roof which was built.
@@robertyoung4275In 1626 and 1666, three columns on the eastern side were replaced. Two of those are known to have come from the baths of Severus Alexander. They were in a standard size of 40’.
Source: Roman Architecture, John B. Ward-Perkins, 1979
So they are all antique, but not original to this building.
There is an image somewhere that shows a construction between the columns. When this was demolished, I imagine the surface of the columns had been damaged.
Fake history
@@fathertime9433 what is fake?
@@adrianrichardson5257 Some people believe « they » have lied to us about history. It is all fake. Crazy level here is off the charts: mud flood, Tartaria. Ridiculous stuff but some will call you brainwashed if you try to give them facts.
I tried to argue in a thesis as an undergrad that garum or fish sauce in general left the European diet generally because by 410 it was exclusively an industrialized production and the knowledge of its processing was limited to a handful of technicians. My instructor was hardly impressed. Will you cite the title of the Carthaginian agriculture treatise that was translated into Latin and which you mentioned?
If you google "carthage agriculture", the second link that comes up is the works of Mago. They copied Mago's agricultural treatise.
The Byzantines ate Garum religiously throughout the middle ages and put it on everything
@@histguy101 and yet where is garum now? I have not heard any mention of fish sauce in Balkan cuisine or in any of the areas under the Byzantine empire. Your mention of Byzantine religious practices actually supports my thesis that with the collapse of an empire, the concentrated large scale production of garum ended with the collapse of the economy
@@dorothyscott2536 It's evident from what I've just been reading on the source that Mago's writing influenced Virgil's The Georgics
@@annarboriter it's an expression, like "they ate garum obsessively," not that it literally served a religious purpose. It was like their national sauce.
I don't know where it is now, but it was still popular in the 10th-11th century.
Years ago, I read an excellent sci-fi story about a fellow with a time machine who took modern tech back to the ancient Mediterranean world in hopes of changing the course of history. He didn't return from the journey, so most people assumed it was a failure. Then the narrator said that it had obviously been a success. The ancients came close as you've pointed out, but they lacked the societal infrastructure to carry it out.
Can I request the name of the novel?
Can you tell the title? I'm definitely interested
come on man, don't leave us hanging like this, we need the name!
Spill it
@@user-fn5pu7go9o sarude dandstorm
Now i've been wondering recently if there were people in ancient Rome that collected coins the same way we do today. I can't seem to find any information on it, and its just a neat idea that people today are still doing the things that people were doing thousands of years ago.
i have no doubt people collected coins back then
Wealthy Romans certainly collected all kinds of things, so I wouldn't be surprised if some collected foreign or ancient artefacts. They wouldn't have had access to as wide a range of coins as the modern day however.
Thanks i appreciate the information! I forgot about the wealthy Roman’s collections of oddities and rarities. With that in mind, yes, it is quite possible that the Romans may not have collected old coin necessarily, but foreign ones. Thank you for the new prospective on this!
They did indeed! Augustus liked to hand out rare old coins to his party guests.
@@toldinstone It's true. I did.
I read a biography of James Watt and the difficulty of building an efficient stream engine. He had viable designs for efficient engines, but the main difficulty was building them to the required precision, one of the difficulties was finding sober and patient workers. The work also needed precise machine tools which were in their infancy, Most metalworkers of the day were blacksmiths, who shaped metal by brute force but he finally succeeded after about 2 decades of effort. It's probably been 30 years since I read it, but it was an interesting read into the early days of the industrial revolution in modern times.
Yeah not many people know Watt’s engine cylinder was bored by the man who invented a new way to hollow out cannons and was famous in his own right (but I forgot his name)
So much of Roman history focuses on the emperors and the senate and wars between all these peoples, you never hear much about the place itself.
This was fascinating and really well done! I didn't realize that things weren't more locally processed, especially the giant water flour mill thing was REALLY surprising.
You should check out Mary Beard as she devotes a lot of time discussing the lives of normal people and "everyday" stuff.
because it's massive and lasted for quite a long time. there's a ton of history it would take forever to learn about it in school or something
Depends on your sources. If you only watch or read things about Roman Emperors and army(although in this field they were also very inventive), obviously you will miss informations about subject debated in this video.
In the end the Romans are just gonna have more slaves to rape. Cant we just stop fanboying over this civilization of hypocrites? you know Christianity was just a Church full of kid molesting priest and clergy men. Christ died on the cross which is the symbol of Roman dominance killing a God.
