Kyle Harper on the Roman Industrial Revolution
Further evidence for the Printing Press Theory
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The latest episode of the Dwarkesh Podcast with historian Kyle Harper covers, among other things, the conspicuous lack of a Roman Industrial Revolution. This is the subject of my most popular post so I listened with heightened interest to their discussion.
Dwarkesh contextualizes the question well. Rome was incredibly advanced in many ways: Massive trade networks, economies of scale, sophisticated financial markets, and sustained productivity gains. Why, then, couldn’t Rome have industrialized and saved a thousand years of history?
Kyle explains: Rome didn’t have a self-sustaining source of new ideas and technologies. In particular, they are missing the kind of high science and mathematics that 17th century Europe enjoyed in the Enlightenment.
We can think of the inputs to an economy are going to be capital, labor, and ideas. What the Romans have is people. They have some investment, but they don't have technology. They don't have ideas.
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They don't have research and engineering that drives continuous productivity gains. I think they go precociously far in a pre-industrial setting where you take trade really far. They have good institutions in terms of strong property rights. There's relatively reliable contract enforcement. There's financial markets. They have the most advanced financial markets in the world before the 17th or 18th century.
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The reason they don't have [an Industrial Revolution] is because they don't have science. Their science sucks. I'm offending some of my colleagues, I'm sure. Galen is great. Ptolemy's incredible. I love Pliny the Elder's encyclopedia, but if you look in the big picture, the contribution that the Roman Empire makes to our knowledge of how nature works and then the applied technology that comes out of that is really pathetic for five, 600 years. They go as far as you can with Smithian advantages to market exchange and specialization, to banks and finance. But without the kind of creative destruction of new technologies that improve productivity, you're eventually gonna run out of improvements.
One quibble with Kyle’s hypothesis is that I think he is underrating the uncertainty around our estimation of Rome’s scientific knowledge. All surviving primary source text from Rome could easily fit on a 10-year old thumb drive. If a single Herculaneum library could double the amount of text we have from Rome, we should be careful before grading the state of Roman science based on the small slice we do have. The archeological evidence and text we do have is a lower bound on the extent of Roman knowledge, not a central estimate.
Still, it’s clear that their scientific output cannot compete with Enlightenment Europe and perhaps not even with the Hellenistic Mediterranean that Rome replaced. After accepting that the Romans do seem to have lacked idea generation capacity, however, we then ask why this is so and face a similar question as we started with.
Kyle implies an answer to this next question when Dwarkesh asks what he would do if he were made emperor and wanted to start-up scientific progress. Kyle references the British and French Royal Societies and identifies three features he sees as necessary for sustained productivity growth from ideas.
One is the promotion of what we would call basic or fundamental science. It doesn't all have to be immediately practical or commercialized. But you're promoting deep knowledge of nature.
Two, you're doing it in an empiricist way. This is something very important in the 17th century that the Romans by contrast don't have, is the spirit of Francis Bacon that we need to ground our knowledge in experiment and observation, not just believe whatever authorities or Aristotle said. That's very much the spirit of places like the Royal Society: we don't take things on anybody's word, especially Aristotle's. You need basic science. You need empiricism, rigorous and self-correcting.
Third, you need a sense of useful knowledge, and that's the other thing that really comes together in the 17th century: not just the basic and abstract science, but the application, and the 17th century language for that is useful knowledge. That is something that doesn't ever get wired together in the Roman Empire. There are tinkerers and engineers, but they're not talking to the mathematicians and the physicists. If you were from on high to design self-sustaining innovation, I think you would want to bring those elements into proximity.
Kyle is definitely right that close feedback loops between fundamental, abstract science and empirical, applied engineering are important for sustained productivity growth from new ideas. But the implication that royal support for scientific inquiry is the missing link between Rome and and sustained technological progress is wrong.
After all, the Greeks had royal support for scientific inquiry for centuries at the Library of Alexandria. Perhaps they managed a higher rate of discovery than the Romans, but they weren’t any closer to the self-sustaining industrial growth that Kyle is trying to start. There was royal support and patronage for scientists in Rome too. Emperor Antonius Pius exempted philosophers and physicians from taxes and funded the university at Athens. Galen was a court physician for Marcus Aurelius, and the scholars remaining at Alexandria under Roman rule, like Hero, still probably received state support for their research.
