Why do so many historians always say that the Mughals, Ottomans or whatever Chinese dynasty they personally like (Ming, Qing, Song, etc) were on the verge of the industrial revolution? Like the whole thing was some egg of columbus moment just waiting to be discovered, and if they had the right flash in the pan genius or moment, they would've shot ahead exactly like Europe did. These niggers just seem to be lazily looking at total iron production metrics, texile metrics, population metrics and then comparing them to Europe, and are missing the slowly building intellectual framework that took place in Europe at the time.If you actually look into the mathematics and technology that went into things like automatic threshing machines and the watts steam engine, you see they are composited of several different innovations in mathematics, engineering and metallurgy that took place over the two centuries prior. The gear functions necessary for the automatic threshing machine required an understanding of epicycloids to even make them work without burning out, which some mathematician worked out and developed into a working theory a hundred years before. If some Mughal engineer tried developing it with what he knew at the time, the gears would just grind against each other and wear out.There's a shitload of accumulated knowledge required that went into the industrial revolution, and the proto-industrial cottage industry of western Europe was the necessary environment to get it kick started. Where do you think the engineering talent came from in the first place?
>>18485005Without the capital accumulated in the Caribbean slave colonies England would have never invested in the production of industrial machines.
>>18485025Dunno man, in the British Raj the British literally delivered the same economic conditions for the industrial revolution for the Jeets (Permanent Settlement of 1793), where they tried to transplant the economic environment from Britain over to India and put an end to the messy Mughal tax system that came before. What they found was the Zamindars (Indian aristocrats) just built palaces in Calcutta and other port cities, imported luxury goods and just squandered all that wealth, living as extractive absentee landlords. They had the advantage of being right there on the ground with abundant coolie labour everywhere, and they just squandered it. They absolutely could've reinvested money into kickstarting industrialization. They could've absolutely imported western books on engineering and mathematics, imported machinery, and patronized smart people to get things going.Menji Japan is an example of how easy it is. I read a book on their industrialization process and it seemed very bottom up? Their massive conglomerates got their start with lots of aspiring capitalists coming together to pool capital together, pinching pennies, and scraping buy until it scaled up. It wasn't like they started with some accumulated Scrooge McDuck treasure vault of wealth. I haven't read into it to confirm, but one of the Austrian Economists writing about the Industrial Revolution in Britain asserts something similar with it there. These weren't fat-cats just sitting idle, most of the capitalists in the early years were highly motivated, highly overleveraged and living extremely frugally.The Indian aristocrats just seemed to not do that and live exactly like the fat-cats degenerates the Hindutva Modichuds accuse the British of being.
>>18485048The first thing the British did in India was to repress local industries, thus making local products less competitive than British ones. The same playbook was used in almost all other colonies that didn't have a majority white population.
>>18485005Because the number of people hysterical about race is far greater than the tiny proportion of nerds with a genuine interest in the history of technology. Their motive is pretty obviously a kind of shock seeing that nearly every great scientist who pioneered the industrial revolutionIt is not enough to say "oh, Europe was ahead of the curve then remained ahead of the curve until they spread their technology throughout the world", because the average person won't understand the nuances of this, they just see "Europe was ahead of the curve" and get offended. They want to see historians talk about the Islamic golden age, Chinese gunpowder and Indian cotton carding or GDP statistics based more on population than productivity and point and say "ackchyually we were wakanda before Europe colonized us".For example Lewis Howard Latimer was part of a team with several white men who improved the filament of the light bulb, the improvement itself is a minor tidbit, there were 1000s such little improvements like this judging by the number of patents, yet this is plucked out and he is made out to be the real innovator behind the light bulb. They are careful not to straight up lie, but in schools they put his picture next to a big picture of a light bulb and being kids they're not going to really analyze the details, just think "a black man invented the light bulb".Of course when they're older if they actually study STEM it will eat away at them that everything they are taught is actually bullshit, but then they will also benefit from DEI and laws enabling frivolous discrimination lawsuits. A good part of their salary will come from being "diverse" not actual merit, and they will know it. Perhaps that is the point, to erode their honesty and make the more accepting of the racket. You don't want your own cult members to start having dignity, they dehumanize them better than we "racists" ever could.
