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New Explanation For the Industrial Revolution
Pcol writes "The New York Times is running a story on Dr. Gregory Clark's book 'A Farewell to Alms,' which offers a new explanation for the Industrial Revolution and the affluence it created. Dr. Clark, an economic historian at the University of California Davis, postulates that the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 came about because of the strange new behaviors of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours, and a willingness to save. Clark's research shows that between 1200 and 1800, the rich had more surviving children than the poor and that he postulates that this caused constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. 'The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,' Clark concludes. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped. Around 1790, a steady upward trend in production efficiency caused a significant acceleration in the rate of productivity growth that at last made possible England's escape from the Malthusian trap."
It's hardly coincidental that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were bringing in the industrial revolution.
/.'er wouldn't exist.
The widespread use of caffeinated drinks helped transform human economies from farm to factory. Boiling water helped decrease disease among city workers. And caffeine kept them from falling asleep over the machinery.
In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee--or Diet Coke or Red Bull--to get us out of bed and back to work, the world of the average
And now, as evidenced by intro of "Idiocracy", we have a trend in other direction...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I have trouble believing slashdotters are helping the population grow rapidly. After all, wouldn't that require... well... having sex ???
In lots of societies, the rich reproduce faster than the poor. A counter example would be societies with polygamy. In that case, many men can't marry because the rich have all the women. Those single men don't reproduce at all. By TFA's logic, those societies should have outstripped us long ago.
Try again dude.
I can see how one may come to his conclusion. It is certainly not unreasonable. I do have another thought that is in line with this thinking.
Would the better literacy and general education not yield more technology which would result in increased production? Sure longer working hours contribute, but generally speaking, if you have more educated people, you have more people thinking constructively. I tend to think that the longer hours were a not large contribution, but rather, what people were able to do in those hours was the bigger issue. So really, the better education allowed people to develop ways to produce more by changing how the labor did something instead of just doing something for longer.
Just a thought really, I hope that came through as I intended.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
It's odd that Clark says that institutional change had nothing to do with it. So there was no point in Adam Smith back in 1776 writing the Wealth of Nations arguing that the laws should be changed to promote capitalism? Or what about China, which did poorly under Maoism but since then has enjoyed remarkable growth under a more capitalist set of laws?
"Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving," Dr. Clark writes.
And so what happens when the reverse hits a culture, and easy credit replaces thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If he is correct in his hypothesis then we're in trouble. If the article post last week about Smart Teens having less sex can be extrapolated to adults then we should see the opposite happen in the US. It already felt like the general populace of the USA is getting dumber this just seems to confirm my suspicions.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
The poor are now having more surviving children than the rich. So are we now going to go back to the middle ages?
I could see how a class system in place, and the working class dieing at a higher rate, could support his theory of natural selection help the economic growth. The wealth moved downwards, which in turn turned raised the overall economy. We see this when the working classes started to buy more creating more of a demand and thus the start of the industrial revolution.
And he hits it on the head when he shows how China and Japan didn't have the same factors until much later. China is pushing to create a modernization push at the expense of the health, thus the supporting his 'germ' argument that can still stifle the lower class. (Of course, the new black death could be aids, which china is starting to have issues with the new high level of prostitution and drug use) so it will be interesting to see how it works out for them.
Weather improved after the last big Volcanic explosion at an Asian volcano, and thus food production went up, and that will count for something, along with a switch from alcoholic drinks to minimize bad water quality to coffee and tea as noted by other slashdotters.
General production of more advanced materials started to make a significant difference with cast iron, steel from Bessemer's furnaces in 1850s, and concrete in 1840s and steam engines w/Fulton's steam boat in the first decade of the 1800s, and not the least were steam powered looms just before 1800 which allowed large improvements in cloth and reduction in prices which freed huge numbers of people from subsistence clothing jobs.
Lots of things came together at once to make manual labor less intensive, even with just simple tools.
