Why Industrial Revolutions Stall

Hey, Upstream listeners! Today, we're sharing an episode from Turpentine's show, Live Players. Up ahead, Sam Oburia and I discuss the almost industrial revolutions in history, particularly in the Roman Empire and Song Dynasty China, their technological advancements, economic factors, and the reasons these revolutions didn't reach full fruition. Let's dive in!

The failed industrial revolutions, the ones we, we don't hear as much about. Where should we start?

I think that one of the biggest events of the last 500 years has definitely been the massive expansion of our technological capabilities and the massive expansion of wealth we have seen in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution itself, like a pretty complicated process with many steps. There's been lots of historians who have worked diligently to try to come together, to try to bring together the relevant factors that enabled something like it, right? Some credit primarily the steam engine. Others posit that it's closer to the late 19th century that we truly see industrial transformation of society and so on. But there is a deeper prehistory to this, right? Hellenistic era of Greek history. And interestingly enough, human history has not been a constant line of improvement of 1% greater GDP every year for 5,000 years. You can tell that that's not the case because it would've gone exponential long, long ago. And instead you have a history where societies end up getting richer and then they get poorer and then they get richer. And at the very best, maybe the trend line leans towards abundance and crosses some seeming threshold where we apparently have become a vastly wealthier civilization than any previous civilization. And, you know, whenever you see one of those charts of like a smooth curve of population growth or a smooth curve of economic growth, almost always false when you look into the empirical data. It's basically like just interpolating data points into the past that we usually don't even have or have been misinterpreted. To give an example, a laborer could actually receive much greater wages of grain for a day of unskilled labor in ancient Sumeria than they could in Athens and that they could in 11th century England. So really, of course, there's some things you can buy in 11th century England that you cannot buy as a Sumerian, like, field worker, but it's kind of surprising that the Sumerian field worker would just be paid more wheat for their labor than an English farmer, given all the seeming technological advances between the Sumerian age and Early Middle Medieval England, right? And there's also evidence from the extraction of Greenland ice cores that Roman mining was so extensive as to produce significant air pollution, but it wasn't so extensive in all eras of the Roman Empire. It was most extensive in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. You often see these, you know, kind of alternative history videos asking, you know, what if Rome had industrialized, right? How would history be different had Rome industrialized? And, you know, I think maybe the most interesting answer we can give is it did industrialize. It had an industrial revolution. It was just a different industrial revolution than ours. And like, we can maybe go into that. Maybe first we look at the Roman Empire and so on. And the Hellenistic era. And then if we have time this episode, maybe next episode, we look also at Song Dynasty China from the 12th century.

Yeah, that's, that's great setup. Let's go into the Roman Empire further and talk about the ways in which it, it did industrialize and the ways in which it, it didn't quite in the way that we particularly understand it. Yeah.

