Ed,
Thanks for the reply.
>I'm not sure that I agree you interpretation of what brought the era to a
>close. Certainly, the actions taken by the official church were important,
>and undoubtedly many an ecological niche was used up by the water and
>charcoal based technology of the time. However, I would argue that some
>important natural and psychological factors were also at work. It would
>seem that the weather turned nasty in the 13th Century, resulting in
>devastation by famine between 1315 and 1317.
?? I thought I did mention the change in climate and the starvation and
plague which it led to. The Medieval Industrial and Agricultural
Revolutions occurred during a benign climatic period called by
climatologits the Little Optimum. The subsequent cooler period did not
pass until the 18th century and I believe had a direct impact on
industrialization by the beneficial effect it had on disease and
agricultural productivity. The cooler period was particularly severe in
the mid 17th century and the poor harvests it caused helped to create the
social and political unrest which led to the English Revolution of 1640
from which flowed in turn the radical protestantism and nonconformism which
contributed substantially to the rise of modern capitalism. It was French
Calvinists who brought the silk industry to England after the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes. Arkright, who the text books say developed the modern
factory and mass production, was actually copying silk spinning mills, the
first one of which was set up in England in 1719, half a century before he
built his first cotton spinning mill, the one near Bakewell. Watt was a
Presbyterian and his partner Boulton was a Quaker. Barclays Bank, now one
of the worlds largest, was started by a group of Quakers. Birmingham, which
in the 19th century became the workshop of the world, was a notable centre
of nonconformism. Coke of Derby who invented the puddling process that
permitted ductile iron to be made with coal and thus provided the basic raw
material of the industrial age on a scale unthinkable with charcol
smelting, was a Quaker. The only one of the really biggies who was not a
nonconformist was Arkright. Nonconformist schools led in technical and
business education - they were in fact the only places where you could
receive it, apart from on the job. There are many other examples which I
give in the book.
>
>All of this suggests that for a century or more the world became a terrible
>place, battered, it would seem, by satanic forces people could not
>understand. This was not the kind of climate which would have promoted the
>speculation, experimentation and learning that had been the hallmark of the
>12th Century. On the contrary, it promoted withdrawal, piety, orthodoxy and
>bizarre religious behaviors such as self-flagellation.
Agreed.
>
>I would agree that the 12th and 13th Centuries had many of the
>characteristics of the industrial revolution, but I would venture that the
>difference between the factories of the 12th Century and those of the 18th
>is a quantum leap rather than a progression.
I don't think I called it a progression, merely that there was a medieval
episode which shared some characteristics of the one in the 18th century,
like factories.
If Europe had not shut down in
>the 14th Century, it is possible that the industrial revolution of the kind
>experienced in the 18th to 20th Centuries might have come earlier, but this
>is a matter of pure speculation. What you could do with the horse and the
>waterwheel is minuscule compared to what could be done with steam power,
>electricity and the methods of mass production. While cities grew and trade
>flourished during late medieval times, the essential character of the
>landscape was nevertheless rural. The second industrial revolution (as you
>call it) totally transformed the landscape to an urban one.
Agreed. But the first one did too. It devastated the forests.
>
>>In the second industrial revolution in the West (there had been another
>>similar episode in China, see Joseph Needham's history of technology in
>>China) the interiority was provided by the Reformation (Luther and Calvin).
>>The Pope couldn't put a stop to this episode of heresy, unlike the previous
>>one, because the printing press spread it so wide and so fast (see Keith
>>Thomas, An Incomplete History of the World). So far we seem to be
>>repeating the medieval model - pressing against the limits of our
>>ecological niche, climate change in the offing (cooling rather than
>>warming, if Milankovich is anything to go by, and since his theory matches
>>all previous cooling episodes I find it rather convincing) though no Pope
>>to put a stop to the orgy of interiority and belief in ascent (sublimated
>>as progress).
>
>Nothing that ever happens is "typical" and I don't believe that history
>repeats itself as some great cyclical process.
Depends how you define the cycle, does it not ? Civilizations do tend to
rise, flourish and then decline, for example. Toynbee and Sorokin had some
worthwhile things to say about such events as did William McNeill.
And rightly or wrongly, we seem to be arriving at the
>conclusion that the identity of progress-maker that we have used for the
>past two or three centuries no longer fits our situation.
Agreed,
But we do not
>even know what our situation really is,
At all ? We have a paradigm of science which ahs been overturned and a new
one emerging. We ahvea soci-cultural mythology called modernism which no
longer functions very well. We have a set of new technolgoies which are
tending to reinforce the new scientific paradigm. We are pushing against
ecological limits fon a global scale, which ahs never been done before.
and we cannot be certain whether we
>should assume a new identity or what that should be.
