Technological Evolution and Inferences for Ancient India
A note on the invention of the Rain Gauge during the Mauryan Age; Investigations into evolution and decline of technology across the globe; And finally, inferences from investigations for India.
Index:
Introduction
In popular perception, there exists a dim association between Ancient India with delivering hard statistical sciences or employing technologies which may require or produce such variables. In the field of hydrology, specifically in the case of measuring rainfall, the most popular instrument which continues to be used today, with the same functionality as it did in the past is the Rain Gauge. In common knowledge, its invention is attributed to the Chinese in the thirteenth century, as mentioned in the Song Era text Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections [数书九章].
Such disassociations are only further deepened by the later Indian astronomers using stars to predict rain. In this short essay, we shall deal with the invention of the living technological fossil — the Rain Gauge [ वर्षमाण ], in India in the fourth century BC. First, we shall then discuss the standard dimensions observed in different eras. Next, we shall take a look at some regional measurements available to us from ancient sources and attempt to map them onto what we know of rains today.
After our brief discussion on the Rain Gauge, we shall venture into full-length discussions on technological evolution across the world, how China was ahead of the entire world for millennia, note the relationship between science and technology, learn about the reaction of people to technology, learn about what are causes of progress and decline in technology.
Finally, we shall end with a brief note on Kautilya and attempt to understand the features of the state envisioned by him and how they may have had a huge hand to play in the brilliant progress witnessed during the Mauryan age.
The वर्षमाण
The oldest reference to the Rain Gauge comes from the Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilya [~300 BC], a celebrated treatise of statecraft encompassing a diverse array of subjects within it. The context in which the device is mentioned makes it explicitly clear that it was widely planted across the entire empire. Kauṭilya, when enumerating the duties of a Treasurer, recites that a Rain Gauge must be installed in all storehouses —
He [The Treasurer] should have the following constructed: on the two sides, a depot for merchandise and a storehouse—built with burnt-brick pillars, containing four halls with a single door and several ground and upper floors, and equipped with escape routes through hollow pillars; in the middle, a storage facility for forest produce with several long halls, and with its walls lined with courtyards;* an armory constructed to the same specifications and equipped with an underground vault; and separately a lockup for the office of the Justices and a jail for tribunals of high officials with separate facilities for men and women, and a prison with well-guarded courtyards to prevent escape. — KAS 2.5.5
In all these, he should have the halls equipped with a ditch, a well, a latrine, a bathroom, defenses against fire and poison, cats and mongooses for protection,* and provisions for the worship of the deity specific to each. In the storehouse, he should place an urn with a mouth one Aratni in diameter as a rain gauge [वर्षमाण]. — KAS 2.5.6-7
As described, each storehouse should have a Rain Gauge placed in the front. The Rain Gauge is a cylindrical vessel of a diameter of one Aratni [24 aṇgula]. There also exist references from Br̥hat Sāṁhita of Varāhamihira [6C AD] and Kr̥ṣi Parāśara [10C AD], which state that the diameter of the Rain Gauge shall be 20 aṇgula and 9 aṇgula respectively. To discuss later mentions in detail is out of the scope of this essay.
In another section, when describing the duties of the Superintendent of Agriculture — Kauṭilya puts to use the Rain Gauge previously placed at all storehouses. He proceeds to describe the annual rainfall measured in some regions across India in the following manner —
The amount of rainfall in dry regions [jāṇgala] is 16 Droṇas and in wet regions [anupānām], one and a half times that—regions where sowing is carried out according to the zone. The amount of rainfall in the Aśmaka [Northern Inland Maharashtra] region is 13 .5 Droṇas; in the Avanti [Western Malwa] region, 23 Droṇas; and in the Aparānta [Konkan] region, as also in the snowy regions, an unlimited amount— unlimited in terms of time also in lands where sowing is carried out with irrigation. — KAS 2.24.5
Despite multiple references to the Rain Gauge and its dimensions and material in later literature — none had the wits to mention some observed statistics from their times, Kauṭilya stands as an exception to this rule. Here, he describes the measured rainfall in a few different regions of India and classifies them broadly into two categories — wet regions and dry regions. Although the method of computation and taking observations as described by Kauṭilya is the same as modern ones — he chiefly differs from them in his reporting of rain as a volume acquired in the Rain Gauge as opposed to the linear reporting in modern times.
The technical terminology here can be a bit too overwhelming to reproduce from scratch. Thus, we shall thus simply go along with the values present in the tables as produced by Dr Patrick Olivele. Which reports conversions as —
One Aratni = ~ 48 centimeters
One Droṇa = ~ 0.005 cubic meters [5 liters]
This would imply that the diameter of our rain gauge is approximately 48 centimetres. Using the aforementioned volumetric conversion units, the average rainfall in the regions as noted by Kauṭilya would turn out to be —
Dry regions [jāṇgala] : 16 Droṇas → 16*5 = 80 liters
Wet Regions [anupānām] : 24 Droṇas → 24*5 = 120 liters
Aśmaka [Northern Inland MH] : 13.5 Droṇas → 13.5*5 = 67.5 liters
Avanti [Western Malwa] : 23 Droṇas → 23*5 = 115 liters
Aparānta [Konkan] or Mountains: Unlimited
These rainfall measurements as reported are volumetric rather than modern-day linear reports. However, since we are intuitively aware that a cylindrical vessel of an undisclosed height is serving as our Rain Gauge, we can convert the volumetric reports into linear ones by simply dividing the volume by the area of the cross-section of our urn.
Then our reports in linear units shall arrive at —
Dry regions [jāṇgala] : 44 cm
Wet Regions [anupānām] : 67 cm
Aśmaka [Northern MH] : 37 cm
Avanti [Western Malwa] : 64 cm
Although climates have undergone a lot of transformation in the previous 2300 years, these readings of Northern Maharashtra and the Malwa plateau still roughly correspond to the modern-day rainfall measured. We are not qualified to comment on whether such a striking resemblance in rainfall measurement is a mere coincidence or in actuality presents the accuracy of observations from Kauṭilya. Nonetheless, such a coincidence is still pleasing to the eye, as can be witnessed in this chart here —
Further reading into the section relating to the duties of the Superintendent of Agriculture even makes it clear that such measurements and classifications weren’t a mere product of some bureaucratic claptrap and were supposed to be employed to aid discretion regarding the kind of crops which are to be sown —
In accordance with that, he should sow either crops that require a lot of water or grains that require little water. — KAS 2.24.11
He should plant a wet crop, a winter crop, or a summer crop according to the amount of irrigation water available — 2.24.19
These are only two verses picked from the entire section, which is full of technical details and important data regarding agriculture. Nonetheless, a cursory reading can let us rest assured that such information available from measuring rainfall was vital and employed in decision-making processes at the Ministry of Agriculture.
Conclusion
From the aforementioned evidence, we can conjecture that the Kauṭilyan State employed the Treasurer to create storehouses across the Empire, which would also have a Rain Gauge attached to them. Readings from such rain gauges would be collected and sent to the Superintendent of Agriculture, who would then utilize them to have farmers across various provinces plant optimal crops. Kauṭilya also happens to preserve some of such data in his treatise, although records of other such measurements do not exist with us anymore.
A cynical person or a person well-versed in the history of the world, at this moment may be overwhelmed by our blind optimism which praises a simple invention, of no particular consequence, and spends a few thousand words describing it. Almost pitying us, for being insular, for being blind to the world around us, to the technologies used by the Greco-Romans. However, that is not the case, we may be old but we are not blind. It was precisely that we had thoroughly studied technologies across the world that we fixated our minds on penning this piece. In the following sections, I shall draw attention to it drawing from a variety of sources.
Author’s Notes: I am going to explain all my inferences in detail in the next three sections. For people interested only in conclusions and wishing to avoid the burden of reading some 13000 words, I’d recommend that they jump directly to “To Conclude Crudely” [ctrl+C, ctrl+F, ctrl+V]
The Song Empire
The Song Empire in the twelfth century was at the peak of the world and enjoyed unparalleled technological supremacy. Europe was little more than a barbarian backwater when compared to Da-Song. To name a few in agriculture alone — dams, ditches, and dikes controlled the draining and irrigation of fields. Sluice gates & stream-propelled chains of buckets raising water could control the flow of streams or prevent silting — a common problem after the creation of hydraulic projects. Eleven-piece iron ploughs doubling up as furrows with adjustable lengths and other improvements in wet field techniques led to a massive boost in rice production in Southern China. Deep-tooth harrows, rakes for weeding, and seed drills were created around the same period. Biological and chemical insecticides and pesticides along with various sorts of fertilizers made of human waste, lime, ash, hemp et al found their way into Chinese fields. Many such developments with co-related with developments in hydrology — the Chinese created the reciprocating hydraulic trip hammer and the vertical water wheel. Literal tons of agricultural manuals and textbooks were produced, eight in a niche like veterinary medicine by the seventh century. In 1313, Wang Chen’s extremely detailed work on sericulture and agriculture contained over three hundred illustrated prints!
Iron casting in China was known since the third century BC, something Europe discovered only by the fourteenth century. The Chinese could thus refine pig iron to produce wrought iron or use cast iron. Chinese cast-iron production on a per-capita basis far exceeded Europe’s even in the late middle ages. The use of waterpower-driven double-acting bellows along with coal and refractory clay allowed them to produce very high temperatures along with the fact that Chinese Irons ores were phosphorous rich allowed them to produce more cast iron. The Chinese had a far superior knowledge of metallurgy, by using better oxidation techniques — they far exceeded Europe in steel production as well. The Chinese had created sophisticated weaving equipment during the Han Dynasty Era itself, by Song times, it had created the multi-spindle spinning wheel and applied central power sources to it — something Europe couldn’t do until the Industrial Revolution.
From the tenth century, the Chinese started working on Clockwork Mechanism, this peaked in 1086 AD when Su Sung complete his famous 40ft tall, the most mechanically complex creation of its time — capable of even discerning many astronomical variables like the positions of the moon, stars or planets. The Chinese had also developed the Compass in 960 AD and mastered the art of shipbuilding and sailing, which would not be paralleled in Europe until the mid-fifteenth century. China had also invented paper by 100 AD, more than a millennia before Europe. Apart from documenting and writing, paper played a pivotal role in advancements in hygiene, shoe-making, armour-crafting, the manufacture of clothes and the complexification of the economy by the introduction of paper money and easier credit subsequently. In 1045, the Chinese had invented block printing and by the 1200s, they had created movable type printing machines made of porcelain — this would only be recreated in Europe in the fifteenth century.
Between the Tang and Song eras, Chinese ingenuity knew no bounds. They had created a 260 feet tall pagoda made entirely out of porcelain. They were experts in dealing with chemicals, producing metallic salts, lacquers, explosives, and insecticides. They were extremely competent in mining and boring, in Szechuan, holes of depth over 3000 feet were drilled to extract brine. The use of man-lifting kites was fairly common in military adventures or as punishments — as early as the seventh century, criminals would often be tied to man-lifting kites for execution. The Chinese were the first to create the trebuchet and the crossbow and use them as standard equipment, the latter was only developed 1500 years later in Europe. Likewise, the horse collar was invented in the mid-third century BCE when the Romans couldn’t differentiate between the harnesses used for Oxen and Horse, and this too took millennia or more to successfully diffuse into Europe. And, the list goes on…
However, it is Europe which we know as the pioneer of the modern world and not China, despite the latter merely being a hair-width away from a full-fledged industrial revolution at one point. Great techniques of yore were forgotten, technological innovation had died an untimely death, and the people had become insular. In the fourteenth century, there was little doubt that China was the most advanced nation in the entire world, as would be attested by many travellers. Yet, in the 1600s, the Chinese were without exception deemed an extremely backward people. The Chinese had covered their ears from such criticism and dismissed European advancements as mundane, the compilers of the late eighteenth-century work write that
In regard to the learning of the West, the art of surveying the land is most important, followed by the art of making strange machines. Among these strange machines, those pertaining to irrigation are most useful to the common people. All the other machines are simply intricate oddities designed for the pleasure of the senses. They fulfil no basic needs. — Ssu - K’u ch’ūan - shu ti-yao
These attitudes were despite of the fact that from the middle of the sixteenth century — Portuguese guns, clocks and machines far outperformed Chinese ones. However, two centuries later, the Chinese themselves would find their technological backwardness extremely intolerable — because of the terms imposed upon them by the British after Opium Wars. Whose decisive battle was won because the Chinese were unaware that British gunboats could sail upstream in rivers. These attitudes would find more acceptance after the defeats in the Sino-Japan wars — where the uncivilized island barbarians dragged a glorious thousands of years old civilization to mud.
Such a decline in technological output is interesting because it happened despite continuous contact with the western world and with an ever-expanding economy and population from the Ming Period till the nineteenth century. Boserup- Simon theorists arguing that population pressures in growing economies lead to technological advancements will have a hard time explaining this away.
The decline in technology is sad to learn about, even for a neutral observer. The Chinese who created the Great Cosmic Engine in 1086 were incapable of computing time correctly in the sixteenth century and had no memory of the former despite being the most well-documented civilization of those times. For many centuries it was thought that clocks and time were a western gift to the Chinese world until this view was corrected by modern scholarship in the twentieth century. When Jesuit missionaries arrived in China in the 1580s, they were easily able to impress Chinese authorities by gifting them European weight-driven clocks. At another time, one Jesuit missionary reveals the same with the following remark —
I have been appointed by the Emperor as a clockmaker, but I should rather say that I am here as a machinist because the Emperor expects me to produce not really clocks but curious machines and automata. — Father Jean Mathieu de Ventavon, 1769
Despite such contact, the Chinese weren’t interested in reverse-engineering this gift like they would’ve some centuries back, instead, it was treated as a novelty, a mere interesting toy. The Chinese who during the Song period had developed automatic silk reeling machines [Sao-Che], capable of reeling in a thousand or so meters of silks were using hands to reel in about 35% of their total silk exports in the nineteenth century, just like clocks — all forgotten.
The Various Theories of Decline
This decline or stagnation in technology didn’t begin immediately, it was a consequence of the Chinese being unable to push forward with the technologies they had created. The movable type, despite being created couldn’t replace the wooden block print; the multi-spindle ramie never found an application to cotton; despite inventing firearms in the tenth century, the Chinese failed to improvise and were gravely impressed by Portuguese firearms and cannons in the sixteenth century; despite their obvious military advantages which gave them a millennia worth of advantage over the rest of the world — the Chinese in the eighteenth century were merely using medieval era equipment; despite their extraordinary breakthroughs in agriculture — the Chinese failed to keep up with western progress by the eighteenth century; despite of their highest per capita ore production during the Song period — the Chinese found it too expensive to implement water pumps or water screws. Why was it that the west could progress slowly from the renaissance in the middle ages to the industrial revolution at last but the east couldn’t?
