Why Didn't Frodo Baggins Have a PhD in Electrical Engineering?
Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution, Part II
V. Introduction to Part II:
“And yet there lie in his hoards many records that few even of the lore-masters now can read, for their scripts and tongues have become dark to later men.”
- Gandalf
Welcome back to making the internet very mad at me, part 2 (née Why Hasn’t Middle Earth Had an Industrial Revolution?) where we explore why Middle Earth should or should not have had an Industrial Revolution.1
In the last part, while we mainly covered natural resources, we briefly discussed how scientific knowledge was probably not sufficient for the Industrial Revolution. The large lag times between the discovery of relevant scientific facts (for instance, the discovery that nature allows for vacuums) and the adaptation of those facts into inventions like the steam engine suggest that more things than just science were at play.2 Today, I want to look slightly more in depth at scientific discovery because, while it may not have been sufficient for development, it does seem necessary.
But, before we can dive into that:
VI. We need to talk about Isengard (and also Mordor I guess)
“But I don’t want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs”
-Sauron (Real quote, look it up)3
“But what about Mordor!”, “You clearly didn’t think about the fact that Sauron is an allegory for industrialization”, “actually, Isengard was industrializing…”
A lot of people seem to think that I have made a fundamental mistake and that Middle Earth actually is industrializing and so my question is poorly put; I don’t think this is right.
First of all, even granting the idea that both Mordor and Isengard are industrializing, that doesn’t actually respond to the question “Why hasn’t Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?”
Fundamentally, the question is about why they have or have not had one instead of if they have or have not, but I also just don’t think any current industrialization is that relevant. Like, imagine a divorcee who buys his ex-wife flowers on what would have been their 25th anniversary. The ex-wife is being totally reasonable when she asks “Why didn’t you do this 15 years ago” and we don’t think a good response is “Well, um… actually I’m doing it now, so your question is poorly phrased.” The point is that you didn’t do something when you should have! Similarly, the defense that some sort of Industrial Revolution is happening on Middle Earth doesn’t really explain why it didn’t before.
A second problem is, while I will concede entirely that Tolkien clearly intended the evil locations in LOTR to represent the Industrial Revolution, they don’t actually seem to be industrializing.4 Most people who pointed this out quoted passages noting the widespread deforestation and smog being loosed into the sky.5 The problem with this is that these are potential effects of industrialization but not actually direct evidence of it. To give you another tortured metaphor, It’s a bit like seeing someone unmoving and covered in a red viscous liquid and concluding a gruesome murder happened. Like it’s possible it was a murder, but it could also be someone having a nap after a hotdog eating contest.
Let’s start with Isengard. Sure, they are burning a bunch of trees, but that’s not actually proof of industrialization. Last week we discussed that coal was relatively cheap compared to wood in England. The reason for that was that London had deforested most of the area around it before the IR!6 For all we know, Sarumon just really hates trees. More reasonably, it might be that the trees are being used as fuel in an extensive increase of non-industrial processes.
That is, Sarumon needs to equip an incredibly large army with armor, weaponry, and all sorts of other equipment. To do that he needs fuel for furnaces and forges as well as wood for use as a material. This is pretty explicit in the text, in Isengard “The shafts ran down by many slopes and spiral stairs to caverns far under; there Saruman had treasuries, store-houses, armouries, smithies, and great furnaces. Iron wheels revolved there endlessly, and hammers thudded.”7
Sure, at first glance this sounds industrial, but furnaces and forges weren’t new technologies in the industrial revolution. Here’s a list of patents for new technologies in Britain broken down by sector during the IR8:
Note how the vast majority of innovations aren’t in mining or smelting (and apparently a lot of the metallurgy patents listed here were actually about plating and tinning).9 Furthermore, it’s not like we have textual evidence that Sarumon is actually getting better at producing metal stuff, just that he is producing more of it. For all we know, all Sarumon is doing is utilizing a great deal more of existing technology rather than actually creating something new. The IR was not just a change in quantity of production, it was a change in quality and kind. There doesn’t seem to be great evidence of that here.
Of course, here are a couple of hints that maybe some mechanization or technological innovation is occurring. Sarumon is described as “a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things,” and during the march of the ents on Isengard “he set some of his precious machinery to work.”.10 But this is really scant evidence to say that Isengard is industrial. That “precious machinery” is described to us by hobbits unfamiliar with the area and is really just opening the furnace vents to let out heat, not exactly the most innovative thing ever. What these ornate and complicated mechanisms seem like to me is a dictator inefficiently directing the labor of the society he controls towards complicated works with existing technology, not the product of an innovative society with high technological capacity.