Doesn't this depend on who the "we" are. Quite a few groups seem to think
they have the low down on that one, from neo-conservative globalizing free
traders to New Agers and Deep Ecologists.
Like the world of the
>14th Century, our world, once bright and clear, has become dark and ridden
>with devils. No Pope may need to shut us down. We may do that ourselves.
Agreed. I doubt we "needed" the pope to shut the first one down either.
Ecological limits and the change in climate would have done that anyway.
>
>Thank you for the excerpt from your book. The industrial revolution came
>much later to eastern Europe than in England. My father went to work in a
>textile mill in Poland when he was eight years old (that would have been
>about 1910). When I was a child, in the 1930s (in Canada), children were
>still beaten quite regularly. The beaters professed not to be doing it out
>of anger, but to "teach them a lesson".
You are welcome.
The more humane way in which we treat children (and women) is one of the
unalloyed successes of Modernism, borrowed via Rousseau from Polynesians
and Amerindians, by the way.
My own paternal great great grandfather managed a silk mill and also had a
weaving garrett on the third floor of his house. His daughters worked all
day in the mill and then wove half the night in the garrett for their
father. That would have been in the 1830s and 1840s. The children of hand
loom weavers were still helping their parents joining threads and shearing
finished cloth around 1900. They were brought home from school to do it
and thoroughly enjoyed it. At least four generations of my family on both
sides were silk spinners or weavers, from the early 18th century onwards
and perhaps even earlier.
>
>>I will be treating the question of whether or not Gregg's model,
>>interpreted as one based on sharing the fruits of industrialism fairly in
>>the community and concern for others and owner employees replacing child
>>labour is in fact a model for the future in a later section of the book,
>>not yet written, or whether there are inherent tendencies in industrial
>>capitalism which make it unreformable, particularly the ability of
>>individuals and corporations to accumulate great wealth and power. (If
>>there is interest I will post it, when completed). Even in the Medieval
>>Industrial Revolution, the abbey capitalists used their great power to
>>compel local residents to use their grist and fulling mills rather than
>>hand grind and full their own corn and cloth. If an institution set up on
>>Christian principles of charity and love of fellow man could resort to this
>>practice, what chance in a secular age of achieving better behaviour ?
>
>Please post. You may find comments from people on the list helpful.
Will do. Comments will be most welcome. I am also looking for volunteers
to review the whole book. Any takers ?
>
>>One last comment, re: the steam engine. If anyone invented it, in the
>>sense of being first, it was Hero of Alexandria. In modern times Thomas
>>Savery and Thomas Newcomen antedated Watt, who improved Newcomen's engine
>>by adding a governor and separate condenser - his mentor of the time, etc.
>
>Thanks. I do remember Newcomen, though not Hero of Alexandria. I recall
>reading that it was necessary to invent the steam engine because horses
>could not get rid of water fast enough as coal mines deepened.
Quite right. They also tried water wheels. You can still see one at Laxey
on the Isle of Man (an island in the Irish sea). It is enormous. Savery,
Newcomen and Trevithick all developed early steam engines to pump out
Cornish tin mines. Watt was asked by Roebuck to improve on them to drain
a deep coal mine in the Scottish Lowlands. They operated by admitting
steam to the cylinder and then creating a vacuum by cooling the cylinder
with water. This made for a very inefficient engine. Watt's separate
condensor was a considerable advance. The piston in his engine was driven
by the expanding steam instead of being drawn by the vacuum formed by
condensing the steam in the cylinder.
There were still steam engines operating in the cotton spinning mills in my
childhood, though they were no longer the old beam engines of Newcomen and
Watt's time. I used to go and watch the "engine tenters" stoking the
boilers. You could also see the flywheels, the eccentrics, the connecting
rods and the enormous leather drive belts through the windows at the fronts
of the mills - they were a point of pride to the mill owners so they
sometimes glassed the fronts of the engine houses so you could see into
them. They were usually in the centres of the mills, adjacent to the main
entrance and offices where anyone coming and going would see them. The
Houldsworth Mill, which was five minutes walk from my house, was like that.
The one engine and belt would drive many thousands of spindles. My first
job after university was with a manufacturer of textile machinery. A
cousin of my mother still owns and operates a silk mill, so I guess that
branch of the family has probably been in the silk business for 250 years.
I still have a silk scarf my grandmother wove.
Gregg's mill is still in operation, though as a museum. The original water
wheel is still there. It is well worth visiting. It is at Styal in
Cheshire. I used to go there as a child.
Best regards,
Mike H
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