I’ve really become fascinated by the hypothesis that outlawing slavery supercharged industrialization, and that the global crusade against slavery is why we had this whole technology explosion.
Rome knew about steam power. There’s some tantalizing evidence some ancient cultures played with electricity and maybe even simple forms of electric lights. There’s Greek stories about automatons. But why try to build machines to do real work? Just have a slave do it.
If we’d abolished slavery in ancient Roman times maybe we’d be looking at photos of habitable exoplanets from probes arriving in the Tau Ceti system by now.
[–] card_zero 1 day ago
What do you have in mind here? The Dendera light is a carving of a lotus.
[–] api 19 hours ago
The non-woowoo proposals I’ve read call for very primitive apparati that would have been possible with metallurgy of the time. If some, I dunno, bored priests and scribes over thousands of years figured out some neat tricks. It’s before the big medieval alchemy craze but thousands of years is a long time.
I also forgot about early optics, the Antikythera mechanism which could not have been a one off, early use of fossil fuel, etc.
I don’t think the thesis I referenced argues that abolition is the only thing that made tech take off, just that it supplied an economic forcing function missing for most of the rest of history.
Tocqueville wrote a bit about this in Democracy in America. Despite the South having an edge in terms of "free" labor the institution of slavery greatly suffocated human potential to such an extent that the non-Southern states still had higher productivity.