Many theorists have attempted to explain this on many scales, but none are particularly persuasive in their approach. Some pointed out that Chinese yield per capita was stable until 1800 and later gave in to population pressure. It ignores that the Chinese population had increased only by 260% between 1750-1950 while the European population had increased by 350%. Another scholar points out that due to revolutionary advances in agriculture during the Song period — the demographic centre of gravity started shifting southwards. To sustain such populations, agriculture had to be intensified and human faeces as fertilizer were adopted. Since most farm work was done in warm water fields — parasitic infections, and schistosomiasis in particular devasted Chinese labour. The problem was responsible for one-fourth of deaths even in the 1940s, so it is speculated that diseases like these “drained” required human energy which was to be invested in labour. While some connections between population health and economics indeed exist, to blame it solely for technological stagnation especially when there was no visible decline in population or per capita output would be too farfetched.
EXCURSUS 1: IMPACT OF RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY, ET AL
When despite living in the age of information and being able to draw upon the works of thousands of scholars, we are unable to get to any conclusions — we can only imagine how hard it must have been for the Chinese themselves who attempted to explain their backwardness in modern times. The wise say that in times of despair, man turns to the wisdom of the elders, the ancients, faith and to God. The very same had happened here, except the aforementioned were facing the gun barrel of blame. In 1922, the Chinese Intellectual Feng Yu Lan published an essay titled “Why China Has no Science,” and argued that —
Chinese philosophy is inherently inward looking… it was not the environment which the Chinese wished to conquer but the self… China has no science, because according to her own standard of value she does not need any at all… The content of Chinese wisdom was not intellectual knowledge, and its function was not to increase external goods… Taoists considered nature to be perfect and felt no need to twist it to their own will… The many philosophies in China — Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism never intended to investigate nature… Confucian philosophy viewed the purpose of scholarship and public administration as the maintenance of harmonious relationships within society and an equilibrium between human beings and their natural environment… — [Compiled from the essay and some comments made on it]
This “argument”, somehow managed to influence people and a milder version of the same was later cited in Lynn White’s essay, with much scholarly acclaim —
The belief in a personal God looking with approval upon the relentless exploitation of material resources was lacking in China. Instead, Chinese (primarily Taoist) natural philosophy sought to find an equilibrium between humanity and the physical environment
The argument that philosophy which was inaccessible to the majority population could somehow influence policy and culture to such an extent that an entire country engages in autocannibalism is absurd, to begin with. Even if one considers any merit to it — it cannot be taken seriously unless clear causality can be drawn. Apart from that, these arguments are entirely ahistorical. They forget that the very same Chinese had engaged in massive deforestation and exploitation of mines, even in their decline phase in the 1800s when they are supposed to be burdened with love for nature — the Chinese were deforesting the entire southern woodlands leading to massive soil erosion across the country. It also completely forgets that China, not the West, enjoyed unparalleled supremacy in technological advancement till the 1400s. This infantile ahistorical commentary reminds us of “genius” young and hot-blooded experts on social media who can psychoanalyze the failures of Indian society over three millennia by selectively quoting verses from literature at will.
Nonetheless, Feng Yu Lan isn’t the only person to engage in such misled self-introspection. Machiavelli was an extremely vocal critic of both Christianity and the Church, he believed that Italians of yore were stronger and dominated the world because they worshipped strong and masculine gods. To him, <redacted /////////// ///////////// /////////////////// ///// ///////// redacted> worship him will always remain weak. His criticism of the Church inspired many notable personalities to turn towards the protestant creed and the Catholic Church banned his discourses in 1559. To Machiavelli, the root cause of the division of the many principalities of Italy was the Church. Since the Church was neither strong enough to unite all the principalities nor weak enough to be dominated by them — it had doomed Italy to remain divided forever. Yet, around the same time, Catholic Iberians were engaged in global adventures, and the Portuguese were creating the first truly global empires. While Machiavelli’s position on the role of the Church as a power broker has some merit, his criticism of Christianity would fail to explain the rise of many subsequent Christian empires. Not all criticism aimed at religion is a product of self-introspection either, sometimes it is imposed by adherents of another faith. Many Christians Historians attempting to explain the relative lack of technological progress in Rome engaged in similar arguments —
Graeco-Roman religion was heavily animistic, anthropomorphic, and discouraged substantial insults against the environment. Religions that regarded nature as a personal force implied that tinkering with its rules was dangerous and sinful.
True, the desire to prevail over the forces of nature lies deep in the human soul, and, as all ancient mythologies show, was shared by pagans. But with the desire came deep-seated fears and guilt feelings that impeded technological progress.
The myth of Prometheus, the quintessential manipulator of nature, illustrates this frame of mind well: although the use of fire, indispensable to survival, was accepted, the guilt feeling associated with controlling something that was properly the domain of the Gods was reflected in the awful punishment meted out to Prometheus and the banes of Pandora's box.
Moreover, animism, as Lewis Mumford pointed out half a century ago, is the mortal enemy of technological change. If every stream, every tree, every patch of' land is populated by spirits, the environment remains capricious, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. — [from authors quoted in Mokyr’s work]
Thus, much like Feng Yu Lan’s criticism of Chinese traditions, it is argued that Graeco-Roman polytheists too were inherently technologically backward because of their fondness for nature — an inviolable entity and their dealings with the abstract world than the material one. However, classical Greco-Romans were significantly more technologically advanced than Christian Europe which succeeded them. If the embedding of anthropocentric attitudes in religion could indeed create a climate of technological change — one would expect Judaism, the original anthropocentric religion, to show much progress, however, we are aware that they had no affinity of any sort towards it. Nor do such explanations do justice to the lack of technological innovation in Eastern Christianity, especially amongst the Byzantines. It was only during modern times when they put their minds to sciences did they come out as exceptionally talented individuals. Even more so, the Church never spoke as a single voice, St. Francis of Assisi for one would speak greatly against the exploitation of nature by mankind. Even if one considers that the rationalised voice was the dominating one — there is absolutely no evidence to prove that all of the laity believed in the dogmas of the Church and didn’t have understandings of their own.
There is no doubt that European Christians in the high middle ages were attempting to rationalize their faith, something which may superficially appear to be a precursor to technology. However, it should be noted that the most scientifically literate men themselves had engaged in the most irrational and superstitious practices, that too with great conviction. Sir Isaac Newton, to whom the world is indebted to even to this date, was the most famous alchemist of his times. Giovanni Battista Della Porta, the first man in Europe to fully realize the capabilities of steam-powered machines was a magician. Giovanni’s corpus where his observations are mentioned too is titled Magtae Naturalis. The most cunning and perfectly rational Roman generals would hold auguries before going to war. The world-conquering Mongols, who were extremely receptive to technological changes and aided globalization and the evolution of technology, would burn the bones of sheep and observe the cracks in them to take decisions of fight or flight. The Chinese who were at the helm of inventiveness with no technological rival across the globe were followers of “vague” and “nature-loving” religions as well. Even from the Indian subcontinent, the great acharya Kauṭiyla, who in the terms of Max Weber represented an “absolutely harsh and truly radical form of Machiavellianism” is known to us to be an ardent believer of omens and astrology.
Notes: As the introductory portion of the essay has suggested, our essay shall revolve around his [Kauṭilya’s] setup. The entire purpose of such discussions is to conclude with what he made available to our country and people.
A more sober version of this argument goes about how the Church had funded the establishment of universities and by building cathedrals across Europe — produced a significant spillover since they would’ve required people from multiple disciplines to work together due to the diverse requirements of a cathedral. An organ maker, a clock master, a glass painter, a sculptor, a smith and many others would’ve worked together and this would’ve allowed a flow of knowledge across various fields. However, such arguments ignore that building a grand temple was common in India and China as well and the advantages offered could only guarantee a marginal advantage even if we go by a Eurocentric approach. It has been very well noted that the early tinkerers in European society were all regular monks. Since Christianity is supposed to have sanctified hard labour as service to God — scholarly monks and the craftsmen class were now working together for the first time. There was a permanent contact established between the scholarly and working classes. This is indeed a valid position — only the blind would ignore the prophetic essays of the Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon — wherein he envisions a world with automobiles and aeroplanes; or ignore the monk Eilmer of Malmesbury, who in his urge to prove that man can indeed fly ended up breaking his legs and living as a lame for the rest of his life. However, on closer inspection, these contributions disappear after the initial phases and to argue that the Church by and large was receptive to knowledge and technological change would be a laughable position. Any technological takeoff in Europe didn’t take place until twelve centuries of a firmly rooted Christian tradition had passed. Regardless, like all other cases discussed, the validity of this position on “sanctity of labour” depends on whether causality can be proven or not, and as things stand — it cannot be proven in any case. Otherwise, it is not particularly hard for a scholar of Hindu theology or Buddhism and Confucianism to present sufficient verses sanctifying labour and argue the same for their technological progress or the lack of it.
We do not dare comment that religion has absolutely no hand in shaping a society’s reception of technological progress. While religious attitudes on an individual level produce very few differences, their cumulative effects throughout history can be significantly high. Apart from that, in Islamic and Christian cultures — religious authorities have enjoyed significant centralized powers which other religions didn’t enjoy elsewhere. The Church infamously has carried out multiple literary inquisitions, exchanging invaluable pagan sciences and histories for ashes. It has remained suspicious of geometry, diagrams, and mathematical equations for long, and prohibited their use in universities. Men like Ptolemy who had held that the earth was spherical were replaced by men like Cosmas Indicopleustes, who attempted to prove that the world was flat, in conjunction with theology. Likewise in another period when the western world was attempting to rationalize their religion, influential scholars of Islam like al-Ghazali concluded that science and religion can never be held compatible. Superstition had dominated Arab society to such an extent that despite having trapezoid lugsails which could sail against the winds, they’d prefer to wait for the monsoons before sailing. A famous Arabian proverb “Only a madman or a Frank may sail against the wind” is testimony to the same. For a long time, owing to theological injunctions, the attitudes regarding innovation were the same as heresy in the Arabic world. All of this was despite Islam having the same anthropocentric attitudes as Christianity.
What the proponents of the “Rational Religion” scheme always forget is that there is no religion/philosophy as extraordinarily rationalist as Confucianism, especially the much-loathed “sterile-Confucianism” which dominated the courts of the Ming and Qing where technological decline takes place. Confucianists held a notoriously rational, historicizing and demythologizing view of their Gods. The Yellow Emperor’s hunt for the divine beast Kiu to use its hide for making the cover of a drum is historicized as Kiu being a good official, who held the Ministry of Music in Huang Di’s reign. The Yellow Emperor having four faces, much like Bhagvān Brahmā is historicized and rationalized as the Yellow Emperor having four great officials who brought him news from all directions to help Huang Di rule the realm righteously. These are just some of the countless examples one can go through, yet Confucianism and technological innovation in China are often in sync and out of it during different times.
Given the many inconsistencies and the problems posed by all explanations regarding religion, we are inclined to dispossess religion as one of the primary factors in driving technological progress forward or backwards unless it has some overarching centralized authority like a Church or the Caliphate. In cases where religious institutions do have control, we find that they are in general more conservative than receptive to technological change. Hence, we are inclined to believe that people arguing about Chinese mysticism being some factor in their technological decline are incorrect on all counts.
End of Excursus 1.
Other scholars argued that the fault lay within Chinese technological advancements themselves as they were built by pure Trial & Error. Such technology may have a jumpstart edge at one point but will never be able to realize its full potential because of the lack of cumulative progress of an ever-expanding knowledge base which was capable of diffusing permanently into society. However, such criticism of Chinese technology ignores that there was no correlation between science and technology in the west until the mid-nineteenth century and western technology was itself built upon pure Trial & Error rather than following a systematic scientifically determined path. A more sober version of the argument follows that the Orient didn’t build a school of logic. Chinese logic was built on historical analogies rather than the Socratic method of questioning and asserting to prove a hypothesis. While this is indeed true to a great extent — we have, as previously mentioned, not seen any correlation between scientific and technological developments until the modern world. We also have no idea about what kind of logic the pioneers of technology used.
Perhaps it would be better to study how technological progress is driven rather than to focus on its decline. The lack of the former can then later be attributed to decline, as we shall see in the following section.
Drivers of Technological Progress
Prof. Mokyr begins with a very inspiring and radical remark, to paraphrase him —
Necessity is not the mother of invention. In fact, it is invention which is the mother of necessity. Human appetites as they are, have always existed, yet the ability to satisfy them have not. It is technological advances which give birth to unrealized desires later transforming into necessities. Markets do not have a demand for technology, technology arrives by helping boost the production of goods and services that were in demand.
An astute observation indeed. There did not exist a demand for air travel, motion pictures, or iPhones until existing technology produced aeroplanes, videos and iPhones. These demands were driven by the production of said technologies. How many of us ever wished for the existence of certain technology-driven services we used until they arrived in a market? Almost none. While unrealized possible demands seeking further optimality without necessarily having a solution did exist, these possible unrealized demands did not have any visible effect on the intensity of efforts of inventors or the capital invested into research and development. Furthermore, all societies have had necessities, there was always hunger across the world but it didn’t improve agriculture, even in highly civilized societies like the Greco-Romans. The Arabs lived in extremely arid regions, even when water was available, the flow of water was too slow to operate a mill, but their lands were full of ever-blowing fast air. In such a scenario, creating windmills would’ve been the obvious answer to feed their necessities. By the tenth century, the Persians had invented the windmill and its use was widespread across Khorasan. However, there is no evidence that it was ever adopted in Arabian lands or its peripheries. In fact, by 1185, the windmill appears in Yorkshire and diffuses to Syria through the hands of Latin Crusaders in 1204. Yet, fourteen years before this introduction, we find al-Jazari, an excellent Arab engineer rightfully credited as the father of early automata, ignorantly claim that —
The notion that such machines can be powered by the wind is incorrect. The wind is too fickle to ever move these machines.
Thus, to argue that “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” would be absurd, especially in the contexts were are going to deal with here. Could one argue that people across Europe wanted a machine to print books faster which led to Gutenberg’s invention of the Printing Press? Not at all. We are aware of heavy resistance against the Printing Press by the people of Europe. Guilds of scribes and monks in Paris in the 1440s resisted the printing press for over twenty years. Not just that, Johann Fust, a partner of Gutenberg was accused of practising black magic and put on trial as a witch and thrown into prison. Printers were labelled satanic inventions and their apprentices were labelled “Printer’s Devils.” In other places like Venice, the scribal protests took the shape of an ethnic conflict, where “Satanic German interlopers were driving honest Italian scribes out of work.” It took a total of two centuries for the hand copying of treatises to go out of fashion in Europe. As was eventually bound to happen as technological progress is a positive sum game with winners and losers. Furthermore, getting back on track, it was not until the modern world that we find people undertaking a structured approach to technological advancements with multiple organizations coming together with a plan to gain from some unrealized demands. To argue that it could’ve happened in the pre-modern world would be unconvincing wholly.
