Stagnation of Technology?

[Ludovicus]

Regarding one of your earlier questions I believe that the Classical Athenian democracy that ruthlessly exploited large numbers of slaves in the silver mines in Laurium was the most innovative society of it's time.

 

 

Are you being sarcastic here, Kosmo? The "democratic" Athenians of classical times may have introduced technological advances in silver mining built on the brutal exploitation of slaves, but this society could hardly be credited with innovation in regard to social relations. What were the Athenian mining innovations that you refer to?

Edited May 3, 2010 by Ludovicus

[M. Porcius Cato]

And my in-depth study of American economic history will tell me that once, what you identify as the primary cause of Southern backwardness, slavery, was gone the South became a powerhouse of industry, banking and trade with a lot of innovation?

 

With respect to the US, absolutely. You will indeed find that industry, banking, and trade grew much, much more in the South in the 150 years after emancipation than it did in the 150 years prior to emancipation. Without slave labor, former Confederate states opened up far more to Northern and international trade, developed transportation hubs, and a vibrant industrial base in textiles, petrochemicals, tobacco products, sugar refinery, and much, much more. Indeed, if you compare the states of the old Confederacy against their former rivals in the North, the most successful (Texas) now has a higher GDP than that of the most successful northern state (New York). Going down the list, the story is much the same, with Florida outperforming Illinois, and North Carolina/Georgia/Virginia sitting between Ohio/New Jersey/Michigan/Massachusetts. (Texas, BTW, now has a GDP almost three times the size of Sweden.)

 

Now what about other countries that emancipated their slaves? You mention Jamaica and Haiti, which is very odd. Perhaps you're unaware that slavery was also abolished throughout the British and French colonies, including Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Ha

[guy]

Is there any evidence for development of technology and increases in labor productivity over different periods?

 

What about mathematical and other scientific studies after 0 AD?

 

The works of Galen, the great physician of Greek descent who first practiced in Rome around AD 161, are a great example of the stagnation of intellectual thought.

 

While alive, he challenged rigid dogma, exposed fraudulent practitioners, and furthered intellectual development of the medical sciences.

 

After he died, however, Galen

[curiosissimus]

Quite an interesting thread indeed! So maybe it is worth revamping it

 

I cannot but wonder if you are focusing too much on slave labor? Slave labor was present virtually everwhere throughout Ancient era, Middle Age (not only in that lesser form called serfdom) and Modern times, and partly even in the contemporary epoch, yet the levels of technological advance of each polity were greatly different. Slavery might well have played a role (even a major one, as far as labor-saving devices are concerned; the example drawn from the Life of Vespasian is quite intriguing in this respect, showing an actual conflict between economic and political considerations: could you please specify the source of that quotation?), and it would be definitely worth carrying out an in-depth comparative study on the (both diacronic and syncronic) relationship between availability of slave labor and tecnological advancement; still, even if such an inverse proportionality were to be conclusively demonstrated, I do not think this might be claimed to be a decisive point in a discussion basically comparing the tecnological advances of Hellenistic or pre-Roman Empire era and the Roman Imperial one. Most likely the truth lies (unintended pun) elsewhere...

 

As to the mentality argument, the most often invoked one (and often the most difficult to define and thus advocate/challenge), I hold that this is the key factor explaining the relative backwardness and above all stagnation (from a technology standpoint) of Roman Empire society and economy. If a conservative mentality (and thus social order) does not constitute in itself a deterrent to creating technological innovation, it is definitely a powerful deterrent to the spread and uptake of it.

 

