But I'm sure the challenge would be different, and potentially less scary, from Henry the Navigator's bane. The Portuguese were in high-freeboard open-ocean sailing carracks, with no effective recourse to rowing. And Bojador, coming from the north, presents a terrifying lee shore: the winds and current push vessels towards it, with shoals extending from the coast. Sailing close to a lee shore is a bit like walking on a slack line: one mistake and disaster is inevitable. You need to accurately predict your drift over the whole transit, you need hope the wind doesn't veer, and because there's a ferocious current too, the wind must not die. In short, it takes a skilled captain and navigator (and the much better strategy is just to sail offshore, which is what the Portuguese eventually did). Even a modern Bermudan yacht would be challenged attempting to transit Bojador southerly and close to shore.

A Phoenician trireme-type-boat would not be able to sail upwind at all - rowing would have been required for this part of the journey. Maybe on a lull day they could out-row the current? In any case, the challenges were different - and they would have had the additional motivation of not being able to turn back for home.

[0] Source: I'm a sailor!

Footnotes so formatted are a shibboleth of this community, not a practicality.

Phoenician boats would have been significantly shallower drafts, and more importantly, they would have been sailing with the wind and current, not against it, since they were coming north at that point, not going south.

He repeatedly makes the point that some technology that Europe 'discovered' in the 13-19hundreds was in fact known in china 1000+ years earlier. Most of recorded history Europe basically played no role whatsoever.

A few examples that struck me, taken from his snapshot pages 'The world in xxxx' which are scattered throughout the book:

5000BCE * first smelting of copper in Anatolia and Elam

2000BCE * glass produced in south west asia * development of the chariot in southwest Asia and china

600BCE * first production of cast iron in china * iron working in west Africa

150CE * First use of paper in china * compass in use in china

600CE * 1200 mile long canal built in china * iron cables for suspension bridges in china * horse collar used in china * paper used in china and korea

750CE * first wood block printing in China

1000CE * vikings reach north America * first gunpowder weapons in china * paper money in china * horse collar used in europe

1200CE * multi-,colour printing in china * European ships adopt Chinese stern-rudder and compass

...

   >  development of the chariot in southwest Asia and china

Disclaimer: I don't know English history well enough to put together a better explanation, but I'm sure this has been the subject of a number of PhD theses. Maybe someone can point to a source that goes into better detail.

The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians.

I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens.

Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits.

Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't.

Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.

Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.

The early moderns are also interesting because of the wage issue, which is not quite what it seems. It is known that wages were high following the Black Death, and this created room for mercantile economics powered by double-entry bookkeeping, rather than tributary ones, to take over the political economy. Everything in the modern period becomes a bit more of a business. However, the political class then moved to lower wages and adopted such as part of early merchantalist theory - keep them lean and hungry so they work hard.

This attitude encouraged the development of impressment, indentured servitude and chattel slavery: the easiest way to move a worker's wages off the books was to turn them into property. Thus by the mid 1600's, you already have a world where the populace has been disempowered and coerced into the project of colonial nation building(a means of putting more assets on the books - claim the rights), and the backlash to that powers an interest in developing liberalism in the 1700's, which coincides with the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Smith. There's a lot of history that coincides with "and then this philosopher published a very relevant work".

The underlying political thing of early modern Europe, of course, was the disunification. The inventors and scholars in this period are always fleeing from a noble that they pissed off and finding refuge somewhere else. A unified Europe would have had more opportunities to surpress technologies, as occurred in China throughout its history.

None of that forms a complete hypothesis, and it doesn't even touch on the "why Britain specifically" question, but it gets it away from being a "Europe so great" anaysis.

[0] http://blog.mmi-direct.com/machining-history-lathe-the-mothe...

First and foremost was easy access to coal. Energy is really where wealth is at. Coal and iron make modern steam engines and rail and trains possible at all. Get that ball going and the possibilities become endless and feasible.

Secondly was not so much economics but financial structure. England had already well-established notions of corporations and stock trading, which made venture fund raising a lot more accessible than loans.

Whatever labor costs might have been, any level of automation would have greatly improved productivity.

That said, perceived labor costs are important. Where slavery operated, the perception of cheap labor made economies less likely to industrialize -- the antebellum American South is representative of this.