EXCURSUS 2: LABOUR, WAGES & INNOVATION
Nonetheless, this is not to say that inventors of the past were entirely disjointed from rewards and incentives. The invention of even seemingly simple things must’ve felt extraordinary to its contemporaries. The Romans never managed to figure out the correct harness for horses or something as simple as a wheelbarrow; the Chinese never learnt to put a crank on their spindles, which imitated the human hand and was the main cause of the efficiency of the later jennies. Similarly, the adoption of such technologies would’ve had social and private costs which were extraordinarily high to their contemporaries but in hindsight appear trivial. Most innovators would’ve been required to put in great efforts and costs and wait for many years for a payoff, assuming there existed any, barely once or twice in a thousand or so innovations. If an invention succeeds, its benefits may dwarf the costs, but the costs were too high for most individuals to absorb, each success would be paralleled with a thousand more failures, retrospectively these failed stories may not appear significant to us, but the contemporaries must’ve been horrified. Apart from this, technological innovation disrupts the market equilibrium. The social costs of introducing an invention to a market are unemployment due to reduction of labour; obsoletion of existing skills; disruption in the organization of production; and damage to existing nature in some cases. These social costs, reinforce an egalitarian ethic in society, where every society desires stability over innovation and is subdued by an “if it ain’t broken, you don’t need to fix it” mentality. Such a mentality can manifest itself physically in the form of violent mobs, cartelization by guilds, decrees of religious authorities and government et al. This mentality need not necessarily physically manifest itself to inhibit technological innovation either. Bulliet argues that since the Ottomans relied heavily on camels in transportation, it created a subconscious bias against wheeled vehicles. This, partially, leads to the lack of emergence of the wheelbarrow — which was responsible for the slow mobilization of construction material on sites or supplies for an army.
Given the many costs of technological innovation, social and private, physical and metaphysical, one is inclined to believe that societies with higher incomes would inadvertently produce higher innovation since individuals on average would have a higher potential to absorb the costs of failure. Since the demand for labour always exists in all societies, drawing inferences from a Supply Curve, one can state that societies, where labour is scarce, would have higher wages compared to societies where easily mobilizable labour is plenty. In 60s America, Professor H. J. Habakkuk proposed the theory that lack of labour leads to higher wages, and subsequently, higher technological innovation. However, a closer examination reveals that the situation was quite the opposite. Theoretically speaking, the proposal is invalid as it assumes that technological innovation was a choice between some alternatives of different optimality which depended upon price. Secondly, cursory surveillance of patents filed across eighteenth-century Britain reveals that they were largely oriented towards producing a finer good or service, and only 3.7% of them declare saving labour as their motive. Furthermore, America, or in our context, Europe, didn’t always have higher wages either. It was only by the 1700s when European countries appear richer than all non-European ones. The extent of the relative prosperity of Europe is highly exaggerated due to the differences between the prosperity of modern Europe and the third world. In 1820, the ratio of the per capita income of the richest country to the poorest country was a mere 3:1. In 1999, this ratio turns out to be 50:1 and in 2022, would appear to be 180:1. Our world is far more unequal than ever and the third-world is relatively sixty times worse off today than its ancestors living in some two centuries ago. Social Scientists like Tainter would see this inequality as a feature of societal complexity, given the prevailing occupational heterogeneity over the world. Thus, it was not higher wages which drew Europe towards technological innovation but sustained technological innovation over multiple centuries that led it towards prosperity.
Nonetheless, labour costs are costs even in economies where the median wages are much lower and cheap labour is never the same as free labour. Thus, even societies with cheap labour freely available to them would prefer to adopt labour-saving innovations to increase their profits. The contraposition of the Habakkuk Hypothesis thus becomes that easily mobilizable labour available in plenty would inhibit technological innovation. Romans created a harvesting machine named the Vallis. However, we do not find any widespread adoption of this machine, and it is argued that since Romans had plenty of cheap labour available to them, they did not need to employ it. While this argument may appear convincing, we should once again note that cheap labour isn’t the same as costless labour. The entire process is extremely random when viewed from such an angle.
Do all rich societies produce technological innovation? Gulf countries will say a loud and bold NO. Do all poor societies lack innovation? European pioneers who were largely drawn from the lower classes would like to have a word with you. While one may have trouble drawing strict correlations between wages and better technological progress, higher wages do imply a higher standard of living which subsequently transforms into higher life expectancy and better nutrition. A short life expectancy would lead to a lesser propensity to delayed gratification, people would not have time to spare for mind-numbing research. Among some innovators whose age at death is known, we find that they lived fairly long. Gutenberg died at 70, Roger Bacon at 72, Magnus at 87, and the Arab Chemist Al-Jabir at 94. Once again, this argument is countered by the fact that Europe did not enjoy any specific advantage in terms of life expectancy until the late eighteenth century. Scientists describe adequate nutrition as a hidden hunger that if not satisfied can induce a general state of lethargy in populations, drawing them away from ambitious tasks such as innovation. Europeans were better fed than the non-Europeans by the 1500s itself. It is possible that a hidden hunger could’ve crippled the rest of the world. However, such effects need not manifest themselves in people other than the lowest sections of society. Overall, while better living conditions and wages must’ve indeed helped innovators, we do not find a strict correlation between the two and the availability of labour barely plays any role in it.
Once again, as we end this note, we would like to remind our readers that our proposition is valid strictly for the pre-modern world. In modern times, research and development itself is a huge market, both capable of absorbing thousands of failures for each success, and extremely well managed, unlike the random behaviour of the pre-modern world. Nations whose governments who spend a bigger portion of their GDP on R&D enjoy far greater prosperity than nations where governments are unwilling to appropriate sufficient funding for research. There exists a good positive correlation between full time researchers available in a country & total available energy supply. The only outliers being gulf countries enjoying the fortunes generated by oil.
EXCURSUS 3: ANTECEDENTAL AND GEOGRAPHIC DETERMINISM(?)
J.M. Diamond’s much acclaimed work “Guns, Germs and Steel” begins with an interesting question —
In the 13,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age, some parts of the world developed literate industrial societies with metal tools, other parts developed only nonliterate farming societies, and still others retained societies of hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Those historical inequalities have cast long shadows on the modern world, because the literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies. While those differences constitute the most basic fact of world history, the reasons for them remain uncertain and controversial. This puzzling question of their origins was posed to me 25 years ago in a simple, personal form.
In July 1972 I was walking along a beach on the tropical island of New Guinea, where as a biologist I study bird evolution. I had already heard about a remarkable local politician named Yali, who was touring the district then. By chance, Yali and I were walking in the same direction on that day, and he overtook me. We walked together for an hour, talking during the whole time. […]
[…] All those things must have been on Yali's mind when, with yet another penetrating glance of his flashing eyes, he asked me, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” — Prolouge; Guns, Germans and Steel
Although we have used bits from this work here and there, it is out of our scope of discussion in its entirety. What is to be noted is that it begins with perhaps the most ingenious proposition we’ve encountered so far. Mr Diamond informs Yali that it all begins 13000 years ago when the many human tribes across various parts of the world were more or less the same. Out of the fourteen types of domesticable animals available to the world, thirteen were in Eurasia alone. North America had much fewer domesticable animals and crops. South America only had the llama and the rest of the world had none. While a few anomalies did exist, these were wiped out by foragers of the Early Pleistocene. This alone gave Eurasia the biggest capital advantage over the rest of the world. It had cows, horses, sheep, goats and many others which could serve as mobile energy capacitors and translate food into mechanical energy. Thus, from the tens of thousands of tribes which existed in the early Pleistocene, only six states ever emerged independently —
Mesopotamia ~ 3500 BCE
Egypt ~ 3500 BCE
Indus-Sarasvati Valley ~ 2500 BCE
China ~ 2500 BCE
Mexico ~ 0 AD
Peru ~ 0 AD
And out of these six independent states, four were in Eurasia, enjoyed a significant head start of over three millennia and continued to advance further. Jones in his work on the “European Miracle” begins with a similar suggestion where he argues that the greater per capita animal stock available in Europe made it a more energy-rich continent than the rest of the world. Marvin Harris even goes on to argue that the lack of domesticable animals in the Americas is why it was Columbus who discovered America and not Powhatan who discovered Europe. This animal scarcity also has deep biological footprints, the majority of Africans, East Asians and Native Americans suffer from lactose intolerance. Geography determines much of the environment, climate and resources available to a people, is Britain’s Industrial Revolution not credited to the heaps of coal it was sitting on?
However, the Amerindians, despite the lack of draft animals to attach the wheel to, did invent the wheel. They used it for toys, but it never occurred to them to use it for pulleys, watermills or gears. East Asians suffered a similar animal scarcity and the wheel was instead adopted to suit humans instead of animals. The wheelbarrow, a simple but highly efficient tool was invented in Han China. But one could ask, shouldn’t Amerindians have all the more reason to invest in inventive technologies because of the lack of draft animals? The invention of water-lifting mechanical devices in Rome, Greece and Hellenistic Egypt is regarded as atypically innovative technology. The Greco-Roman philosophers and scientists had an aversion to participation in engineering, which was derided as banausic labour. Yet we find great participation from respected scientists like Ctesibius and Archimedes in the invention of water-lifting and pumping devices, although the latter was derided for his participation nonetheless. Even after the initial stages of invention, we find a striking initiative to further improve them. Hero of Alexandria or Philo of Byzantium, all considered their inventions to be worthy of being preserved properly in notes. Oleson points out that timber is lacking and water is scarce in the Mediterranean. Water pumping and lifting technologies were extremely crucial to the Greco-Romans because crops can’t be grown in many areas without them; nor can urban civilization sustain; nor can inundated lands be prepared for construction activities; nor can one mining operations continue without draining shafts. It was in contrast with other centres of civilization, like Pataliputra, which was surrounded by five rivers. If unfavourable geography can be the cause of innovation for Romans, then why not for Amerindians who displayed comparable social complexity as well?
Many people are quick to attribute such faults to supposed genetic inferiority overlooking everything else. To this, we would pose another question. During the High Middle Ages in Europe, there was a considerable diffusion of watermills. Several improvements were being made to water-lifting technologies during this period. The Renaissance witnessed a rebirth of ancient learning where engineers like Ramelli would improve upon pumps of the past. It is common knowledge that watermills need water to function, because of which they would be more suited in rainy areas than dry areas. Thus, rainy England soon witnesses the rise of thousands of watermills all over its geography. However, rainy Ireland, constituting the geography, climate and people, doesn’t witness the rise of any watermills. How would one explain this if geographic determinism were to be true? The Romans, despite their marvellous success in producing water-lifting technologies, failed to employ them sufficiently. Only a very small fraction of sites available in Italy and Gaul were ever used despite their machines being capable of working in even slow streams.
In the past, Aristotle had once argued that geography was an extremely crucial factor in the making of the human spirit and character, subscribing to the Eurocentric theory of inherent European exceptionalism —
The nations that live in cold regions and those of Europe are full of spirit, but somewhat lacking in skill and intellect; for this reason, while remaining relatively free, they lack political cohesion and the ability to rule over their neighbors. On the other hand the Asiatic nations have in their souls both intellect and skill, but are lacking in spirit; so they remain enslaved and subject. — Politics of Aristotle, 7.7
While this is an often-cited example of geography and climate somehow determining human valour, it is noteworthy that Aristotle himself admits that people living in the cold are lacking in skill and intellect. Furthermore, it was not the Hellenes who had dominated the world for two centuries before the writing of this text but the “spiritually lacking Asiatic” Achaemenids. What is more interesting is that such characterization of one’s geographic realm and climate as superior to the rest isn’t something common to the Hellenes. During the middle ages, we find Moslem scholars engaged in similar activities where the latitudes of Arabia are presented as fit for human development and the cold latitudes away from the Arabian peninsula as savage and barbaric —
As regards the people of the northern quadrant, they are the ones for whom the sun is distant from the zenith, those who penetrate to the North, such as the Slavs, the Franks, and those nations that are their neighbors. The power of the sun is weak among them because of their distance from it; cold and damp prevail in their regions, and snow and ice follow one another in endless succession. The warm humor is lacking among them; their bodies are large, their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull, and their tongues heavy. Their color is so excessively white that it passes from white to blue; their skin is thin and their flesh thick. Their eyes are also blue, matching the character of their coloring; their hair is lank and reddish because of the prevalence of damp mists. their religious beliefs lack solidity, and this is because of the nature of cold and the lack of warmth.
— Al-Masudi, 10C.
Arabs of the tenth century were a global power and the Franks were mere savages compared to them. Since they could not study world history in its entirety, but also had to come up with an explanation for their unique position in the world. They ended up developing explanations modelled around what was visible to them — air and land. Similarly, Aristotle created his treatises between 335-323 BCE, when he witnessed the Hellenization of the entire known world after the feats of Alexander. Notably, the descriptions of peoples of the colder regions by Arabs at their peak are in contrast with those of Aristotle at the peak of the Hellenes. Thus, we find such attributions to the character through geography are a mere tool of political propaganda, albeit sincere, and we are inclined to dismiss it entirely given the many inconsistencies.
When studying the effects of geography on technological innovation, it is impossible to ignore Britain and its Industrial Revolution. Wrigley proposes the causality between resource abundance and technological progress. He notes that between 1775 and 1830, the per-capita consumption of coal in Britain increased over three times. It was because of the large quantities of energy, in the form of coal, which was put at the disposal of the British people did the Industrial Revolution take off. Indeed, had it not been for coal, the timber requirements of a country like Britain would’ve been too much in the early-nineteenth century itself, leaving behind all prospects of the Industrial Revolution. Mokyr, once again challenging conventional wisdom, puts forth the argument that Wrigley has assumed causality in the opposite direction. It is not resources which led to technology but technology which led to the demand for resources. Coal was available in Britain forever and was employed in various industries for centuries. Techniques of coal mining did not improve during or before the Industrial Revolution either to allow a sudden availability to boost such a technological revolution. Advances in steam engines were paralleled by advances in water-lifting technologies rather than advances in coal mining or discovery. Regions like Switzerland, Catalonia and Ireland, developed substitutes for it and proceeded with industrialization. Traditional historic accounts had held that deforestation in England led to the rise of charcoal prices and the eventual adoption of coke smelting, a superior fuel made by heating coal in a low-oxygen environment. However, modern research analyzing charcoal and coke prices has shown that the conventional historic account is incorrect. Furthermore, charcoal production is a labour-intensive and time taking procedure. Continuous attention had to be paid to a kiln for as long as fifteen days to get the correct product. Countless small-scale innovations to make the procedure more efficient or to find substitutes were taking place since the mid-sixteenth century.
