this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Well, the classical steam engine also wasn't very powerful. It spun... but that's it. They would have needed to add a proper turbine and closed ducts around it if they wanted to get a useful power output the same way. To be fair, I'm sure they could have figured it out or moved to a piston design, but as you point out they didn't know economics and technological advancement were a thing. As far as they knew things were the same as they ever were and science was a hobby for the idle rich.
It's a lot easier to talk about the industrial component than the (arguably more important) ideological one because it is so concrete. The Roman empire showed signs of early economic automation, like mechanical harvesting machines, which all vanished as it collapsed. The Chinese were using blast furnaces already in the same period, and you can see mass production of things like pottery vary far back in the archeological record indeed. For some reason, it didn't take.
I personally suspect feudal lords just stifle innovation. Industrialisation showed up at the same time as the ideological enlightenment, and we see similar patterns in modern developing countries. But, I could be wrong. Are you drawing your four-part theory from a book I could read?
No, that is just a listing of all the diffrent explanations I have heard. I suspect they all play a role to a greater or lesser degree. My personal idea is that slavery was the thing. It would never be profitable to spend the money to invent a labor saving device when there was effectively infinite cheap labor. They didn't have the metallurgy to create high quality machine parts and the industrial design and manufacture ideas were invented for a long time yet. Their mechanical engineering was better than ours till like the 1900s. So it was all bespoke work. All expensive and kidna delicate. So you wouldn't want to pay the expense of a labor saving device when you could just buy a few gauls for the money.
In the way of capitlaism stifling blue sky innovation feudal lords had to be even worse.
Exactly. Under feudalism, there's no "disrupting" established lords regardless of the pitch or your personal connections; even if one wanted to be your patron the others would probably gang up on them. This is basically why Russia is still using 99.9% old Soviet technology. They haven't given themselves titles yet but oligarchs are basically feudal lords, Kamil Galeev has gone into more detail about that specific case.
To be fair, most the soviet stuff was well made in ways lots of modern stuff just isn't. Like up untill the very recent period we didn't have any space flight capacity but the old soviet stuff was still going strong.
It's true. They set out to be hyper-progressive science people, and in some ways succeeded. Their engineers were always decent, and when a factory could source the stuff they needed good stuff was built.