I mean, one common story you might've heard about the Roman Empire is that it didn't industrialize because of the abundance of slave labor. Right? Slaves were just too cheap. There was no reason to build machinery. I think that's not true, especially because slaves did become actually very expensive later on in the Roman Empire. The empire of abundant, cheap slaves, cheap human labor, is the period when Rome is expanding through conquest, right? It's not the later period when, if anything, the empire is shrinking. Right? And there are fewer captives to be taken. So yes, there is a massive expansion of agricultural work that's powered by basically the slaves the Romans capture when they're conquering areas like Gaul or Iberia or North Africa and so on. But later the price of that labor goes up and actually the treatment of the slaves is Significantly improved. Roman slavery is not directly comparable to, say, the experience in the New World of like American, early American slavery, or in Brazil or so on. You might be paid wages for your labor. Laws were passed later on, like limiting the rights of masters over their slaves, et cetera. It started off out of this practice of of captives. There was always like a large class of people that was free and they would sell their labor, even in Rome. And importantly, the slave labor shortages were significant enough to reward innovation in terms of using other energy sources and mechanical devices. The most important one here Is the watermill. Now, we don't think of the watermill as a precursor to industrialization, but in Europe, were it not from the 13th century onward to have the proliferation of water power usage, I don't think we would've ever gotten to sort of the Industrial Revolution starting point. Recent archaeological evidence that has been coming out over the last 50 to 60 years, predominantly done in Europe, Though I'm sure if the same work had been done in, say, Iraq or Syria, we would've found a lot of evidence there as well. And we find evidence, I'm sure, also in Egypt, suggests that there are hundreds of sites where Romans basically harnessed water power. Some of these were very, very impressive complexes. Like there's a complex in Spain where it's 10 water wheels, like one after the other. Set down on the slope of a hill. Or you have examples where, you know, famous Roman water engineering is used, where you're piping in not just drinking water, you're piping in power, water power, but still power, right? You're bringing the water and you're harnessing, you know, over aqueducts and you're harnessing it to deliver the kind of mechanical energy that you need. Now, this application wasn't just for milling flour, which of course very important in the Roman Empire. The majority of your calories were carbs. You know, carbs might be bad for the individual, but they seem very good for empire. So, you know, America is safe. We grow enough corn, you know, get to have empire. And Rome got to have empire because it grew so much wheat, both in Egypt, North Africa, but also places like Gaul. So any automation in agriculture is very, very important for freeing up surplus labor, and it's only worth doing again if you're trying to economize on labor. So beyond milling of flour, they would also use it in ironworks. So it'd be used in basically blacksmithies, and it would also be used for saws. So they would use saws to process wood in truly vast quantities. But not just that, they would use water power to cut marble. So all those beautiful Roman marble buildings, I think we all imagine that every single piece of marble is just human-shaped. You know, again, a poor unfortunate soul chained, probably watched over by, you know, like very red legionary in the, in the classic Hollywood attire. And I'm sure that a lot of that happened, but it's also the case that those marble blocks were probably precut by water power in many cases and were probably shipped all over the Mediterranean. So, you know, today you might have something like Monument Labs in San Francisco where you first have like a robot chisel out the outline of a statue and then a human Craftsman finishes the last few touches. I think we actually saw a lot of that with the basic building blocks of the Roman Empire. So when Caesar Augustus bragged that when he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, a lot of that marble was probably cut at these water saws, water-powered marble saws. Now note, that's a quite significant technical accomplishment because you need a saw that's, you know, basically good enough To cut through rock, right? Like, you know, marble is, is, is relatively soft, but it's still, it's still a quite durable material. And you have to also make sure that it doesn't overheat, et cetera, et cetera. The mechanics of it have to be quite robust. It's again, not very trivial to turn sort of the circular motion of a water wheel into like this kind of horizontal motion of a saw. So that demonstrates like a significant technical capability. In fact, there's a man buried in a small mausoleum in Asia Minor that features mechanical wheels and water wheels in his small mausoleum. So this was probably, probably a Greek, though he has a Latinized name. It's from the era of the Roman Empire, and he was clearly very proud of being a mechanic, of having worked on these ubiquitous machines. So I think it's very clear that despite this other stereotype which we often apply to the classical era, I think we conflate classical Athenian society with Republican Rome, with Imperial Rome. It seems by the imperial period, while I'm sure that, you know, the nobles didn't think very highly of mechanical devices, there was a well-paid class of very skilled craftsmen who would use their mechanical knowledge, not just in this context of like keeping the watermills milling flour and like hammers hitting iron that is produced in truly massive quantities, but also And, you know, cutting marble, cutting wood. They were probably also quite well compensated because they were working on military engines. Like, Rome has a lot of these engineering manuals related to siegecraft, to construction. So you might think that this is sort of the only main application of water power. I very much encourage listeners To check out an, a site in modern-day Spain. It's a UNESCO site. It's called Las Médulas. Like I said, it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site today. It is in modern Spain. It was a massive Roman silver mine. Las Médulas looks like a lunar landscape. It looks like this kind of like open-air mine where the Romans just rebuilt the landscape, much as you might see in Appalachia. You know, when you have those hills where it feels like the hill is like cratered up. Or that it— the top has been cut off. This silver mine looks exactly the same. Now, they didn't do this with gunpowder, but they probably used water in a pretty direct way. You could catastrophically flood areas to quickly strip all the soil off of it. Like, if you— you could redirect basically an artificial river to do so. And not just that, again, you could use water power to power various mechanical devices that helped in this process. I don't want to necessarily exaggerate the flexibility of water power. Ultimately, it does have a great disadvantage compared to the steam engine, and, you know, this disadvantage tends to be just you can't put it anywhere you want. It has to be near a river. But on the other hand, Most cities of ancient Europe are near rivers, and water is fairly plentiful in a lot of these places. And in the places where it's not plentiful, well, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Nile River— those are basically the only inhabited parts of relatively desertified areas anyway. So in a way, water power was exactly where it was needed. And There is circumstantial evidence that it might have been used in other forms of mass production. Now, I've talked now about the powering of it, right? Many people, for example, don't know that among the fuels used by the Romans, coal was actually among the fuels, as was thatch. Roman houses in England were heated with coal. So even things like digging up coal These are not novel concepts. Now, I don't think that they ever scaled the steam engines they did have to industrial production, but listeners might be surprised to learn of Hiram's steam engine. Hiram of Alexandria created basically a simple steam engine as a science experiment. You might sometimes hear it described as a toy or a curiosity. But in the original text, Heron is very insistent that this is a device that demonstrates the principle that heat is a form of motion, and doing so by heating up a brass sphere that has 2 jet nozzles on each side. As the water inside the sphere boils, the sphere starts rotating faster and faster, and you can use this rotating motion to power various fun and interesting automation, right? Like, one example is an automatic mechanism to open a door to a shrine if you give a donation to the shrine, and then the shrine doors open, the god is revealed, you know, you carry out whatever ritual you have, and then the doors close. So stuff like that, right? Or curiosities like machines where People would make basically an automaton that was shaped like a woman, and that would, depending on what setting you pressed, you put a cup in one of her hands, and then she would pour either water or wine to measure, right? And would mix your water and wine at whatever setting you put it in. So really, a lot of mechanical and technical sophistication exists, Water power is used widely. Conceptually, conceptually, you know, using fuel like coal or wood to produce mechanical effects is understood to be possible. And then you might ask, well, what is the scale of production? I already talked a little bit about the scale of like metal production, right? Like just mining at a truly astounding scale, the kind of scale where You know, you end up remaking entire mountains and where you leave enough of a footprint of lead pollution in the atmosphere that in distant Greenland, the little bubbles of air trapped in the ice actually show elevated levels, levels that would not be matched until our own era, until the 19th century.

