CODA: THE FLASH FLOOD
One mystery remains. Industrialism was a flash flood in history—a brief three centuries lost in the immensity of time. What caused the industrial revolution? What sent the Second Wave surging across the planet?
Many streams of change flowed together to form a great confluence. The discovery of the New World sent a pulse of energy into Europe’s culture and economy on the eve of the industrial revolution. Population growth encouraged a movement into the towns. The exhaustion of Britain’s timber forests prompted the use of coal. In turn, this forced the mine shafts deeper and deeper until the old horse-driven pumps could no longer clear them of water. The steam engine was perfected to solve this problem, leading to a fantastic array of new technological opportunities. The gradual dissemination of indust-real ideas challenged church and political authority. The spread of literacy, the improvement of roads and transport—all these converged in time, forcing open the floodgates of change.
Any search for The cause of the industrial revolution is doomed. For there was no single or dominant cause. Technology, by itself, is not the driving force of history. Nor, by themselves, are ideas or values. Nor is the class struggle. Nor is history merely a record of ecological shifts, demographic trends or communications inventions. Economics alone cannot explain this or any other historical event. There is no “independent variable” upon which all other variables depend. There are only interrelated variables, boundless in complexity. Faced with this maze of causal influences, unable even to
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