Additional factors include having a middle class, a venture/enterprising culture (think East India company), a permissive government, and other things. Perhaps even the background of recent civil wars and religious strife might have helped, I don't know.

So why did it start in Britain, rather than the United States or post-revolutionary France?

To be fair, I think freedom and individuality are part of the story, but that story is more sociological than philosophical. In part, I wonder if it is a consequence of the reformation and counter-reformation, which arrived at an accommodation in which the populace was allowed some freedom in how it conducted itself, so long as it did not challenge the authority of the state.

Link: https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_6.shtml

Relevant paragraph: "Something did happen, and it was called the Industrial Revolution. I’ve marked on the graph the year 1769, in which James Watt patented his steam engine. While the first practical steam engine was invented in 1698, Watt’s more efficient steam engine really got the Industrial Revolu- tion going. One of the steam engine’s main applications was the pumping of water out of coal mines. Figure 1.5 shows what happened to British coal production from 1769 onwards. The figure displays coal production in units of billions of tons of CO2 released when the coal was burned. In 1800, coal was used to make iron, to make ships, to heat buildings, to power locomotives and other machinery, and of course to power the pumps that enabled still more coal to be scraped up from inside the hills of England and Wales. Britain was terribly well endowed with coal: when the Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting in coal under Britain was roughly the same as the amount sitting in oil under Saudi Arabia."

If I had to pick one factor: I’d say the breakup of feudalism in Europe, in which a lot of hierarchies were thrown upside down, was probably the most important factor. If you read accounts of Chinese science, you often see things like “but then that fell out of favor in the court, and was abandoned.” In a society where everyone has a specific place, and roles and hierarchies are rigid, there isn’t much room for invention and change because it’s going to be seen as threatening rather than as an opportunity by the people one step above you. That would be my guess.

As an example, China had imperial examination[1] for government jobs since 607 - a system not seen in the West until modern times. Ancient Rome built concrete buildings that their descendants couldn't replicate for centuries, yet they failed to start Industrial Revolution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination

The short version is that the Song dynasty appeared to have all the precursor technology needed for industrialization by the 12th century, but then just didn't. The most commonly held view is probably that society and economics is as important than technology, and that while they at that point had the kind of metallurgy that Europeans could only dream of until the late 18th century, what they didn't have was labor shortages and capitalism, which were what made industrialization something people wanted to actually do. But this is by far not the only proposed explanation.

In general, because of the recent history of the west appears like it, I think we are far too predisposed to view of development as a linear progression towards something, that history has a direction, and that direction is up. For most of history, for most societies, this hasn't really been true. As many societies have spent as long stagnating or even regressing as have advanced. It's just that so long as one advances, eventually it's going to influence it's neighbors, either by taking them over or by having them frantically play catch-up to not be taken over, and so the whole thing has a direction.

This leads to my pet theory for why Europe: Because Europe has managed for almost the entirety of it's history to avoid being conquered by a single empire, so everyone was always afraid of their neighbors, yet there was a solid enough foundation of international law that everyone wasn't at war with all their neighbors all the time. This created both a backdrop that forced states to push to be more powerful, even over entrenched interests, and the conditions where the best way to do this often enough wasn't beating up your neighbors and taking their stuff.

"Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of superior intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions."

For example the mediterranean region had 5(6?) domesticated animals and had wheat,barley oats and spelt grains. Asia had rice.

The North Americans in contrast, had no domesticated animals and didn't get maize until shortly before the Europeans arrived.

That has slowly over ages created culture that put premium on technological progress.

What other things are at play, for example, in Japan's bonkers hight population across history?

I find it useful to explain some concept that most readers probably know, to bulletproof ("yes, I'm well aware there are one or two edge cases but they're really not relevant in general. Let's move on."), historical digressions that aren't important to the general point, and references. (Of course, if it's only references, those work fine as end notes.)

The only way to do it is to sail far out into open ocean, well beyond sight of land, but the change in the winds drives you even further out to sea. Even in the early 1800s it was lethal, sinking as many as a handful of ships per year. Coast hugging just isn’t going to cut it.