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So clearly lots of metal is being dug up, but what about products that require human labor? You know, there is a hill in Rome that is an artificial hill. When people talk often that, isn't it sad that, you know, the ancients like left us the pyramids and the Colosseum and we're only gonna, you know, we're only going to have the ruins of the Colosseum. leave the future, these giant trash dumps which we've like buried with all our plastics and all our waste. You know, actually, the Romans left us this too. There is a hill known as Monte Sacchio in Rome. It is an artificial mound, and it is composed exclusively of fragments of broken ancient Roman pottery. This is from discarded amphora, and they dated these, and it turned out they're from the period of the Roman Empire. So this covers about an area of 2 hectares, and the volume's like approximately half a million cubic meters. Okay, doing the math, the estimate the archaeologists came up with— they came up with was 53 million amphorae. It would take 53 million amphorae shattered to make that hill. So tell me, can you imagine 53 million amphorae being produced even over 100 years? Let's be conservative and say that was 100 years. That's 5 million amphorae a year. That's a lot. That's the equivalent of like, you know, almost a modern American consumer lifestyle. I bet if we, we put together all the aluminum cans that I've used or you've used through the course of the year drinking, you know, fizzy water or, or Diet Coke or whatever, you know, I'm sure we get to an impressive number, but that's not a number that mere craftsmen produce, right? They were mass-producing pottery, and we have records of this. They would build these giant clins where they would like put all the pottery in around a big fire because the economies of scale are best there. And they would make amphorae on a truly industrial scale. They would make glassware on a truly industrial scale, and also they would make statues on a truly industrial scale. Earlier I talked about monument labs. Well, maybe, you know, maybe we're reinventing some Roman technology here as well by thinking more industrially about our statues. The market in Rome and in the Roman Empire was fairly high for replicas of famous works of art. So these were already replicas. It wasn't that every statue was unique, or to have, say, a new model of, you know, the statue of the latest Roman emperor be distributed around the Mediterranean. These were so standardized that in fact, the torso of the statue and the arms and the head were often produced separately. And were interchangeable. Like, so if you go to the Vienna Art Museum, you can observe a full Roman statue that fits together perfectly, made up of 2 separate finds where they found the torso in— of one copy of the statue in Anatolia, and the other totally standardized statue had like the head and the arm, but the torso was damaged. And then you just put it together and it fits. So at least in statues, standardized parts, actually with military equipment, also standardized parts with amphora sizes, standardized parts. You know, the Romans had their equivalent of standardization and systematization, right? You might have the 2, you know, the 2-liter Coke is universal since, you know, talk, talk about soft drinks earlier. Coca-Cola sells that in America too, even though we don't use liters. Just because it's simpler to build one standard at scale for the whole world. And the Romans had their standard-sized amphora too. So now we start talking about this. It's like, okay, you have standardization, you have commerce shipping tens of millions, likely hundreds of millions of amphorae. Actually, no, probably a billion amphoras. Because we were talking about just one hill in one city, Rome. And Rome was not the only large city of the Roman Empire. You had Alexandria, Constantinople, Miletus, etc., Syracuse even. Likely the consumption and production of the Roman Empire over 200 or 300 years of its history was a billion amphorae. You know, those start sounding like Silicon Valley numbers, right? Like maybe, you know, with the time machine, we invest in the VC business of olive oil and olive oil distribution. So really, this is a sophisticated consumer economy, right? And it is consumer-driven, right? Yes, there is welfare in the form of the dole, but that oil, that glassware, those statues are bought by people, not just by the nobility. They're bought by something that could accurately be described as the Roman middle class. Sometimes the Roman working class.