According to the article, as a result of the rich reproducing more successfully than the poor and replacing the poor in the jobs and communities, says the author, "Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving,"
In other words, the poor are poor because they are irrational and lazy and passed these values onto their children.
More, he is suggesting not only have these values been passed from rich people in one generation to the next, but in fact that as a result of this period of the rich being overwhelmingly more successful in procreating, rapid biological evolutionary processes have produced genetic advantages in these societies that underscore purely social evolution.
In other words, not only are the poor poor because they are irrational and lazy, but also because their are genetically inferior to their rich masters.
Therefore - and this is suggested later in the article - the reason that today's third world countries have not experienced industrial revolution and modernizations essentially amounts to the following: 1) their peoples are lazy and irrational, and 2) they do not have access to the superior rich genetic lineage that underscored the industrial revolution in England.
Suffice it to say, the primary criticisms of the author's hypotheses by other scientists and historians is the utter lack of convincing and systematic evidence.
The NYTimes article, not the paper itself, makes this typical leading statement: "For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence."
...
That is false, at least as far as hunters and gatherers. See, for example:
"The Original Affluent Society" -- by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
Hunter and gatherers has much more free time than most people today -- and time is also a form of wealth.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Sounds fishy to me. As established in many places and times, the poor compensate for infant mortality be fecundity and as things get a little better, they outnumber the rich. I'd need more proof of solid numbers that the absolute numbers of children born to poor is less than the number of children born to the not-poor.
The ideas taking hold, on the other hand, have been noticed before, but I agree with the old-fashioned historians who say religion was responsible for that. The power of the state to enforce religious values all the way from the top to the street created a new culture, even among the poor. The king or government's incentive? A less violent population is less likely to cause problems later. Encourage the idea of non-violence in the poor and turning the other cheek, and you can avoid usurpers rallying an army or peasant-lead revolts. Encourage the ideals of hard-work to get more value of the land you own. Saving money by using the church owned banks.
Eventually, society learns to depend on the state instead of family bonds for their security and to enforce contracts, and you start to see a modern world of high mobility and capital flow (you no longer HAD to marry the miller's daughter to get the miller to invest in your factory).
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
That's been the case for a while now. Miraculously, we've escaped that for the time being. You seem to be assuming that the "high breeders...them that start at age 12 and keep popping them out until death or menopause" are genetically inferior and will always be in that same socioeconomic class. However, both of those statements are untrue, and it's improbable that this collapse you speak of will occur within the next few generations.
And if the major population-culler wasn't a disease that strikes you in your prime, completely debilitates you, and requires more energetic people to spend lots of time caring for you.
On the other hand, on the topic of things that will actually help, there are many organizations doing many productive things to help.
The Industrial revolution was accompanied by untold misery to the world.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
For laws to be changed to be more capitalistic people have to become more capitalism-minded.
Maybe China saw a good case for capitalism (the USA). Then after a generation or two the rulers had a new mindset. One that allowed (and even promoted) capitalistic values. And guess what has happened economic growth in China has exploded.
If there are no capitalists in a nation you can change the laws all you want. But people will still highly prefer to trust their income to their employer or to the government.
The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages
Everyone would have 2^n ancestors if no one ever interbred, but obviously that's not the case. My guess is that what really happened is enough people married across class, in combination with people choosing important sounding surnames for themselves, to make it appear as if a majority of English have upper class ancestors. A whole lot of people can be descended from royalty; all it takes is one or two horny princes or princesses to spread the royal genes far and wide. The poor people's genes are spread far and wide too, it's just that no one made up any fancy genealogical charts saying they were directly descended from Bob Shaftoe, mud worker in 1329. So all the evidence is selectively chosen to point to the most well known ancestors.
I could be wrong, and maybe they somehow found all the original upper class DNA in a vault somewhere and did a conclusive study to show that most people in England share some of it, but my guess is that their result is just an improper interpretation of the fact that almost everyone is descended from almost everyone else's ancestors if you go back far enough.