Deforestation and timber scarcity occurred in China as well during the eighteenth century, but it did not lead to them making such advances. One could argue that China had become too primitive altogether, but we witness the same failure by the Greco-Romans at their peak. Timber was scarce in the Mediterranean as well, the Greco-Romans were aware of the presence of coal in at least one instance where Theophrastus mentions its deposits at Olympia. The Greco-Romans lacked in metallurgy, they couldn’t produce higher temperatures in their bloomeries leading to spongy and uneven produce which has to be hammered for days. The best iron in those times came from India and China was ahead of the world in casting. It would’ve been ideal for the Greco-Romans to exploit coal reserves to produce coke for iron smelting, yet this did not happen. Petroleum deposits of Mesopotamia were very well known to the Greco-Romans, yet they failed to make use of such high calorific value fuel. At this point, we have two seemingly contradictory theories with us. The former proposes that the lack of resources promotes technological innovation and the latter proposes that the abundance of resources leads to technological innovation, and both have overwhelming evidence in favour and opposition. While they don’t necessarily contradict each other, they do prove that while geography may play an active supporting role in promoting technological innovation, it is in no manner the most important one and all theories of geographic determinism can be safely dismissed. It is worth noting that water-lifting technologies could lead to the development of the steam engine in Europe but not in the Greco-Roman world, even when the latter was aware of Hero’s aeolipile and could’ve exploited known resources. The answer lies in the development of the crank and rod mechanism which was unknown to the Greco-Romans. It was only because of this antecedent knowledge that the invention of the steam engine was possible in Europe. If such simple innovations can lead to revolutionary changes over the centuries, then perhaps it becomes necessary to investigate the antecedents of technology to understand development better.
It is impossible to come across the many brilliant marble pieces of the Greco-Romans and not be captivated by their beauty. Surely the people who made these must’ve been the inhabitants of the greatest civilization on our planet? What the beauty of their marble hides is the antecedents behind it. Roman art did not develop in a vacuum, their realism wasn’t their conception, nor was it created in a short amount of time. What culminated as Greco-Roman realism was a product of minor innovations taking place in art over three thousand years across some of the biggest centres of civilization with cross-cultural diffusion. Taking portraiture as an example, realism in portraiture first developed in Ancient Egypt, some 2000-3000 years after its first urbanization. Egyptian artistic styles heavily influenced the world around it, until the cultural revolution of Pericles after their unlikely victory over the invading Achaemenids, Greek sculptures seem heavily influenced by Egyptian ones. Far earlier, they had influenced the Minoans, who unlike the Egyptians wouldn’t spend copious amounts of royalty and temples but instead divulge into more finesse. The Minoan artists were very much alive to influence the later Mycenaean Greeks. Who in turn influenced the Greeks of the archaic period and Greek settlers in southern Italy would influence the Etruscans later. Finally, we find the Romans draw both their art and architecture heavily from the Etruscans beside them. While the chronology and influence presented can be debated on many small degrees, the principle argument is that Roman hyperrealism wasn’t magic, it was a cumulative product of the improvements in inherited art forms across the Mediterranean and the Near East for almost over four thousand years. It took them four thousand years to go from childish drawings to the realism celebrated in their marble. Could the Romans have created such art without inheriting techniques from the past? Civilization in Gangetic Plains during the Mahajanapada period evolved independently of foreign or antecedent influences largely. Even though the IVC had existed not so far away, the Janapadas didn’t have the fortune of inheriting their artists in a way the Romans could inherit the Etruscans or the Mycenaeans could inherit the Minoans. Gangetic Plains had gone through its first urbanization, although labelled a second one in popular literature. Thus, it was only natural for them to be behind art when compared to inheritors of thousands of years old traditions like those in the Near East or the Mediterranean. This is why one would often find idiotic comparisons between the art forms of the two, completely detaching the context and time in which they evolved. Had the Romans been born to such a fortune, we’d not find any beautiful marbles today but laughable drawings.
Similarly, the more persuasive argument about geography is its role in creating antecedents which had spillovers allowing progress to take place over a long arc of time. For instance, mining couldn’t have ever begun in a place where mines didn’t exist. In its primitive form, it is an undemanding activity merely requiring intensive-labour effort. However, as the need for ore started to increase and mines started getting deeper, miners had to struggle with groundwater flooding their shafts. Thus, the need for water pumping mechanisms and boring technologies would arise as positive spillovers. Eventually, these technologies helped create the steam engine and the modern world as we know it. Furthermore, mining is a multidisciplinary subject requiring knowledge of civil, mechanical and metallurgical engineering. The convergence of these rather distinct subjects allowing the flow of information across them and subsequently leading to greater progress is yet another positive spillover. Similarly, the development of wind-driven sawmills in Medieval Holland owes its existence to sail-making, which had emerged from shipbuilding, which in turn emerged from the needs of the regular fisherman wishing to expand.
Technological progress mimics evolution in many ways, mutations occur slowly and randomly and may or may not be beneficial to the species. The more the number of experiments at hand, the more the mutations and even more so the paths which successfully lead to progress in a sea of paths which lead to technological dead ends. It is only reasonable to assume that technological progress would be dependent on its previous stages, as seen in the case of the steam engine and industries in Holland. However, not all technological changes follow a monotonous path, many of them which appear to be creative innovations retrospectively were mere lucky choices for their contemporaries, who were unaware of where these choices may lead in the future. Thus, seemingly superior choices can lead to stagnation and vice versa. In the eighteenth century, the Irish started adopting potatoes as their staple diet against grains. Potatoes have thrice the number of calories as grains, thus it seems to be an obvious progressive choice. Yet it had the opposite effects, areas specializing in grains saw a tremendous increase in yield while those specializing in potatoes saw no such progress. Likewise, the invention of the camel saddle in the Levant seemingly appears to be a great progression which allows the people to harness camels effectively to traverse through the many harsh deserts. However, the success of the camel gradually came to replace wheels from transportation, as seen previously with Ottomans through the comments of Bulliet. Wheeled rides on camels were undoubtedly inferior to riding the camel directly with saddles, but the presence of wheeled rides creates many positive spillovers and demands for other technologies such as roads. Thus, once again we can notice that not all progress leads to more progress, it may lead to dead ends, and innovators are never aware of the consequences of their innovations.
It is not to say that technologies do not depend upon a path, many innovators during the Industrial Revolution in Britain were instrument and clockmakers. Regions which had specialized in clockmaking in general maintained a significant edge in technology over the rest. Nonetheless, it is not a complete explanation as it fails to explain even trivial cases of developments in mining in Germany and England as opposed to stagnation in Hungary, Spain and Sweden. In conclusion, while technological developments more often than not, did depend upon previously existing innovations, they could arise all of a sudden as well. Nor were all previously existing innovations capable of leading further technological progress, and many led to even stagnation or decline. Now, we are aware that readers in the twenty-first century may find it difficult to sympathize with such statements because in the modern world — scientific and technological developments can only build upon each other to improvise. Thus, let's briefly examine the relationship between science and technology in the past.
EXCURSUS 4: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
While a completely objective distinction between science and technology is hard to draw, especially in modern times, Gille’s words that “Science teaches comprehension while technology aims at utilization” holds true in all contexts. The piece-by-piece comparison of the relationship between science and technology is an inexhaustive subject on its own merits and cannot be undertaken here. We would instead like to draw upon the conclusions as is —
We have seen that what we call today "scientific knowledge" was rarely a binding constraint on technological progress before 1850. The relationship between scientific and technological progress, as Otto Mayr has pointed out, has confounded the best minds in both fields. Indeed, an eminent historian of science like Thomas Kuhn, has made the startling assertion that there was a negative correlation between the two, because the social conditions that promote science are antithetic to technology and vice versa. — Joel Mokyr
Francis Bacon made a distinction between technologies which could be created at any time anywhere and those which depended on a particular state of knowledge. Most technologies before roughly 1850 were of the former category while those afterwards were of the latter. Be it an improvement in agriculture, machines, sailing, metallurgy, water-lifting or the creation of the cotton gin, they were all products of rigorous trial and error. However, this is not to say that they were completely devoid of science. In the early modern ages, Galileo’s theory of machines was fundamental to the development of all later machines, the engineering of Smeaton and Maudslay depended upon it. The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century played some role in invigorating the spirit of observation and orderliness in scientists. Innovators like Watt and Stephenson learned from scientists the importance of accuracy, and the difference between cause and correlation. Without the scientific insights into atmospheric pressure by Torricelli, the efficient use of steam power would’ve been impossible. Not all seemingly scientific insights had positive effects on technological progress either. The Frank Antoine Parent devised an equation to estimate the peak efficiency of a water wheel. He declared that the waterwheel is most useful at one-third of the peak stream speed and 4/27 parts of the stream's natural force. Despite these calculations being incorrect and against empirical observations, they were widely accepted to be true.
Trial & Error may have an ill repute but it was the source of most technological developments and sometimes produced the optimal solution as well. When in the late eighteenth century scientists were attempting to use their newfound knowledge to devise the optimal size and shape of the sail, it was found that the concave warp shape used by Dutch windmills for centuries was indeed the optimal solution. Millenniums before the invention of the Bessemer Convertor, India had created the world-renowned Wootz steel by the end of the first-millennium BCE by adding carbon sources in the furnace, like bamboo or leaves. It was done through simple trial and error, and not by studying the “clustering of Fe3C particles made by melting of low levels of carbide-forming elements.” Mustard gas was in use way before Chemotherapy was invented, it was only during WWII that it was observed that mustard gas could inhibit the growth of white blood cells — which paved the way for the creation of cancer treatment. Aspartame, the artificial sweetener too was a product of pure luck rather than a systematic effort following some scientific procedure. James Schlatter produced aspartame as an intermediate step in generating another anti-ulcer drug, he discovered that it was extremely sweet when he accidentally licked his finger which was contaminated with aspartame. Food canning was invented when Nicolas Appert, a baker, observed through a pure accident that food left inside a glass jar doesn’t spoil unless there are air leaks present. It would take another fifty years for Louis Pasteur to appear and explain the science behind this brilliant development.
Regardless of the merits of trial and error; science triumphed over it by the 1850s and has plunged the world into seemingly endless possibilities ever after. Science could not designate a path for innovation but also explain why certain innovations failed. The Caloric Engine of Ericsson was a failure because it opposed the second law of thermodynamics. The best of tinkerers could no longer depend upon their creative geniuses but needed the guiding hand of scientists to look forward. Thomas Edison owes his success to the mathematician Francis R. Upton and the chemist Reginald Fessenden, whom he had hired to give a physical meaning to his ideas. The class of inventors who refused to play by science soon went extinct, the age of untrained and unsystematic innovators doing magic was over immediately. The research produced by scientists was often centuries ahead of the time of its application, as any engineer could tell you. Nonetheless, these effects are largely post-1850 ones. Before that, science had a very small effect on technological progress, and it was by no margin a limiting agent of technological progress, in fact, as we shall see later in our section on society, it was completely antithetical to technology. To argue that that science somehow led to progress, especially in the context we are speaking, would be wholly incorrect.
State and Society
We examined plenty of factors that may or may not have a role in leading progress in society. Most of these factors applied only to some societies and showed completely different results in other societies. Many of these variables, like geography, which appears to play a far more significant role than the rest, were exogenous and the people had little role to play in it. What we have overlooked so far are the people themselves, the kind of values they looked up to, the kind of political institutions they preferred to abide by, and the kind of activities they engaged in. It is the people who make up a nation and not institutions, or geographic territory et al. Despite the carefulness with which we tread to not engage in racial reductionism, one could hardly convince themselves that the Industrial Revolution could’ve taken off in Britain if the people were magically replaced by the Turks or Afghans in the eighteenth century. Putting jokes aside, it is indeed imperative to analyze the behaviour of people and societies as a whole. Some are conservative and shun innovation while others are liberal and value it; some are collectivists who value obedience, while others are individualists who value freedom; some are materialists who value wealth and power, while others value austerity. In this section, we shall analyze the causality between some endogenous variables with technological progress.
EXCURSUS 5: AGENTS OF LIFE AND DEATH
The Black Death was the single most catastrophic event in the middle ages, responsible for wiping out as much as 60% of the population in Western Europe, 30-60% of all European population and a third of the population in the Levant. The Yersinia pestis bacterium was responsible for causing the bubonic plague. As it had evolved near the Tian Shan mountains, the people of the western regions had no natural immunity against it, resulting in heavy mortality. The plague was introduced to Europe by the invading Mongols in 1347. The Tatar troops of Jani Beg were suffering from the disease during the siege of Kaffa, a Crimean port. Jani Beg took the opportunity to catapult diseased soldiers into the walled city to infect the inhabitants. As the disease took hold, Genoese traders suffering from the plague started fleeing and introduced the plague elsewhere in Europe, like Constantinople. The consequent spread of the plague across Europe resulted in what we know as the Black Death.
The debates around the origin and transmission theories of the plague are endless and out of the scope of our work. What is important to note is the effects it had on humans and their institutions. One problem faced by many early anthropologists studying the early farmers was reconciling with the fact that early farmers showcased a far higher mortality rate when compared to foragers. This was despite the fact that Agricultural societies enjoyed far greater food surpluses than hunter-gatherers, which is precisely why their populations would grow. After further study, it was found that while food surpluses in agriculturalist societies did boost populations, they also made populations entirely dependent on farm surpluses. A single season of bad harvest could be catastrophic for any agriculturalist society, nor would their high populations be able to sustain themselves on forager lifestyles. Thus, while populations did grow, mortality increased as well.
Something similar happened in Medieval England sometime before the Black Plague. Owing to the Medieval Warm Period [actually just an NWEU Warm Period], there was a significant boost in productivity in England between 900-1300 AD. It was a prosperous period for Northwestern Europe. Greenland and Iceland could be cultivated by Norse settlers, crop diversity and productivity increased elsewhere, and icy coasts cleared up allowing more fishermen to hunt. In such prosperous conditions, it was natural for England to see a boost in human capital, just the way a boost in animal and plant capital had taken place. And by the early fourteenth century, the population of Medieval England peaked. However, sometime between 1315-1322, it started facing excessive summer rains which led to a massive successive crop failure. And in turn, a terrible famine swept across northwestern Europe. While the English had barely recovered from the Summer Famine, the Black Death pounced upon them. As a result, the population of Medieval England went from around 6 million in 1300 AD to 2 million by 1450 AD. Similar population collapses followed across Europe and the Levant.
The Black Death and similar events were massive shocks which continue to remain beyond the scope of conventional economists and historians. However, this is not to say that we are to turn a blind eye to its effects. While a simple Malthusian model may predict an increase in per capita wages with deaths skyrocketing, the economic and political transitions were far more complex. During the initial stages of the pandemic, trade collapsed as traders were the first to die and travelling to newer lands became riskier. Labour shortages dues to high mortality led to unharvested food rotting across farms in Europe. The lack of labour hit landlords differently in western, central and eastern Europe. Since the west had experienced a favourable warm period, there were more urban settlements available as opposed to the East. As a result, rural and even city labourers had a much higher scope of fleeing to other places in search of opportunity. This led to an increase in wages across Western Europe. In the East, due to limited opportunities, labour couldn’t flee to other cities in search of work. In the East, since labour couldn’t flee for higher wages, landlords chose physical coercion to stop labour shortages, however, landlords in the west couldn’t rely on it. In England, the Statute of Labourers was passed in 1349 to limit wages. In 1351, the French passed a similar statute to limit wages and regulate guilds and prices. Some places like Florence employed physical coercion in rural areas but allowed urban workers to enjoy the rising wages.