And so why do you feel like this era is underappreciated or underrated, or why don't we consider it, you know, sort of as significant as perhaps it should be?

I think 2 reasons. I think that one, it is kind of concerning that a society could be well on the trajectory of industrialization. And then something interrupts that. So we prefer to pretend this is not industrialization and that the economy of the Roman Empire around 100 AD is no more sophisticated than the economy of like a peasant Roman Republic, 300 BC. Could you imagine future historians making the same mistake? Imagine them talking about, well, you know, America was like, you know, essentially an agricultural slavery based society. You know, they export cotton. And, you know, this explains why in the early 21st century they were overtaken by China. Like, that, that makes absolutely no sense. But that, but that's the level of granularity that we talk about when you talk about Rome. We pretend it's not 1,000 years of development. Okay. The Roman Empire experienced true progress within the bounds of the existence of that civilization. But it was within bounds, and only a small fraction of that progress, materially almost none of it, technologically some of it, and culturally a lot of it, got transmitted outside of that civilization. And I think we don't want to consider the possibility that we are just like that, that we are also a fragile civilization. Look, maybe coal is not enough for escape velocity. You know, maybe it'll turn out that like in 4 or 5 years we hit the energy constraints on AI. AI is not good enough, but at the same time we're aging really badly, et cetera, et cetera. I could tell a pessimistic story where we actually regress from AI and then future civilizations like talk about us and they say, oh, you know, they discovered primitive computers and, you know, they even got something that could be described as a proto neural net. But really, that wasn't a true intelligence explosion revolution. That was only achieved by, you know, the Martians in 6000 AD, you know, descended from Elon City or whatever, right? Like, that could easily be how future historians dismissed us if we, quote unquote, didn't work out. So that's the first reason. The second reason, I think it's literally Hollywood.

Okay.