Another interesting aspect - oddly neglected in this otherwise exceedingly rich thread - is the role of military-driven tecnology innovation (just think of how many military spinoffs have lately become standard features or even staple fixtures of everyday life such as the Internet, computers, radar, GPS or even microwave oven; coming back to Romans, their military and tecnology were strictly intertwined: just think of their engineer-soldiers able to build and repair palisades, castra and war machines as well as to trace and pave roads). Of course tecnology alone is - and was - not enough without organization, discipline, tactics and strategical vision (and Hellenism was no exception to that: just think of Archimede's "burning mirrors" and shiplifting machines that did not prevent his sieged Syracuse to be seized), but Romans, being practical and pragmatic, had plenty of them. My point is that, at or around the apex of their expansion and power, Romans had basically no major incentive or need (read: external enemies) demanding or justifying large investments in military tecnology (China, the only potential antagonist envisageable, was too distant for that time's geopolitical horizon - the core of the Roman world was always to remain the Mediterranean basin - and no relationship between those two empires has ever been documented or otherwise demonstrated to date)... Therefore it would be interesting to know more about the innovations in weaponry (if any) used by Romans against their most formidable enemies like, e.g., Parthians (whose empire, though, was in fact shrinking in the period at issue, having attained its climax around 60 BC)...

Edited May 23, 2010 by curiosissimus

[Kosmo]

As to the mentality argument, the most often invoked one (and often the most difficult to define and thus advocate/challenge), I hold that this is the key factor explaining the relative backwardness and above all stagnation (from a technology standpoint) of Roman Empire society and economy.

 

Another interesting aspect - oddly neglected in this otherwise exceedingly rich thread - is the role of military-driven tecnology innovation

 

Mentality is even today the most challenging aspect of top-down efforts to spur innovation, efforts that usually fail.

War is not always driving technology and for the entire empire history full of wars only Greek Fire seems to be an innovation, or rather a serious improvement over existing technology.

[curiosissimus]

Mentality is even today the most challenging aspect of top-down efforts to spur innovation, efforts that usually fail.

 

True, changing mentality is and has always been a formidable challenge. Yet I cannot say if top-down efforts made in that direction "usually fail": a major counterexample is given by the French Revolution, initially quite an elitist process spurred by an intellectual

Edited May 29, 2010 by curiosissimus

[caldrail]

Social stability, intellectual freedom, and patronage are essential to foster intellectual curiosity and growth. These were missing until the emergence of the Renaissance.

 

Not true at all. People were no less intelligent during the middle ages than they were before or afterward. It is true however that the dominance of christianity was not conducive to intellectual pursuit. A religion that demands conformity and faith does not want its literature or methods questioned, especially with so much money and political influence at stake.

Nonetheless, advances were made during the middle ages. We see the likes of Thomas Aquinas pursuing philoosphy. We see colleges and universities created in european towns, often with royal support. Agriculture began to develop from the ruin of the dark ages (albeit with a few disasters along the way). Commercial activity restored itself after the fall of the Roman Empire, and we see large scale enterprises forming a crude analogy of modern multi-national corporations. We also see monasteries making the first steps toward industrialisation. Literature is no less represented. It's thanks to medieval writers and copyists that we know as much as we do today about the Romans, and whilst its easy to sneer, don't underestimate the market for fiction in the middle ages. Arthurian romance is nothing new. The medieval equivalent of paperback novels were on sale seven hundred years ago, and the creative impulse to write them ever present.

 

Lets be frank about the renaissance. There was no instant change of heart. People like Leonardo Da Vinci are exceptional, but despite his enormous intellect, he achieved very little other than muse about the possibilities, nor did his ideas have any significant impact on science or technological development afterward, which instead went hand in hand with the ability of industry to supply the hardware needed for these developments. The renaissance had less to do with intellectual growth, but rather the beginning of emancipation of christians from a form of intellectual and emotional slavery.

 

What you'll find is that there are always those in society who want in some way to bend you to their will. I know that sounds vaguely communist, but that's how human beings are. Intellectual thought survives because historically there was no way to prevent people from thinking, and in cases where a regime destroys the evidence of such thought, then the adherents to philiosphy and science merely go underground. That again, is normal human behaviour. There are more modern examples of this.

[Novosedoff]

On 5/30/2010 at 2:42 PM, caldrail said:

We also see monasteries making the first steps toward industrialisation.

The only example that comes to my mind is wine making and Cistercians with their famous Chablis. But I wouldn't dare to call it "industrialization". What other examples did you have in your mind?

