Wondering if you'll address one of my favorite bits from Hobsbawm, namely that the IR happened in GB because they had a literally captive market in the form of a colonial empire. The explosion of productivity wouldn't have been profitable without massive potential demand, and while to some extent a huge change in consumer goods supply can create its own demand by changing consumption habits, industrialists still needed to expect that they'd have somewhere to start selling their massive oversupply. And wouldn't you know, Britain was just completing its subjugation of an entire subcontinent, densely populated and totally at its economic mercy.
So basically, maybe Middle Earth never industrialized because - despite having kingdoms ruled by the literal personification of evil - there was still no one as evil as the British.
The clear way out of your proposed bind, in my view, is just to think that the industrial revolution and a culture that favors science innovation and so on were all Bad, Actually (or at least would have been so for middle earth)
These angels are shepherds of humanity and other than the one with a big hardon for learning the rest are like "Nah, man, we have divine knowledge of how fucked that gets, sure at first your standards of living go up, but then you get the internet and any regular joe can google how to use magic to make WMDs in his garage, or the world gets taken over by a rogue AI that made a digital ring of power to help itself do text completion on the speech of evil creatures" or whatever other messed-up magic-scientific apocalypse you might choose to imagine
Wondering if you'll address one of my favorite bits from Hobsbawm, namely that the IR happened in GB because they had a literally captive market in the form of a colonial empire. The explosion of productivity wouldn't have been profitable without massive potential demand, and while to some extent a huge change in consumer goods supply can create its own demand by changing consumption habits, industrialists still needed to expect that they'd have somewhere to start selling their massive oversupply. And wouldn't you know, Britain was just completing its subjugation of an entire subcontinent, densely populated and totally at its economic mercy.
So basically, maybe Middle Earth never industrialized because - despite having kingdoms ruled by the literal personification of evil - there was still no one as evil as the British.
The clear way out of your proposed bind, in my view, is just to think that the industrial revolution and a culture that favors science innovation and so on were all Bad, Actually (or at least would have been so for middle earth)
These angels are shepherds of humanity and other than the one with a big hardon for learning the rest are like "Nah, man, we have divine knowledge of how fucked that gets, sure at first your standards of living go up, but then you get the internet and any regular joe can google how to use magic to make WMDs in his garage, or the world gets taken over by a rogue AI that made a digital ring of power to help itself do text completion on the speech of evil creatures" or whatever other messed-up magic-scientific apocalypse you might choose to imagine