I think Hollywood needs to depict that the Hellenistic era— so this is after the conquests of Alexander the Great— and ever more so then in the Roman era, in the imperial era, that period isn't quite swords and sandals. Sure, it's swords and sandals, but it's swords, sandals, and weird mechanical devices. In fact, to modern eyes, if you went to Rome, first off, it would be colorful, chaotic, But you'd be surprised, it, it would feel almost a little bit steampunk, right? You would have firemen carrying water pumps and then pumping water through like fire hoses to put out fire, right? You would have machines that are portable that I can hold in my hand and manually like spin something, and I can calculate the position of the stars. Either for an astrology chart or for navigating my ship. I'm referencing here the Antikythera mechanism. You would have machines that to some extent keep time. You would have automated, you know, like hammers. You would have, you would have iron production in truly vast quantities built at scale. And you would have, you know, to some extent, probably very sophisticated chemistry in use in metallurgy and in use in artifacts like the Lycurgus Cup. I might have mentioned the Lycurgus Cup here before, but I'll just describe it again for the listeners. It is a dichromic cup, which means that depending on how you light this glass cup, it either is green or red. And that's achieved through a precise mix of gold and silver particles ground to a nanometer level mixed into the glass. And the glass is, it's called the Lycurgus Cup because it has the mythical founder of Sparta on it. And he's being attacked, I think, by vines at the directive of the god Pan because he tried to outlaw wine, you know, trying to outlaw wine. And you have the guy being strangled by vines on the cup. that you're probably drinking wine out of. It's like a fun meme. So we only have one of these, but the very fact that we have it and that it's from the 4th century AD, so very close to what's usually considered the end of the Roman Empire, 476 AD, you know, the fact that we have a glass cup of this type means there were thousands of these made. I would maybe buy that a golden cup is treasured and not melted down if it's super valuable. Glass breaks. We were very lucky to get one. Had someone been a little bit clumsy in a monastery in the 16th century or whatever, poof, we would've lost that. It would've just literally swept it away. And you know, maybe we'd find some weird glass fragments, but probably not even that. Who's gonna look for some glass fragments? So there were probably thousands of these cups made and they were being made in an era of the Roman Empire where the economy was already decaying, where a lot of the barbarian invasions had happened and so on. Still though, this world, it's like, you know, can you imagine the Rome or the Alexandria of mechanical devices? It was steampunk. We don't even have the exact right word, but aesthetically it would feel steampunk because of gears and things around you, right? Various devices and so on. I think it might— I don't know, it might feel a little bit like 17th or 18th century, but just without the gunpowder, right? It would probably feel much more like that than it would like, say, ancient Egypt or even classical Greece, because all of these were, were recent and intense transformations. There had never before been a Greek city as large as Alexandria. They'd never before built truly giant bronze statues such as the Colossus of Rhodes. Something happened after the Industrial Revolution, right? It was like, you know, the Colossus of Rhodes is in size comparable to the modern Statue of Liberty. No matter, you know, how rich a trade or merchant power you are, the sheer cost of metalworking had to be much lower for you to make that statue. And for Alexandria, well, that was where the Lycurgus Cup was almost certainly made, and that's where a lot of the amphorae were made that we talked about earlier. A massive population center with people from the entire Mediterranean world gathering there. So not just the Egyptians, but the Greeks, Jews, etc. You know, honestly, probably the best analogy would be it was the New York City of the ancient Mediterranean. So it was a globalized world, a small world, but globalized in the sense that you could have trade from England, Syria, the Black Sea, silk from China, spices from the Indian Ocean. This was a very developed trade network with a lot of interdependencies, and I think Alexandria was probably essentially a productive city. It wasn't just, you know, it was a city that not only was a center of import and export, but was a center of production. So this actually brings me to a third reason that I think we have neglected the economics, the positive and productive economics of ancient cities. It is the case that in the middle of the 20th century, most historians, especially historians in the archaeological community, were just Marxists. So the idea was that you kind of were trying to prove that the city was parasitical on the countryside. So they loved thinking about just Rome as the city that taxes the entire Mediterranean, but they didn't pay enough attention to cities like Alexandria, which are not just political centers, but centers of production. And they also didn't want to upset, you know, the sort of original Karl Marx thesis of like slave societies Followed by feudalism, followed by capitalism, right? The capitalistic or free market elements of the ancient Roman economy, that throws a lot of wrenches in that, you know, in that model. And I don't want to exaggerate it. There are obviously like several differences, but there were entities that had like legal standing on their own, right? You had Roman corporations and Roman guilds. That, you know, had this something, you know, I wouldn't quite say corporate personhood, but definitely it was possible for organizations to pull together resources and organize them in a way that's more sophisticated than, oh, okay, this is my personal property and that's all there is to it. So, you know, I, I think that again, The Roman Empire would have happily made use of James Watt's steam engine if and only if they had had a reason to dig a lot of coal. Because let's remember, James Watt's steam engine, when it was invented, was not even the first steam engine really. It was just the first one that could economically pump water Out of a coal mine. So it's almost the perfect case. You're like building a steam engine right next to the fuel source, and you're using it to pump out water so you can dig up more coal. And the reason coal was in demand in England was actually heating. So, you know, maybe ultimately the Romans just did not have a reason to dig up enough coal because wood was so abundant and other fuel sources were abundant. But, you know, had you given them a century or two more, had population densities increased, especially in the colder parts of the Roman Empire, I think you might have seen a pretty direct application of steam engines. But at the end of the day, I don't, I don't even think that would've necessarily prevented the fall of the Roman Empire, right? And to give an argument for this, I'm gonna briefly transition to talking about the Song Dynasty in 12th century. China. The Song Dynasty was notably advanced technologically. I believe gunpowder was probably invented in that period. There's some debate about it. It was used at least in fireworks. They had clock towers. Productivity was very high. It was one of the richest dynasties in Chinese history, yet they still had to retreat Essentially before nomadic horse people conquering them from the north, right? And the Southern Song Dynasty was one of the only ones in Chinese history that had a maritime orientation partially out of necessity. So say a somewhat more successful Roman Empire that continued on its steampunk trajectory would've still faced significant military challenges. As demonstrated by Song Dynasty China.