Similarly, Sarumon’s takeover of the Shire at the end of LOTR is not really a great example of industrialization. When the Hobbits return to the Shire, they find that the has been a coup that overthrew the prior government and instituted an autocratic kleptocracy with Sarumon at the head.11 The main point people make when they claim that this is industrialization is that the new government knocked down the old mill and replaced it with a larger one “full o’ wheels and outlandish contraptions” that is polluting the river. This is, I think, slightly better evidence of industrialization.
Using water mills to provide a source of power definitely was a part of the industrial revolution.12 But, if you read carefully, this mill is explicitly described as still only being used to grind corn.13 That is, this mill is just a better version of what mills were used for in Britain since at least Roman Occupation!14 Perhaps it portends the oncoming harnessing of power for various mechanical purposes, but it definitely isn’t evidence of mechanical transformation itself.
As for Mordor proper, I think the evidence is even worse here. Sure, we get descriptions of lots of forges and furnaces, but, again, this isn’t industrialization.15
Repeat after me, it isn’t industrialization unless it involves the development of new mechanized technologies, otherwise it’s just sparkling pollution.
VII. Science and Culture
Of their original home the Hobbits in Bilbo’s time preserved no knowledge. A love of learning (other than genealogical lore) was far from general among them, but there remained still a few in the older families who studied their own books, and even gathered reports of old times and distant lands from Elves, Dwarves, and Men.
- The Red Book of Westmarch
So, anyway, science.
When I say science was necessary for the Industrial Revolution, I really mean something like “the product of science was necessary for creation of the various technological inventions and improvements that occurred during the Industrial Revolution”. What was the product of science? To hear Joel Mokyr tell it: useful propositional knowledge.
What does that mean? Essentially, facts. Scientific investigation produces clear, concrete, and (largely) correct pieces of information like “The melting point of steel is X”, “Nitrogen improves crop yields”, or “The Beatles are overrated”. Inventors in turn take these bits of knowledge and can combine and innovate with them to produce technology.16 To return to a frequent example, the facts surrounding the properties of pressure were critical for the development of the steam engine. Without these various bits of discrete knowledge, it’s really hard, if not impossible, to make innovations.
This is really a multi-step process that is worth breaking down into pieces:
Here’s an example of how this process might go. Let’s say I’m a research scientist and I discover after rigorous empirical testing that, as a matter of physics, Tolkien fans are magnetically repulsive to members of their romantically preferred gender. I take my results and write them up in a journal article using standardized notation and practices for communicating facts. That journal article is then read by someone else who uses this previously unknown fact to create the world's first human-driven electromagnetic generator, singlehandedly solving the energy crisis and stopping climate change in its tracks. Each of those steps from discovery to the encoding of the fact being read by the inventor is necessary for a new invention to be made.
The Mokyrian explanation for the Industrial Revolution is, basically, that in the immediate run up to the time period, each step in this process became easier and occurred more, creating a much larger knowledge base than would have been present otherwise and allowing for new inventions and innovations to flourish.17
What caused this change? The Enlightenment.
More specifically: the Baconian program. Mokyr has spent a large part of his career documenting how, immediately prior to the enlightenment, there was a fundamental shift away from the neo-Aristotelian Thomist synthesis of the Medieval system towards a new empiricist approach to physics and science.18
The “Baconian Program” termed after Lord Francis Bacon, was, simplifying a bit, a (partially uncoordinated) attempt to generate a large body of general principles based on empirical regularities.19 For instance, Newtonian mechanics may be thought of as one of the largest contributions of “the program” in as far as it was a proposed set of regularities based on the observed instances of apples falling off of trees or whatever. This resulted in a much larger body of useful knowledge to draw on for invention.
It wasn’t just that there were more facts, they were also more accessible. There was an increased willingness to make research public and to do so in a regular manner (by standardizing things like notation and measurements).20 Furthermore, there was an attempt to increase distribution of these facts through the regular publications of scientific journals as well as large anthologies of scientific information (most famously Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie).21 The result of this was that scientific knowledge was more available than ever.
