| ▲ | alexey-salmin 5 days ago |
| Nope. If the only kilowatts at your disposal are the ones that you, your slaves and your horses can digest, you cannot just upscale the production of goods (or anything else) arbitrarily. The whole economy is bottlenecked on production which is bottlenecked on energy supply. Increasing the demand when supply is the problem would only make things worse. However once you're burning coal (or harness the wind in case of dutch) things are very different, kilowatts flow freely and all the things you say above start to be true. |
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| ▲ | wbl 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| From 1000-1700 there was increasing wealth in Europe not through serfdom intensifying (but see Poland) but through increased trade, fishing, agricultural improvements and culminating in the steam engine. Watermills were medieval inventions. Smith's pin factory has no steam engine. Nor did Slaters mill which created US industrialization. Steam required institutions to grow, institutions that had created growth earlier. |
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| ▲ | inglor_cz 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Watermills are pretty limited technology, though. It is advantageous to build them on rivers in hilly terrain, which is usually far from the seaports that are used for trade. Hilly terrain is also often agriculturally subpar, therefore you need to import food for the workers from the lowland, making the operation more expensive. Finally, medieval watermills cannot produce heat, which is absolutely necessary for production of iron and steel. Which means that you cannot increase production of iron and steel beyond pre-modern levels, a major obstacle in development of technical civilization. | |
| ▲ | alexey-salmin 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Agreed, and that is aligned with the point I'm making: bottleneck was the production, not consumption. Saying that increased consumption of freed slaves would somehow pull you out of pre-industrial age (the comment I was replying to) is just bonkers. The increased production was indeed a result of centuries of incremental improvements. You're right to point out that some of them were not about energy, but I would argue that all of the big ones were. Slaters mill put hydropower to work and even though watermills were medieval, the machines that poured that energy into cotton weren't. Same with the windmills during the Dutch Golden Age which I mentioned above. Increased trade happened through massive wind-powered ships, not slave galleys. (Though the Smith pin factory unlike the Slaters mill is not a real factory but a criticized thought experiment, I wouldn't consider it too influential) But yes, indeed the steam appeared at the right time, only when there was enough technology to put it to use down the line. |
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| ▲ | astrange 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I would say that inventing new technologies is one of the things that isn't possible when you've enslaved the inventors and made them farmworkers. I mean, making them do research might work. That's a command economy, aka actually existing communism. Should be able to invent the waterwheel and crop rotation. I do think it's hard to invent antibiotics and the Haber-Bosch process, and without that you are still in a Malthusian economy where everyone's going to die if they slack off farming. |
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| ▲ | alexey-salmin 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Well yes, but how is this even relevant to the conversation? No one says innovation thrives with slavery. The point made is very simple, it's about commandable energy and EROI in particular. No amount of antibiotics can change that. |
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