>>18485109You are crashing out
>>18485092Where is your evidence of this? I heard a story of the EIC breaking people's thumbs, but the story is dubious, limited to a single year and could not have been the policy across the entire country over decades.Then there is evidence to the contrary. The British often invited the sons of aristocrats and merchants to study in Britain and thus see the level of development that was possible. Mahatma Gandhi himself was educated by Britain. The British attempted multiple times to start textile industry in India, due to the obvious advantage in reduced freight and labor costs. If the British wished to stifle native industry, why didn't they just pull a gun to Jamsetji Tata's temple and pull the trigger?There is no real evidence of some sort of conspiracy by the British to keep India "deindustrialized". Also your motive is obvious, which is to blame your failures on the British as opposed to extant Indian politicians and the massive corruption present in Indian society at almost every level, or perhaps to justify racial discrimination against white people in your favor as per various policies related to "diversity", which is a major modern bias.
>>18485120>Where is your evidence of this?Tariffs imposed by the British government on Indian textiles>If the British wished to stifle native industry, why didn't they just pull a gun to Jamsetji Tata's temple and pull the trigger?By then they had already dominated the textile industry and shifted their interest to other industries
So there is this historiographical debate on whether industrial revolution is solely a technological succession or a socioeconomic one that could be described through industrialized work.Many pre-industrial socities were on the verge of large scale manufacturing through specialized division of labour, efficient trade and a bureacrautic mode of governance. So the argument usually is between these views - what is an industrial society or a revolution? Not all nations underwent the same path of England, Germany or US. Gulf states are arguably industrialized but they never hosted industry outside of petrochemicals mostly produced with foreign knowledge, manufactored intermediate goods and foreign expats - and the industries barely employ the local population. Yet saying that UAE is not an industrialized society feels odd.
>>18485129>Tariffs imposed by the British government on Indian textilesIndian businesses were literally free to trade with Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc over the course of the British Raj, barring years of certain wars and the 1930s pivot to protectionism. If the bong homeland was tariffing your textiles, why not export them elsewhere? The tax burden for the administrative empire (silver actually sent out of India and to London) was like 3% of the sub-continent's GDP, which is a pathetically low tax burden. The Mughal state that preceded it was much more extractive and wasteful with the money. When the British got established in Calcutta, immediately Indian coolie labourers moved in to settle. There was a constant flow of people into British controlled territory, and merchants wanting to live under British jurisdictions. The rule of law was less arbitrary and enforced properly. Then there's the fact that even after Britain left, India flatlined economically all through the "Licence Raj" during the cold war. The same indolent rentseeking behavior you seen with the Zamindars got repeated with government bureaucrats. Why innovate when you can just extract wealth parasitically as some government official and have people grovel to you?
>>18485205>free to tradeIt's trash every rich country today developed thanks to state intervention and protectionist policies
>>18485267Rich countries developed because their native populations are smarter and more efficient Everything else is cope
>>18485279Is that why they impose free trade on every one else except themselves?
>>18485129>Tariffs imposed by the British government on Indian textilesAre you talking about the tariffs on cotton calicos in the 18th century? Even this is spurious since it was the EIC that began shipping the calicos to Europe in the first place.>By then they had already dominated the textile industry and shifted their interest to other industriesOther industries? You mean the advanced manufacturing of the late 19th century? Technology like steam turbines, automobiles and light bulbs? Was India a Wakanda of sorts that already had these well developed industries before Europe developed the technology?Sorry but the "deindustrialization" meme popular among Indian nationalists is just plain incorrect.
>>18485297What are you talking about? Rich countries imposed tariffs on each other. The British were less concerned by Indian industry than German industry or American industry. Further if a new technology increases productivity 2 or 3 fold, a 20% tariff isn't going to make much difference.You are blowing "tariffs" way out of proportion.
>>18485332I'm talking about now you stupid fuck, I'm using present simple not past tense.
>>18485324You are dumb as fuck keep being in denial
>>18485297No, it's because the rest of the world has no standards
>>18485612Nice deflection try to answer the question next time dumbass
>>18485619It's true you low-iq subhumanCountries that have similar standards find it easier to remove trade barriers between them, unless ideology is involved
>>18485644>Countries that have similar standards find it easier to remove trade barriers between them, unless ideology is involvedPseudo economic mumbo jumbo, the EU literally imposed tariffs on Chinese goods for years because they can't compete.
