Comment by fsckboy
1 day ago
>The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work
you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc.
if you look at the growth industry before that, it was mercantilist overseas trade.
The big productivity gains of the Agricultural Revoution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... started considerably before the Industrial Revolution, though naturally the Industrial Revolution in turn fed back into agricultural productivity, in time.
Yea, the first few percentage points are underrated.
Dropping from 90% of the population being ~farmers to 80% of the population being farmers doubles the amount of time people can spend doing everything else including research, manufacturing, education etc.
In many ways it was equivalent to the drop from 51% being farmers all the way down to 2%. However, it wasn’t nearly as obvious because 90% farmers looks a lot like 80% of the population being farmers and the transition was relatively slow and unevenly distributed.
From 1000 to 1300 the population of Europe doubled, mostly from improvements in agriculture.
The first London coffeehouse opened in the 1650s and the industrial revolution started in ~1760. It just took a while for the habit to catch on.
The mechanization of the ag industry took place 100 years after the industrial revolution. Try again.
The Cotton gin was created in the 1700s.
Maybe you mean this one, Green Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Other way round
> mechanization of the ag industry
... was not what produced the British Agricultural Revolution.
Seems like this and parent are referring to two different waves of improvement. Pre-IR improvements in plowing and cultivation (still draft and human traction), followed by post-IR mechanization for harvesting and transport?
Farm labor demands wax and wane with the seasons with harvest typically being the most labor intensive; so, it was actually stationary motors that did the most to reduce labor demands. Tractors mostly helped farmers eliminate the need for horses on a farm.
One of the leading economic history theories of why the industrial revolution happened was that it was largely a result of the Black Plague.
The theory is roughly that before the Black Plague, the population was stuck in Malthusian dynamics at the top of the logistic curve - population had expanded to the level that land could support.
The massive deaths allowed the remaining population to only farm the most productive land, leading to a massive surplus. The elite were able to capture that surplus and fund things like art, science, etc. Some of those scientists were able to create technology that led to further efficiency gains, so that technology could make the economy grow faster than population growth could catch up.
There are a ton of things that allowed that surplus to translate into technology and economic growth. But AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.
Black Plague ended in 14th century while industrial revolution started in the 18th. There is no connection.
The growth started in the 14th. It was awhile before the industry happened, but the change in growth rate is strongly connected with the Black Plague.
One of the many, many descriptions of this is here (many because this is the mainstream theory): https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/black-death-and-industrialisa...
The first technology wasn't the steam engine, it was eating beef instead of just grain, and having cattle pull plows. We don't think of that as a huge technological revolution, but it was a dramatic efficiency gain at the time. It wasn't a new invention, but there wasn't enough surplus to deploy it widely before that.
16 replies →
You might regard the Renaissance as the prelude to the industrial revolution.
Lots of serious historians disagree. There are whole books on the topic. Here's just one paper as an example
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demograph...
Societal changes are slow beasts, they may very well take several centuries to develop. Nation-states were a direct consequence of the printing press, yet they didn't arrive until XIX century.
I thought the aftermath of the Black Plague also allowed people to charge a lot more for their labor and services, since most of the laborers, well, died.
I mean all part of the surplus - you weren't struggling to barely survive so could do other things with your time, and some of the people used that surplus to invest in efficiency.