Oars need to be relatively close to the surface of the water, and where there are oarlocks water can get into the ship. Open seas are heavy seas, meaning the waves are very very high; six foot seas are nothing in the ocean, but a bitch to bob around in. And, in heavy seas you need deep draft--the "height" of the boat under water--for stability. Also, the "powerplant" and "fuel" for oars takes up too much space limiting the freight capacity of a ship. This is basically why rowing technology was abandoned for sailing around the world or across oceans. Paddle steamers were used somewhat, but the paddles just don't have the purchase against the surrounding water to move a heavy deep draft ship.

Not saying it couldn't be done, but the logistics boggle the mind.

You assume the coast was the same two milennia before.

My hometown, a thousand km north, was in the coast two thousand years ago. Now it's 5 km inland.

> Examining the Pilot Charts for this area, however, it becomes clear that the main concern lies in the changes in winds that occur at about the point at which Cape Bojador is passed in sailing down the coast. It is here that the winds start to blow strongly from the northeast at all seasons. Together with the half-knot set of current down the coast, these conditions would naturally alarm a medieval mariner used to sailing close to the land and having no knowledge of what lay ahead. In the end it was discovered that by sailing well out to sea—far out of sight of land—a more favorable wind could be picked up.

Much of the tin used to make the Bronze Age the Bronze Age came from Cornwall, and the Phoenicians had a monopoly on that trade.

For example, we now have multiple solid lines of evidence that ancient Polynesians were making it all the way from Oceana to Peru, and back, with some degree of regularity. We see this in human genetics on both sides, as well as the introduction of the potato to Oceana. The Polynesians had a very different approach to navigation than europeans, one based on amassing a great deal of knowledge about currents, bird and sea life behavior, as well as intuitive celestial navigation.

It seems likely the first folks to make this trip were forced into it via a storm or such, but what's stunning is it's clear some of them were able to map the path well enough to be able to find their way back home later. There are still some people who use these navigation skills today. Look up the maps they make with sticks and twine. They're pretty interesting.

In any case, my point is there's historically been a lot of variation in sailing techniques and technology. If you looked at an ancient Polynesian proa, you'd almost certainly assume it's impossible they could cross such a vast distance. But they did. No doubt many drowned, but we know as an empirical fact some made it, and made it back.

The ancient Phoenicians were brilliant mariners. They invented the trireme, the keel, the amphora, etc. It's easy to think of these as crude technologies, especially based on hollywood portrays, but the reality is these were the NASA astronauts of their era. Coordinating large number of rowers that are stuck in the hull and blind to their surroundings is not as trivial as it might seem.

As another comment points out, triremes and similar vessels usually beach at night. The sailors are capable of dragging the things considerably away from the water line. In fact they have to do so relatively often to let the boats dry out for some number of days. Likewise we know of several places around the med where ships were dragged considerable distances over standardized portage/ferrying routes routinely.

This is very different from the ships the Portuguese were using in the 1400s. Their ships were bigger, with deeper draft, and with rock ballast in the lowest hold for stability. They'd have a limited capability to use poles/oars to push themselves through shallows where they were partially dragging, but covering longer distances on land with such ships is infeasible without far more people. Combine that with an aversion to sailing out of sight of the coastline, and you can see why they'd face more issues in this area.

In any case, I'm no authority on these topics, just another curious person on the internet, but I find it entirely plausible the Phoenicians simply walked their boats past this obstacle.

Modern humans have an unfortunate habit of projecting our own perspective on labor onto ancient peoples. Humans are capable of truly astounding things with nothing more than their bodies when focused on a common goal for a sustained time. The best example is neolithic architecture. There was no magic trick to building Stonehenge. They just used a ton of people over a long time to drag the rocks there, and then sea saw them into position.

Three correct details (Africa mostly surrounded by waters, Africa straddling the equator, Africa being very large) that would have been hard to make up out of sheer fantasy. Especially (2).

Though the Egyptians almost certainly long had known by then that the Earth is round and it's possible that he made very educated guesses and told us a fantasy just cause, and pretended to not believe the bit about the Sun just to make his story more mythical to his contemporaries. But is that likely? Did he do a lot of that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_Ship_Expedition

Isn't that saying the same thing?