>>18485092It's also what they did to Latin America after sponsoring and even directly aiding the uprisings against Spain.Completely stymied Latino economic development, and ensured the entire continent would be one big export market for finished British and American goods while being a source for cheap raw materials.
>>18485109This is really fine point social analysis.Keep up the good work.You already got someone triggered.
>>18485943>During the 1960s and 70s, Latin Americans developed an influential body of economic thought called “dependency theory.” It is out of fashion now for good reason: Predictions based upon it have been falsified, and there is too much it cannot explain. But it is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking Schoeck found among primitive tribes translated into more sophisticated language. According to dependency theory, Western prosperity causes poverty in the rest of the world. The West controls the terms of international trade, locking up the market for technology and sophisticated manufactured goods while forcing everyone else to supply them with raw materials, thus condemning them to perpetual backwardness.>There was an obvious racial aspect to dependency theory, or at least to its popularity in the third world, with the white man like the well-fed Dobu islander who must have spirited his extra yams out of other men’s gardens. Whether Melanesian headhunter or third world economist, the constant claim of the envious man is that the advantages enjoyed by others were got unfairly and at their expense.>The downfall of dependency theory among serious economists, by the way, was its inability to explain the rise of East Asian countries, most of which started out with fewer natural resources than Latin America. The case is exactly analogous to the inability of our opponents to explain why the “white supremacists” who supposedly designed IQ tests should have done so in a way that lets Asians outscore whites.Dependency Theory is a cold war meme and kept alive by seething, envious thirdies.
>>18485025industrial machines were being produced long before Colonialism began.Machine investment came from stock brokers trading in Germany, not from colonial maritime traders btw.
>>18485005Song dynasty China was on the verge of industrialization, and this was only stopped due to its failure to defend its core territories from northern invaders, which was caused by its uniquely anti-military political order. Losing Kaifeng in 1127 meant that Song China lost access to the vast coal reserves in its north (which they were already making heavy use of). Song era inventions like the mechanical clock and solar calendar were more advanced than anything else in the world including what subsequent Chinese dynasties were using. The Song had discovered petroleum and were burning it to make ink (instead of using charcoal). They invented primitive refrigeration and fertilizers. Gunpowder weapons reached new heights including the invention of rockets, grenades and landmines. In 1212 the southern Song established the world's first permanently standing navy. Their ships were described by Ibn Battuta as being by far the most advanced in the world, since Song China had invented ballasts, rudders and paddle wheel propulsion, far superior to anything the Europeans had until the age of sail. The economic complexity of Song China was high enough that Chinese cities had invented take-out menus in restaurants.
>>18485984That's not what I'm talking about at all.There are actual real world consequences for overthrowing governments that do not care about your ideology.The removal of Spanish protections and subsequent apocalypse wars among the newly created Latin "nations" were extremely detrimental economically and destroyed what was an effective trade bloc. And the British, who facilitated these revolts, were the ones to profit meaningfully through extractive loans and long term economic dominance over these nascent republics they had a hand in creating. Britain would be *the* key economic partner held in common by these republics who so often found themselves killing one another.To say nothing of the Monroe Doctrine, which was a direct response to Bolivar and the like.You can pretend that United Fruit is a "cold war meme" but nobody is going to take you seriously.These are just facts. I don't care about your damage control at all. The loan a new Mexican state secured in the 1820s from London was critically disastrous for them economically, and forced them into bankruptcy and a debt crisis that would last for decades. For example.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_American_wars_of_independence#Effects_of_independence
>>18486111Song inventor Su Song invented mechanical clocks capable of keeping time to accurate to the minute. Song solar calendars reached within hours of precision for the 365 day year. Song mathematician Qin Jiushao created the "Chinese remainder theorem" named so because no European mathematician until Gauss was able to solve it. A movable type was invented by Bi Sheng, predating Gutenberg by many centuries. Currency was distributed in paper instead of metal coins for the first time in human history. Dream pool essays written by Shen Kuo describes many other inventions and natural scientific discoveries in this period.