I don't buy this. At all. The methodology of reviewing old wills to glean data of child survival rates, in particular, seems quite specious and misleading.
The decline of interest rates is better explained by a move to urbanization, move to a specie economy, and away from interest measured in bushels of grain and 2 extra chickens in the spring. The Reformation and a move away from Papal decrees against usury had a lot more to do with fractional banking and declining interest rates than sudden "thrift". I just don't buy this at all.
Upper middle class values behind hard work? Or was it just that the only work available was in a dark satanic mill and there were no other options to avoid starvation - save leaving it all behind and heading off to the bogs and wilds of America or Canada where the saving grace was that the slaves had it worse than you did? No way. I'm not buying it - and moreover, I doubt this author has much of an acquaintance with hard physical labor. What - the medieval peasant was a layabout and the industrial middle class was hard-working? Bullshit.
How about this explanation?
England had unique advantages. It had an evolving class system that still made room for urban capitalists and a parliamentary and burroughs system that advanced their interests, relative to those on the Continent. It had significant geopolitical advantages with the English Channel, which allowed it the luxury of developing a superior Navy, and better navigators, explorers - all of which allowed it to increase and exploit merchant shipping - without having to be Napoleon and try to field a massive army at the same time (Which Napoleon, to his credit, almost pulled off).
And how about this?:
England had wrested control of the less immediately valuable land away from the French in 1759, and because it yielded beaver pelts and tabacoco - but no Treasure Ships as Spain's massive holdings supplied - England had to PLAN for Mercantilism to make any of its new holdings worth it in the long run. England's only plan was to make it grow - while Spain's land made it the Superpower of the world for 250 years. England enslaved millions of Africans to work in America - and dumped its own poor and huddled masses in North America, Australia and New Zealand during and thereafter to provide it with more economic breathing room - and Lebenseraum.
I'd say THAT played a far greater role in escaping the Malthusian Trap than the migration of upper middle class values of "hard work". Moreover, a dumping ground for Les Miserables allowed England to progress in its political institutions without the out-and-out class based revolutions, which consumed the energies - and capital - of the French, the Hapsburgs and Prussians. Winning the Napoleonic War and thereby controlling the world and its Oceans for the next 99 years didn't hurt either.
Grand Theories of politic-economic hegemony are hard. I'm interested enough to buy his book - but from the NYT's summation, I don't think this author is collecting the right data, interpreting the data he does collect correctly - or giving plain old dumb-luck geography, technology and institutions their due.
.Robert
What's this? A scholarly explanation of the Industrial Revolution that ignores the influence of the 16th century Christian Reformation on the attitudes and behaviour of people in the Protestant countries of Europe that made the Industrial Revolution possible. Isn't there at least some possibility that the influence of Reformed Christianity may go some way towards explaining the so called "strange behaviour" of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours, and a willingness to save.
Clark's research shows that between 1200 and 1800, the rich had more surviving children than the poor
Well professor if you look at statistics from ANY time period, for ANY country in the world, the rich ALWAYS have more surviving children than the poor. Lack of squalor, better access to sanitation and the best available medical facilities is something the rich have always had over the "have not"'s.
Also I'm surprised that an "economics historian" thinks you can "save" your way into an economic boom. Perhaps he also thinks he can "save" enough to retire a millionaire. Yeah good luck with that. Let's totally disregard the fact that the industrial revolution meant that the same or less quantity of workers could produce more, higher quality, and standardized products. Maximizing available resources (time being an important one) and reducing waste. THIS is where the economic growth came from.
Why should I read this document if dear Dr. Crank doesn't even realize this?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
What it really stinks of is a disturbing lack of evidence. It reminds me of the kind of bunk we used to come up with after we'd had a half a bottle of rum and thought we were super-bright prognosticators. The difference was we would sober up and realize we were talking bunk.
