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Industrial Revolutions: Energy Basis
The medieval period is defined by the series of invasions which collapsed the last empires of antiquity, and the coming of an era of sea based globalization. The euro-centric position places this as the Italian Renaissance, but this misses the global nature of what was happening. Some areas were forced to participate by being invaded, others however were full and active participants in the modern age. That modern age can be identified with a series of industrial revolutions defined by energy basis.
There is a great deal of confusion about energy basis, and it is worth looking at it carefully before proceding.
Energy is, in physics, is the capacity to do work. However, energy, in a biological sense, is a great deal more constrained. The same is true in economics. It is a vacuous statement to say how much solar energy falls on the earth. In reality, energy is somewhat of a nano-technology - it is about the placement of individual atoms in the correct places. The ability to convert even a few new arrangements of molecules into another arrangement of molecules creates a vast change in the amount of economically usable energy available.
When such a capability emerges, when a particular arrangement of atoms is opened to be converted to another arrangement of atoms, a new energy source has been tapped. Energy is much more like breaking a code, than it is like statistical mechanics. This confusion repeatedly hobbles thinking about energy. This Pauling sense of energy is essential to understanding energy basis. Energy basis is not a matter of raw sources. It is not a matter of the raw material itself. In fact, the raw material is often attractive because it is common. Consider what "oil" means to most of us. Consider that in 1800, it meant whale oil. There is a great deal more petroleum in the world than whale blubber, but it was less trouble to send men out in a wooden ship to harpoon whales in 1800, than it was to drill and refine petroleum.
For most of human history the most important energy basis was muscle power. While some cultures, particularly the Polynesian cultures of the Pacific, made large scale use of wind power, in general, to do was to do with muscle power. This was noted by Jared Diamond in his thesis on large pack animals. Wind, gravity, fire, were all auxiliaries. Even fire was more muscle driven, since acquiring wood was done primarily with muscle power.
Before human history, the first energy basis revolution was hunting and fire. A concept so important that it figures in both texts, and literature. The control of fire is almost the crucial technology which differentiates humans from animals. However human history begins with the next great muscle powered energy basis shift, but it is not a single shift.
Double shift is based on the shift of climate from unstable and rapidly shifting temperatures, to stable temperatures. This made possible what is called the "agricultural" revolution, but is really the "stability revolution." This is because that herding is an equal technology to agriculture, and herding cultures through the period of per-history and antiquity had a running equilibrium. We speak an Indo-European language, the Indo-European people's were not agricultural specialists, but hunters and herders. Their language displaced earlier people's, even though in many cases the genetic stock did not.
The stability revolution encompasses both herding and planting. Thus began the horse-house conflict of history: they were two radically different, but not entirely uncomplimentary ways of accessing muscle power, and different forms of social organization.
The muscle power economy developed several subsidiary forms of energy development: fire, water power, metallurgy, combustion, wind, were all present. The muscle economy would make a series of large steps upward, replacing bronze with iron, for example. However, the medieval period would rest on a triumvirate of muscle power innovations. The first was the wide spread use of iron in implements, which was not done in almost any area of antiquity. Most importantly, in the plow. The second was the improved bows of the medieval period. The final innovation was the horse yoke and stirrup. These two innovations together dramatically increased the energy from the horse that could be used. The 900-1400 period saw these innovations used in a series of successful empires.
However, with the dawn of the 1400's a new series of states began to emerge: states based on the modern economy. Many of the features of these states existed previously. In particular, Song China had many of them. What previous states had lacked, however, was the access to a globalized trade network which was capable of producing enough economic surplus to become a self-sustaining cycle of development. The crucial pieces were all present, but were scattered across the globe. No one piece was enough, which is why it is so difficult to create a simple story as to what caused the transition to the modern period.
The change in energy basis was not that the modern age suddenly gained a majority of its energy from non-muscle sources. Nor was it that the new sources had not been present. Instead the crucial shift of the first industrial revolution was far more software than hardware: improved machining, mechanics, mathematics and navigation were more important than the raw materials of wind and water themselves. The Europeans would, in fact, discover new kinds of wind and water resources, for example trade winds and the gulf stream. But primarily the change in the world was about finding greater efficiency inh harnessing. Much as the stirrup harnessed the horse.
This is also why the raw resources themselves are rarely the predictors of success: because, as Machiavelli noted in The Prince "good men can secure gold, gold cannot secure good men." Armies with the appropriate technological and military advantages could secure resources. The Americas had the potato, and reserves of raw materials. It was the first purely modern empire, the Spanish Empire, that would take them.
The medieval period collapsed because its muscle based globalization was completely incapable of coping with the requirements of centralizing its power enough to advance. The early modern period would be plagued by the same problems, but it's roving advancement was enough to drive it forward. One empire would collapse, but another would take it's place in short order. This was the difference between the modern energy basis, and the most successful muscle empires - the muscle empires were based on ruthless exploitation of the same amount of energy and the same kind of energy. When the political will and stability to do this faded, the empire collapsed into civil war, and did not produce a successor state, but fell into smaller, and more manageable units.
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