We know how to describe how the industrial revolution was deployed in Europe, without however succeeding in explaining why it happened as well as. The scenario proposed by Joël Mokyr is a most attractive hypothesis.
Innovations, there were however, throughout the Middle Ages : water mill, harness, windmill, astronomical telescope, fire weapon, navigation techniques, mechanical clock etc…. But, as important that they were, these inventions nevertheless did not contact a systemic technological revolution. It is true that the application of any new idea always comes up against resistance to change that is marginalized, or slows down the generalization of its potential effects.
Everything that happens should therefore not inevitably happen. It could have happened at another time or be suffocated in the egg at an early stage. Historical circumstances favorable to the germination of seeds already present. And in particular sufficient conditions to go beyond mistrust that arises from emotional attachment to the ways of doing traditional. The industrial revolution which intervenes in Europe, from the half of the 17ᵉ century, is in no way due to any superiority, whether intellectual, ethnic or institutional on other civilizations.
Because, nothing predisposed a priori this continent to live this tectonic reversal of values, thought and practices. Several favorable factors were certainly present: the invention of printing, the dissemination of books by publishers concomitantly with the acceleration of literacy, but also the improvement of postal services and mobility. However, none of this would have made it possible to reverse the dominant beliefs, representations and preferences, if there had been a favorable geopolitical situation.
China or the Middle East were then structured around centralized, coherent and compact empires, under the control of a conservative authority. Europe, on the other hand, is fragmented into a multitude of states competing with each other, engaging in incessant wars. Princes and Kings are then competed to offer protection and patronage, financial resources and reception, security and status conditions to the most renowned artists and scientists. What they were looking for above all was not to open up to modernity, but to acquire prestige and notoriety, preponderance and ancestry, by being more welcoming than their enemies. When a local authority hunted an innovator, he was welcomed with open arms at the neighbor.
In a counter-intuitive way, it would therefore be these oppositions that would have constituted the soil on which a real transnational republic of letters could flourish. The vanity and the need for ruling nobility to spread their power was the fuel. New ideas would have disseminated themselves according to intellectual exchanges, the circulation of learned publications, but also epistolary correspondence. The small bunch of intellectuals sailing on a frail Esquif saw its workforce go from 1200 to 16ᵉ century to 12000 to 17ᵉ! The world of thought was invaded by a plethora of rival methodologies and different interpretations each proposing to study and explain the world, on a competitive market of ideas.
-It is in this context that European learned elites built a transnational community throwing bridges between religions, social origins and nationalities. A flowering of new representations arises, open and immediately shared, questionable and disputed, without property rights, acquired by the experimental method and the reproduction of the results obtained initiated by Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. The intolerance of the proponents of orthodoxy and their attempts to suppress new ideas by could never really be coordinated by central authorities, because of their fragility in the face of the scattering of powers.
The Catholic religion which could have played this role never succeeded, shared that it was between supporters of many science within its breast and its fundamentalist opponents. The conservative system ends up collapsing. The fear of the new gave way to fascination with innovation. Competition between ideas would lead to competition between companies in turn leading to economic development.
This article is part of the “open book” section
He is signed Jacques Trémittin
Do not miss his site “Tremsite”: https://tremintin.com/joomla/
Photo: Joel mookyr a 2012 Mejudice Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