The Industrial Revolution's roots are reasonably well known. After a series of a few centuries of upheaval starting with the plagues and ending with the Golden Revolution (which ended the final bouts of disunity and civil unrest that had plagued England since the Civil War), England found itself in possession of an enormous global empire, a upwardly mobile population and attracting some of the brighter minds of Europe. Advances in agriculture saw the country liberated from having to maintain a substantial labor pool, which pretty much assured that the first industrialists had a lot of cheap labor to utilize.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
One does not need to get mythical and utopian about the past to recognize how deeply and profoundly fucked up colonialism and imperialism were. There's a book that I regularly refer people to in order to get a sense of just how profound the socioeconomic effects of European domination were: Late Victorian Holocausts, by Mike Davis. I'd also recommend reading King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, for a look at 19th century sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
We tend to be indoctrinated about 20th century atrocities, particularly those of the Nazis and the Soviets. Democides involving millions were perpetrated in the century before, but aren't nearly as much part of day to day historical memory.
OK, the guy covers Japan, and sneers about the lack of uppercrust genes making their way downward to the hoi-polloi of Japanese society.
Yet he somehow fails to mention they went from medieval backwater to global Superpower in about the same amount of time it takes a Skyline GTR to go from zero to sixty. Just ask the Russians - they might still have Czars if the Japanese hadn't kicked the crap out of the mighty Russian Imperial Navy, a scant half-century after the Black Ships arrived. They're still a global superpower, in terms of industrial, scientific and economic influence. They were in the "Malthusan Trap" because the nobility liked it that way, and could get away with it until the advent of the steam engine. No other reason.
So, in short, the book's crap, and just another excuse for right-wingers to justify spreading colonialism the globe over, as some sort of natural gift given to them for being better bred than the mud-people.
SoupIsGood Food
What it really stinks of is a disturbing lack of evidence.
RTFA. Then RTFB when it comes out. A number of experts in the field express reservations about the theory -- especially, the Darwinian elements. But they concede that it is a well-argued and exhaustively documented thesis that answers a question that hasn't been satisfactorily resolved. Which is a surprising sign of progress in the humanities (I note as a humanist). Usually, these kinds of unsettling ideas get greeted with pies in the face.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
Amen. I haven't the faintest idea what my genealogy is beyond the grandparent level, but I do know that I'm a descendant of inbred hillbillies. I am now in the honors program of a well respected university and consider myself very knowledgeable in a good many fields of study. Obviously, I don't have much respect for genetic determinism (and the rest of that elitist BS), because, among other reasons, according to it I should be about as smart as the average jar of mayonnaise.
There isn't any mystery about why some countries prosper and others stagnate. It's all about whether the economy is based on individual rights and property rights, or not. Those economies that respect and enforce rights, thrive. Those that do not, stagnate. It happens over and over, with country after country. Even China has started to prosper rapidly in the last few years. What changed? The country started respecting property rights.
I find it pretty hard to believe that there was some sudden evolutionary change in the Chinese brain that affected a billion people overnight.
Thanks for learning English ;)
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The problem with people trying to understand why there was no industrialization in 1100 as opposed to 1800, is that we all tend to take a lot of things for granted that are only true _today_. And miss a lot of real limiting factors.
E.g., earlier they simply needed 90% of the population working in agriculture, so that simply didn't leave enough people to build an industry with. When you realize that the other 10% were the army, clerks, clerics, etc, and a few craftsmen, that was all your population accounted for.
During most of the middle ages, for example, agricultural production was about 2 to 7 grains harvested for every 1 grain planted, which is piss-poor. They had a unit of surface for how much land is needed for a peasant family to subsist on, and support 1/5 of a knight, the "hide". It was 60 to 120 old acres, or 15 to 30 modern acres, or 6 to 12 hectares, depending on fertility. You needed that freaking much land just to feed a family and pay 1/5 of one knight's fee.
(And if you didn't pay that knight, someone else would come who had knights, and take your land and your crops. Getting more craftsmen and less soldiers was just not an option.)