In the later stages of the pandemic, physical coercion became uneconomic, labour shortage pressures triumphed upon the greed of the socio-political elites and a sharp increase in real wages was witnessed in the following decades. Marginal lands across Europe were abandoned as landlords started shifting from labour-intensive arable farming to land-intensive pastoral farming, enjoying the benefits of higher per-capita animal stock. Peasants enjoyed unprecedented social mobility, and many themselves turned into landowners. But the most important consequence was the demise of serfdom in Western Europe.
Since serfs could flee to work at higher wages, the very institution of enfeoffment was under threat. This demise wasn’t entirely a product of the Black Death, although by and large driven by it. The agrarian economies of feudal Europe differed from those which preceded them. While a correct chronology cannot be established, medieval landlords had started leaving a considerable portion of their land to peasants for tilling at some point. Once the rent was paid by serfs in goods and labour, the peasant was free to do so as he pleases, unlike the setups in the early middle ages. More than half of rural England was populated by serfs in 1300, but by the 1350s, there was a sharp decline in the serf population. It was because the demographic shock of the plague ensured that landlords could no longer maintain servile institutions through physical coercion and coordination between landlords turned into a competition where a serf could flee oppressive fines and harsh labour requirements of any manor and work at another. By the 1500s, serfdom had entirely collapsed in England even if never abolished formally.
It was not the only social change taking across Europe. The Black Death also resulted in the weakening of religious institutions. The Church had to draw its human capital from laymen who were often corrupt in their practices, decreasing the social capital the Church held as the faith of the people moved away from them. Since the dawn of marriage itself, women across the world would be married off to suitable partners in their early teenage. After the Black Death, falling under the pressure created by the demographic collapse, medieval Europe saw an increment in the age of marriage of women as more of them entered labour markets. The effect was limited to Northern Europe as Southern European land was suitable for arable farming as opposed to pastoral farming in Northern Europe which requires female labour. Studying the trends of marriage and fertility, Hajnal termed it the European Marriage Pattern in 1965, as it was the characteristic feature of European marriages in the 1900s. The Hajnal pattern is defined as —
Higher age of marriage for women ~ 25 years
10% of women never marry
Formation of nuclear families rather than joint families
Low levels of illegitimacy
Two popular claims exist around the Hajnal Pattern. The former argues that it restrains fertility and hence maintains per capita income in a Malthusian economy. This is a rather weak claim as central Europe which observed the Hajnal Pattern more rigidly saw economic stagnation than progress. The other claim is it helped transition societies into modern economies. Regardless, the Hajnal Pattern is a subject of much debate with various claims and counter-claims, which are beyond our scope. What is notable is that by delaying marriage, we are giving free time to young men with no responsibilities on their heads.
What was the purpose of this discussion so far? How does it relate to what we were talking about? Due to the Black Death, serfdom collapsed and real wages skyrocketed. Rural populations would migrate to cities for better wages and consume manufactured goods in turn. Significant portions of the population were now equipped with more disposable income which could be spent on goods and luxuries, creating higher demands for the same. Furthermore, marriages started getting delayed, a married man can generally be considered more risk-averse than a bachelor. People were no longer attached to their lands like the serfdoms of the preceding ages, they were free to do what they want once they were done tilling their lands. English Common Law for one, had a great role in enshrining and protecting property rights in the late middle ages. In this environment, with increased disposable wages, with increased demand for manufactured goods, with increased freedom to do as one pleases away from the clutches of landlords and priests and delayed responsibilities like marriage — it was only natural that people would be more capable of undertaking adventures and risking capital for pursuing innovation. It is no surprise that more than 75% of the pioneers during the Industrial Revolution were middle-class men and not clerics, aristocrats or the poor.
EXCURSUS 6: SLAVES, INTELLECTUALS & VALUES
Intuitively, it would appear that the discussions revolving around what enables a man to pursue innovation have already been completed by now. Time, markets, freedom, disposable wages — these are the four horsemen of the apocalypse, in our case, it being innovation. However, before we casually proceed with such theories, it is necessary to check for falsifiability. Lucius Seneca [4 BCE - 65 AD] was one of the most influential stoic philosophers of post-Augustan Rome. By no measure, he is a man of meagre intellect, lacking astuteness in observations. He notes the following in one of his letters —
Further, I dispute the statement that it was the philosopher who discovered iron and copper mines, when the earth, white-hot from a forest-fire, spewed up molten veins of surface-ore: these things are found by the persons who are interested in them. Even the question whether the hammer or the pincers came into use first doesn't seem to me so subtle as it does to Posidonius. Both were invented by some one whose intellect was nimble and keen, not massive and sublime: so was everything else the quest of which involves bowed shoulders and earthward gaze.
All those handicrafts which fill the city either with the solicitations of the hawker or the clatter of the factory, are about the business of the body, which was once a slave with slave's allowance, but is now the master whose every esteemed command is executed. Thus on either side we see the cloth-mill and the foundry, here the perfumer's distillery, there the academy of effeminacy in the shape of dancing and deportment or the more sentimental forms of music. For the natural standard, which defines a man's desires by the satisfaction of his needs, has disappeared.
Some things we know to have appeared only within our own memory; the use, for example, of glass windows which let in the full brilliance of day through a transparent pane, or the substructures of our baths and the pipes let into their walls to distribute heat and preserve an equal warmth above and below. Need I enlarge on the marbles with which our temples and houses gleam? On the columns, vast polished cylinders of stone, on which we support colonnades and halls in which whole nations could find room? Or on the shorthand which catches even the quickest speech, the hand keeping pace with the tongue? All these are the inventions of the meanest slaves. Philosophy sits more loftily enthroned: she doesn't train the hand, but is instructress of the spirit.
She doesn't contrive arms and fortifications and munitions of war: she is the friend of peace, and summons the human race to brother-hood. No, she's not, I say, an artisan producing tools for the mere everyday necessities. — Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, No. XC
The Romans gained fame for many great achievements but fair treatment of slaves was not one of them. Slavery was widespread during the Roman expansion and millions of slaves were brought into Italy. Over 53,000 men were sold into slavery after Caesar defeated the Atuatuci; more than a million were enslaved during his conquest of Gaul. While some slaves did enjoy high offices and esteem, the bulk of them had no rights whatsoever. Slaves were subject to regular torture and humiliation, they owned no property, they had no fixed wages, and their lives were full of drudgery. Yet as Seneca informs us, it was slaves entirely who contributed to Roman technology and not their freemen or aristocrats and intellectuals. Shouldn’t it instead be freemen, intellectuals and aristocrats who lead innovation instead, with their huge capital surpluses and freedom?
The counter-argument holds that freemen in slave societies will have no incentive to innovate because slave labour was easily mobilizable and cheap. However, it ignores that slaves had to be captured, transported, clothed, fed, housed and most importantly, managed. Without an effective managerial class capable of using physical coercion at all times, slaves would refuse compliance, either flee or perform ill on their jobs. Thus, they were only suited for routinized tasks in the absence of an efficient managerial class. But the routinization would mean that there would be lesser skilled labour available in markets. Thus, it becomes incorrect to assume that slave labour was necessarily cheaper, it had both direct and indirect costs. Roman Empire in its later centuries saw a workforce which was less dependent on slaves and largely dependent on freemen. However, we don’t find the private sector of the Late Roman Empire to be particularly innovative, if anything, it fared far worse than when it was dependent on slaves. As discussed previously, slaves were at the vanguard of leading innovation, and there doesn't exist any evidence to prove that a freeman was more skilled than a slave at any particular task.
It was not the case that the Romans had hit the peak in Tainter’s Optimum of technological progress. Romans could’ve certainly appreciated a ship which could sail windward better. Lead ore extraction had high mortality rates for slave labour, they could’ve certainly benefitted from improved metallurgy, even more so in casting iron and steel making. The Greco-Romans never improved their tools of agriculture, whatever little innovation existed, came from the Gauls and Celts. Despite their advances in astronomy, there was little use of the instruments of the Hellenistic astronomers to perform tasks as simple as orientation at the sea. The Romans despite their advances in water lifting, remained backwards in employing watermills and never produced a correct harness for the horse. And what of the scientific treatises produced by geniuses like Archimedes? Surely there must’ve been a positive spillover from his brilliant treatise on hydrostatics, dynamics of solids and mathematical mechanics? As evidence suggests, his work was entirely detached from practicality and technological innovation. There does exist another work titled “Mechanical Problems”, formerly ascribed to Aristotle, although its authors are unknown. The following passages will give a glimpse of how people actually involved with technology dealt with it —
Among questions of a mechanical kind are included those which are connected with the lever. It seems strange that a great weight can be moved with but little force, and even when the addition of more weight is involved; for the very same weight, which one cannot move at all without a lever, one can move quite easily with it, in spite of the additional weight of the lever.
The original cause of all such phenomena is the circle. It is quite natural that this should be so; for there is nothing strange in a lesser marvel being caused by a greater marvel, and it is a very great marvel that contraries should be present together, and the circle is made up of contraries. For to begin with, it is formed by motion and rest,* things which are by nature opposed to one another. Hence in examining the circle we need not be much astonished at the contradictions which occur in connection with it. Firstly, in the line which encloses the circle, being without breadth, two contraries somehow appear, namely, the concave and the convex. These are as much opposed to one another as the great and the small; the mean being in the latter case the equal, in the former the straight. Therefore just as, if they are to change into one another, the greater and smaller must become equal before they can pass into the other extreme; so a line must become straight in passing from convex into concave, or on the other hand from concave into convex and curved. This, then, is one peculiarity of the circle.
Another peculiarity of the circle is that it moves in two contrary directions at the same time; for it moves simultaneously to a forward and a backward position. Such, too, is the nature of the radius which describes a circle. For its extremity comes back again to the same position from which it starts; for, when it moves continuously, its last position is a return to its original position, in such a way that it has clearly undergone a change from that position. Therefore, as has already been remarked, there is nothing strange in the circle being the origin of any and every marvel. The phenomena observed in the balance can be referred to the circle, and those observed in the lever to the balance; while practically all the other phenomena of mechanical motion are connected with the lever.
It is an absurdity par excellence, this is the kind of answer one would expect an illiterate rustic Indian of the modern age to give if forced to speculate about the problem of levers. The author doesn’t deal with the problem of levers scientifically or produce postulates on the relationship between distances and weights like Archimedes. Instead, our author is completely devoid of coherent logic, he believes that circles are some miraculous device and attributes all greater marvels like levers owing their existence to smaller marvels like the circle. All the thirty-five problems discussed in the “Mechanical Problems” contain such ambiguities and absurdities. This is precisely why the Renaissance writers didn't value this work. What it reveals is how detached technology was from science at any stage.
Cipolla begins with a harsh critique of Chinese society and her intellectuals in his work, “Clocks and Culture”. While the European man delighted himself in drawing mills, gears and machines, the Chinese intellectual was pleased with flowers and butterflies —
If people such as Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo da Vinci, who were above all and essentially artists, delighted in drawing mills, gears and machines instead of flowers, fishes and butterflies as their contemporary Chinese fellow painters did, the explanation lies in those anonymous but overpowering influences that the environment exerts on men from their childhood on, in shaping their tastes and their values.
This view, as we have noted previously, is indeed outdated. The Chinese may have not produced Leonardo da Vinci but they did produce men like Agricola and Tartaglia, and they produced them millennia before Europe. A certain and very dominant Eurocentric view has always held that Europe was pushed forward by the scientific pursuits of its intellectual classes, while the lazy Brāhmaṇas of India were content with philosophy, and the indolent intellectual classes of China were busy reciting poetry. Although we have already noted the disassociation between scientific pursuits and their practical implementations throughout history, one is inclined to ask how well the European intellectuals or aristocrats fared in the ancient world. K.D. Oleson, an eminent scholar of water-lifting mechanisms of Rome, has the following to say —
The typical Roman intellectual and aristocrat, like a child incapable of extensive analysis of his data or of basing theoretical deductions upon it and hedonistic in his dislike of pain, change, or risk, wandered through a dream-like haze until the opportunity for progress - however limited- had been lost.
People like Archimedes were exceptional individuals and not a norm. Just like anywhere else in the world, the upper classes had nothing but sheer contempt for the unwashed masses engaged in banausic labour and prejudice against non-abstract thought or practical applications. While exceptions have always existed, a Platonist would research dialectics and not practical applications of sciences, nor would he ever find a patron who takes an interest in the application. Plutarch’s comment praising Archimedes for “regarding mechanical occupations and every art that ministers to needs as ignoble or vulgar, he directed his own ambition solely to those studies the beauty and subtlety of which are unadulterated by necessity” is testimony to such attitudes. When science did turn away from the abstract and stoop down to the real world, it was limited to toys and fancies for the rich. The automata of Hero of Alexandria and Philo of Byzantium were never put to scale despite being comparable to eighteenth-century models. While the classical scientists did excel at rationally understanding the world around them, the insights were an end in itself, not the practical application of such knowledge.
Nor were the Roman landlords particularly enterprising in comparison with the “Oriental Despots”. To quote another scholar, “they were a very dishonest and mediocre class, who behaved like bureaucrats, settling into a routine and doing as little as they could to upset the quiet life.” Even landlords possessing more than enough capital to initiate technological progress did little to reduce the costs of labour or increase productivity. The first-century writer Columella, notes the following in De Re Rustica —
When a rich man bought a farm, he selected from his entourage the most enfeebled in years and vigor . . . disregarding the fact that this particular job demands not only knowledge, but the liveliness of a man in his prime . . . to cope with its hardships.
Although the private initiative is lacking, the Roman public initiative was excellent, as witnessed in their war machines, architecture and water-lifting devices. Here too, money or freedom was not the primary catalyst. For instance, we are aware of Seneca’s comments previously noted wherein he notes that it was the meanest of slaves who innovated in architecture. Similarly, men working with machines, and pumping water were paid only as much as sewer cleaners.
