Paywalled, and the https://archive.ph/o0LpH link is 502'ing for me

There was a fascinating article about 6 months ago on 'why no roman industrial revolution?' which dove into the convergence of requirements - and almost coincidentally convenient technological advances - that led to this happening when and where it did - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187

The 'we can't run counter-factuals' comment in the opening paragraph of TFA is the crux of course, though Bret Devereaux's article (via HN link above) provides some highly compelling arguments about the key 'causes'.

Mentioned in the article (§Coal and Cotton).

Key idea/thesis in that essay:

> It is particularly remarkable here how much of these conditions are unique to Britain: it has to be coal, coal has to have massive economic demand (to create the demand for pumping water out of coal mines) and then there needs to be massive demand for spinning (so you need a huge textile export industry fueled both by domestic wool production and the cotton spoils of empire) and a device to manage the conversion of rotational energy into spun thread. I’ve left this bit out for space, but you also need a major incentive for the design of pressure-cylinders (which, in the event, was the demand for better siege cannon) because of how that dovetails with developing better cylinders for steam engines.

[…]

> As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables. If Spain or Portugal, for instance, rather than Britain, had ended up controlling India, would the flow of cotton have been diverted to places where coal usage was not common, cheap and abundant, thereby separating the early steam-powered mine pumps both from the industry they could first revolutionize and also from the vast wealth necessary to support that process (much less if no European power had ever come to dominate the Indian subcontinent)?

Really worth a (re-)read.

Discussions on it:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40567667

There was an interesting, related discussion on HN awhile back that touched on material science, iron and steel quality: "Why no Roman industrial revolution?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187