You just couldn't _feed_ a horde of industrial workers earlier. You had a cap on how much population you can feed, and everyone over that limit would just starve. That they died of plagues was just as well, because the alternative was to die of starvation anyway.
Boiling the water wouldn't have solved much, because you'd just have more population to starve instead.
Violence? That was the reason for violence right there too. When people's only choice is to starve or mug someone, they'll mug someone. Well, not always the vulgar robbing one in a dark alley, but also the organized mugging a state by another, a.k.a., warfare. Or raids across the border motivated by just hunger.
You can see what happens when more population survives than you can feed, because that was the Viking invasions. As only the oldest son would inherit the farm, there were a lot of sons kicked on the street with exactly no means of subsistence. And that farm just couldn't feed more than a family, locally or in the city. If not enough people died of disease, that was a lot of population who had to work as mercenaries, guards, or pirates. ("Vikings" was what they called the pirates.)
A lot of people there simply _had_ to raid and loot, because the local economy couldn't support them. It wasn't a fun life. They were dirt-poor desperate people whose whole belongings fit in the small box they sat on when they rowed the longship. They had a choice to die painfully in battle or die slowly of hunger, and they chose the former.
The whole belief in the warlike Aesir gods wasn't as much the cause of violence, but the result of _having_ to be violent to maybe survive a little longer. Damn right you had to believe there's a sense to it all, and that there's some reward awaiting you for that shitty life.
That's really what would have happened if they started being healthier sooner. They'd just have produced more people that the economy can't feed. And they wouldn't have started a great industry, simply because industrial workers need to eat too. If the agriculture doesn't support them, that's it.
That's, of course, one of the factors that armchair historians miss, but it will have to do as an example. The industrial revolution didn't start earlier, simply because a lot of things weren't there to support that kind of a society. You can't go and say, basically, "oh, I know, it's because they didn't boil water" or "oh, I know, it's because they were too bigotted and violent", when other things (e.g., agricultural production) weren't there to support larger urban populations anyway.
Other surrealistic ideas I see thrown around, some even in the summary, include that somehow it took a culture change to get people to work long hours rather than stay poor (they worked long hours earlier too) or that only now they realized they should save money t
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You bring an insightful point, but there are two problems with it, so let's deal with the more obvious one first: you can't have a steam-powered thresher, or a steam-powered anything, without inventing steam power first. They just didn't have that earlier, so it's silly to look for other explanations like "maybe they were lazy" or "maybe they needed caffeine".
It may seem like a simple idea, but it took a huge time to have all the pieces in place even for the most primitive ones.
E.g., Watt's machine didn't use steam to _push_ a piston. It just filled a cylinder with hot steam at room temperature, sealed it, let the steam cool down, at which point its temperature would drop and _suck_ the piston in. (Or rather the higher air pressure outside would push it in.) It was a very weak and slow engine.
But even for that you first needed stuff like a gasket that seals well enough, or low enough tollerances for the piston and tube so the outside air doesn't flow right in.
It wasn't trivial at all to make something like that in the middle ages. Medieval canons, for example, left a huge empty space around the canonball (sometimes up to an inch) rather than even try to get a neat tight fit. As late as the mid-1800, it was easier to make the Minnie ball (first practical rifled bullet for mass army use) just expand its base to engage the rifling than to even try to have it made exactly the right caliber.
Plus you needed theoretical concepts that they just didn't have yet, such as air pressure. Unless you know about air pressure, and that it's greater than zero, you can't come up with the idea to use it to push a piston in.
So basically there's a damn good reason right there why the industrial revolution didn't happen earlier: they just didn't have the technology yet.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A little out of date now, but this TV series was amazing, and happens to be an excellent example of your point.
