[dredmorbius]

The general form of this question, or at least one version of it ("why did the Industrial Revolution occur in England and not in China, which had developed a vastly larger set of technologies far earlier") is known as the Needham Question, after sinologist Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China, an epic 30+ volume work covering Chinese invention and technology, begun in 1954 and still in process. (Needham himself died in the 1990s.) There's a fascinating Wikipedia article on the topic, and if you can find a copy of the completed volumes (many college/university libraries have it), it's a treat.

The general question of the how, why, and when of the Industrial Revolution has fascinated historians, technologists, and economists for ages. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms,[1] and numerous other works address this.

Geographic determinism has become tremendously unpopular among historians, though elements of it carry weight with me. Of China and Japan vs. Europe and Britain, there are several factors:

- Political unity vs. disunity, as you note.

- Crops. Wheat is suitable to individual, independent farming. Rice requires community coordination.

- Hydrology. The Chinese empire effectively started as a large civil water works management bureaucracy. Outside Egypt and Rome's aqueducts, there was no similarly-scoped coordination in the West.

- Watersheds. Europe's rivers diverge from the interior, China's flow in parallel to relatively proximate mouths. Political boundaries in Europe have typically conformed reasonably well to watersheds, though allied / opposed alignments have changed with time. Even today, many county-level jurisdictions correspond to local watersheds. And in both China and Europe, virtually all heavy transport until modern times was along rivers or canals, if not sea or lakes.

- While Britain and Japan are both large islands near continental empires, the geology is utterly different: sedimentary with vast coal deposits, and volcanic with virtually no fossil fuels. While each island was tremendously politically stable, resistant to invasions, England could fuel growth of iron, glass, and steam industries, Japan could not. England was generally relatively wealthy, Japan was one of the poorest countries prior to industrialisation.

- China has long been politically unified (if subject to occasional invasions), Europe has long been politically fractured. China could shut down innovation and foreign trade. No such global policies were possible in Europe.

Within Europe, the distribution of coal is almost wholly in the north: Wales, England, a tiny patch in northern Spain, some in France, and heavy deposits in Germany and Poland. Southern Germany is very fuel-poor, excepting petroleum (not very handy in pre-industrial times) in Silesia, Romania, and Baku (Russia). Coal fueled metalurgy, glassmaking, and eventually steam power in England.

England's flat terrain and ready access to the sea (no part of Great Britain is more than 60 miles from the coast) made transport of the bulky fuel by ship viable. Overland transport wasn't an option -- firewood fuel locally gathered was far more attractive. A similar situation existed in the US where coal didn't overtake wood as a fuel until the 1880s. Rail transport finally made hauling coal from mountain-based mines in Apallachia possible, but benefited greatly from advances in steelmaking (Bessemer process, 1860s), allowing stronger, less fracture-prone rails, and stronger, more powerful locomotives. Rail is effectively canals-on-land, the first truly viable overland freight tansport mode.

There are many other factors, there's tremendous dispute over all of this, and as I've hinted, there's a large literature. I obviously find the geological argument at least plausible in many regards. Given the lack of testability, final adjudication of the question is unlikely.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Clark teaches a course at UC Davis on economic history before the Industrial Revolution, which touches somewhat on this (the principle focus is Europe). A corrected playlist for the YouTube lectures, in proper order, is here: https://pastebin.com/raw/bgKkGyjt

[dredmorbius]

For the curious, here's the watersheds of Europe map I had in mind:

http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

The borders especially of Spain, France, the former Austro-Hungarian (better described as the Danubian) Empire, and much of Germany and Poland are reasonably well evidenced.

The Balkans are as fractured hydrologically as they are politically.

Currently contiguous peninsular regions are defined in significant part by their coasts rather than rivers, probably showing the significance of sea-borne transport. Norway and Sweden are divided along their fall line, as are Spain and France by the Pyreneese Mountains. Switzerland is an identifiable mountain valley.

