All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent. Now all of that said I want to reiterate that the industrial revolution only happened once in one place so may well could have happened somewhere else in a different way with different preconditions; we’ll never really know because our one industrial revolution spread over the whole globe before any other industrial revolutions happened. But we can still note that the required precursors for the one sample we have didn’t exist in the Roman economy.

this is a particularly interesting point to consider–what other ways might an industrial revolution (or series of them) happen besides the way in which ours did? i’m sure someone out there has written alternate history to this effect, since there’s alt history for almost everything you can think of.

That’s kind of a ridiculous question… the industrial revolution took place like a thousand years later