So what was preventing the feedback loops of technological growth taking hold? I argue the missing piece was the printing press. Kyle’s examples of early industrial Europe provide some evidence for this. He notes that the connection between abstract theoreticians like Newton and Leibniz, and applied tinkerers like Denis Papin was essential to spark sustained technological progress. But these connections were only possible because their ideas were cheap to print and easy to spread around Europe.
Just as the printing press enabled these connections in early-modern Europe, it’s absence prevented them in the ancient world. Hero of Alexandria was experimenting with vacuum pumps a few generations after Archimedes studied fluid physics and a few generations before Diophantus was investigating number theory, but it’s much harder for their ideas to cross paths because copying Hero’s works is the labor of a lifetime rather than the labor of one man over a few months. Similarly, Kyle wonders where Euclid’s elements came from and where the knowledge went:
I'm super interested in the history of math. What happens after Euclid? It's very hard to say because you get these really interesting people that pop up, like Diophantus who's later, in the early Roman Empire. There's still really interesting math going on. Euclid is incredible. The Greek experiment in math and science is the one that I think had the better chance of sparking sustained takeoff.
And it didn't. It'd be interesting to know more about why. Why did things stall? Because these people... Euclid is not just a towering genius who comes out of nowhere. He's very much a product of the culture and the questions that are being asked in the generations before. It just sort of feels like after him, you fail to get that kind of sustained continuous progress and advance. Maybe back to that big question that we were asking before: what prevents the kind of breakthroughs that we see in the modern world?
As Kyle points out, Euclid is part of a larger culture of inquiry. Archimedes sent his proofs as letters to other mathematicians in Alexandria. The Mediterranean sustained something like a republic of letters for centuries under both the Greeks and the Romans, but it never materialized into a feedback loop of technological growth.
In contrast, as soon as Europe rediscovered classical Greek and Roman texts and started mass producing them with the printing press, it began the feedback loop of improving knowledge and technology that never took hold in the ancient world, and eventually led to the Industrial Revolution.
What Rome was missing wasn’t state support for science or proximity of abstract philosophers to applied technicians. It wasn’t even missing a flow of original and important ideas; the more inventive Greeks were well integrated into the empire and the classical texts were enough to ignite modern growth in Europe in the 15th century.
What Rome was missing was the printing press1. Without it, any idea has to overcome the massive activation energy required for copying before it can be spread or last over time. Rome had plenty of sparks of innovation, but lacked the catalyst to sustain them.
Rome was close to an industrial revolution. The empire housed massive economies of scale, continent-wide trade networks, and sophisticated financial markets. It also had a healthy flow of scientific and applied innovations. If Rome had combined all of this with a cheap way to preserve and spread these ideas, it would have begun the feedback loop of economic growth and saved us all a thousand years of history.
And perhaps also cheaper paper.
Interesting column but people often don’t realize all of the Industrial Revolution is based upon the use of hydrocarbons, first coal and then oil and gas. Hydrocarbons are very dense forms of energy which can easily be used. I don’t think Rome had ample supplies of hydrocarbons at hand, however, England and Northern Europe did.
Nice post, Maxwell. But that begs the question: why didn't the Roman world come up with the printing press? For what it's worth Jacques Ellul thought, in his seminal work The Technological Society, that the lack of further Greek/Roman technical progress was because of the fundamentally different worldview that the ancient world held:
"The Greeks were suspicious of technical activity because it represented an aspect of brute force and implied a want of moderation…The rejection of technique was a deliberate, positive activity involving self-mastery, recognition of destiny, and the application of a given conception of life. Only the most modest techniques were permitted - those which would respond directly to material needs in such a way that these needs did not get the upper hand….No one ought to apply scientific thought technically, because scientific thought corresponded to a conception of life, to wisdom. The great preoccupation of the Greeks was balance, harmony and moderation; hence, they fiercely resisted the unrestrained force inherent in technique, and rejected it because of its potentialities."
Indeed, the rise of technique and the decline in faith in God are linked phenomenon:
"Technique worships nothing, respects nothing. It has a single role: to strip off essentials, to bring everything to light, and by rational use to transform everything into means. More than science which limits itself to explaining the “how,” technique desacralizes because it demonstrates (by evidence and not by reason, through use and not through books) that mystery does not exist….
Nothing belongs any longer to the realm of the gods or the supernatural. The individual who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing spiritual anywhere. But man cannot live without the sacred. He therefore transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed its former object: to technique itself."