Think about the economic pressures that promote mechanization. Optimal conditions combine tremendous wealth with a labor shortage. In ancient China, technology was used to harness excess human labor. Paul Polak built a poverty-alleviation program out of harnessing cheap labor in modern India. You’re not going to invest in primitive steam engines when human labor is cheaper than coal.
I guess I don’t see why I would expect mechanization to be important, given this argument. If labor is expensive, I get why it makes sense to invest more in substitutes for labor. But… shouldn’t that just lower the cost of labor to the point of places where labor is cheap? If labor is cheaper than coal, why didn’t the other places make the things with labor that Britain made with coal?
I think there’s an argument that the ceiling for mechanization is much higher, because you can plug machines into other machines more easily than you can plug human laborers into other human laborers, and there’s transfer between applications for different machines, or something like this. But I somehow think this is the interesting story, and the ‘but they had cheap labor so they didn’t need machinists’ isn’t the interesting story. Like, I almost have an easier time buying “Britain, as a colder country, had higher demand for domestic use of coal than the Ottomans / China / India, and so invested more heavily in coal mining tech, which then turned out to be useful for industrialism more generally.” Or, “Britain, as a country with more useful water power, had an easier time making powered machines and had more of a maritime culture than those three countries.”
I guess I don’t see why I would expect mechanization to be important, given this argument. If labor is expensive, I get why it makes sense to invest more in substitutes for labor. But… shouldn’t that just lower the cost of labor to the point of places where labor is cheap? If labor is cheaper than coal, why didn’t the other places make the things with labor that Britain made with coal?
I think there’s an argument that the ceiling for mechanization is much higher, because you can plug machines into other machines more easily than you can plug human laborers into other human laborers, and there’s transfer between applications for different machines, or something like this. But I somehow think this is the interesting story, and the ‘but they had cheap labor so they didn’t need machinists’ isn’t the interesting story. Like, I almost have an easier time buying “Britain, as a colder country, had higher demand for domestic use of coal than the Ottomans / China / India, and so invested more heavily in coal mining tech, which then turned out to be useful for industrialism more generally.” Or, “Britain, as a country with more useful water power, had an easier time making powered machines and had more of a maritime culture than those three countries.”