Some of the ideas in the 10,000 Year Explosion have got me wondering whether the spread of the Ashkenazi culture played an important role in starting the industrial revolution.
The Ashkenazi developed a unique culture that was isolated for many centuries from the mainstream. Then around 1800, western Europe allowed Jews to interact much more with the rest of society (The 10,000 Year Explosion suggests that it started in 1791 in France).
At about the same time, the same region experienced a sudden shift in values that increased the status of merchants, which is what you’d expect if Ashkenazi culture that had previously been shunned became partially accepted. Those values may have contributed significantly to the industrial revolution.
The 10,000 Year Explosion explains why the Ashkenazi had some unique values that were somewhat unlikely to have been duplicated elsewhere, which would help explain why the industrial revolution didn’t start somewhere other than northern Europe.
This isn’t a complete explanation of the industrial revolution – for one thing, it doesn’t explain why England developed faster than France.
A completely unrelated idea of how agricultural diversity helped British farming productivity around the same time: Agricultural biodiversity crucial to the agricultural “revolution”.
The Ashkenazi Jews had nothing to do with the early stages of the Industrial revolution: nothing to do with with people like Boulton and Watt.
The timing is wrong.
> This isn’t a complete explanation of the industrial revolution – for one thing, it doesn’t explain why England developed faster than France.
And as you say, it is dependent on the timing being right; when the IR should be identified as starting is an old argument. Clark in _A Farewell to Alms_ identifies a number of different starting points; apparently as late as 1860 has been seriously suggested.
Also, the Ashkenazi are a really small group and not famous for their involvement in steam or shipping or other areas identified with industrialization, and the IR was a massive worldwide shift, so the imbalance makes me skeptical. It’d be a lot more plausible numerically if the shift started with Protestants or just Calvinists.
Suggested reading and considered an old classic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism
A somewhat more interesting question for me on closely related matter:
Hasn’t southern slavery in the United States been passed off as by most historians “pre-modern” or “pre-industrial”, when in reality it survived precisely because of the industrial modernity of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin ?
And didn’t slavery in the antebellum United States actually provide surplus investment capital to spur industrial growth ?
That’s why so many of our historic American industrial giants like the railroads and shipping companies employed slave labor.
And why the first US insurance companies (many headquartered in the north) underwrote and often ensured losses from the slave trade.