All Your Memory Are Belong To Java
Someone smarter than a jar of mayonaise should be able to comprehend the difference between absolute and fatalistic determinism (which IQ is not) and predisposition (which IQ is). Adult IQ is approximately 80% heritable.
n #Criticisms
Yes, this article is from Wikipedia, but it is well sourced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ#Heritability
As for your earlier assertion that IQ can't be defined and therefore doesn't exist, it's the result of a simple, rigorous factor analysis. A broad population survey of things such as health, income, reading ability, mathematical prowess, education level, romantic success, academic ability, and so on are all interrelated by a single scalar. Again, this scalar doesn't DETERMINE these other traits, but they are correlated, and often highly so. They call that scalar 'g.' IQ test scores correlate very highly with g. So if you want a semi-rigorous definition of IQ, it would be something like "an admittedly error-prone measurement of that single scalar variable uncovered by factor analysis that has proven highly predictive of a variety of abilities listed above." Does it matter that you call artistic ability intelligence? No. "Intelligence" is just how some people interpret g. You don't have to agree. But -- and this is crucial -- your disagreement does not invalidate the empirical reality of g.
As to The Mismeasure of Man, I urge you to familiarize yourself with some of its criticism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Ma
Notably, the popular press loved the book but the scientific community excoriated it. Gould's theses contradict much of mainstream academic psychology, and the discrepancy between the two has only grown in the ten years since his second edition. If you want to believe what reality SHOULD be (in your mind) over what it IS, that's fine, but at least be honest that your beliefs are religious and not scientific. For whatever it's worth, I join you in wishing that there were no such thing as inherent intelligence, that the variability in success owed entirely to strength of character and other worthier traits (ideally not themselves genetically predisposed), and that everyone got to play with the same hand of cards. Likewise, I wish that things such as autism, Down syndrome, and other such marked inborn disabilities did not exist. But neither of these reflects the world we live in, and for both of them, I accept that science disproves my wishful thinking.
Finally, while I know you're very impressed with your own intellect, the honors program of a state university is not exactly the elite upper crust of American education. I wouldn't use your enrollment there as evidence that you're some sort of science-defying luminary. Certainly you're smarter than average, but again, even adult IQ is only 80% heritable.
I'll probably get flamed for this, but here goes:
It's social Darwinism, plain and simple. I find it ironic that many of the same people who believe so vehemently in the principles of evolution actively work to defeat the same forces of natural selection in their society.
In the pre-industrial revolution society where you had to provide everything for your children or face losing them, it made sense to have no more children than you could afford. You would be constantly broke and your children would have a rough life.
Today it is the poor who are out-reproducing the upper and middle classes. For the upper and middle classes who consider their ability to pay for a good start for their children, the advantages of good daycare, better education (tutoring, piano lessons, college), medical care (braces, contacts) it makes sense to have fewer children. But for the poor, whose children will all get the same minimum-standard subsidized food, medical care, housing, and education, it makes little difference if they have one child or a dozen.
In other words by removing the natural selective pressures on reproduction, we have structured our society to encourage the reproduction of the poor. This should in theory drive the society the opposite way - toward a less educated, less advanced, less successful populace. I believe we are already seeing the beginning of that; but that is strictly a personal observation.
I again recommend the Davis text. The claim that these regions advanced economically under colonialism is actually incorrect.
I'd argue that things have to be taken by a case by case basis. For example, Rhodesia was much better off under colonial white rule than Zimbabwe is today under "Bobby" Mugabe (but then again, that's Communism for you). South Africa, even though it's teetering over the abyss, is relatively better off compared to it's peers largely because of the contribution of the white Africans who live there. Look, I don't doubt that colonialism was horrible. What I'm saying is that it wasn't unprecendented or a European invention. Spain was a colony of the Arab Muslims for 800 years. Greece and the Balkans were colonized by the Turks for 600 years. Egypt was colonized by the Arabs, who managed to destroy just about every vestige of pre-Arab culture. Tibet is being colonized by the Han as we speak. In almost every case of colonization, the native population loses out. But the things that are rending Africa apart have almost nothing to do with colonization or imperialization. It's an accumulation of things like extremely inept and corrupt leadership, bad choices, bad luck, tribalism, and the clash of primitive societies with modernity (the rapidity of which destroys existing stabilizing cultural institutions without providing an adequate replacement). Throw in things like the decimation by HIV, and you have a big mess, none of which is caused by the West or curable by the West. In 1955, South Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world and the recent scene of massive bloodshed due to the Korean war. Quite a few nations in Africa were better off, and some even had a functional, stable government courtesy of the British. South Korea had it's affairs meddled with every bit as much as the countries in Africa, but whereas South Korea made the right choices, African countries did not. Africa isn't an unwilling and unwitting victim here.