I'm curious to understand more how failed industrial revolutions are similar or different in different places and what happened in Rome, how it's comparable to—

I mean, we, we call them failed, right? But what if our own is just a particularly tall example of the same species, right? What if ours is, you know, ours has not yet been a success. How do you define success?

Right.

But yeah, I think a key lesson here is that something like the Industrial Revolution was probably going to happen historically, even if the contingent facts about England or Germany or Belgium were a little different. I think the large-scale commerce and trade, significant military demand because of essentially the state just You know, commissioning 100,000 swords and so on. This produces like workshops at scale. It produces environments where using something like water power is relevant. I focused a lot on water power earlier because I want to point out that any machine you design that can economically be powered by water power can probably be economically powered by a steam engine too. So in a way, once you discover that, you, you build that new source of mechanical energy, you can just plug it into all of these other machines you already understood. And water power was heavily used in, in England, in Scandinavia, and so on in the 17th century and before. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, it's plausible that in the 19th century Once you could hook these power sources up, you would get a great expansion of the use of old machinery. As a result, the invention of new machines. I think what they have in common though is, like I said, there is a vast scale of the commerce and of both private and state demand, right? State demand for big construction projects, for big shipbuilding projects, for like standardized military equipment. And then on the other hand, there's something like a large class of people that can buy consumer products, and there's like some way to deliver those to them. And I think this is something that Song Dynasty China has in common with Rome. It's like shipping economics are very good compared to anything that's transported over land. And most of these examples that I was talking about, these are obviously cities with access to the Mediterranean and cheap shipping across it. And in China's case, some shipping through the 2 great rivers and some shipping through the, what today we call the South China Sea. So transportation costs are relatively low. It really, in a way, Perhaps it was not for England even the steam engine. Perhaps it was the sailing ship, because you could get wool, you know, getting wool from New Zealand or silver from Argentina, or let's say, let's say cotton from the American South or from Egypt. Getting all of these raw materials or like somewhat processed resources from the cheapest part of the world's land masses where it is the cheapest place to produce them, that bringing those together in a single location is, I think, a prerequisite for industrialization. So I do think something like large-scale shipping over water is perhaps a much more important prerequisite for an industrial revolution, and it's in common With all of these industrial revolutions. And I think what stops it basically is, I think both in the case of Rome and China, and if that were to happen to us as well, there is a saturation point reached where you basically have no concrete reason to further expand production. Like in the case of Rome, population did literally begin to decline. So there was no reason to really start using much more coal or expand production further. Like, industry grew to meet the needs of society, and then for a variety of reasons, society stopped growing both demographically or geographically. And once those needs are met, The Industrial Revolution stops. So that would be my proposal. Song China, too battered, could not expand, constant military insecurity. Eventually, basically the machinery saturates demand and the sort of like flywheel of ever better machinery making the economics ever better slows down and then kind of stops. So in other words, The Industrial Revolution as an S-curve, and then the bigger your civilization is and the smarter it is, or the more ambitious it is, the taller the S-curve. So that's what I think it is. It's like it starts plateauing when the growth of non-technological factors does not keep up with what is necessary to jump to the next level of technology. I think that would be at the most abstract level, would be something like that. And with Rome, it might have been first demographic decline, or it might have been just political fragmentation. You know, political fragmentation is not bad as long as trade isn't stopped. So I don't even believe it was Roman political fragmentation. I think their population just stopped growing and started shrinking. Meanwhile, in China's case, I think they were just militarily defeated by a people that was just really just very interested in taxing them. And not that mechanically inclined. Yeah.

Fascinating. You also mentioned, and maybe if we should put it for a separate conversation, we can, but the Hellenistic era as well.

Yes. Yes. I mostly talked about the Roman Empire because of its vast scale, though I did touch in a few points on the Hellenistic era. You know, as soon as you hear the word Alexandria, you know, you are in the sort of Hellenistic era. There's the Ptolemaic Egypt. There's the Seleucid Empire and so on. But perhaps we save details of that, which I think is honestly the birthplace of modern science, that time period specifically. We save that for the next episode.

Yeah. So should we, should we wrap, wrap on that then? That, that inter— or is there anything else around the topics that we discussed today that—

I think that's a good spot to wrap.

Awesome. Well, some of this is A fascinating topic that we don't pay enough attention to, sort of the quote unquote failed industrial revolutions or the revolutions that, that we don't call revolutions. As always, a great conversation and excited for more soon. Yes.

Thank you.

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