Why the west was the first to industrialize?

Hi fil, that's the non formal most correct answer to a question that wasn't asked. Industry may have a general dictionary definition of purposeful activity but industrialization is a socioeconomic transformation with a much tighter definition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrialisation

I am well aware on the classical narrowed sense of Industrialization hinge, just thought the broader picture fit the development of the debate on a complementary manner...after all you are trying to debate the progress of the technique of technology...

I think there is 360 degrees to a circle, and since in the past 333 years you had about 65,000 direct ancestors, without gene mapping, we cannot assume any of your family, clan, or tribal assumptions about the history of the Nation of England, which is a place, not a race ... are at the center of the bell curve. Reading details of Roman accounts of the tribes in the British Isles, and gene mapping of thousands of years of migrations and interbreeding, and scientific analysis of language, shows a connection between all English peoples, and the Scots, Welsh, and Irish, in their present condition, ARE related to the builders of Stonehenge. In the past 2000 years we all literally had millions of direct descendants, and very seldom does any long term isolation occur, and if it does, eventually disease wipes them out.

Don't forget the Vikings.

I thought capitalism was the impetus to industrialization. And, in that context, Max Weber's "Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism," I thought gives Protestantism the accolade for the correlating development in the West.

And, when we say, the West, we include Southern Europe, but let's be intellectually honest and admit that Catholic Europe tended to be agrarian, while the West that was Protestant had a different focus. If you do not agree with me, argue with Calvin (idle hands bring the Devil).

Another theory that ties development with Protestantism is that Protestantism is focussed on the future (predestination) more than Catholicism, and that future oriented thinking results in industrialization, while present oriented thinking (Southern and mainly Catholic Europe) tends to focus on enjoying today.

The historical timeline of who made wool, and who processed it, may be the result of time orientation of a culture, which correlates to religion.

You don't know much about Asian history, do you?

That's ci's standard response. It does, of course, carry the implied preening that he knows all about the matter because he once flew in and had himself photographed in front of a famous Asian temple eating a hamburger and grinning.

...well I am Portuguese and certainly agree with the general idea you brought up, the difference between Iluminism at North and Humanism at South also point on that direction...
...the typical defensive argument on our side was that Northerners were profit oriented "barbarians" and that the Roman Civilized Empire ended up from France up...(I always laughed at the argument)

What are you trying to say? Asia had the industrial revolution? You mean the novels of Charles Dickens should have included Asian factories as the backdrop to Victorian life? What Asian factories?

You don't even know about the "industrial revolution" to be asking such a stupid question.

Yeah, that's a good example of Wikipedia being confused and unreliable. It makes the mistake of conflating "assembly line" with "division of labor." They're not the same thing. Adam Smith was quite familiar with division of labor. He had no conception of the assembly line.

Darwin's circle had Joe. They had lines of girls with different sized paintbrushes and different coloured paints constructing the images that went on the expensive pottery items.

Because prior to that the west had colonized most of the world, and they brought massive amounts of resources from colonies, which led to industrial thinking. Excess of resources means excess production, which means excess consumption. The fat of the land.

Sheesh! Why didn't I think of that?

But you will grant that the example I gave predates Ford?

And that the whole point was that industrialisation was in full swing before Henry Ford put his first assembly line together...

Wasn't it something to do with the invention of the whistling fanny?

Yes, but it wasn't an example of an assembly line.


I'd agree that industrialization occurred before Ford. I'm not sure when historically the "full swing" era occurred. I'd put it around 1930-1948.

Hey Joe, while you're in the peanut gallery, why do you think the west was the first to industrialize?

That's my understanding of what Henry Ford did with his assembly line production of his cars; I believe that was the first time. I also think the "division of labor" had a different connotation about jobs, and not about assembly line manufacturing.

Even ford in his memoirs wrote that he was inspired by the Chicago meat packers which in 1867 had carcasses on pulleys moving between workstations where separate tasks were carried out.