Of course, this just seems like we’ve punted our explanation of the industrial revolution back one step. If enlightenment scientific advancement caused industrialization, what caused the enlightenment? Continuing with Mokyr’s explanation, the answer is culture.22 Specifically, the driver of this change in approach towards understanding the world was a newfound belief (among elites) that economic and technological change was both possible and desirable.
This attitude drove increased amounts of attention and resources to scientific progress (directly as more people wanted to engage with science and indirectly as status rewards incentivized scientific discovery and patronage of scientists).
So, to spell out the process being proposed here entirely, it goes:
Culture → Science → Invention → Economic Growth
We have pretty decent qualitative evidence of a cultural shift towards science. We also have excellent evidence of an increase in scientific discovery. We can even see the increase in science quantitatively.23
There was an increase in scientific journals:
As well as scientific societies:
So there’s at least some evidence that Culture → Science.
What about Science → Innovation? Here, I think the evidence is more mixed.
To remind you what the causal mechanism is that was being proposed, it’s that scientific elites discover new knowledge which then trickles down to artisans and fabricants who then use that knowledge combined with their skill to create new inventions. So, first of all, we need evidence that artisans could actually access the new science that was being created.
Van Zaden (2009) provides us some evidence of this by looking at books over time Europe and finding that they became cheaper and more available.24
Books were more accessible and more people were capable of reading them:
So that’s pretty good evidence that scientific knowledge would have been more available than ever. What’s the issue?
A couple of things. First, the Enlightenment was a European wide phenomena, but industrialization began specifically in England. If it was a large driver, then why didn’t other countries take off at the same time?25 I don’t think this is too big a worry for us specifically, as we are only thinking of science as a necessary condition rather than the sole driver, so we can allow that Britain had unique factors that drove early industrialization.
The second problem is that the evidence that inventors of new technology during the IR actually used scientific knowledge is simply mixed. That is, even if scientific knowledge was available, it may not have been used frequently during invention. Instead, some research suggests that innovation was a more isolated phenomenon generated mainly by ‘tinkering’ or trial and error until a successful device emerged rather than being constructed in accordance with predictions made by science. For instance, “Less than one-fourth of those had any schooling other than an apprenticeship”.26 It’s simply hard to see how to square the low rates of education with the idea of science as a driver.
But, of course, not having a formal education is not quite the same thing as not having access to science. Where does that leave us? I think, basically, we are in a similar spot to the Factor Price theory, where there is credible evidence both for and against, but the immense plausibility of the theory demands we at least treat it seriously.
VIII. Do Elves go to School?
It is told that in their beginning the Dwarves were made by Aulë in the darkness of Middle-earth; for so greatly did Aulë desire the coming of the Children, to have learners to whom he could teach his lore and his crafts, that he was unwilling to await the fulfilment of the designs of Ilúvatar.
-The Silmarillion
So, how does this story of Culture -> Science -> Invention -> Economic Growth fit in with Middle Earth?
Frankly, Middle Earth’s level of scientific innovation is abysmal. There are a few groups mentioned in the books (which again, I have not read) that we could think of as dealing with the sorts of academic inquiry we are interested in: the archives of Minas Tirith, the elven school of Lambengolmor, and, of course, the council of five Wizards. These all turn out to be incredibly backwards institutions with little interest in discovery or exploration of natural science.
Let’s start with the Archives. We are told that the collection in Minas Tirith has a vast collection of “hoarded scrolls and books.” and that at least a fair amount of staff are employed in maintaining and interpreting the collection. Indeed, when Gandalf is seeking knowledge about the one ring this is the first place he seeks out, suggesting it is a location of at least decent renown. But this is also a fundamentally backwards institution, in the words of Denethor “If indeed you look only, as you say, for records of ancient days, and the beginnings of the City, read on!’’ he said. ‘‘For to me what was is less dark than what is to come, and that is my care.”. This suggests that the archives primarily serve as a repository for the wisdom of the ancients rather than as an active research institution dedicated to furthering current knowledge. And the archives are even bad at their job of maintaining existing facts! Gandalf tells us that “And yet there lie in his hoards many records that few even of the lore-masters now can read, for their scripts and tongues have become dark to later men.” The most extreme example of this is that a scroll that tells you how to identify the one ring, basically the Middle Earth equivalent of detailed instruction on how to build a nuclear bomb, has just been sitting around unread by anyone in the basement for centuries! This is not the sort of place we should expect productive science from.