The lack of private initiative from intellectuals or aristocrats isn’t unique to Roman society. Both science and technology were the initiative of the intellectual classes in China, especially the ones in bureaucracy, usually funded by the State. Su Song’s celestial clock was built by government officials at the behest of the Emperor. Mencius, a Confucianist of fame, recites how it was the Minister of Agriculture who introduced novelties of sowing, reaping and cultivating some five different types of grains. Wang Chen and Xu Guangqi, authors of massive treatises on agriculture were both bureaucrats. The State played a major role in initiating research, enquiring into diseases, financing scientific and technological expeditions and procuring necessary materials and equipment. The mathematician Zhang Heng who invented the first seismograph was an official in the chancellery. The Eunuch Cai Lun who used mulberry bark to invent paper was a minister in charge of weapons and instruments. Such technologies weren’t an end in themselves either. The Han Dynasty took a major initiative in diffusing good agricultural tools and practices like harnessing draft animals or use of iron ploughs. Song Dynasty set up financial institutions to help farmers use innovative techniques in agriculture and helped diffuse the knowledge of medical sciences to all corners of the empire. Even the Yuan and Ming governments had undertaken a major initiative in diffusing cotton. Private initiative has its limitations, Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century attempting to re-engineer Chinese mining techniques understood that certain technologies simply cannot be created without the active support of a state. However, this is not to say that all Chinese intellectual classes were pioneers of science and technology while the Romans were despotic and lethargic. Aristocrats across the world are lethargic, so were they in China, sometimes even a hurdle in the path to innovation. Similarly, Intellectuals of China have been criticized for not showing an active interest in technology and being content with poetry, women and wine —
If the educated and powerful classes are not interested in production and lack technical knowledge, they will not make any effort to introduce technological improvements, and stagnation will ensue. Fei's central argument was that in traditional Chinese society the intelligentsia was a class without technical knowledge, interested mostly in the wisdom of the past, literature, and art. By regarding the world through human relations, he maintained, the Chinese intelligentsia were a conservative force, because in human relations the end is always mutual adjustment whereas technological change leads to social disruption. — Fei, 1953 [as Cited by Joel Mokyr]
Why was it that China had the major public initiative but was lacking in private initiative? As Fei argues, the Chinese intelligentsia were a conservative people who disapproved of social disruption, but what about the people in general? Joseph Needham, one of the most erudite scholars who brought to light the many inventions of China which were forgotten, believes that the answer lies in the structure of society itself. He describes that the Orient, the Chinese especially, were a highly conservative people who desire stability over everything else, while Europe had a built-in instability to it. When one speaks of social stability, the Indian caste system is impossible to be kept out of the discussion. Mokyr describes the caste system to be “a fiendishly clever and almost failure proof incentive system to protect the status quo” where individuals could guarantee a good rebirth if they remained obedient and followed the path of their ancestors in their current life. Something like a caste system was also observed in Roman society when the decline in slavery led to a labour shortage in many occupations. The Emperors Diocletian & Constantine then passed laws which tied the occupations of sons to their fathers. Intuitively, it makes sense that an ascriptive hierarchy where socioeconomic status is inherited than earnt may inhibit technological progress. As De Camp puts it “what baker's son will fool around with an idea for a bicycle when he is compelled to make bread all his life willy-nilly.” But as Mokyr notes, these appendages proved to be very successful in stabilizing Roman society and leading it to economic progress. Since the succeeding middle ages proved to be far worse and incapable of having a centralized system and were antithetical to all sciences and technology — the Diocletian reforms of building a quasi-caste system were surely far better.
But could the development of quasi-caste systems or a conservative society be always good? Had such systems existed in Europe in the late middle ages, then we could rest assured that no technological progress would’ve taken place and the world would still be a dim place. A caste system, on account of being extremely conservative, inhibits private initiative. Therein lies another criticism of conservative societies, that they are resistant to innovation and attempts to break social equilibrium leads to negative feedback, often in the form of violent mobs. Assuming it to hold for India, despite the lack of documented events — the rest of the world wasn’t any different either.
We had previously noted the case of Gutenberg’s associate Fust being put on trial for witchcraft because of his use of the printing press which was deemed diabolic. Parisian scribal guilds were able to successfully delay the introduction of the press by some twenty years. Conflicts around the same issue took an ethnic shape in Venice. We shall cite a few passages as noted by Joel Mokyr, and Friedrich Klemm to show the same —
In 1299, an edict was issued in Florence forbidding bankers to use Arabic numeral
In 1397, tailors in Cologne were forbidden to use machines that pressed pinheads.
In 1561, the city council of Nuremberg, undoubtedly influenced by the guild of red-metal turners, launched an attack on a local coppersmith by the name of Hans Spaichl who had invented an improved slide rest lathe. The council first rewarded Spaichl for his invention, then began to harass him and made him promise not to sell his lathe outside his own craft, then offered to buy it from him if he suppressed it, and finally threatened to imprison anyone who sold the lathe.
In 1579, the ribbon loom was invented in Danzig, but its inventor was reportedly secretly drowned by orders of the city council. Twenty-five years later the ribbon loom was reinvented in the Netherlands-though resistance there, too, was stiff-arid thus became known as the Dutch loom.
In 1733, John Kay, the inventor of the flying shuttle, was harassed by weavers. He eventually settled in France, where he refused to show his shuttle to weavers out of fear. But the prolonged opposition of vested interests against the flying shuttle in Britain was ineffectual. Resistance to new technology was traditionally strongest in the textile sector.
Instead, there are far fewer known instances of Ludditism in Chinese history despite them belonging to a far more conservative society.
Chinese creativity also reappeared in the interior. One of the earliest instances is Chen Qiyuan's pioneering work in the Kwangtung silk industry in the 1870s. After visiting French Annam and seeing modern steam-driven filatures there he came home and built some in imitation, only worked by human power. He later advanced to steam-power, and put up a factory employing over six hundred men. This sparked off a protest from other silk-workers who were afraid of losing their livelihood. Chen survived, thanks to the help of the authorities, but was moved by his experience to invent a smaller silk-reeling machine suitable for those with only a little capital. — Elvin Mark
Another time in 1887, an American newspaper reports the following —
Over 1,000 telegraph poles belonging to the Munaman-Mintzag district and the Kweichew Lane line, in China have been pulled down by the people, who say the telegraph is a diabolical European artifice.
Many people tend to buy too much into the idealization of the European character. Even in the Industrial Age, European technology wasn’t immune to resistance from supposedly enlightened labour while illiterates in the Orient went around whacking every piece of machinery they could find. Labour unions in nineteenth-century Britain commanded so much power and influence that they could successfully modify the process of innovation and created an atmosphere antithetical to technological change. The main motivation of such unions was to ensure that their wages remain high and machines remain out of factories so that their skills could be protected. To cite a few passages from Mokyr presenting the same —
Alfred Hobbs, the American lockmaker who introduced interchangeable parts to lockmaking, stated in 1857 that the "great obstacle in the way of the gunmakers of Birmingham in introducing machinery was the opposition of the workpeople to such innovations."
Joseph Whitworth, in his 1854 report on the differences between American and British manufacturing, emphasized that British workers were far more hostile to new technology than American workers, because they were more skilled, better organized, and less mobile.
The installation of a sewing machine was prohibited in the center of the shoemaking industry, Northampton, after three strikes against it in the late 1850s, and new machinery was successfully kept out in some centers of carpetmaking, printing, glassmaking, and metalworking where resistance was stiff.
To conclude, in light of such incidents, one is tempted to believe that while liberal societies may be more capable of churning out radical ideas — they are equally capable of standing in rebellion and protecting themselves from such ideas whenever the need arises. While conservative societies may not show much potential for private initiative, they are equally incapable of rebelling against changes. Intellectuals in the pre-modern world had very little bearing on technology in Rome, but they started merging with craftspeople in medieval Europe. All societies benefit greatly when the state takes an initiative in technology. Roman art, architecture, war machines and water-lifting devices were ahead of their time because of the public initiative undertaken by governments. China from the Han to Song period took great initiative in both technology and people. In Rome, the intellectuals weren’t funded by the state to take up scientific or technological expeditions. Thus, they produced abstract sciences but never implemented them. It was the slaves who carried out innovation, perhaps because they were the only ones working with it and doing better than their peers was their only way of getting out of their misery. In China, the state played an active hand in funding intellectuals in all fields, which is why it maintained an edge over the rest of the world. Interestingly enough, Europe outdid China in times when it was broken into many states fighting each other, as opposed to times when it was a single state under Rome. This brings us to the discussion in the next section.
EXCURSUS 7: KINGS, STATES AND WARS
A great difference between Medieval Europe and Medieval China was that the former was more often than not a mass of many fragmented polities while the latter was one unified unit. A compelling answer to why this happened lies in their geography. Diamond and Jones proposed their “Fractured Land” theory which argued that Europe’s geographic fragmentation explains its persistent political fragmentation. The emergence of Rome is an exception in an otherwise permanently fractured Europe. Natural barriers like mountain chains, coasts and major marches, formed natural boundaries and distinct geographic zones of roughly the same sizes. The Pyrenees separated Iberia, the Alps separated Italy from the rest of Europe, and England was an island away from the continental mass. These many distinct geographic zones could thus provide nuclei for future European states, all the while safeguarding the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the people residing there. On the other hand, China has a single large mass of plains between the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The presence of such a highly productive core region and the lack of it thereof in Europe could explain why China would be united around the former while Europe would remain fragmented.
Apart from that, China’s unification was as important to the existence of Chinese civilization as the production of water-lifting machines was important to the emergence of Greco-Romans. This was because sometime around 1200 BCE, the nomads of the eastern steppes domesticated the horse, and from this point forward till the eighteenth century, they remained an unresolvable threat to sedentary civilizations all across the world. The Mongols under Chingiz Qagan, known for their brutality and the destruction they brought upon the rest of the world were just one such people of the many predatory tribes of the steppes. The fragile ecology of the steppes ensured that the barbarian nomads would move south in such greener pastures, invading their nearest sedentary neighbours during periods of long durations of cold. The much-derided Northern Barbarians in Chinese history were none other than their steppe neighbours who would wreak havoc now and then. In such a setting, if a state could be strong enough to defend its northern borders, it would surely be strong enough to unify the rest of China as well. In the case, all states fail to do so, they would be overrun by the northern barbarians. This pressure ensured that China would, more often than not, exist as a unified polity.
On the other hand in Western Europe, Vienna, the city with the most exposure to the steppes is about as far from the steppes as Guangzhou, the city with the least exposure to the steppes. Countries like England have enjoyed an unparalleled privilege in this regard. Surely, Western Europe was susceptible to invasions from many dimensions as well, but arguably, none posed a danger as big as that of the eastern steppe people. Rome could survive the various barbarian tribes in Europe but collapsed permanently whence it was sacked by the Huns. The people of the steppes rarely showed interest in settling, they would destroy all farmlands, depopulate the countryside and plunder as they pleased without care for pragmatism. Perhaps, one could even argue that the innate conservatism and risk aversion in countries like India and China was a product of being in frequent contact with the predatory steppe invaders. The aftermaths of such invasions would undoubtedly make one shun all foreigners and insulate themselves to foreign learning, as seen with India and China. This was in contrast with Europe which was more than willing to learn from foreigners. What we call European now, often belonged to a single region or ethnicity which would diffuse to all peoples sooner or later. The Romans could appreciate the creativity of the Gauls, Celts and Thracians. Or during the high middle ages, in the words of a Hungarian cleric —
As immigrants come from various lands, so they bring with them various languages and customs, various skills and forms of armament, which adorn and glorify the royal household and quell the pride of external powers. A kingdom of one race and custom is weak and fragile.
Coming back to our topic of interest — centralization indeed has many benefits. When Rome conquered the Mediterranean, it created a unified market economy; introduced standardized monetary policies; suppressed piracy; limited tariffs; made use of otherwise distant resources together like Spanish silver and Cornish tin; Romanized the upper classes of conquered people and forged a pan-Roman identity; assimilated foreign workers and much more. Despite Rome’s technological fallings which we have discussed in length previously, they fared far better than their fragmented successors. Their successors were small and weak, could not even afford necessities for their subjects, and lacked the bureaucratic capacity to even tax the people. As a result, various poles of power started emerging within all polities. Political and military power became more decentralized, economical power was left unchecked and ideological power became the monopoly of the Church. The divisions between the King, his nobility and the Church laid foundations for the emergence of parliaments, independent trading cities and many other important institutions in the future. Rulers within states had to cede power to social, political and religious elites to continue ruling. Furthermore, the competition between the many states became an incentive to either innovate upon current political, economic and technology or be wiped out by your neighbours.
Mokyr points to something which he calls Cardwell’s Law. While the law uses a lot of ambiguous terms, it gives us a very general understanding of technological progress across the world that seemingly appears to fit in all contexts despite not being backed with proper empirical references —
No nation has been technologically very creative for more than an historically short period of time.
… Call it a class, a nation, a race … — what you will, which advances progress in one period, in highly unlikely to advance progress in the succeeding one.
This held exceptionally true for medieval Europe. There was no singular nation where all innovation took place in Europe. The many nations in a fragmented Europe played their part at certain times and went dim at another. The technological centre of gravity popped up in Italy, then shifted through Germany, Holland, France, and England and resided in Germany again by the twentieth century. Unlike India and China, wars didn’t have an insulating effect on European states. The information would always flow freely among European states, ensuring that only the best practices are settled for, regardless of wherever the practice may have emerged from. While often states were hostile to innovators and so were the people, endemic inter-state political competition ensured that Rulers must opt for the best practices in the long run of time if they truly wish to survive. Rulers could no longer allow market or ideological status-quos to dominate their policies. Great dangers ensued if an innovator migrated to other states. Rulers across Europe thus started incentivizing innovators to immigrate even though they did not fund innovation directly like the Chinese. Tolerant states like England and Netherlands became prosperous beyond imagination and acquired disproportionate political and economic power. Intolerant states like Spain and Ottomans were left behind and similarly fell behind in their political influence. By the 17-18th century, states started playing a direct hand in innovation and business realizing the profits that could be made. Surely, the inter-state war had a huge negative impact on Europe and negatively impacted technological progress as well, but it was never the case that centralized societies ever enjoyed peace all the time either.
On the other hand, in China, all progress was a prerogative of the Emperor. We have already noted how deeply the state was invested in science and technology in China and how it was the bureaucracy which carried out all scientific expeditions. Indeed, as even industrialists of the nineteenth century noted, there are certain tasks which cannot be accomplished without the state actively funding them. However, as we are all aware by now, the Chinese lost all of their edges by the seventeenth century despite being at the top of the world in 1400. The political system was still the same, the bureaucratic system was the same as well, then what had changed? Well, China got conquered by Mongols. But it wasn’t necessarily bad, after the initial turmoil associated with the steppe people — Kublai Qagan proved himself to be a generous ruler. He set up thousands of schools to ensure literacy, invited scholars from all over the world, promoted trade, and revolutionized credit by setting up paper money as the sole medium of exchange. A major disadvantage was that since the Mongol armies didn’t use iron extensively, its production decline heavily, something which had a long-term effect. Another notable thing is the lack of revenue raised, the Song could raise over 15% of their economy while the Qing could only tax 1% or lesser. The Qing had failed to provide any kind of public service much less fund scientific expeditions, nor did it maintain characteristics of Chinese monarchy like standardized weights, commercial laws, roads or police. This was despite being run by professional bureaucracies which selected candidates through an imperial services examination than through patronage, as seen in Europe.