Overall I have to say that the role that the monastic orders had to play was twofold. On one hand, they are often considered as a citadel that underlay the proliferation of literacy and knowledge, which eventually culminated in the birth of modern universities (Rodney Stark seemed to share that opinion). We do find some examples of the monastic influence even in mathematics. There is so-called Alcuin's sequence in maths, which got its name from a medieval English monk. On the other hand, many seemed to forget that the monastic orders only sprang out since the 6th century (Benedictines were the first) while the reason for their ascension was very earthly: tax redemptions and fiscal benefits. Monasteries used to be no different from the modern offshores and tax havens for medieval tax dodgers looking to arrange their retirement plans.

The reason for the European renaissance lies beyond Europe. It was partially due to Osmans who demonstrated the power of their weaponry when they brought down the walls of unconquerable Constantinople.  It was even more due to the influence exhibited by Chinese who invented gunpowder, compass, paper etc. Chinese admiral Zheng He used to traverse the Indian ocean long before Vasco da Gama reached India. 

The Arab world also seemed to be far more advanced when compared with the medieval Europe. The law of cosines would be known to the Arab mathematician al-Kashi long before Europe learnt it. The very word "algorithm" takes its origin from the name of a region in Central Asia (modern Uzbekistan) and scientist al-Khwarizmi. Arab physician Avicenna (who originated from the modern day Uzbekistan too) used to perform complex eye surgery long before Europe knew it. Even the basics of the probability theory that was so skillfully applied by merchant-bankers clan of Medici was contrived by the Arabs. So effectively Europe was chasing the rest of the world when we say about the emergence of the renaissance. While the Christian monastic orders seemed to have very little to do with all that.                               

 

Edited November 1, 2022 by Novosedoff

[caldrail]

The reason for the European renaissance lies beyond Europe

No it most certainly does not. It emerges from the Republic that encouraged free thinking in Florence, Italy, in the 16th century. Eastern advances were ignored by the West for the most part.

[Novosedoff]

7 hours ago, caldrail said:

No it most certainly does not. It emerges from the Republic that encouraged free thinking in Florence, Italy, in the 16th century. Eastern advances were ignored by the West for the most part.

Free thinking was the matter of necessity and competitiveness. But why did you ignore my question about examples of industrialization inspired by monastic orders?

[caldrail]

No, necessity and competition do not inspire free thinking, they merely increase the intensity of acceptable boundaries.. The Roman Empire was one of the most competitive societies ever and its scientific contribution to the world, all those centuries of it, is almost zero. They finished with almost the same level of technology they started with. Free thinking comes about by communication and freedom to express new ideas, the point being that people in power tend not to like others thinking for themselves.

I don't have any formal sources on the British monastic thing, but one monastic site was working on iron casting, but of course Henry VIII wanted cash and to remove allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church so a great many of these places were closed in 1536. 

[Guaporense]

On 11/3/2022 at 9:42 AM, caldrail said:

The reason for the European renaissance lies beyond Europe

No it most certainly does not. It emerges from the Republic that encouraged free thinking in Florence, Italy, in the 16th century. Eastern advances were ignored by the West for the most part.

I recommend Mogens Herman Hansen's work, in particular, his work on the Athenian Democracy and on the Classical Greek City state:

Amazon.com: Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State: 9780199208500: Hansen, Mogens Herman: Libros

Which made me think that city-state societies tend to be more modern and dynamic than traditional societies of territorial states. In Medieval Northern Italy, there emerged a society of 300 city-states, of which cities like Florence and Venice were the largest. Connected to the mediterranean sea, these city-states traded a lot and achieved a very high level of economic prosperity so that by the 14-15th centuries, Northern Italy was (likely) the richest region on the planet.

When people achieve a relatively high level of economic development, they have more free time to think about ideas and to work in art. That is why artistic flowering are strongly correlated with periods of economic prosperity (such as the artistic flowering in Late Classical, Hellenistic, and Early Imperial Roman art, Renaissance Italy, and Golden Age Netherlands).

[Guaporense]

On 11/4/2022 at 5:09 PM, caldrail said:

No, necessity and competition do not inspire free thinking, they merely increase the intensity of acceptable boundaries.. The Roman Empire was one of the most competitive societies ever and its scientific contribution to the world, all those centuries of it, is almost zero. They finished with almost the same level of technology they started with. Free thinking comes about by communication and freedom to express new ideas, the point being that people in power tend not to like others thinking for themselves.

