Slavery and Industrialization
Published in
Dec 23, 2021
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
By the time of Archimedes, the ancient Greek/Roman world had remarkable mechanical know-how. What prevented them from developing steam, electrical, and internal combustion engines?
Perhaps slavery. If necessity is the mother of invention, where there is no necessity, invention does not take place. For whatever they needed to do, they had cheap energy readily available in the form of slaves. Hence there was no need to develop alternative forms of energy. The Industrial Revolution in England and then in New England coincided with the abolition of slavery. And in the South, industrialization could not happen until it, too, abandoned slavery.
