I don’t disagree with your explanation of exponential growth or how it does answer for the speed at which we went from, say the magnifying glass to the hubble space telescope.
However, the exponential growth alone model does have a floor: it presumes that there was some kind of push, drive or want for progress. Like, as if there was a destination we’re supposed to end up at and its just a case of how long it took to get there. It excludes the idea that people might not have wanted to.
People didn’t want to toil all day in someone else’s farm. In smaller numbers, on good land, people didn’t have to do very much to get the food they needed. Its only when farming became developed and consistent enough that those living there had the numbers to go kill the people who lived on the good land.
Once we’d been, for all intense and purpose, domesticated by grain, “progress” was inevitable.
Another example would be the industrial revolution. People ask why it was so much faster here in the UK than France. It wasn’t because of a desire for progress. Its that French people had a natural aversion to being worked for 12 hours a day in hell-like factories and workhouses. I mean, British people did too but they had mostly just been kicked off the common land they had lived on for centuries. So, they had no other place to go and begging and not having a job for more than three days was made illegal, punishable by being sent to to workhouses. At one points, they had more British soldiers fighting the riots at home than they had fighting napoleon.
my comment referred to knowledge more than anything. the more you know, the more you have to go from to learn new things. incredibly simplistic summary for very complex phenomena, but I wasn’t going to go through the entire human history. there are breaking points and regression stages, but generally speaking it makes sense that the more you progress, the faster you can progress further. you have more tools.
Not entirely true, England just had a shit ton of trade from its colonies, and better trade led to more intense interconnection, and wealth which in the developing industrial method of production led to an explosion of capital. It was to the point the Rhodes (Rhodesia the British colony was named after him) called expansion an existential question for England, because the explosion of capital had to go somewhere. What’s nuts about capital is that it produces more capital using ever more advanced industries and methods of production. England with massive markets and capital available was able to do this to an insane degree. But still, France is something like the third wealthiest nation after US and England, so they did not do too bad for themselves, and their capital still had a field day in Africa. Highly recommend reading Marx or Lenin on imperialism, it’s legit the whole Marxist thesis how modern industry came about, and for Marx, he literally wrote Capital based on data in England. It’s absolutely fascinating how society and the economy entered a seismic shift with the advent of Captialism
None of that explains the difference in time it took for each country to industrialise. For it to, would be to claim it was capitalism itself that did so, meaning the claim is that it wouldn’t have happened were it not for capitalism which wouldn’t be right.
Thanks but I’ve read das kapital too and, you’ll find on reflection, that, far from refuting what i said, it corroborates it fully. In particular, the chapters where he talks about the acts of enclosure. Around chapter 26 or 27, if I remember correctly.
Tried to find it but could not. Also the level of commerce absolutely had to do with how rapidly England industrialized, even if it was not the only factor. The massive accumulation of wealth and concentration of productive forces in cities was made by and made possible the advent of industrialization. Also it would not be wrong to say that capitalism caused itself, it was a continuous development from feudalism to capitalism, until it wasn’t and had to be sorted out by capitalism overthrowing the previous social order. So even if the populations of each country were different, the core idea that capital shapes the social relations still holds true, regardless of what may have come before, capitalism at a certain point had to revolutionize social relations. Perhaps if you want to argue, you could say the French were more radical in resisting capitalism (the monarchy, then the working class), maybe. But the working class could only fight capitalism once capitalism had developed to the point of creating a working class.