Actually, there was a lot of scientific progress from 600 BC to around the of Augustus, then the number of scientists peaked in the first 150 years of the Roman Empire. After the early 2nd century AD, the number of documented scientists collapsed. 

This is documented in the number of recorded cases of ancient scientists from Keyser and Irby-Massie (2012), who recorded a timeline of about 2,000 ancient scientists (mostly Greek and Roman, but also some Persian and Jewish authors as well, see Amazon.com: Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and its Many Heirs: 9780415692632: Keyser, Paul T., Irby-Massie, Georgia L.: Libros):

Technology also made substantial progress in Classical Antiquity. For example, buildings like the Pantheon would be inconceivable a few centuries earlier (and also became impossible to build after the fall of Rome until relatively modern times). Then, scientific and technological progress stopped during the period of the greatest power of the Roman Empire due exactly to the centralization of power in the emperor.

Alain Bresson (2016) indeed blames the centralization of power into the Roman Empire for killing the institutional foundations of Classical society, which was the autonomous city-state. Ancient science and technology progressed a lot during the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, the age of city-states, and even during the beginning of Roman hegemony, cities around the Mediterranean world continued to function as city-states, operating independently of Rome except that they didn't start wars with each other (unlike the Classical period), so scientific and technological progress continued, peaking around the time of Augustus.

It was the gradual centralization of power in Rome, starting with the Social War in the early 1st century BC, which incorporated all of peninsular Italy into Rome, and finishing with the centralized bureaucratic empire of Late Antiquity, that killed independent thinking and, therefore, hindered further scientific and technological progress.

After the prosperity of the Early Imperial period (which economic historian Peter Temin states, Early Imperial Rome was likely the most prosperous society that existed before the Industrial Revolution), it took about 500-600 years of slow but dramatic economic and demographic decline for the Roman Empire to lose most of its territories, becoming the tiny Byzantine state of the early 8th century. By then, however, cities across the Mediterranean were mostly abandoned, long-distance trade in bulk commodities disappeared, and there were no economic resources available to support scientists in advancing the knowledge accumulated by the ancients. Then it took about a thousand years for the European population densities to surpass the Roman peak, and with economic recovery, particularly in the city-states of Italy and the Hanseatic League to the north, the Renaissance blossomed.

Still, in the 17th century, the famous mathematician Leibnitz cited Apollonius of Perga from about 200 BC as an example of cutting-edge mathematics. Thus, it was only in recent centuries that modern western civilization fully surpassed the ancients.

[caldrail]

Scientists? We're talking about the ancient world, by definition science didn't exist back then. No, I'm sorry, but the technological level of the Roman world remained at the same level from the 3rd century BC until the end of the West in 476, and the only reason that the Byzantines made any interesting progress was because their culture was more Greek than Roman. Rome was a slave using society, it did not invest in new ideas, it had religious objections to progress, deeply held ideas about tradition, and quite frankly a political system that made invention a risk of public ridicule and loss of career.

Edited February 27, 2023 by caldrail

[Guaporense]

If you take a look at that book can you give some background on the people they call scientists. Basically, it says that in modern times we have the development of modern science, in antiquity they did not develop modern science, but there were people who were doing work that today we would call science. The largest number of such people were active during the Late Republic and Early Imperial periods.

In regards to technology, there was very substantial technological progress from the time of the Early Republic to the Early Empire.

For example, in 300 BC there did not exist watermills (which were the biggest technological advance in energy technology until the Watt's steam engine in the late 18th-century), keyboard instruments, mechanical geared devices, nor domes, nor sophisticated concrete structures or arched structures. All these were invented over the next few centuries.

As a result, the Pantheon build in the early 2nd century AD would be science fiction for people living at the time of the First Punic War. Other technologies invented during this period include the heavy plow (the Romans described it being used in the heavy soil of Roman Gaul and Germania) and the Gallic mechanical reaper.

This old scientific american article from 1979 is a good description of how ancient catapult technology evolved:

Ancient Catapults on JSTOR

Edited February 28, 2023 by Guaporense