@@bobfrog4836 damn
Professor J.E. Gordon, in his book "The New Science of Strong Materials," casually tossed off the fact that Greek colonists in Sicily routinely reinforced their buildings with cast-iron beams 12 feet long and 18 inches wide. He noted that anybody with the technology to cast iron in that size could certainly have made it into boilers, rails, etc., and concludes that the only reason the Greeks never did that was that their minds weren't attuned to that sort of thing. The Romans' minds, though -- given their enthusiasm for road-building and empire-building -- certainly were...
Except that cast iron was nothing like the cast iron the british had in the 18th century. Neither the romans nor the greeks had the theoretical knowledge of physics nor geometry to create effective steam engines nor industry with interchangeable parts.
I’ve always been keen to the idea that a lot of the “frivolousness” in late Roman science and engineering is created by later European scientists and engineers who couldn’t figure a practical or industrial use for some of the Roman technologies. Snuck into a friend’s classical engineering history (sort of how it sounds) lecture and the unit was on Iberian stone cutting devices. A student asked if there was anything else than stone cutting and mining, the professor sort of shrugged and gave a wishy washy answer.
When they knew all along that the ancients must have figured out some kind of stone softener in order to craft such perfect masonry with only stone and soft metal tools! Either that or the aliens and their lasers!
@@mtn1793 its silly to think about nowadays, but instead of general education, most people were trained from a young age in a few specific crafts. but the device in question were a roman era wet stone mill sort of thing. basically using water to cut through stone in a controlled matter with the aid of a specific sort of saw.
I never knew the Romans actually made things with blown glass!
Pun intented, I'm absolutely blown away! Why didn't they tried to make distillation apparatus and other stuff as well?
may i ask how the romans produced their glassware in any other kind?
Glass blowing is big in Venice if you ever find yourself there. On one of the secondary islands you can watch them work
@@andrewcornelio6179 wrong link. directed me to a song video, but thanks for explaining!
@@andrewcornelio6179 Thanks for the warning. I was about to get rickrolled.
Look for a Corning Museum lecture called Innovation in Early Glass: The Road Enion.
Dr. Ryan, your channel has so quickly become a favorite for me! Thanks for putting out this content in such a digestible format.
I think they would have needed better steel technology and more info on magnetics and electricity before they could have made the leap. But it's really interesting to see where they were. Thanks! Looking forward to part 2!
That leap into a better understanding of the development of stronger steels and alloys likely would have happened. After developing a few small machines and scaling them up to only discover the metals they have can not hold the pressures needed would likely have ignited the advancement and discovery of such metals. It is kind of the same thing that had taken place with the industrial revolution, there was a TON of trial and error that drove advancement, etc.
It's a similar thing with the Baghdad battery it could function as a battery although very weak it shows that at least our ancestors had made some connections
@@27Zangle yeah but I think by the industrial revolution there was more people hence more trial and error. Back then majority were still peasants or slaves. It's why we need more people educated and not holding them back with poverty but that's another story
@@monsterhunter445 The main reason these time and cost saving inventions were not used was that slave labour made them artificially more expensive in comparison.
@@27Zangle Roman ironmongery is significantly behind that of even the late medieval. The Roman's used bloomery furnaces to smelt iron and create steel which is an incredibly limited method compared to the blast furnace; it's unreliable, burns at a much lower temperature leaving more impurities and has a much smaller yield. It was a dead end technology adapted from earlier bronze smelting practices that needed to be seriously reworked in order to handle the greater demands of iron smelting.
Even if they were experimenting with steam power, they lacked the metallurgy to harness that steam power as the steam pressure needed to do really useful work would have likely been too high for the Roman metals of the time.
The industrial revolution was the result of multiple different technologies and methodologies coming together at the same time.
Individually none of those technologies or methods would be been particularly useful or viable on their own.
Don't forget that early steam engines were entirely vacuum based. You don't need terribly precise machining or consistent metallurgy to produce a basic vacuum based steam engine. Such engines are frightfully inefficient though, and only really made sense for draining coal mines, in which case fuel is readily available. But if there's no great demand for coal and no need to dig deep for it, then there's no point in bothering making such engines.
Also, the usefulness of coal vs charcoal improved enormously in the 1700's when the coking process became widespread. It made fossil coal far more suitable for metal production and other sulphur sensitive processes, which both made iron enormously cheaper, but also boosted the demand for coal quite a lot.
I suspect what demand there was for fossil coal in Roman times could be met by far more accessible deposits near the surface.
While true, they could have used steam for toys and to power mechanical musical instruments. And thus lay the groundwork for steam power thousands of years before the technology to build powerful steam engines.
@@HA-gu1qk But you wouldn't have either of those without the steam engine to lay the necessary groundwork
In the end the Romans are just gonna have more slaves to rape. Cant we just stop fanboying over this civilization of hypocrites? you know Christianity was just a Church full of kid molesting priest and clergy men. Christ died on the cross which is the symbol of Roman dominance killing a God.