It can be argued that the Communist societies also "recognized their own colonialism,"
That's rich, since the Communists spread by means indistinguishable from imperialism. I can argue that the moon is made of blue cheese, but that doesn't make it true.
Ok, sorry for the long delay, but here's the second problem I see there: a machine is only useful in the right circumstances. There may be times and places where the same machine doesn't even make sense at all.
E.g., since we're talking threshing machines, let's remember that threshing is only one step of it all. It starts with the ploughing.
An acre was defined basically as the area of land that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dawn to dusk. (They worked long hours before the industrial revolution too.) There's also a reason why that was defined not as a square, but as a long rectangle: you lose more time when turning at the end, so you could plough a larger area if it was a narrow strip and you had to turn less often.
So a peasant with one hide of land, at the worst end of the spectrum, would look at 120 days spent on just ploughing that land. Add to that work duties to the seigneur/lord/whatever-you-call-him, and that was more than half a year spent just ploughing. (They used more than one kind of crop, though, so they could sow the early crops and let them grow, while they continued ploughing the land for the later crops.)
Harvesting was also very work intensive. Not only it took a lot of time, but it was time that couldn't overlap with anything else. (E.g., you couldn't harvest some very early crop off field 1 on the same day as you ploughed field 2 for some very late crop.) And again you had some more days in between when you were required to work for the seigneur.
I mention the overlap, although maybe insultingly obvious, just to highlight the point that you can very much do a sum there. You add X days for ploughing to Y days for harvesting, and you get no overlap.
You also have pretty hard limits on when you have to be ready with it either, because the seasons don't wait. So you can't extend much further than those 120 old acres of land anyway, because then you'll be ploughing frozen ground in January to cover it all.
Threshing, by contrast, was a couple of days at the end. The whole point is that agriculture was that horribly inefficient, that you'd actually need all that surface just to feed your family and pay your rent and tithe. For all that year long working dawn-to-dusk, at the end you had a small mound of grain to thresh. Not a fun activity, but a lot shorter than everything else in that whole process.
So if someone had built a thresher back then, it would have saved those peasants... what? Maybe 1-2 days out of the whole year?
No, what had to came first was the ability to (A) get more land, (B) have the means to work more land, and (C) get more grain per acre too. Otherwise mechanizing threshing would have solved nothing. The real bottleneck would have been just the same.
Someone else correctly mentioned the black death, and indeed that was one major factor in why they could get more land to work. But another thing came a bit earlier too, namely a way to actually be able to plough more land: someone figured out a harness with which they can use a horse to pull the plough. That went much faster than with oxen. That had actually been invented much earlier, in the year 800 AD or so, but it took a while for that invention to spread and it took an even longer while for more and more peasants to be able to afford horses. (Initially that was something more exclusive, and the rise of the knight class was basically the rise of those who could afford a horse. And in some parts of Eastern Europe they continued to use oxen until the 1800's.)
And from there there's a whole period known as the British Agricultural Revolution, spanning from the 16'th to the 19'th centuries.
That's a whole series of long steps that were needed, before a thresher even started to make sense. Before you can worry about threshing more grain faster, you first have to start with actually being able to produce more grain.
And I'm saying that the same applied to the whole industrial revolution. You don't need to just look at "hmm, what did
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