These effects too are a product, not the cause. The cause lies within the actions of the King and the Bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are an inherently conservative force which attempts its best to maintain the status quo and their privileged positions within it. Their resistance to changes isn’t limited to social, administration or policy, but also political. An Imperial Court is never a monolithic entity regardless of how extensively bureaucratized and centralized it may be in theory. There are various factions, some in favour of the regime, others against it, and bureaucrats working under ministers are a part of this game as well. A change in regime led by any dominant faction implies that officials in support of the preceding regime must now be eliminated to ensure stable rule. All men who become emperors are not far-sighted or selfless, there is nothing better for an emperor than to remove all thorns in his flesh and ensure that he rules for 10,000 years. Herein, the end goals of a despot concerned with only furthering his rule and that of a bureaucracy wishing to remain unaffected by politics unite. A wise emperor can bridge the gap between the working class and intelligentsia through great policy reform and have the most intelligent men of his empire, the bureaucrats, undertake scientific inquiries. But, an unwise despot obsessed with power and wealth can also shut all expeditions down if he doesn't see his longevity benefitting from them. During the reign of the wise Emperors of the Song Dynasty, Chinese maritime trade value exceeded overland foreign trade for the first time in history. Even during the early Ming Era, the Yongle Emperor proved to be an ambitious and far-sighted man by enabling the voyages of Zheng He. He commissioned a naval fleet of 3500 ships, with the grandest of them being longer than 400 feet in length, five times longer than Columbus's Santa Maria. But by 1430, felling to the political pressures of the court, the Ming Emperor ordered the destruction of all oceangoing ships and crafting ships with more than two masts was prohibited.
Wars between internal political units became rare in China after 960 A.D, as opposed to Europe where warfare was endemic. While the inter-state competition was by no margin a prerequisite for technological progress, it ensured that the fate of technology never entirely rested in the hands of one lone man who can flip the switch as he pleases. Regicides and coup d`etat were commonplace during the Tang and Song periods when the Emperors were not acting like despots and finishing all political competition against them. It was in contrast with the Later-Ming and Qing emperors who were far more autocratic than their predecessors. Conformity and absolute obedience defined the Ming Court and the bureaucracy being inherently conservative only helped further these goals. The political dynamism and the lack of absolutism of the Song-Tang periods ensured that Rulers would take decisions in the best interests of everyone. The autocratic reigns of the Ming-Qing emperors meant that the decisions would be taken only in favour of the longevity of the Emperor. Innovators and pioneers would be suppressed as the emperors preferred stable controllable environments over those which introduce new dynamics to society and state. It was in stark contrast with the political dynamism in Europe which enabled competition and progress to take place.
No single power in Europe was strong enough to pursue progress in the way the Song or the Yongle Emperor was. However, this also meant that no single power in Europe was strong enough to decimate progress the way the Ming court did in 1430, by ending the entire shipping industry in one blow. Similar things did happen in Europe as well, it was not that all European sovereigns were wise. When the Portuguese lost maritime initiative after 1580, the Dutch and English were more than willing to replace them, unlike China where there was no alternative to the orders of the court. As Jones puts it more eloquently —
Books might be burned and scientists tried by the church, machinery might be smashed by mobs, entrepreneurs banished and investors expropriated by governments, but Europe as a whole did not experience technological regression. The multi-cell system possessed a built-in ability to replace its local losses . . . and was more than the sum of its parts.
The same goes for any other centralized system like a bureaucracy. We have noted previously that Chinese officials and bureaucrats were the ones responsible for much of the scientific and technological progress. The bureaucracy offered unimaginable upward social mobility and bureaucrats were selected through an Imperial Services Examination, it was a meritocratic institution even if plagued with corruption and nepotism at times. During the Han times, there were only a handful of commoners who were a part of the bureaucracy and most officials came from the intellectual classes. During the Tang-Song Era, commoners continued to remain lesser than 10% of the bureaucracy. During the Ming, however, commoners had exploded to some 23% of the bureaucracy and this trend continues further under the Qing. During times when the bureaucracy played an active role in S&T, such a thing meant that the best minds from all over China could come together under imperial patronage and lead innovation. But even when the bureaucracy stopped playing a role in leading progress, its prestige did not die. As we have seen, a large mass of commoners would prepare for and attempt the Imperial Services Examination in later times of Imperial China, ensuring that their youthful potential is wasted on things like administration than the creativity of the sorts which was characteristic to many in Europe.
Nonetheless, all of these relationships we have established so far are rather ambiguous even if their importance is visible to the naked eye. For instance, political fragmentation, more often than not, led to more destruction than innovation. Ancient Greece, Medieval India, Feudal Japan and Islamic Spain are all examples of political competition having an adverse effect on technological progress. Nor was it the case that centralized states were inhibitive of technology. China maintained an edge over the world for more than a millennia, Imperial Rome too was an exceptional figure despite her fallings. Often centralized states wake up from their slumber due to the “Sputnik Effect”, the realization that they’ve fallen back from the rest of the world, and undertake great expeditions. Russia under Peter the Great, Meiji Japan and America after the Soviets launched Sputnik are a few examples of the same.
To Conclude Crudely
So far, all questions we posed and the answers we gave have been satisfactory only in the context they were asked rather than applicable to the world around them. We will now attempt to sum up the net content of our study. While it is indeed impossible to sum up the history and causes of technological progress over thousands of years in a few thousand words, we can certainly draw a crude observation which can fit upon most societies, albeit for different reasons, just like Cardwell’s Law. We will thus be using a bunch of ambiguous words ourselves to not bore our readers and proceed smoothly. To begin with, all societies face problems and societies successful at solving these problems succeed in all dimensions and overtake others while others collapse under different kinds of pressures. Humans consume energy to solve problems, technology is capable of reducing the human capital consumed for performing any task, or capable of producing disproportionate changes through little effort, thus allowing the advancement of the people.
Exogenous factors like immunity, geography, climate, and human and animal capital have been either problematic or supportive of technological progress and don't display a strict relationship with it. At times, the lack of resources ensured innovation, while at others, even the excess of resources did not ensure any, some countries even suffered the “Resource Curse.” Geography and climate defined the institutions a nation would build but had no bearing on intellect or valour. Sometimes, the constant threat from powerful invaders paved the way to centralization, while others succumbed to such pressures. Sometimes the lack of animal capital ensured the development of alternatives which boosted technology, while other times it caused stagnancy. Science and technology before the mid-nineteenth century were not only independent in development but even antithetical to a great extent. Some technologies depend upon previous states and innovations that had taken place, but most of them were capable of taking place at any given time with a bit of creativity. Most technological innovations consisted of small improvements, following the pattern of biological mutations, capable of bringing marginal advantages. On historically rare occasions, these micro-inventions culminated into macro-inventions like the printing press or the steam engine and gave an exponential boost to societies capable of harnessing them. Religion had little bearing on technological progress, its direct effects were often negative but second-order effects, by funding architecture or universities were largely positive or by bridging the gap between the working class and intelligentsia through its social capital. Freedom and wealth proved to be valuable in leading progress at some times, while during other periods it lead to lethargy and created states where slaves would be more susceptible to leading innovation.
Endogenous factors included the nature of the people and the state. A centralized state throughout the history of the world was far more capable of leading progress than decentralized ones. However, the fate of progress rested entirely in the hands of the monarch. While a wise ruler could bring forth a golden age of science, a despot could very efficiently stamp out all heresies which make him insecure. Fragmented polities engage in constant warfare and are poorer than vast centralized ones, thus they cannot fund progress in the way centralized ones can. if technological progress is once triggered within them then nations more tolerant of it would eventually win over all others. Technological progress is a positive-sum game, there will be winners and losers, while at any given stage more nations are likely to be intolerant of change than be tolerant of it, in the long run, all must accept innovation or be consumed by those who have accepted it. As long as a single polity in many fragmented ones is capable of accepting innovation, there is no way for it to be completely stamped out unlike in centralized units. Since public initiative is usually more lacking in smaller nations, they depend on private initiative. A ‘Liberal’ society is more likely to produce private initiative than a ‘Conservative’ society. Private initiative takes place when technology is democratized and people are free and capable of tinkering with it and the gap between the intellectual and working classes is bridged.
It is unclear whether liberal societies are a product of failing institutions and decentralized polities or whether the latter is a product of liberal societies. In the case of the Greeks, the causality runs from the people to the institutions, while in the case of feudal Europe, the causality runs from the demise of institutions to the people. Societies where small changes can lead to great adversities invariably turn out to be conservative in all dimensions. Be it the existence of predatory steppe neighbours, agriculturalists in arid regions or extremely harsh climatic conditions with a resource crunch — all can lead to conservatism, but we have also seen that it is not in complete opposition to innovation as many societies which faced such difficulties, ended up churning out institutions and technologies to overcome them. While liberal societies may be more capable of churning out radical ideas, they are equally capable of rebelling against innovation when it inconveniences them. Similarly, conservative societies may be incapable of bringing forth innovative ideas but they are equally incapable of resisting them without active efforts from political institutions. All ruling classes throughout history have been at odds with their subjects and find it in their best interests to ensure that the status quo and their privileges are never broken. Thus, it is more likely to be in the interests of the rulers of liberal societies than conservative societies to ensure that all innovation remains under their control. Such barriers are broken when competition with foreign states becomes more dangerous than the threat of breaking the status quo. To conclude, it was not a miracle that feudal Europe had seen innovation while feudal India or Japan hadn’t or how centralized China had seen far more innovation than a centralized Rome. Liberal societies satisfy the conditions to lead innovation under decentralized competing polities. Conservative societies innovate when the state invests in innovation and teaches them to.
While there can be endless debates around the nature of conclusions here, a few things have become very clear and the most important one is that only very few systems are inherent against or in favour of technological progress. There is no one size fits all approach and it contains more randomness than an explainable intuitive phenomenon. While it is clear that Europe succeeded extraordinarily within the last 500 years, we don’t have any reason to believe through reductionist approaches that there have always existed people who were superior in their craft owing to things inherent factors like genes, geography, climate or even culture, while others were always inferior, with no hope of ever overcoming them.
Kuṭilamatiḥ Kauṭilya
With the many inferences we have drawn in our essay so far, we can now attempt to apply them to the great Acharya Kauṭilya. China and India had shared much in culture, by the Tang-Song periods this had only increased further due to the diffusion of religious and philosophical thought from India to much of the Orient. Both were self-regulating conservative societies with largely similar religions and social structures. Both societies had to face powerful invaders from the steppes at regular intervals. As discussed previously in our concluding theory, and as also witnessed by the historic success of China during the Tang-Song Era, it would make sense for India to succeed and innovate if it could follow the paths of the Tang-Song emperors.
Such a path would follow that the state must be centralized for a conservative country to be taught innovation; the state must promote bureaucrats to undertake science; it must set up various factories for arts, crafts and textiles to thrive; it must ensure that skilled labour has sufficient freedom and disposable incomes to tinker around in free time; it must ensure that feudal structures don’t keep people bound to land; ensure that private property is not violated; it must ensure that there do not exist any barriers to information; it must be willing to absorb refugees of foreign countries and extract their skills; known skills must be standardized to create a path upon which further developments can be made; the state must bridge the gap between the intellectual and working classes in order to put sciences to practical use.
A great state is not established through war and deceit alone, a great state is sustained through conscious effort, by keeping up with the changes across the world and leading them wherever possible. In the Kauṭilyan state, the use of slavery was minimal, Āryas were exempt from slavery and selling them into it was punished. The barbarians, however, could be purchased as slaves and Āryas after reaching the age of consent could pledge themselves as one for repaying debts. Āryas belonging to all four castes pledged as slaves had rights against exploitation of all sorts and couldn’t be forced to handle corpses, urine or faeces either. In the case of labourers, wages were standardized and proportionate to the work. Most land across the empire either was held privately or belonged to the crown, which was managed by bureaucrats. Feudal practices were marginal and labour was not tied to the land. Private producers on average would pay one-sixth of their produce while those working on crown lands would receive appropriate wages. Skilled labour received appreciable incomes and often had their families compensated if they were to die. Religious institutions were respected and protected by the state but didn’t have any restraining powers as seen with Christianity and Islam. All of these conditions satisfy the requirements for private initiative. The people are free from drudgery and skilled people are given satisfactory disposable incomes along with free time to tinker around.
The State operated factories and warehouses in all sectors, be it pastoralism, agriculture, mining, trading or travelling. It also provided workmen with tools of trade and initial investment in businesses. Such an atmosphere is visibly appreciable for innovative deeds to take place. As witnessed in the above histogram, physicians and carpenters were compensated extremely well. A distinction has been made between carpenters and artisans and craftsmen, this makes us believe that while the latter was engaged in more laborious tasks, the former held some managerial position alongside a technical one. In this manner, the state played an active part in innovating in the fields of biochemistry and mechanics, and it had good returns as well. Kauṭilya Arthashastra is rife with examples of mechanical devices which are not mentioned elsewhere. From simple water-lifting machines to advanced contraptions capable of controlling staircases and false walls or the many war machines mentioned in the Arthashastra, most of which are without a precedent, appear to be the many innovations during Kauṭilya’s age. Unfortunately, since they were without precedents, the specialized technical terminology has been lost forever and we cannot reconstruct most of them. To name a few —
The Superintendent of the Armory should employ artisans and craftsmen with expertise in these to manufacture mechanical devices for use in battle, for the defense of forts, and for assaulting enemy citadels, as well as weapons, armor, and equipment, after he has come to an agreement with them as to the amount of work, the time for completion, the wages, and the final product.
The stationary mechanical devices are Sarvatobhadra, Jāmadagnya, Bahumukha, Viśvāsaghātin, Saṃghāṭī , Yānaka, Parjanyaka, Bāhu, Ūrdhvabāhu, and Ardhabāhu.
The mobile mechanical devices are Pāñcālika, Devadaṇḍa, Sūkarikā , Musalayaṣṭi, Hastivāraka, Tālavr̥nta, hammer, mace, Spr̥ktalā , spade, Āsphāṭima, Utpāṭima, Udghāṭima, Śataghni, trident, and discus.
