Deveraux's piece is an accurate history, but his claim that this was the *only* way industrialization could come about has always struck me as tenuous and unsupported. Sure, you can always look at the exact contours of the current situation and give a *local* explanation, but to claim that it's therefore a fundamental law of industrializ…
Deveraux's piece is an accurate history, but his claim that this was the *only* way industrialization could come about has always struck me as tenuous and unsupported. Sure, you can always look at the exact contours of the current situation and give a *local* explanation, but to claim that it's therefore a fundamental law of industrialization... he's way out over his skis.
It reminds me of the old Douglas Adams bit: “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it?" Deveraux is giving a local explanation for the forces which caused the puddle to take its shape given that particular hole, which is true so far as it goes, but that's not gonna get you a general law of how holes form.
> his claim that this was the *only* way industrialization could come about
I think this is a misreading; he explicitly states the opposite:
> Now all of that said I want to reiterate that the industrial revolution only happened once in one place so may well could have happened somewhere else in a different way with different preconditions; we’ll never really know because our one industrial revolution spread over the whole globe before any other industrial revolutions happened. But we can still note that the required precursors for the one sample we have didn’t exist in the Roman economy.
Deveraux's piece is an accurate history, but his claim that this was the *only* way industrialization could come about has always struck me as tenuous and unsupported. Sure, you can always look at the exact contours of the current situation and give a *local* explanation, but to claim that it's therefore a fundamental law of industrialization... he's way out over his skis.
It reminds me of the old Douglas Adams bit: “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it?" Deveraux is giving a local explanation for the forces which caused the puddle to take its shape given that particular hole, which is true so far as it goes, but that's not gonna get you a general law of how holes form.
> his claim that this was the *only* way industrialization could come about
I think this is a misreading; he explicitly states the opposite:
> Now all of that said I want to reiterate that the industrial revolution only happened once in one place so may well could have happened somewhere else in a different way with different preconditions; we’ll never really know because our one industrial revolution spread over the whole globe before any other industrial revolutions happened. But we can still note that the required precursors for the one sample we have didn’t exist in the Roman economy.