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Last weekend, I read a fascinating essay by historian Bret Devereaux, who used scholarship to answer the question: why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution? In answering the question, Devereaux notes that the industrial revolution was never inevitable. There was, in essence, a confluence of factors in Britain that helped lead to industrialization, to wit: an abundance of coal and the absence of cheaper forms of energy, a need to pump water out of coal mines AND a thriving textile industry whose bottlenecks could be improved by machines that could perform repetitive rotary motion. (I’m definitely oversimplifying some of the points here–do read the whole thing.)
Basically, absent…