What about the Elves? The best reference I could find to any sort of organization dedicated to knowledge gathering is yet another backwards looking collection of loremasters. The school of Lambengolmor, which is primarily composed of linguists and historians, seems to be the clearest example of an Elven institution dedicated to discovery of facts or wisdom. Notably absent is any sense of forward looking discovery, with instead a focus on compiling facts about what happened.
And so we come to the Order of the Wizards. For those who (like me) have not read the books you need to understand that while wizards in Middle Earth may appear to be a friendly collection of doddering old wise men, they are, in fact, an elite strike force of angels sent by lesser gods to prepare Middle Earth for war with Sauron.
As such, I’m not too surprised that we don’t get any direct evidence that they themselves are engaging in scientific research, but it is somewhat surprising that they don’t seem to even encourage it? After all, surely with the heavy emphasis on how Sauron is tooling up Mordor for war it would have been helpful to, say, spend some of the last 1000 years helping the Free Kingdoms learn how to make better steel or something? Alas, the Wizards seem to have a fairly anti-inquiry bent with Gandalf notably telling a (fallen) Sarumon that “he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”. This is in reference to Sarumon making a discovery about optics that white light can be split into multiple colors. Your basic platitudes are standing in the way of the invention of glasses, Gandalf! So, no scientific discovery or encouragement is coming from here.
I think these bits of evidence combine to paint a picture of a society that is fairly backwards looking with a culture that emphasizes holding on to the teachings of the ancients over new discovery. So, the low level of discovery seems to make sense given the cultural values of the Middle Earth.
But, when interrogating the world building, I think we can go one step deeper and ask if this sort of backwards looking culture makes sense.
To do this we need a model of culture change and cultural equilibrium(s).
To start with, let’s think of society as consisting of a complex network of nodes.27
Where each node represents a person and each line is a social connection between those people. Now let’s assume that each person has a set of beliefs, values, and preferences that we can group under the general banner of culture.
For any given cultural item that someone has, we think there is a chance that they transmit it to someone else. So, in our model, if Frodo comes up with a new cultural idea, say “We should form a group in charge of geothermal-powered jewelry recycling.” then there is a chance that people exposed to the new belief (i.e. connected to Frodo) will choose to adopt it. If they do, the process repeats for those people’s connections and so on.
There are a few factors that we might think make it more or less likely for beliefs to be spread. First, it’s not like all cultural properties are equally likely to be adopted. Think about it in real life, just because you tangentially know somebody who thinks that the Pentagon is actually just a really low polygon flying saucer doesn’t mean you are going to start thinking that. Various things bias upwards or downwards the probability of a cultural norm being adopted. For instance, for beliefs that clearly do not comport with observed facts we might expect some resistance to adoption.
The second thing that might determine culture spread and change is the size and density of the societal network. Ideas can be adopted in two ways. First, they can be picked up from someone in the network. Second, someone within the network can be a cultural innovator who sua sponte comes up with something new. The more people you have in the network, the more likely you are to see the introduction of new ideas. Similarly, connecting previously unconnected networks allows for access to previously unavailable ideas. Furthermore, we should pay attention to the density of the network. That is, for any given node how many others is it connected to. This density of connection allows for much faster spread and prevents novel ideas from getting “gated” where all of the connections to the novel idea connect it and it therefore never gets a chance to spread.
As an example here, the development of the printing press and national mailing systems in Europe allowed for the emergence of much larger and denser social networks among the elites in Europe. This allowed for the formation of what is termed The Republic of Letters, a social network for scientifically and philosophically inclined elites who were able to distribute ideas and discoveries amongst each other at a much more rapid rate than they would have been able to otherwise.28
So, to return to Middle Earth, the questions we should be asking are: Were there reasons that elites in Middle Earth should be biased against adopting pro-scientific cultural attitudes, how large were the social networks amongst elites, and how dense were the social networks among the elites.
Let’s start with the latter two questions about density and size of the network. In essence, this is asking us to investigate communication technology in Middle Earth. In general, it seems to me to be quite poor (with a couple of exceptions). Some of our evidence for this comes from the fact that the Palantiri, the seeing stones which essentially function as a long range communication device, are so highly valued. That they are so rare and so highly valued indicates lack of an alternative but similar technology, suggesting no magical means of communication is common. As for more traditional means of communication… it’s complicated? As far as I can tell, the Shire has essentially a totally functioning postal system. We get explicit reference to Bilbo and Frodo receiving mail on a regular basis. This is fairly in keeping with other aspects we learn about the Shire’s government like the presence of mayors and a professionalized police force.