These devices weren’t mentioned merely for the sake of it. They are often referred to for their capacity at destroying huge fortifications or protecting fortifications. While the loss of specialized technical terminology has made it impossible to know them correctly, Indologists have attempted to conjure what they might have been based on medieval commentators who themselves had a hard time identifying most and recommended other texts to find scanty references. The Jāmadagnya & Bahumukha appear to be some sort of stationary ballistae which can shoot arrows. The Sarvatobhadra seems to be a cartwheel-shaped device that hurls stones like catapults upon spinning. Saṃghāṭī appears to be a machine for propelling incendiary devices against enemies. It should be noted that various recipes for incendiary grenades are mentioned in the Arthashastra as well. Parjanyaka appears to be some sort of fire engine to put out fires and Śataghni seems to be a spiked log fitted on cartwheels to be hurled against incoming enemies. The lack of archaeological remains shouldn’t stop us from believing in the existence of such devices either. Professor Dieter Schlingloff in studies prove that the archaeological remains of forts, drains and cities from Kauṭilya’s era have an extremely close resemblance to the designs mentioned in the Arthashastra.
Similarly there exist various recipes for producing medicinal, poisonous, incendiary or metallurgical effects. While many scholars have had a habit of brushing them off for their association with alchemy or for being esoteric, a critical investigation into them reveals that they were fully capable of producing the desired effects. While we are not competent enough to understand biology, we would like to cite one such example of a seemingly esoteric recipe —
Powder made from the speckled frog, Kauṇḍinyaka-insect, Kr̥kaṇa-insect, Pañcakuṣṭha-insect, and centipede; powder made from the Uccidiṅga-crab, Kambalī -insect, Śatakanda-insect, Idhma, and Kr̥kalā sa-lizard; powder made from the house lizard, Andhāhika-snake, Krakaṇṭaka, Pūtikīṭa-stinkbug, and Gomārikā— all this mixed with the sap of Bhallātaka-tree and Avalguja-plant causes instant death; or even the smoke of these. Or, after boiling any one of these insects along with a black snake and panic grain, he should desiccate that mixture. It is considered to cause instant death — Kauṭilya Arthashastra 14.1.4-5
Upon this, we shall quote the investigations by one very erudite scholar @blog_supplement which proved that these weren’t mere esoteric practices but serious poisons capable of killing people.
People have taken these recommendations of the great AchArya to be a bunch of hocus-pocus. However, in light of the reality of beetle toxins and the allusions of Ctesias and Aelian (both closer in time to kauTilya), both of whom also mention the deadly snake venoms being used in India, we take these seriously. It is interesting to note that Hindu method also involves mixing the toxin with plant extracts just as done by the bushmen. Of specific interest in this context is the use of the uchChiTi~Nga beetle – the very identity of this word has been obscure to modern Hindus. For instance, questioning modern college Ayurveda practitioners from the mahArATTa country one gets responses such as “poisonous insects”, “some kind of scorpion”, “centipede”, a shrimp or a venomous crab! Clearly most modern Hindus have lost the naturalistic spirit of their ancestors. But the key clue is given by the description of the envenomation by the uchChiTi~Nga in ancient Hindu medical tradition:
hR^iShTa-romochChiTi~Ngena stabdha-li~Ngo bhR^ishArtimAn | daShTaH shItodakenaiva siktAnya~NgAni manyate ||(This is from the medieval physician va~Ngasena’s chikitsA-sAra-saMgraha but it is a quotation on uchiChiti~Nga intoxication taken from the great saMhitA of charaka: chikitsA-sthAna 23.153)
Horripilations, priapism, violent seizures as though wetted by freezing water are the symptoms of uchChiTi~Nga envenomation. The mention of the priapism supports this being a cantharidin producing beetle: In the case of the French soldiers being poisoned by cantharidin the physician Meynier reports that they had “érections doloureuses et prolongées”. One of the symptoms mentioned by him is the lowered body temperature which matches wetting by freezing water account of the Hindus. Apparently, in the ancient world the Roman philosopher Lucretius Carus wanting to achieve pleasurable dhvajonnati instead attained the realm of Pluto by trying out cantharidin. Other arthropod toxins causing priapism are the Brazilian wandering spider and certain scorpions. The former is not known from India and also the Hindus clearly distinguished spiders in the lUtikA shAstra. The scorpion envenomation is always given separately in the Hindu texts under the vR^iShchika section and the ancient Hindus always distinguished the two in their toxicological works. Neither does it fit the sequestration induced toxicity of crabs and shrimps. Hence, indeed a beetle identification is the favored one. Traditional physicians in some parts of India use the potently toxic cantharidin-bearing beetle Mylabris cichorii for treating skin tumors making it a probable candidate. While the cantharidin-producing meloids are good candidates we cannot rule out secondary cantharidin-sequestering beetles (e.g. pyrochroids or anthicids); a bug could be an additional cantharidin sequesterer, which was also used: the pUtikITa of chANakya. — from the blog of @blog_supplement on twitter
Unlike medieval Hindus who had insulated themselves from the world beyond them, the great acharya was fully capable of absorbing information from foreign lands. He had set up a system of espionage in lands both domestic and foreign and officials, from the village level were expected to prepare full-length censuses of their surroundings. A nation capable of absorbing even trivial information from all corners would also prove itself capable of absorbing major advances from across the world. The depth of such censuses only goes on to disprove the trivial characterization of India as an unwritten civilization, but further what they prove is that the State had an active interest in all information, which it could use to enact the best policies.
The Collector, after dividing the countryside into four, should make a record of the total number of villages classified into best, middling, and lowest, stating which is exempt from tax, which supplies soldiers, and which provides grain, farm animals, money, forest produce, labor, or counter-levy, and how much. Under his supervision, a Revenue Officer should look after a five-village unit or a ten-village unit.
He should have a written record made of the total number of villages according to their boundary limits, and the total number of fields by enumerating the plowed and unplowed fields, dry and wetlands, parks, vegetable plots, flower gardens and orchards, forests, buildings, sanctuaries, temples, reservoirs, cemeteries, rest houses, water-dispensing sheds, holy places, pasture lands, and roads. In accordance with that, he should, with reference to the boundaries and the fields, have a written record made of the dimensions of the borders, wild tracts, and roads, and of grants, sales, favors, and tax-exemptions, as well as of the houses, enumerating which ones pay taxes and which are tax-exempt, and stating—in them, there are so many who belong to the four social classes; so many who are farmers, cowherds, traders, artisans, workers, and slaves; there are so many who are two-footed and four-footed; and this is the money, labor, duty, and fines accruing from them. With regard to men and women of the families, furthermore, he should find out how many are children and old people, what their occupations and customs are, and the amount of their earnings and expenditures. — Kauṭilya Arthashastra 2.35.2-5
These are not mere conjectures, the Kauṭilyan state’s capacity at keeping up with best practices is proven by the extensive knowledge of geography and produces from across the world mentioned in the Arthashastra. Amongst many other things, Kauṭilya is aware of the corals of Egypt and the Mediterranean, and also the silk of China. However, his adoption of superior foreign practices is best displayed in his use of the word suruṅgā in his treatise in the context of military activities. The term suruṅgā comes from the Greek word σήραγγα [síranga]
, some scholars have argued that Kauṭilya probably learnt of the use of tunnelling and counter-tunnelling during sieges from the Greeks who employed such techniques massively and adopted them. If Hindus of medieval times were open-minded like the great acharya in the adoption of superior military techniques of the Turks then perhaps the history of India would’ve been different today.
While Kauṭilya is not fond of any sort of political dynamism, his extensive use of the secret services to root out malpractices and corruption is fairly enough to ensure that the bureaucracy doesn’t become a conservative inhibiting force. Like with all centralized regimes, this can be a double-edged sword where one bad apple can ruin the efforts of generations before him, and that did happen, with the third generation of Maurya monarchs turning to infidelity.
Much like the Chinese where bureaucrats were supposed to be at the vanguard of scientific and technological progress, Kauṭilya too expects that the many ministers and bureaucrats are well-versed in various sciences necessary for the progress of their respective fields. In his times, we find science and technology coming together by bridging the gap between the intelligentsia and the working class. Kauṭilya democratizes science by leaving its practical applications in the hands of the working class, and bureaucrats are supposed to be the ones diffusing such information. This is partially witnessed in the standardization of weights and time through the diffusion of the steelyard and the water clock and more witnessed in the qualitative analysis of gems and application of forensic sciences during criminal investigations.
Gold*-bearing liquids are those that flow in the interior of hollows, caves, valleys, rock cuts, or covert excavations on mountains in recognized regions; liquids that have the color of rose apple, mango, Palmyra nut, slice of ripe turmeric, jaggery, orpiment, red arsenic, honey, vermilion, white lotus, or feathers of a parrot or peacock; that have water and plants of the same color in the vicinity; and that are viscous, limpid, and heavy. If they spread like oil when thrown in water and soak up mud and dirt, they are capable of infusing copper and silver over a hundredfold. What is similar to them but with an acrid smell and taste should be identifi ed as bitumen. Ores from earth and rocks that have a yellow, copper, or coppery-yellow color; that contain blue streaks or have the color of Mudga-bean, Māṣa-bean, or Kr̥ṣara porridge when they are split; that are speckled as if with drops or globs of curd; that have the color of turmeric, myrobalan, a lotus leaf, moss, liver, spleen, or saff ron; that contain lines, dots, or svastikas of fine sand when they are split; that have nodules and are lustrous; and that do not split but do produce a lot of foam and smoke when they are heated—they are the ones that are gold ores. When used as an admixture, they are capable of infusing copper and silver. — Kauṭilya Arthashastra 2.12.1-6
While we are not attributing the discovery of such qualitative analysis to Kauṭilya, his merit herein should be noted in the fact that he has standardized it and handed it over to the Superintendent of Mines and his team. This allows further development of qualitative analysis of mines as a branch as a whole by democratizing such standardized knowledge to all miners, who can in turn give their insights if they find any. The practical application of sciences reaches its epitome in forensic investigation, wherein mere investigators were to conduct experiments to find out the cause of death. Some technical terminology has gone missing in this case too and replaced by easier words, but the translation conveys the principles in action appropriately —
He should examine a person who has died suddenly after he has been coated with oil. When urine and feces have spurted out, the abdominal skin is bloated with wind, the hands and feet are swollen, the eyes are open wide, and the throat has marks on it, he should know that the man was killed by suffocation through strangulation.
When the hands, feet, teeth, and nails have turned dark; the flesh, bodily hair, and skin droop; and the mouth is coated with foam, he should know that the man was killed with poison. When a man with those same marks has bloody fang marks, he should know that the man was killed by a snake or insect. When the clothes and limbs are contorted and excessive vomiting and purging have taken place, he should know that the man was killed by a coma-inducing mixture.
He should examine the leftover food of a man killed by poison using birds. When material extracted from the heart is thrown in fire, if it makes a crackling sound or becomes rainbow-colored, he should know that it contains poison; or when he sees that the heart remains unburned after he has been cremated. — Kauṭilya Arthashastra 4.7.1~13
Since the Arthashastra isn’t a treatise on medicine or chemicals, we’d never learn the true source of such insights. What is appreciable is that the State has played an active role to translate scientific insights into practical applications usable by all people in a way which is rare to witness across the world.
Final Conclusion
This brings us back to the question we posed initially, what was so special about a simplistic carrier of water like the Rain Gauge? Why did we spend so much time elaborating upon it? I suppose our readers would’ve understood it by themselves at this stage but let us elaborate anyways. The Rain Gauge encompasses all features of a state engaged in advancing itself. Creating a jar for measuring rainfall is simple technology; understanding the effect of rain on the yield of crops in various regions and soils is a science; planting measurement stations across a country is the democratization of technology; having bureaucrats study agriculture is the state’s scientific initiative; recollecting measurements from across the nation is the state’s capacity to absorb information; using this information to predict rains in the near-future and craft appropriate policy is good statecraft. Thus, the implementation of a Rain Gauge, albeit a very simple task, is an evidentiary value of a state’s bureaucratic capacity, its capacity at democratizing technology and is a very practical mixture of science and technology. Apart from this, as previously discussed, Mauryan India had advanced very fast in metallurgy, shipping, forensics, alchemy, medicine and art.
All of this goes on to prove that Mauryan India was on a path of progress, not just in expansion on land but also in sciences and technology, which was somehow later lost. Societies like India cannot innovate until a centralized state partakes heavily in it. It is no wonder that the bulk of Indian sciences was produced in the courts of the Gupta Emperors. One could even argue that it was this openness and initiative to progress, rather than blind revanchism which led to a unified India stretching across the subcontinent for the first and perhaps only time.
Let us end with a salutation to him, who is the source of pride for every Arya inhabiting this earth, as authored by the wise Kāmandaka—
Salutation to the wise Viṣṇugupta, born of a great family with descendants renowned all over the world for their sage-like conduct in not accepting gifts of any kind; salutation to him who appears to be as effulgent as the sacrificial fire, well-versed in the Vedas so much so that with his own inherent faculty he mastered all the four Vedas as if they were one; salutation to him who by his magical powers, as irresistible as thunder in fury, totally uprooted the great and powerful Nandas; (salutation) to him who like the god Śaktidhara, single handed by the exercise of his power of counselling secured the world for Candragupta, the prince among men; salutation to that learned one who produced the nectar of Nītisāra out of the mighty ocean of the Arthaśāstra.
Don't know how to edit the post, will add the bibliography in comments. Also, requesting all to only ask relevant questions, I'll remove/block them otherwise.
1. Kautilya Arthashastra by Patrick Olivelle [10/10]
2. The Lever of Riches -Joel Mokyr [10/10]
3. How the World got Rich - Mark Koyama & Jared Rubin [10/10]
4. Greek and Roman Mechanical Water-Lifting Devices & The History of a Technology -JOHN PETER OLESON [9/10]
5. Clocks and Culture - Mark M Cipolla
6. Medieval Technology and Social Change - Lynn White
7. The pattern of the Chinese past : a social and economic interpretation - Elvin Mark
8. A history of Western technology - Friedrich Klemm
9. The Collapse of Complex Societies - Joseph Tainter
10. Science and Civilization in China [6 volume work] - Joseph Needham
11. The European Miracle - Eric Jones
12. Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared M Diamond
13. The Rise and Fall of Imperial China - Yuhua Wang
14. https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/
Respected sir, I am a second year college student studying Mechanical Engineering. Inspired from people like you, I have come to know about the glory of Ancient India.
After doing some research myself, I have come to know that it is India where all the major technology related innovations have occured:
1)The Indians were the first to enter in the bronze age.
2)The earliest evidence of Iron age is also found in India(Tamil Nadu 4500 yrs bp)
3)Age of Electronics and Communications was started by JC Bose.
4)Father of Optical fiber was an Indian.
5)Also, Ancient Indian prosodist and mathematician Pingala was the first to develop and use the binary number system.
Which eventually led us to the computer/digital/information age.
What I want to know is that between the Iron age and the Electronics&Communications age, there was an age of Industrialisation which was possible due to our understanding of thermodynamics, but I cannot find about any mention of science of thermodynamics in our Hindu Scriptures.
So can you please do some research and make a dedicated video on What Hindu scriptures say about thermodynamics.
It will be a great contribution to our heritage and our culture from your side if you make a dedicated video on this.