That’s not the face value, that’s the bullion value.

The face value is what is written on it.

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I think that slavery was bad for ecomomical progress.

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Especially in Japan, there are tenth and eleventh century troves of Buddhist sutras and guardian figurines that had been buried across the archipelago by monks who thought Buddhism was entering an age of decline. Many have been discovered, but it’s not improbable that there are still more out there.

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Maybe they just forgot

So, there is another aspect to this issue that the author of the cited article touches on briefly but then does not revisit, and that is labor.

It's funny because he starts getting into that with his high-level discussion of the Roman economy, as an essentially alien thing, but then almost makes the same mistake as the "old modernists."

Yes, everything he describes connects the dots in terms of establishing the basis for the industrial revolution. But he doesn't include the labor factor. The ur-question behind all of the technical innovation that drove the Industrial Revolution -- and indeed its underpinnings in the mechanical power generation of the pre-industrial era -- is: why not just get lots of people to do the work?

Like... why were there so many water-wheels and windmills to begin with? Why so much animal muscle power for that matter?

Like I say, he mentions this question but then shies away from it, which is a little surprising. Because one of the glaring differences between Great Britain and Ancient Rome is that Ancient Rome didn't have a manpower shortage. If you needed 20 people to pump something, or even if you needed 200, or 2000, you could get them. Or to turn a wheel. Or perform any repetitive work that we would today associate with a machine.

We have become accustomed to not thinking of 17th and 18th century Britain in those terms, as a labor-scarce society, because we look at the energy economics of work in that milieu and we say, "Oh well they had labor enough, and oh look at all these machines they also had, everyone has machines, that's just a normal thing to want in any society." But that belies the issue. These are not independent phenomena. The machines existed precisely in order that the economy do enough work while still having enough labor. And that goes back into the proto-industrial era of the early 18th century.

By the time the steam engine comes along, the stage is already set. Yes, of course the steam engine was valuable for pumping water from coal mines because the labor requirements were prohibitive. But why? It's because Great Britain didn't have a large class of idlers, fed by patrons to hang around and be available for labor-intensive tasks. And, increasingly, Britain also didn't have slaves. Certainly not a large slave underclass the way Rome did.

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Not disagreeing with you but interchangeable parts were a thing that was grasped by Carthaginians during the Punic Wars with ships that were built with standardized, interchangeable parts and even had IKEA-style assembly instructions. It’s just that this kind of thing didn’t really catch on again at large until the Industrial Revolution

This is so interesting to me. When my grandfather passed away my dad and his sister, my aunt, went to his house to clean everything out and what not. They found all of his savings in cash in the walls (? Or maybe closet, just somewhere hidden). I guess it’s just a natural human naturey thing to do

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Not exactly. While slaves don’t need to be paid, they are not free to keep, and there is a limit to what one slave can do in a day. If you are working with high value products, there is also the problem that an unwilling workforce (slaves) has the potential to destroy a lot of value simply due to being uninterested in doing a good job.

If a factory machine can produce more in a day than 10 manual workers and require 1 operator, but if the operator neglects their job the machine gets badly broken, it is far more economically advantageous to have 1 happy, paid worker to run the machine than 5 slaves whose cost is the same as the paid worker doing the job by hand.

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Thanks for this post, it is interesting to see the steps needed and taken to allow modern type metalworking. I would, however, take issue with this being the necessary step to denote the beginning of the industrial revolution. Steam engines, albeit in less efficient formats, had existed for quite some time before Watt’s improvements, and those improvements came when they did because a requirement emerged to make improving the steam engine a problem that needed a solution rather than an interesting curiosity.

At it’s core the industrial revolution is taking what had been artisanal skilled craft based trades and using machinery to deskill them, allowing for a huge increase in volume and reduction in cost of production. The two milestone events in this were the opening of the Etruria pottery in 1769 and the Cromford Mill cotton mill in 1772.

Both of these events preceded the machining developments you describe by a few years, and I would suggest that it was these and similar developments in the factory system that showed the need for and motivated the improvements in machining technology, rather than the machining technology being the key enabler that you imply.

If I go by the coins in the pic which appear to be roughly the size of a quarter then I'd say each coin is about 1 ounce. So roughly $60k-$80k at face value but maybe different if a collector is allowed to buy it.

Yeah, Roman math sucked. Indian math was really good and it was really the foundation of the math we use today.

But Romans were really good at logistics and manufacturing. That's something that India lacked.

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Friendly reminder to read the articles posted, bc it answers your question within the first couple of sentences. Also, it’s extremely short.

Before reading the article, I was assuming the Arab invasion of the Eastern Roman Empire or the Roman/Byzantine reconquest of their eastern and southern territories from the Persians were most likely. After reading the article, it seems experts have pegged the Arab invasion as the likeliest explanation, which makes sense.

Decades of war weakened the Byzantines and the Sassanid Persians, allowing the previously relatively minor Arab tribes to conquer the entirety of the Persian Empire and much of the Eastern Roman Empire (although, the Roman/Byzantine state would survive for another 800 years til 1453).

I only missed a little bit more fleshed out argument about the possible usage of wind power. It in itself could have triggered a 'little industrial revolution'. Like we have in the Netherlands where it turned into a economic powerhouse in a short amount of time. That also required a perfect combination of factors, like England in this example. But those would have been more present in the Roman empire.

Btw, I love your argument about the requirements of machining and precision. I always made the same argument about why a blacksmith wouldn't be able to create a good motor block from scratch. And that this is one of the reasons you can't just 'skip' technologies.

The industrial revolution also enabled societies to create new forms (of metal), because it allowed for options to create higher forces, pressures, then ever before. It were great steam presses that enable making the plates for the Great Eastern, for example.

7th Century Palestine, would be roughly around the time when the Arabs conquered the area from the Greco-Romans.

So my guess maybe someone tried hiding the coins so they wouldn't be looted. Hard to say the exact reason. But the owner most likely died or left to never return

toldinstone also did a 2 part video series on this:

https://youtu.be/5uqPlOAH85o