The Fall Of Rome Caused The Industrial Revolution. Wait...What !?

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[myt-mat-mil-mit-met-com-trol]

The Fall of Constantinople, which marked its 571st anniversary yesterday, likely caused the Discovery of the Americas. With the Ottomans controlling all routes to the East, Europeans were compelled to find alternative passages, ultimately leading to their westward exploration.

[Makrangoncias]

I'd like to protest against calling the thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire "darkness". There was plenty of innovation and great achievements in the middle ages as well.

[marcv]

This is a question I have studied and thought about for years because academics have no good answers. There are a lot of small innovations that occurred which made the industrial revolution possible. When I say small innovations, I'm talking about small devices like the flying shuttle for example or tools or devices that you can hold in your hand, and small labor saving machines made of wood that single a person can operate by hand. This is in great contrast to the large machines built by the Romans.

The difference between ancient Rome and the early modern period is that even though Rome had many technological innovations and large scale industrial processing, they lacked many of the small practical innovations that made industrialization possible on a small scale. One thing I have to emphasize is that the modern industrial revolution started with small human powered machines used in cottage industry by one or two people, but which made them far more productive. So the industrial revolution that started in Britain was a small scale affair conducted by inventors and entrepreneurs, not the central state operating giant mills.

When it comes to the steam engine, you have to realize that the concept of the steam engine comes out of the idea of a vacuum pump. This would not be obvious to almost anyone. The concept of vacuum had been known to the Romans. The power of steam had been known to modern and ancients alike. The modern steam engine first comes by way of quenching a steam heated vessel with cold water. Leave it to the English to come up with this.

Thomas Savery's 'Miner's Friend' steam pump was predicated on the power of vacuum suction, which inspired Newcomen's atmospheric engine. So you can't get to the steam engine through Hero's Aeolipile because it lacks all preliminary mechanization. There is no practical step forward to build on. This is very important. The conception of doing mechanical work practically from steam is to produce a partial vacuum that results from rapidly cooling the steam heated vessel to drive a piston. Again, this is not obvious to people when they think of a steam engine, because it is the opposite of how an efficient steam engine works. There is no direct route from steam pressure to a practical steam engine because there are too many pieces of preliminary mechanisms that must be produced and must be functional. So you have to start at low pressure. Components like valves have to be invented and made functional for the first time, which first means making the tools to make the components. The route is circuitous through atmospheric pressure inefficiently controlled by temperature. The reasons are manifold. Not only are a number of conceptual breakthroughs needed from a world where none of these concepts have been demonstrated, but a number metallurgical techniques and tools need to be developed just to fashion an apparatus that can stand up to stresses and tolerances required. All this requires a number mental and practical techniques and innovations. In other words, a lot of thought and hard work.

You get to the steam engine first by trying to harness the power of the vacuum. That path of learning about the vacuum came through a number of early modern experimentalists like Torricelli, Otto Von Guericke with his pump and hemispheres, as well as many others. The concept of the vacuum was known to Greeks and Romans, and there are even examples of water pumps used by the Romans which are amazing. None of these Greek or Roman innovations were on a direct path to get us to a steam engine or an industrial revolution though. Many of the Greek and Roman industrial innovations required large numbers of people to work in coordinated teams. I look at Roman technologies as thinking big. Large civil projects with obvious productivity improving payoffs that resulted in higher living standards. An efficient way to get a lot of work done for a lot of people at the same time. Rome had a more collective industrial mentality directed from the top down. Rural England did not have the same kind of coordinated human resources at the ready for collective production the way the Roman state did. So England's industrialization was carried out by common people using labor saving tools and techniques to make their lives easier.

Another thing to think about regarding the Industrial Revolution in England and Europe. The innovations that became the collective Industrial Revolution had no direct connection to one another for a century or more. We think of textile mills and steam engines. Newcomen's engines were in service pumping water out of mines for the better part of a century before Watt developed his engine. The textile industry had no connection to steam for a very long time. Mills were powered by animals and then water power. The first railroad steam engines didn't burn coal, they burned wood. So it wasn't a fortuitous abundance coal that gave rise to railroads. In the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution there were innovations in Europe in every area of human endeavor. Practical improvements in farming, engineering, architecture as well as philosophy, music, art, physics, biology, economics, government literature and more. There was no top down control or plan or design. It was the culmination of people looking to improve their circumstances and inventing the methods to do it. Most of this did not come easily either. There were always entrenched interests every step of the way, opposing every new innovation that came about. Many innovations languished for decades due to lack of resources, political opposition, wars, etc.

[zakharkhmurych]

The fall of Rome and its consequences were a disater for human race

[pscm]

That is super important to understand. Jérôme Baschet explains this with the same comparison to China in The Feudal Civilization, but more precisely about the impact it had on power projection and colonization. He explains that what made Europe so dominant at the end of the Middle Ages was a combination of unity and disunity. Europe was fragmented, which lowered the need of heavy administration that big Empire need... but it was more or less united under the cross, which lowered the need to constantly fight between each other. The result was small states that could project a lot of power overseas. Just take the exemple of the United Provinces of Netherland ; it was a ridiculously small country compared to how powerful it was, and it colonized vast regions of the world. It was only possible due to this unity/disunity of Europe.

