Introduction
Imagine you are a time traveler with one mission: prevent the Industrial Revolution from ever happening. What would be your strategy?
Destroy the Newcomen steam engine in 1712? Would one single Londoner notice? Well, not at first. But the miners in Manchester would. Slowly but surely, the effects of missing steam engines in coal mining would emerge: production of coal and other minerals would plummet and production in coal and mineral-dependent industries would decline; Britain’s ten-fold increase in coal production from 1750 to 1850 would vanish; textile manufacturing would stagnate; despite the introduction of the coke-fired blast furnace, without the steam engine, the exponential growth of iron production fueling additional industries would also disappear; and finally, no steam locomotives or steamships rise from the beginning of the 19th century to revolutionize transportation. Boats of European immigrants bob across the ocean at the mercy of the winds, and the central plains of America host the migrations of buffalos for a bit longer still.
What I’m illustrating in this drama is not the essentiality of the steam engine to the Industrial Revolution, but rather the unprecedented magnitude of interconnectedness of industries and elements which fostered the exponential economic growth that has sustained until even today. One might even argue that the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century could qualify as an ‘X-Event’.
X-Events
In ‘X-Events: The Collapse of Everything,’ John Casti argues that excessive layers of complexity create fractures in society, ultimately leading to collapses. But how does a society even get to a point from which to collapse in the first place? The 1700s, arguably, was the site of exponential growth of the economy, distinct from all previous centuries. By relying on the principles of Casti’s book, on how complex entities and phenomena collapse, I believe we can gain perspective on how they rise. Casti outlines seven ‘faces of complexity’, but we will work with three: Emergence (a part cannot represent the whole), Red Queen Hypothesis (evolution must be necessary to survive), and Incompleteness (logic alone is not enough for explanation) (Casti, 2012, p. 57). With ever-increasing complexity layering atop society in the 1700s, the Jevons paradox likewise emerges. The Jevons paradox states that higher efficiency in systems consuming resources results in an increase in demand for resources. Ultimately, through this lens, we’ll look not for how one element impacted the economic growth of the 1700s but how those elements interacted with each other to create the complexity fostering sustained development in a way distinct from previous centuries, building layers of complexity that made our current world possible.
Slavery
12.5 million people. This figure’s significance depends on the historical context around it. 5000 years ago, this was the human population on Earth. By the 1700s, it was the estimated number of slaves transported during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. However, slavery was not a novel practice, thriving since the agricultural revolution. Ancient Sumer, the first recorded civilization in the world, was thought to be the birthplace of slavery. So what made the trans-Atlantic slave trade distinct from millennia before? During the Industrial Revolution, the slave trade went global, whereas previously it had remained continental, with significant slave populations rarely being shipped across vast oceans. Approximately 6.5 million slaves were traded during the 18th century alone, representing more than half of the total number traded. African people were exploited as slaves in the Americas to harvest cotton, or were purchased with Indian cotton shipped to West Africa to be used as currency for buying more slaves. Cotton production was both the product and the currency, perpetuating the exploitative labour systems that sustained its increasing demand and thus increasing production. The principle of emergence is evident here, as the supply chain also includes the demand for cotton and textile production in England. One factor alone cannot explain this dynamic, as the emergent relationship between the exploitation of African people further fostered textile production in England. Likewise, when we integrate the evolution of the steam engine into this model of understanding, principles of complexity further emerge.
Steam engine
The first example of steam engines came from Heron of Alexandria, a Roman mathematician and engineer in the first century CE. Due to the steam engine’s physical constraints, and humanity’s inability to tap into coal reserves earlier, the steam engine was not “invented” until the early 18th century. Three figures throughout the 18th century contributed to the finalization of the steam engine: Thomas Savery (1650-1715), Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729), and James Watt (1736-1819). Savery patented the first steam pump in 1698; however, most historians label the invention of the modern steam engine with Thomas Newcomen, who invented the atmospheric steam engine. The initial purpose of steam engines was to pump water out of English mines. As the Europeans of the 17th century switched from wood to coal as their main energy source, coal mines were deepened causing flooding from natural groundwater. The steam engine offered a solution. The steam engine allowed more coal production thereby increasing economic growth. Finally, Watt’s steam engine allowed for more efficient industries.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains how factors intersect, contributing to the introduction of different inventions. To list a few: cheap labour, patent and property law, and war. The enslavement of Africans and exploitive wages for British people satisfied the cheap labour requirements (Diamond, 1997). Meanwhile, Britain saw a wave of patents between 1740 to 1840, from close to 0 to almost 600. Finally, most European countries spent more than half of the years fighting in the 1700s: Britain with 73 years, France with 77, and Austria with 58, creating a degree of competition for resources, innovation, and dominance that percolated throughout the economic demand.
Energy Usage
Before the industrial revolution, for millennia, humanity has relied on only a few prime movers for most of their energy usage: animate labour, water, and wind (Smil, 2017, p. 130). Animate power, or power derived from animal biomass, is limited, with the “metabolic requirements and mechanical properties of animals and human bodies restricting the reach of pre-industrial civilizations” (Smil, 2017, p. 132) For example, it takes two acres to feed one horse for a year, and with even 20% of Britain’s total land mass dedicated to horse feed, Britain would have only 3.5 million horses at the maximum (958,125 MW maximum energy output), which cannot support the 82.2 million MW of energy that Britain consumed in 1850. In the 1700s, the increase in coal extraction combined with the innovations in technology to exploit coal’s fuel capacity grew economic productivity rates exponentially, releasing us from such limitations. There was hardly an industry that was not affected by this energy revolution that would set the foundation for yet another revolution in the 1800s with the discovery of oil reserves. Another example of the Jevons paradox, as the efficiency of conversion increases, the demand to build more machines that create the conversion also increases. This further perpetuates a red queen phenomenon that one must integrate electricity or die off.
Transportation
Back in the 1790s, how would a person get from New York to London? Sailships in the 1700s would require around six weeks at best to travel across the Atlantic, and by 1845, the same journey was completed in 14 days by the SS Great Britain, a steam-powered ship. Everything changed with the introduction of the steam engine. As the efficiency of other industries increased due to the steam engine, it also increased pressure for the transportation industry to innovate and improve–an example of the Red Queen hypothesis. The introduction of the steam engine created two notable improvements: the steam locomotive and the steamship.
Conclusion
The 1700s were a divergence in sustained growth from the centuries before it. This century introduced the steam engine; this century doubled the world population; and this century hosted costly, historical wars such as the American and French Revolutionary Wars and the Seven Years' War. As the century closed out, it manufactured the first pencil. The pencil may be the best symbol of what sets the 18th century apart from its predecessors. In Leonard Read’s essay, ‘I, Pencil’ he explains the complexity of a system as simple as a pencil. From Northern California’s cedars to San Leandro’s saw mills, from kilns drying the freshly cut wood to the carving of the pencil from a mold, from the graphite mined in Sri Lanka to the clay in Mississippi (even excluding the machinery required to chop the wood, mine the ores, and gather the clay, and transportation needed to ship and transfer materials from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Coast of America), millions of human hands were inserted into the creation of a pencil. In our 21st century, it is more important than ever to see this supply chain through the lens of complexity. This practice in historical perspective can bring awareness to the fact that the forces that create growth and expansion may be the same which leads to collapse.
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