Musson and Robinson pointed out in Science and Technology and the Industrial Revolution 1971, there were numerous factors, not only technological but socio-economic behind the Industrial Revolution. In fact, France was the leading scientific nation in the 18th Century but did not industrialize. The widespread dissemination of scientific knowledge in the UK was a factor along with economic ones. I will discuss below the role of Indian maths in the Scientific Revolution and what actually happened in Britain's Industrial Revolution in terms of financing and suppression of Indian competition in textiles and steel etc.
A crucial factor ignored by the Eurocentric Westerners (who conflate 'scientific' with 'European') in regard to Ancient Greece and Rome [rehashing Colonial era Classics' misrepresentations of Greek shamans and mystics as 'scientists'] is that Modern Science could not have developed without Indian mathematics. Most of what the West called Modern Maths in the Renaissance was in fact Indian. Modern Arithmetic, Algebra, Trigonometry and even Calculus all originated in India - see Christian Yates' '5 Ways Ancient India Changed the World with Maths' in The Conversation online. Cambridge professor John Barrow described the Indian Number System [decimal place value system with zero], the greatest ever intellectual invention made by humans, the nearest thing to a universal language. Laplace wrote that we do not appreciate the genius of Indian number system as it appears to be so simple - yet it was beyond the greatest mathematicians of Ancient Greece - Archimedes and Apollonius.
The arrival of Indian maths [Leornardo Bonacci of Pisa (Fibonacci) translated Al Khwarizmi's translations of Indian arithmetic and algebra into Latin] was equivalent to the modern development of computers in facilitating calculations in terms of speed and accuracy. Richard Teresi tells us that Late-medieval Italians paid to watch mathematicians at fairs do amazing calculations such as 14 times 27 in their head using Indian Arithmetic as this appeared magical.
Way back in 1817 Henry Colebrooke showed that modern Algebra is based on Ancient Hindu Algebra known as bijaganita. Colebrooke noted that al-Khwarizmi had also translated an Indian Astronomical work which must have utilized Hindu Algebra. He then framed astronomical tables based on those of the Hindus. In the 5thCentury, perhaps earlier, the Hindus had already developed algebraic methods extending to the general solution of both determinate and indeterminate problems of the 1st and 2nd degrees. They subsequently advanced to the special solution of biquadratics wanting the second term and of some simple cubic equations . In India and China mathematics was largely algebraic whilst in Greece, mathematics was typified by Geometry. In fact, the Greeks had inherited Babylonian algebra but did not make any significant improvements to it. A method of resolving maths problems by reduction to equations was not to be found in any Greek until Diophantus around 360 c.e. Colebrooke notes that Diophantus’s work is very far behind that of the Hindus. The Hindu Algebra was far superior to that of Diophantus, with a better and more comprehensive algorithm; management of equations with more than one unknown term; the resolution of equations of a higher order and anticipating the modern discovery of solutions for biquadratics; general methods for solution of indeterminate problems of 1st and 2nd degrees going far beyond Diophantus and anticipating discoveries by ‘modern’ (i.e. European) algebraists; and the application of Algebra to astronomical investigation and geometrical demonstration where again the medieval Hindus made mathematical discoveries and methods that were repeated centuries later in ‘modern’ Europe.
A few days ago in regard to Russian Oligarchs in Britain I posted this comment which shows how Britain's Industrial Revolution was linked to India's Deindustrialization by the British.
Robert Clive returned from India with his 'loot' [the Hindi word for plunder] as the richest [non-monarch] man in Europe. His East India Co. mafiosi henchmen became the new super-rich 'nobs' (from 'nawabs') and often bought up parliamentary seats - the Pitt family made their fortune looting India. Meanwhile, 1/3 of the population of Bengal Province [inc. modern Orissa and Bihar] - some 10 million died in the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 due to the rapacity of the Brits. Richard Becher [relative of William M. Thackeray] had predicted this 'Ruin of Bengal' which had been the richest province in Mughal India [which had 27% of global GDP before British occupation]. The Ruin of Bengal also led to economic crisis in Europe as dozens of banks collapsed in days as looted Indian wealth dried up for a while and Adam Smith had to delay his 'Wealth of Nations'.
As research published by Columbia UP showed in 2018, the British stole some US$45 Trillion from India over two centuries which financed the Industrial Revolution and much else in Britain and its white settler colonies [see Jason Hickel's article online]. They also killed tens of millions of Indians by exporting India's foodgrains for British Food Security and profit including the setting up of Death Camps which gave less starvation rations than Buchenwald for hard labour to victims of the 1877 Madras Famine killing 7 million [whilst record amounts of exports of Indian foodgrains lowered prices for Westerners]. George Orwell wrote that 100 million Indians must be forced to starve so that the British can live the way that they do.
