Anything can be anything if you stretch definitions far enough. But normally industrialization is seen as distinct and antagonistic to artisanal culture.
There was a very marked change in the growth rate, which is why economic historians focus on that.
Yes, there were multiple further steps that needed to happen, as you note. But the black plague got the population "unstuck" from a local minimum that they could not grow from, to being able to have cattle plow the fields and eat meat that allowed them to have some surplus to capture the further gains.
It's not that the later gains were inevitable, but that they never would have otherwise happened, and the growth rate started with the plague.
It's like saying the current AI boom started recently, there's no way the steam engine was related. It is a clear causal chain, even though many things had to happen in between.
But before the black plague, at least the "western world" was stuck in Malthusian dynamics where there was no growth in technology or income.
The economy went from 0% growth for 100s of years to 3% growth that lasted many hundreds of years.
Yes, at each step keeping the 3% growth needed things to keep going, but the big thing was unleashing the nonzero growth rate, to get unstuck from the local minimum.
I will try to steelman watwut, a lot of people presume compound exponential economic growth is basically inevitable as a law, so you can always go back to some point in time.
However, economic growth was basically flat before the Black Plague, and increases were basically random events that went back to Malthusian dynamics.
Only since the Black Plague has the world enjoyed exponential economic growth.
Most people talk about the industrial revolution, a lot of other comments talk about the british agricultural revolution before that, but economic historians have identified the inflection point at the black plague - that's where compound interest really started to be a driver of growth, it barely existed before that, at least on long time scales.
The Justinian Plague was as bad or worse, but rather than result in flourishing it ushered in the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the so-called Dark Ages. So maybe the Black Plague was an important element, but if so also had to have happened at the confluence of other critical events.
According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.
<quote>
One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications.
</quote>
If we are limiting causes to things that would lead to an event every time no matter what other conditions exist, then we aren't going to ever have any causes.
This would be like saying "well drunk driving doesn't cause accidents because I drive drunk once and didn't get in a crash"
That's a super interesting question and I agree! I am only saying the modern period of compound economic growth clearly started at the black plague with good explanations as to why.
Why other events did not have the same effects are very interesting questions for economic history.
Yes, there were multiple further steps that needed to happen, as you note. But the black plague got the population "unstuck" from a local minimum that they could not grow from, to being able to have cattle plow the fields and eat meat that allowed them to have some surplus to capture the further gains.
It's not that the later gains were inevitable, but that they never would have otherwise happened, and the growth rate started with the plague.
It's like saying the current AI boom started recently, there's no way the steam engine was related. It is a clear causal chain, even though many things had to happen in between.
But before the black plague, at least the "western world" was stuck in Malthusian dynamics where there was no growth in technology or income.