However, this network doesn’t seem to extend even to close neighbors like Bree, as when Gandalf needs to send a letter to Frodo from the Prancing Pony his best option is to just leave it with the proprietor who in turn attempts (and fails) to hire random laborers to walk it to the Shire? This suggests an abysmal lack of communication institutions interregionally.29 As far as I can tell, none of the other locations we visit have anything better to offer and the Shire seems unique in this property. This suggests we are looking at a world where, relative to our world in the 18th century, information spreads much slower and the average person is exposed to fewer sources of new ideas. Thus, it seems probable cultural shifts would occur at a much slower rate.
As to the third question about cultural spread, whether we think the residents of Middle Earth have reasons that make them more or less likely to adopt cultural attitudes that inculcate scientific discovery, I think this can go both ways.
u/Username42 on reddit responded to my post last week and basically predicated the case in favor of a negative bias that I was going to make (and. as I am lazy, I am more than happy for others to do my work for me):
This kind of cultural change would be much less likely in Middle-Earth than in our world because most of the great disasters in the history of Arda come from innovation going wrong. The unleashing of the Balrog and destruction of Khazad-Dum came from the dwarves pushing their mining and industrialisation efforts too far. The Numenoreans were highly militarised and are hinted to have more advanced technology than anywhere in the Third Age, and their ambition got them all drowned by the Valar. Celebrimbor developed new technology for Rings of Power but Sauron was able to exploit them and gain power over their bearers. Back in the First Age, Feanor's development of the Silmarils led to the Kinslaying and the War of the Jewels, and you could even argue that the introduction of sin into the world into the Ainulindale was Melkor attempting to innovate beyond the these presented by Illuvatar.
If you're an elite scholar in Middle-Earth, you're raised on stories of everyone who tries to develop anything radically new getting punished for their hubris, and even though it's thousands of years ago, there are many people in the world like Elrond and Galadriel who were literally alive at the time those events happened. It's not an environment that's conducive to someone like Francis Bacon becoming a cultural icon as he did in the European Enlightenment.
I have a couple of quibbles here and there about the specifics (not sure the Dwarves specifically were increasing in technological capability and it leaves out that the main reason for the sinking of Numenor was the attempted invasion of Valinor) but I think the thrust of this proposition is right. We would expect the deep study of past failures resulting from attempts at development to create a deep resistance to technical progress among the elite.
So, it would seem that Tolkien has defeated me once again.
At least this would be the case if we weren’t overlooking a key element that suggests Middle Earth ought to be pro science: Fundamentally, to think that Middle Earth should have a culture of stagnation, you have to accept that multiple lesser gods are just fundamentally, absolutely and irrevocably terrible at their jobs.
Let’s back up.
For those who aren’t in the loop on the finer details of Ardaian Theology, in the beginning there was Eru Illuvatar. Eru wanted there to be more than just Eru, so they made a bunch of disembodied spirits who were really good at singing to sing a planet into existence. Melkor, one of these spirits (and basically the Vader to Sauron’s Kylo Ren) was like “Nah dude, you all want to sing some gospel music but I think we should sing death metal”. This led to strenuous disagreement. Long story short, big G God ends up sending a bunch of lowercase g gods known as the Valar to the physical world to help guide mortals.
Why am I regaling you with this? Because included among those lesser gods is Aule the Smith. Aule the Smith, is, surprisingly, the god of Smiths, Craftsmen, Invention etc. We are explicitly told in the text of the Silmarillion (which, again, I have not read) that “He is a smith and a master of all crafts, and he delights in works of skill”. And he isn’t just invested in old or traditional ways of crafting. The text (allegedly) tells us that he “desired to make things of [his] own that should be new and unthought of by others, and delighted in the praise of [his] skill.”