The British also deindustrialized India which had dominated manufacturing exports in textiles. H.H. Wilson wrote in 1853 that Manchester and Paisley could not have risen, even with steam power without the systematic elimination of competition from cheaper and superior Indian handloom cottons. This included the breaking of weavers' fingers and the cutting off of thumbs of Dhaka Muslin [which cost many times the price of silk] weavers as well as tariff barriers and creating a Captive Market for British goods. Governor General William Bentinck wrote that the plains of India are bleached with the bones of her weavers. In the 1790s English experts declared Indian Wootz the best steel in the world and Sheffield copied its techniques but Indian steelmaking was stifled to suppress competition. India had been a major shipbuilder and continued to be in the early British-rule - the oldest seaworthy ship in the Royal Navy is HMS Trincomalee built in 1817 by an Indian company in Bombay of superior Indian hardwoods. But soon afterwards, British shipbuilders stopped shipbuilding competition in India. As Shashi Tharoor tells us in Inglorious Empire, Indian engineers showed that they could design and build locomotives and thus the Brits stopped such manufacturing as well. Even during the 1939-45 war [when British Empire admirer Hitler wanted to make Ukraine and Russia Germany's 'India'], the British refused US plans to make aircraft factories in India as they did not want an independent India postwar to compete.
After the war the British [and the postwar USA - following George Kennan's strategy of holding Asia down as poor compared to the West ] refused to help India build a steelmill at Bhilai saying stick to your traditional raw materials! The Brits created the First World/Third World schism and tried to maintain it. It was the USSR that stepped in and helped build Bhilai. They also built India's first Institute of Technology. This - not arms sales is what led to the strong Indo-Soviet and then Indo-Russian partnership and friendship!
Naive time-traveler: "I have a machine that can farm a field that would take 50 men to do!"
Roman: "Why do you think I have 50 slaves?" Laughs and walks away.
Yeah I'm skeptical about Romans wanting to "make the most" of their slaves, but not wanting any labor-saving machines.
The cotton gin revolutionized the cotton industry and actually led to an *increase* in slavery at a time when it was actually dying out.
@@brandondavidson4085 Actually paying wages and having very little invested in each worker makes labor saving devices more obviously valuable. If you are already invested in slaves, there is a loss in switching to less workers that isn't shared by someone paying wages and firing people or hiring fewer.
The value of man hours saved can be calculated in dollars paid to wages, the same unit you spend making the investment in labor saving.
As someone else already pointed out the cotton gin was one of the largest spikes in the slave trade. The cotton gin allowed for the same amount of work to be done by a much smaller number of people. At first glance you'd think there would be less need for slaves. But that's the opposite of what happened. Instead people saw the efficacy and realized that if they went the other way and increased the number of slaves their production could reach heights never before thought possible.
Roman farmers didn't own slaves, only high status people did
Why do people comment without even watching the video?
3:57
I thought I knew everything interesting about Rome that could be summarized in a 10 minute video but every time you upload I learn something new and fascinating. This is definitely my favorite history channel, thanks for doing what you do!
Here, here for Part 2, ASAP! Thanks toldinstone. Much appreciate the videos.
Hey Garrett, just finished my listen of Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators and War Elephants on audiobook. Great work.
Just bought your book really excited to read it! I've gotten into a hole of wanting to learn as much as possible about the ancient world and you've been a fantastic resource to learn from and provide starting points to do more research on. Keep it up buddy!
This is a fascinating topic, I love hearing about roman technology and industry, and I'm excited for part 2.
Something that really springs to mind is that most of the 19th century innovations that people fixate on, like steam engines, wouldn't have been possible without Benjamin Huntsman's crucible steel. Iron with layers that had high carbon content certainly existed in the 1st century AD, but without homogenous steel it's virtually impossible to make the huge load bearing beams that Brunel designed, or pressure bearing vessels like a steam engine boiler.
Another absolutely beautiful video! Mass-production in antiquity is especially absolutely fascinating. I look forward to part 2
Excellent topic! Can’t wait for part 2
I absolutely love your choice of topics for these videos!
Feels like Sid Meier's Civilization game...
Imperial Steam Punk should be a thing.
Definitely! The greeks had a shot at it too. Perhaps ancient chinese and Egyptians with a little more progress
Great video! I especially liked the paintings you included in this one they were really fun to look at!
Amazing content yet again! I love that everytime I check your channel, I see you have more and more subscribers! 🙏🙏
The distraction we all need right now. Can't wait for part 2! :D
The Romans lacked 2 things that prevented them from inventing the Steam Engine. Biggest reason was they hadn't invented the cam shaft that changes the rotation energy into up/down motion required for work. The other reason was precise instruments that let them build piston's and cylinders with tight tolerances required for steam engines.