What's impressive about Russia is how unified it is by waterways. The Volga-Baltic Waterway provides contiguous maritime communication from the Black Sea to the Baltic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga–Baltic_Waterway

A comparable watersheds map of the US, showing the immensity of the Mississipi-Missouri-Ohio-Arkansas-Red river system:

https://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

(Also the utter insanity of most current US state boundaries. At least if you're a fish.)

And the comparable watersheds map of China:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190825155610/https://s3.amazon...

[vidarh]

To add to your points on both flat terrain and waterways in England: in fact the current railway that runs a few blocks from my house runs along what used to be a canal dug from the Thames to enable transport. It was one of the last ones to open before the railway took over (and the operator went bankrupt and sold the land to a railway company that drained it and used the conveniently flattened land for more rails)

A local lake used to be an artificial reservoir to keep the canal filled.

The UK is full of canals that were viable to dig because of that flat terrain.

So large parts of England that were not reachable by river are still reachable by canal boat, and even more used to be before many of the canals were filled in or drained when no longer commercially viable for transport.

[dredmorbius]

And, researching just now: there are a few canals in Japan, though even a modern listing is short:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Canals_in_Japan

Among the earliest is the Takase River canal, in Kyoto, 9.7 kilometers, dug in 1611. Most of the remainder date to the 19th or 20th centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takase_River

The Tatsumi Canal was constructed in 1623, 11 km.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatsumi_Canal

Contrast the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canals_of_the_United_Kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canals_of_the_United_K...

[dredmorbius]

Right, though the bulk of canals in Europe were dug after 1500, and most of England's in the 18th & 19th centuries. This contrasts with Japan's general lack of same; digging through mountainous volcanic rock is far harder than flat limestone (and yields fewer fossils, another story).

China though has its Great Canal which dates to 12 BCE and has had pound locks since the 10th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)

In the US the Erie Canal opened up the West and cemented New York City as a transport, commerce, and financial hub, beginning in the 1830s.

[riazrizvi]

Clearly by the 13th Century China could be considered a technological forerunner, but then the Mongols took over. I suspect the cultural tendencies of the Chinese civil service that drove innovation just couldn’t weather the merging of cultures and the scholarly edge of Chinese culture was collateral damage.

[dredmorbius]

I'm still very weak on my Chinese history, but it was the turning-inward of the Ming dynasty (15th century), not the Mongol invasions, which precipitated the halt.

Also (as already mentioned in this thread), the asset-sheltering tendency of established power groups, halting the emergence of potential rivals, as Bernhard Stern documents in other (non-Chinese) instances.

[toasterlovin]

Thanks for that most excellent answer! It gets at the industrial revolution (and the importance of coal deposits), but the scientific revolution preceded the industrial revolution by quite some time and was not dependent on coal. Something was happening around the English Channel and what is now Germany starting in around the 1600s. Why there and not somewhere else?

[dredmorbius]

Again, views and theories vary greatly.

The Renaissance, printing, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the breaking of uniform Catholic control over thought and science. That's an area I've been exploring (I'm exploring a lot of areas, progress is slow), and it's fascinating.

The Bacons (Francis and Roger, no relation), free-thought movements especially in the north (Amsterdam and Copenhagen), and relative political freedom of inquiry in England all seem to have helped. It's interesting that the Enlightenment itself played heavily in Scotland, otherwise a hinterland (Adam Smith travelled to London for an education he didn't think much of, taking six weeks to make the journey by coach or on horseback, in the 1740s or 50s).

James Burke's television series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed cover much of this development (as well as earlier and later periods), and have been useful, though I'm starting to find holes in Burke's treatments (he wholly ignores Joseph Needham's work and Chinese invention, as examples).

Gregory Clark, mentioned above, has a generally excellent treatment of the question, one of the best I've read yet, though there's much I've yet to read.

Another excellent resource is the History of Information website. It's a useful place to explore questions such as this.

http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php