[David-fmgo]

I find it concerning that most all of the "factors" stated deal with precisely one half of the impetus for Industrialization, and the only mentioned pretext for the other only exists when it pertains to nations and tribes. Competition among individuals (completely ignored) for "individual material gain" is what picked up the scientific advancements of the Renaissance and "secularization" mentioned and drove them forward at a pace unseen previously in the history of mankind. The end result being that we went from a paradigm in which 90% of the world's population (including the Roman Empire) lived in grinding, subsistence farming in a society dominated by large estates (many of which were slave holding), to a world in which countries that industrialized have at minimum reached middle income if not wealthy status.

Yes slavery is a factor in precluding the industrial revolution, because slaves have no incentive to invent, are frequently prevented from being educated and inhibited from developing into a middle class consumer base. However, the mere absence of slavery, doesn't ensure the industrial revolution would occur, especially if the most important factors not mentioned in this video, is missing. Individual rights and freedom of choice. Furthermore, Aristocratic societies, tend to discourage innovation and the development of trade and commerce because it weakens their political power. It is no accident that in England lead the industrial revolution, while certainly possessing of an Aristocratic class, also had a larger middle class and non-Aristocratic landowners. This diversity in wealth holding, also created competition for political and economic power among the classes.

While the secularization brought on by the Renaissance was important, so to was the Protestant Reformation and its religious zeal. This promoted an individual relationship with God and thus promoted literacy so as to facilitate the utilization of the bible in native languages by individual practitioners of the faith. This produced some of the most literate populations in the world in places like England, the United States and Germany by the 18th Century. All three were early leaders in the industrial revolution.

Lastly, the entire Middle Ages was not "the dark ages", such was the view of Italian renaissance writers obviously, but it is a biased take and completely discounts the successes of the High Middle Ages.

I like this channel, but it frequently demonstrates a bias

[SarimFaruque]

I think what made the fall of Rome so special is that it made a huge impacting legacy. We have so many kingdoms calling themselves the "next Rome" and they tried to restore the glory with varying degrees of success. The Eastern Roman Empire (actually they were Romans), Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Napoleon, USA, Russia, and even the Ottomans themselves.

[davidsphere]

The Industrial Revolution occiúrred in the British Empire which kind of diminishes your thesis that empires are stagnant

[dtz]

This video contradicts earlier videos which said we would have developed technology quicker if Rome hadn't fallen.

[billmiller]

Well, what made the explosion possible was rather the invention of printed books as it allowed a much quicker distribution of ideas and techniques.

[svon]

competition from business is also a thing, the industrial revolution would have happened with Roman/Greek logic eventually. It could have taken longer or even happened sooner, especially since the Sassanian Empire still existed.

[TetsuShima]

0:35
Imagine Augustus seeing this in a nightmare...

[stevenvail]

The fall of Eastern Empire and the recent reconquest of Spain from the Muslim caliphate led to the age of exploration mainly due to the disruption of the old established trade networks, between east and west but also the need to rebuild the economy of spain due to the cost of wars during the reconquest along with the need to cut out the middle man, who where mainly Turk and Arab traiders at this point and whom now had a stranglehold on trade.

[JoeyCaracal]

The fall of the Roman Empire and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race.

[coindorni]

1:10 Black Legend. There was nothing particularly dark about the "Dark Ages" (term in academic disuse)

[frankvandorp]

It's also noteworthy how many great thinkers, scientists and philosophers of antiquity hailed from small, independent city states. So much was developed in Greece and its colonies when it was a scattered patchwork of poleis, especially when you compare it to later ages when it was all unified under large empires.

[davidmcgarry]

Rome progressed for as long as it did because first its leaders ensured a regular supply of food throughout the empire thanks to its irrigation techniques and an efficient empire-wide distribution system. Second, the empire had plenty of gold and silver due to its conquests of Gaul, Hisoania and Dacia. The gold and silver supply dwindled after the second century as they were unable find new sources of these metals, and everything went downhill from that point.

The modern agricultural revolution began in Holland and was adapted and improved in England soon after. England was the first country to use coal on a large scale, and was blessed with huge deposits of this commodity. So, England had excellent food supplies, and improved farming techniques meant the country had workers to spare who could be used in other ventures. The country also had abundant local supplies of fuel that could be used for industry. Last, but not least, England had plenty of capital to invest in mass production and engineering projects. This combination of factors is why the industrial revolution took place where and when it did, instead of in France, Spain or the Holy Roman Empire.

I suppose Rome's contribution to all this was to cease existing. One could make a similar claim about the Mongols, or Charles Martel turning back the Moors in the eighth century.

[amienabled]

Rome was saving humanity from the industrial revolution and its consequences ❤

[p.d.stanhope]

Yes. Plenty of Post-Keynesian economists believe that period of 476 A.D. to 1760 A.D. was what initiated the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The concept of "technological investment" in home grown markets that had a cascading effect with economies as a whole within a nation/kingdom like Great Britain via steam power & patents. John Fitch who patented equipment that could harness steam power was also the first "loss leader" as they say in Silicon Valley. By 1800 the Industrial Revolution was unstoppable in Europe and North America (the U.S.) was chasing after the British, the French and pre-unified German duchies.

[captainroyalty]

Thank you for this video. Many of my fellow historian friends would get angry or wouldn't believe me on why the fall of the romans helped in the rise of innovation and industrialism. (They're also big roman fans)