Cam or crank shaft?
They would have gotten there pretty quickly though. It was already common knowledge that rotational energy could be transferred to do work, they just did it with animals and people pushing and pulling things. You don't actually need to adjust it into up/down motion. Simply being able to transfer rotational motion to another rotating thing would have created many devices, even cars. A simple gear system would have made that energy transfer to chariot wheels to make it go. There are lots of crude ways to transfer motion. For example, a rotating disc with an L shaped rod pointing downward. Attach that to a cross bar with some hinges that attach to another hinge and bar that attaches to the inside of a wheel, and you can effectively use that to make wheels go. Or a system like a bike. Granted, they would have been extremely inefficient starting out, but still a vast improvement over horses for things like moving heavy loads. As time goes on, they would have improved upon the design. Even if they could make a steam powered chariot that only went 5-10 miles per hour, that would have been well worth it to them. 50-100 miles traveled in a single day was unheard of in Roman times, especially for heavy cargo. Rome would have propelled upwards very fast, even with big clunky steam powered machine. Same for boats. Steam powered boats in Roman times? It would have been insane. A propeller only needs to rotate. That requires no up or down motion. The camshaft is more about efficiency and design. The Romans could have built all kinds of contraptions with very simple gearing mechanisms. It wouldn't have been a huge leap to up/down motion, because they were already familiar with hydraulics. So a steam piston wouldn't have been far off, even if they had to have a person manually regulating it for each stroke. Some springs, a piston chamber, pushing a rod with a flat disc on the end down the chamber, where a mechanism on the end is rotated at the end of the disc to reveal holes to quickly to release the steam, and the spring the disc pushes against pushes the rod back down. There's your steam pressure creating a piston. Even if they had to have a guy whose only job was to do that once every second, it would have been worth it for what they could achieve with it for the time. Highly manual steam punk kind of stuff. But if it gets cargo somewhere in 3 hours instead of 3 days....well why not?
They could have directly gone to the Wankel turbine by perfecting Heron's device. They would then have realized what they were lacking as for metallurgy. They would have probably started with bronze, and then gone to alloys. That could have happened for the easiest in Romania which had the low hanging ressources and a close market in Constantinople. But that industry would never have grown to the scale we know now. It would have been applied only when really profitable in terms of spared ressources and work hours for the empire, especially the army, and not in terms of money for the bourgeois class.
Steam engines were built by blacksmiths buddy, hardly any tolerances there lmao.
@@outrun7455 Necessity is the mother of all invention. Romans had almost unlimited slave manpower. By the time they were short on manpower all these clever types were long dead.
Genuinely looking forward to the second part. Thanks for bringing this kind of sober yet fascinating history content to the platform, Garrett. Hope your hugely underrated channel gets the exposure it deserves in the coming year.
This is gonna be a good one!
Excellent video, and I’m looking forward to part two! I recently explored this topic on my own channel as well! While the Roman economy was certainly modern in many respects, I do think that one of the key factors that led Britain to the industrial process before most others is the roughy two hundred years of gradual social change the country had been undergoing, such as with the Enclosure Movement. A similar argument has been made for Song Dynasty China, especially with the California School branch of divergence studies
Do you have any recommended reading on the Roman economy? I’m familiar with Finley and couple of the big names, but it’s not really my area of focus
Thank you! You're right, of course - I touch on Britain's unique history (briefly) in Part II. In my opinion - and take it with a grain of salt, since this isn't my area of focus either - the best survey of the Roman economy is the The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, whose Roman chapters cover quite a bit of ground.
@@toldinstone thanks for that! I’m going to be reviewing your book on my channel once I finish it, im enjoying it so far. Hopefully it drives some sales and subscribers your way
Fascinating! I look forward to part two.
This is probably my favorite video topic in a while, great job!
On vacation in Rome now. A huge thanks to toldinstone for providing historic context!
Enjoy one of the most beautiful cities in the World, just be careful with the traffic! 😀
Yay! Naptime narrator voice is back 😊 I would actually pay to listen to you read bedtime stories.
I just realized, audiobooks are kinda like adult bedtime stories. Haha
He does have an excellent narration voice. Well paced and articulate.
His voice is similar to Jonathan Haidt’s.
Very true
Is a robot vocoder,?
@@Warios4Christians hwut
As always, thanks so much for these. I really appreciate and enjoy them. Best to you.....
I love your voice, and I love hearing you tell me about ancient Rome. Keep the great videos coming!