>>18486122The only actual extractive state that heavily stifled development, outright looted, and paypigged their periphery dependents was the Soviet Union, most specifically the Soviet Union towards East Germany and Poland. And even despite tearing up machines and sending them eastwards, locking East Germany into unfavorable deals, deals so bad one of their trade ministers shot himself in protest, East Germany still shot ahead and had a higher standard of living than the USSR itself. The paypigging wasn't totally economically retarding and eventually in the Brehznev era, the doctrine reversed and the Soviet Union propped up the periphery with cheap oil and gas. I struggle to find anything with the second wave of western colonialism (late 18th and 19th century) that was as bad as what the USSR did in terms of crippling their colonies/puppets. You have to go back to literal Caribbean sugar plantations for anything comparable. I read a book on West Africa during decolonization and it just seemed like the French regarded the whole thing as a moneysink? The meme about protectionist common markets where you do tie up the colonies to the mainland was a 1930s-1950s meme and experimented with here, and the French cabinet came to the conclusion it benefited absolutely no one but a few unproductive businesses in France and was a huge fiscal drain on the French taxpayers and public. They extrapolated African population growth and were like "This cost will grow exponentially, let's get the fuck out of here".
>>18486127China was historically insular, still is for a large part, at least culturally.Literally the center of the world.This is probably the prime reason why they didn't take off.Why bother colonizing far off lands, when everyone else is already going out of their way to come to you? You see the problem here. They already had everything.Also industrialization at scale isn't really something that just happens when you hit a certain level of development.Saying the medieval Chinese were *just* about to start production of large machines meant to produce other standardized machine parts until those pesky Mongols took over is kind of dumb. They simply weren't, to my knowledge, consciously working towards that end.Industrialization in modern western Europe was consciously oriented to those specific ends, from the beginning.Comparing their respective goals and intellectual contexts is anachronistic. One-off machines created by artisans with custom parts incompatible with other creations is one thing.Standardization and mass production of steam hammers is another beast entirely.
>>18486161>one of their trade ministers shot himself in protestbasedimagine if people had the balls to still do that kind of absolute madman shit
>>18486080The wealth generated from the plantations was reinvested for construction of new infrastructure and production of the first industrial machines. Even the raw materials were provided from those colonies
>>18485005Kenneth Pomeranz makes the same assertion. Its the California School of economic history. They want to be seen as anti-racist as possible because thats how Californians just are.
>>18486319The Californian School have a point in that Europe wasn't exactly leaps and bounds ahead of Asia and the Middle East in the way people think. It's not like some game of Civilization where you've accumulated more tech points due to more wealth, and therefore you shoot ahead. The world operated at the Malthusian limit and manufacturing was for the most part a function of agricultural production. China and India could generate a larger caloric surplus, so they pumped out more goods and services and fielded a larger army. That's literally almost all those stats showcasing the massive GDP/aggregate output of Asia against Europe show, the advantage of rice farming. Treating coal like Britbongs just happened to be blessed with it and had the excess colonial wealth to make use of it is absurd too. Coal usage came with the Holznot (Wood crisis) in Europe, a malthusian limitation that forced people from clean wood to the smokey, polluting coal. Because of this, it lead to the development of chimneys, which eventually flowed down from the elite to everyday average cottages. In the high middle ages, the population was low enough to just keep on using wood and have the smoke go out through shingled roofs, and have the cottage somewhat smokey but tolerably smokey. When wood became too expensive during the late middle ages and early modern period, they innovated with dedicated chimneys and developed the ratios necessary for air pressure differentials to drag the smokey coal smoke out out of the cottage. That's what fueled the development of Britain's coal industry. As far as I'm aware this particular chimney system never really took off anywhere else, even areas with massive coal reserves.
>>18485647>unless ideology is involvedChinese goods were and still are lower quality too Learn 2 read ramshit
It takes thousands of attempts by generalists to leverage specialists and skilled laborers to make tiny revisions on any leap forward invention which by itself is typically a flawed though a proof of concept. The germs and japs have been great at this sort of bureaucracy and are major contributors to tooling and scaling manufacturing in itself which is actually where all innovations go to roost. Americans were the ones to kick this off but fell dependent on managerialism, which eventually came for everyone, which made them more cost of living and expansion focused all in service of cash flow and liquidity. China took over their tooling at the end of the last century.
>>18485005>Why do so many historians always say anyone could've done itThey are leftists that don't believe that anyone can be better than anyone else.