And apparently Aule is very invested in imparting his ideology! We learn that “Of him comes the lore and knowledge of the Earth and of all things that it contains: whether the lore of those that make not, but seek only for the understanding of what is, or the lore of all craftsmen: the weaver, the shaper of wood, and the worker in metals” This sure sounds like a god who might want to stick his thumb on the scale in favor of science to me! Aule is actually so on board with teaching people how to make cool stuff that he skips the queue and makes sentient life thousands of years ahead of when it was supposed to emerge on earth: “It is told that in their beginning the Dwarves were made by Aulë in the darkness of Middle-earth; for so greatly did Aulë desire the coming of the Children, to have learners to whom he could teach his lore and his crafts, that he was unwilling to await the fulfilment of the designs of Ilúvatar.”
So, this is where, after approximately 9,000 words of exposition, I can finally hit Tolkien with a couple of barbs. Because exactly what has Aule, a literal deity who wants people to learn craftsmanship and facts, been doing for the last 35,000 years? Clearly nothing useful given the abysmal state of Middle Earth.30 This, I think, is the fundamental flaw in the causal chain. We know explicitly that the Valar are deities with a positive interest in the flourishing of… humankind? Elfkind? Peoplekind? The group of sentient people that populate Middle Earth. Why are they doing nothing to kick Middle Earth out of this negative equilibrium of stagnation? Given that their benevolence is basically stipulated, I think the only option left is to assume incompetence. As surely this is not what Tolkien intended, I deem him a failure whose greatest legacy is the existence of ElfQuest.
Conclusion to Part II:
So, if you buy science as a necessary condition of industrialization, then I think you are stuck in a bind between thinking Middle Earth is internally consistent and thinking that it’s gods are like, good at their jobs. This maybe isn’t the biggest worry ever however. I mean look at Gandalf, he’s an angelic emmissary of one of the gods and his best plan for saving the world involves 2 hobbits going on the worlds longest and least supervised field trip.
Having now covered resources, factor prices, and science but somehow my determination to engage in what is, if we are honest, a fundamentally pointless excercise is holding on by a thread. So join us next time where we ask: exactly what was Aragorn’s job anyway?
Stop screaming “Read LOTR” at me. I will never read Lord of the Rings, coward.
Allen, Robert C. “The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective,” 2009. Pg. 6
Kalan, Elliot. Spider-Man and the X-Men Issue #2. New York: Marvel Comics, 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism_in_The_Lord_of_the_Rings
Sentences like “Iron wheels revolved there endlessly, and hammers thudded.”
Allen, Robert C. “The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective,” 2009. Pg. 85
Tolkien J.R.R., The Two Towers. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. Print.
Bruland, Kristine. “Industrialisation and Technological Change.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, edited by Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, 1st ed., 117–46. Cambridge University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521820363.006.
Ibid.
Tolkien J.R.R., The Two Towers. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. Print.
Tolkien J.R.R., The Return of the King. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. Print.
Bruland, Kristine. “Industrialisation and Technological Change.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, edited by Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, 1st ed., 117–46. Cambridge University Press, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521820363.006.
“Pimple’s idea was to grind more and faster, or so he said. He’s got other mills like it. But you’ve got to have grist before you can grind; and there was no more for the new mill to do than for the old”
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1889-0622-1
“of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-duˆ r, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength.”
Mokyr, Joel. “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth,” n.d., 67.
Ibid.
Mokyr, Joel. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1wf4dft.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Mokyr, Joel. “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth,” n.d., 67.
This is a simplified version as he actually proposes something like the interaction term of Institutions and Culture being the driver, but since I’m hitting institutions next time I’m leaving it at just culture for now. For more on Culture and Institutions interacting see:
Alesina, Alberto, and Paola Giuliano. “Culture and Institutions,”
Mokyr, Joel. “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth,” n.d., 67.
van Zanden, Jan Luiten. The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution, (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 17 Jun. 2009) doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004175174.i-346
Allen, R. C. “Why the Industrial Revolution Was British: Commerce, Induced Invention, and the Scientific Revolution1: INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.” The Economic History Review 64, no. 2 (May 2011): 357–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010.00532.x.
Ó Gráda, Cormac. “Did Science Cause the Industrial Revolution?” Journal of Economic Literature 54, no. 1 (March 1, 2016): 224–39. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.54.1.224.
Mokyr, Joel. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1wf4dft.
Ibid.
Gondorian beacons don’t count, no one was sending personal letters over them
I imagine someone is going to point out that Aule has had two of his Maiar betray him possibly lowering influence. As a bit of a note, while Sauron and Sarumon are the only named Maiar, the evidence suggests Valar have thousands of Maiar each.
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