Was metallurgy and metal working developed enough to create steam engines in the 2nd century? You need pretty good tolerances to make it work. Pumps are easy - a one way valve can be as simple as a piece of leather.
I know they used valves to move water uphill via gravity alone, which would then fall onto a wheel powering a mill. That is almost better than steam, just constant energy, albeit a small amount considering the magnitude of construction required.
The first viable steam engines were built well before the first early-modern metal cutting lathes were built.
No. Roman metallurgy was not as advanced as what we had in the middle ages even
@@gregorymalchuk272 Steam _motors._
Engineering natural forces for useful purposes is basic and practical. What triggered the English or British revolution in industry begins not with simply harnessing steam but doing so with precision. I refer anyone to Simon Winchester's extraordinarily interesting book "Precision".Cheerio
/edit: the correct title: The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World".
Absolutely fantastic book.
"The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created..."?
@@petermuller3995 ah...correct title...thanks.
@@MemesOfProduction69 Indeed and among so many great books from the author. Cheers.
@@416dl I was asking, as the book sounds very interesting
i have an important aviation/flying examination tomorrow morning and toldinstone's vids always manage to mellow me out before bed while filling my brain with fascinating gems of knowledge about our ancient relatives. keep up the good work!! 💜
I know I'm extremely late, but I hope you did well!
@@ChatGPT_ChatbotTest thx! i have my Commercial Pilots license now
Cant wait for the second part! So fascinating!
Favorite video so far.
Such a great history channel. I've been learning lots, thanks for these. One of my biggest fascinations though is ancient Egypt, could anyone point me to a channel similar to TIS but for ancient Egypt?
Thank you for your knowledge your putting into these videos🙏
I'm really glad I discovered your channel, great stuff :)
I think it was simply the mentality. Great Britain perfected the steam engine because it had an intense desire to transport goods from India to all parts of the world to fulfill contracts on time. Steam engines were mostly used for ships. Most Romans did not fret about shipping delivery times as the concept of a contracted deadline wasn't really perfected so who cares if you're late? Great Britain basically developed the idea of a universal standard of measuring time. The concept of a shared time created the concept of contractual deadlines which created the need for speed thus leading to innovation in steam. The Big Ben clock tower felt so significant to Londoners for a reason.
For Romans there was no pressure for time to market because it was challenging for deadlines to be officiated over by the courts. All that they had at the time were sundials and perhaps hourglasses and water clocks which were for sporadic needs. Additionally the idea of using coal to transport people possibly seemed much more costly compared to using horses that simply needed water, hay and rest.
Time has all to do with concurrency and competition, a factor that didn't play a role in the roman era. because much of the production and trade was monopolized by a the rich upper-class. The need for more production speeds up and peaks in times of war, so the pax romana in fact held production steadily at low level. The many wars britain fought in the centuries before formed the prelude to the industrial era.
This was way before India though 1600s
Romans had a pretty good system of contracted deadlines actually, you just needed a basic ex die stipulatio in your contract. Compared to a lot of roman contract law it is very straightforward.
No, first steam engines in Britain were used to pump water, later for trains.
No it's the other way around. Steam engines were originally used for transporting into and out of coal mines as well as production for things like making beer. It took several revolutions in steam generation and engines before steam could viably power ships for domestic use and then several more before there was enough efficiency to power long haul steam ships.
I remember hearing a lecture long ago about this. His proposal was that food was cheap so slaves were cheap. And since slaves could do almost anything you wanted them why build machines.
yea i heard it from Stefan Molyneux back before he was controversial
@@michaelmoran2125 that maybe where I heard it. Amazing what happens to the mind when you get old.
Don’t believe a word from Stefan Millicent
This one video is leagues ahead of most of the other history on UA-cam. Excellent! Subscribed!
Imagine how far we would be if the industrial revolution happened 2000 years ago? Like the actual industrial revolution happened only 200 years ago and look how far we've come.
The Romans were masters of gears to the point that they were building clockwork robots.
They were just beginning to tinker with steam and it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that steam could power things which had previously been powered by water, slaves and animals.
Had the Romans lasted another century they would have figured it out.
I agree with everything you said but keep in mind that rome already lasted 1000 years, i think another century wouldnt have changed anything
Each new subjet of your videos is cooler than the next.. Like I'm always sucked in ! Thanks
Thank you so much for all of your incredible content
very fascinating concept! Glad you decided to tackle it
This is something ive specifically thought about alot ever since i saw a random history channel show about ancient rome when i was a kid, and it showed Heros aeolipile. Ive always wondered why didnt they take the next step and try to use it somehow? They surely saw the rotational energy being created and had to think of uses?? great video
A very interesting topic! Well done with the video you had me glued to the video the whole time. This video even got me to subscribe. Best of luck!
