David Oliver's blog

So, to sum up this rather long series, in which I gave a selective history of pre-industrial, post-medieval Europe, focussing on two phenomena: colonialism, and the ‘scientific revolution.’

What do those two things have to do with the Industrial Revolution?

Practical innovation

I’ll start with the scientific revolution, where the connection is easier to see. This was where the practices of modern science were born. For the first time in human history, people were developing a detailed and accurate description of how nature works. Continue reading “Backstory to the industrial revolution: conclusion”

Backstory to the industrial revolution: part 3

In the last post, we traced the origins of colonialism, first with the Portuguese mapping a route around the tip of Africa to Asia, rapidly followed by the Spanish discovering and colonizing America. Drawn to the east by trade, and to the west by the appetite for land and resources, Europeans spread across the globe.

In this part, I want to cover what went down within Europe over the same time period.

Thing is, a lot went down. On the cultural side, there was the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, just to name the major watersheds.

On the political side, European supremacy was contested by a shifting cast of major powers, alongside a multitude of smaller political entities. In the 1600s and 1700s, conflicts within Europe were increasingly mirrored by wars in the colonies in America and Asia.

To compress the story into a single blog post, and at the risk of committing the sin of teleology, I’m going to emphasise a single cultural development that seems crucial as a precursor to the Industrial Revolution: the so-called ‘scientific revolution.’ This was the transformation of the natural sciences, over a century or so, from a medieval framework into more or less the form we know today.

As I noted in a previous post, the IR was in large part a technological phenomenon. The rapid technological change that took place is inexplicable without the knowledge and the techniques that were introduced by the scientific revolution. Continue reading “Backstory to the industrial revolution: part 3”

Backstory to the industrial revolution: part 2

Let’s continue the backstory of the Industrial Revolution where we left off. We saw that European traders briefly enjoyed direct access to eastern luxuries during the reign of the Mongols, then had it cruelly snatched away.

In this installment we’ll trace the rise of colonialism, which started as a mission to regain that access.

In the colonial era, Europeans became masters of the world’s oceans, and thereby the controllers of international trade. Eurasia and America also became linked for the first time, which would be a huge spur to European development. (Though not so great for America’s native civilizations.) Continue reading “Backstory to the industrial revolution: part 2”

Backstory to the industrial revolution: part 1

So to recap: I traced the roots of modern wealth to the Industrial Revolution which began in Britain in the late 18th century and spread through Europe and the United States in the 19th century. Then we got diverted into a somewhat abstract discussion of why the IR permitted such a profound transformation in living standards and human capabilities, based on the massive multipliers in energy output allowed by new technologies. Continue reading “Backstory to the industrial revolution: part 1”

Finding the energy

Why is the world’s wealth distributed as it is?

At the end of the last post, looking at Gapminder, we took note that the rich countries of the world could be divided up into roughly four groups. There are the states of western Europe; a few former English colonies, most notably the US; the oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf; and finally the highly-industrialised countries of east Asia.

How did it come to be that way? Well, how long has it been that way? Continue reading “Finding the energy”

For richer or poorer

I want to write about a topic I don’t fully understand. In my defense, it seems like nobody else does, either. But the posts to follow will be as much about documenting my own learning process as about sharing what I already know.

Why are some countries rich, and other countries poor? That’s the question I’m interested in. How did that state of affairs come about? Why does it persist? Continue reading “For richer or poorer”

Writing: it’s all about the reader

I said in the last post that I wanted to impart some tips on writing which have been very useful to me. These are all taken from a great article, The Science of Scientific Writing, by George Gopen and Judy Swan.

Gopen & Swan’s big theme is ‘reader expectations.’ Readers, it turns out, don’t just suck up all the words in a text indiscriminately, scramble them all in a mental blender, and absorb the resulting purée as pure information. Instead they look for a running story in any stretch of prose. And, semi-consciously, they – we – look for clues to that story in the structural choices made by the writer. I’ll explain what this really means below. Continue reading “Writing: it’s all about the reader”

Good writing and bad writing advice

I read Monserratt’s first thesis chapter this week. It got me thinking about the subject of writing well, and the related sub-subject of giving advice on writing well.

The latter makes up a fairly vast genre. Good writing style doesn’t come easily. More to the point, writing makes people anxious. The demand for advice runs high, and the supply is there to match: Amazon gives about 12,000 results under the ‘Writing Skills’ category.

A lot of this advice is undoubtedly good. But there’s an insidious and perversely resilient brand of writing advice which is bad, bad, bad. I’m talking about what is politely called prescriptivism. It’s less politely known as ‘pedantry’ or ‘grammar Nazism.’ Continue reading “Good writing and bad writing advice”

What’s in a Turing test?

The Turing test is one of those snippets of technological folklore that, every so often, triggers a flurry of media excitement. Wild claims are made, dubious headlines are run up the flagpole, much fun is had by all.

Partly, no doubt, because it’s beautifully simple to explain. The idea was articulated by British cryptographer Alan Turing, back in 1950. Turing posed the simple question: could a machine think? Being a no-nonsense chap with a distaste for definitional wrangling, he illustrated his question with an objective test. Take one human judge. Have the judge communicate with two subjects. One is a regular-issue human being, the other is a machine. The trick is, the judge doesn’t know which is which. The subjects are in a physically separate location to the judge, and can only communicate via text message. The judge’s job is to detect the human, by posing any questions they see fit. Continue reading “What’s in a Turing test?”