This was extraorinarily informative and interesting. It popped up in my suggestions and now you've got a new subscriber. I am wondering though, when you talk about pipes in Roman times, of what material were they made?
Thanks!
Woaw
That's extremely generous. Thank you very much!
I also find the oft-overlooked Chinese oil tapping hundreds of years before Britain's Industrial Revolution. While the technological explosion wasn't as pronounced, it did have a significant impact on their quality of life in many aspects.
I was so excited when I heard you on American History Tellers! BTW, I’m an IPA aficionado too😂😘😘😘
Very cool stuff.
Keep this kinda content up!
I have to say, you have a gorgeous voice.
I was 30 seconds into your ad for Surfshark and I didn't even realize it was an ad.
Also a great video, the industrial revolution and the causes that lead Britain to it are fascinating, and why previous empires like Rome or China had not gone through it is an interesting subject.
Asking the same question with "Romans" replaced by "Chinese" is also interesting.
Nope. Current Chinese government has made all of China throughout history the bad guy. Sought to erase the Dynastic history yet it persisted but is now tainted by the current dogs in power.
@@beastminer147 crazy to think, how much they've lost during 'cultural revolution'
I think i read somewhere that the ancient chinese harnessed natural gases to fuel their iron smelters
amazing work !
This is good stuff bud! Keep it up!
There's no doubt in my mind the Romans knew more than we have discovered. They were amazing builders.
They lacked the institutions, imo.
How would Rome ruling class react if the power started to shift from the agrarian elite to some proto industrial elite? Wouldn't they ask the emperor to create laws to put an end to those iniciatives?
The imperial ruling class would oppose to anything that could cause some social unrest, or endager their position as the ruling ones.
Renember how absolutist monarchies in Europe opposed to any industrialziation as much as they could. Austrians and Russians speacially.
When Rome lacked of slaves, they enslaved their own people by creating the institution of "Coloni" (that later lead to the serfdom), how would a society like this develop to an industrialized one?
I am very much looking forward to watching this video :)
You have to be one of the best Rome channels on UA-cam for sure.
Was the Roman Empire the most complex civilization possible without the (major) use of fossil fuels??
I'd wager the chinese empire(s) were more complex at times but for as long as the romans lasted, in europe they definitely were.
Depends on how you define “complex” and “possible”.
“Slavery was expensive” is a statement with a lot of asterisks. It might be conceptually expensive, but those who made use of it found it more than affordable. During times when there were many war captives being bought back, slaves would most definitely have been cheaper. The legal protections offered would effect pricing, so on and so on.
I get my bristles up when I hear this because, although Roman slavery was obviously pretty different from the slavery in America, I hear it used as some notion that ‘slaves were treated well in the antebellum South, actually’ and that’s an outright falsehood that fuels a lot of genuinely harmful ideas.
Slavery wasn’t only in America
Really enjoy your videos and your book.
Another great job with a very interesting subject.
It would have been really interesting and cool if the romans had made more use of steam power but I don't think it would have looked anything like the industrial revolution in western nations during the 19th century. You gotta remember the romans didn't have the spinning wheel so mechanization of the textile industry wouldn't have happened.
Think about it…..what need would they have had for steam power? About the only need they had was to replace a waterwheel for a mill. Not much else stationary that would require rotational energy.
The argument that the Romans would have welcomed mechanization because slaves were expensive doesn't feel like solid argument to make. You only have to look at the pre-Civil War American South to see how resistant to any change a society with a slave-based economy becomes. There was a grudging acceptance of the cotton gin (because once it came into use on a few plantations, it allowed them to wildly out-produce their competition) but that was about it. Even the railroad was very slowly adopted in the American South; before the Civil War, there were single states in the north which had more miles of track than the entire South.
Why societies based on slave economies become so ossified when it comes to technological advancement is a question worth examining and one I don't feel fully qualified to answer.
The Roman economy wasn't actually slave-based in most aspects, as they almost universally made a point of having several times as many free workers as they had slaves- this was a measure against slave revolts. The US South both used slaves to compensate for the low population of workers, and also used the relatively large slave class to compensate for the lack of governmental recognition of aristocratic rank, neither of which was a limit for Rome.
At any rate, the South was also hindered by fear by the political class that they would strengthen or create new political rivals.
even brazil
Technology = social emancipation from the master = progressism.
This needs to be an.hour long special
I LOVE these videos. Thank you for posting them for us. DA
Congratulations to a well-researched episode. Your arguments are very good.
And this is coming from a person who is regulary attacking leading "economic experts" around the world for all the nonsense they say. Historians too often blindy and uncritically follow what earlier "economic historians" have written, which most of the time just leads to faulty assumptions about the past.
I salute your bravery for not just going along with the mainstream opinion.
When will the next part be released?
Next Friday
I like thinking about things that could have been. Thanks, I'll definitely watch this video
5:59 It is fascinating to see that Cyrene's "principal product" was Silphium. May we learn more of this healing plant.
Michael Grant reports in The World of Rome:
When Vespasian was offered a labor-saving machine for transporting heavy columns, he was said to have declined with the words: “I must always ensure that the working classes earn enough money to buy themselves food.”
Different mentality from now.
Unfortunately Vespasian didn't know that if the productivity of labor could be increased, then the standard of living would also rise and the wealth of the Empire would increase as well.
Politicians are never the deciders in that kind of affairs. Napoleon thought exactly in the same way : he didn't believe the English revolution to be a sign of good economic force and rather feared that too many machines might both make the workers and soldiers indolent and bring down the cost of common labour to famine levels as was indeed the case. Many intellectuals and political figures in England were as opposed to industrial development for about the same reasons : it took place nevertheless because Britain was in a position where it would have rapidly returned to the state of a poor country if it hadn't gone on with it.
@@kevinbyrne4538 uNfOrTuNaTeLy
Admit it. If you had a time machine you'd go back to ancient rome and petition the emperor of the time to give you the resources to build a steam engine.
amazing video man, as always.
Very interesting - thank you very much!
Another topic I’m interested about and would like to hear you talk about is the pedophile and mental illnesses in Ancient Rome.
Btw big fan of your channel.
Countless incremental inventions and tiny improvements in technology and science, as well as improvements in precision, material quality, consistency and efficiency of manufacture on a widespread scale, were required as a foundation for the industrial revolution. It simply was not possible until it that foundation was laid. And once the foundation was laid, the industrial revolution became immediately inevitable.
Every "big invention" or "big innovation" or "big scientific discovery" that we learn about in history books and about which we tell stories, is built upon thousands upon thousands of small, unheralded insights and inventions, many of which required every bit as much genius as the "big names" that we remember.
The first commercially useful steam engines were built before the first accurate ealry-modern metal cutting lathe was ever built.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Interesting factoid. Not sure if you intend it as an example of what I'm saying or somehow a counter-argument.
Do you apply this same logic to the romans they were the the “big names” of their time yet built on the knowledge from the past. So by this logic no one gets credit for anything because all of human civilization is built on past knowledge that was accumulated over time.
@@meep3035 Roman history spans a millenia, two if you count the byzanting empire. Every generation built upon the past. I'm not sure what you are asking.
I'm not sure why you think my point means "no one gets credit for anything". My point isn't really even about who gets credit. It is simply that when we recrod and talk about the history of science and technology, we drastically over-simplify because we tend to focus on "big discoveries" and "big achievement" that make good stories, while countless small stories are forgotten. And those big moments are built on the incremental progress of many of those forgotten stories.
This applies to all people at all times. I did not say anything to suggest Romans would be an exception.
It's a bit of a distraction from the main point: countless things had to be in place and come together for the industrial revolution to happen: culturally, economically, engineering advances, science advances. Bringing those things into place required the intervening centuries.
Scott Graham referring to your last statement. Yes of course but this applies to absolutely every civilization that ever was the romans, greeks, egypt, china, india, etc. so im not sure what you’re point is. Just like the industrial revolution roman achievement would not exist without the same factors you stated. To me it sounded like you were implying that we should thank the romans for industrial revolution and to that I would say the romans have to thank many many people for their achievements. Or maybe you’re weren’t referring to the romans at all but thats what I assumed since this video is about the romans.
You're so knowledgeable!
this absolutely blew my mind open.
Guess they didn’t have enough campuses to boost for science to get Industrialization researched~
Even if they had been capable of harnessing steam power on an industrial scale, let’s be glad they didn’t, because if they had, we might have begun to suffer the effects of man-made global warming 1800 years earlier.
Great point, I thought the same. We're programmed to believe that more technology equals more positive progress, and ignore any problems caused.
@@jonathangullett3143 Thank you for proving my point.
Can't wait for Part 2!💘💘👍👍
These are the type of UA-cam videos I live for
You miss an important point about slaves: their value as status among slave owners. Slaves were expensive, as you note, therefore having more slaves was an indication of wealth. Thus, labour saving devices were decentivised. Not declined - the social value of slave owning wasn't determinative - merely decentivised. Also, industrial production is only really useful to flows that benefit from such growth. Thus, they did have "factories" that made bread, as every Roman citizen was guaranteed bread. To be able to do that, watermill driven factories were developed in the hills nearby where bread was made in huge quantities. One of the largest estates in Pompeii was that of a baker who had a bread factory on lot. Food production can never be cheap enough.