WEBVTT

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Hi, I’m John Green;

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this is Crash Course World History

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and today we’re going to discuss
the series of events

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that made it possible for you to watch

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Crash Course.

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And also made this studio possible.

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And made the warehouse containing the studio
possible.

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A warehouse, by the way,

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that houses stuff for warehouses.

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That’s right, it’s time to talk about

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the industrial revolution.

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Although it occurred around
the same time as

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the French, American, Latin American,
and Haitian Revolutions—

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between, say, 1750 and 1850—

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the industrial revolution was really

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the most revolutionary of the bunch.

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No way, dude.

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All those other revolutions resulted in,

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like,

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new borders and flags and stuff.

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We’ve studied 15,000 years
of history here at Crash Course,

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Me from the Past.

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And borders and flags
have changed plenty,

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and they’re going to keep changing.
[that's a twofer: awesome + ominous]

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But in all that time,

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nothing much changed about

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the way we disposed of waste
[g'luck with toilet teching, Bill Gates!]

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or located drinking water or
acquired clothing.

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Most people lived on or very close
to the land that provided their food.

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[like above an Eata Pita?]

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Except for a few exceptions,

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life expectancy never rose
above 35 or below 25.

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Education was a privilege not a right.

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In all those millennia,

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we never developed a weapon

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that could kill more than
a couple dozen people at once,

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or a way to travel faster
than horseback.

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For 15,000 years,

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most humans never owned
or used a single item

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made outside of their communities.

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Simon Bolivar didn’t change that

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and neither did the American
Declaration of Independence.

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You have electricity?

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Industrial revolution.

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Blueberries in February?

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Industrial revolution.

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You live somewhere other
than a farm?

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Industrial revolution.

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You drive a car?

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Industrial revolution.

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You get twelve years of free,
formal education?

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[peep the creepy teacher in the back]

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Industrial revolution.

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Your bed,

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your antibiotics,

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your toilet,

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your contraception,

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your tap water,

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your every waking
and sleeping second:

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[mongol-tage footage!]

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Industrial revolution.

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[Intro music]

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[intro music]

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[intro music]

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[intro music]

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[intro music]

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[intro music]

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[intro music]

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Here’s one simple statistic
that sums it up:

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Before the industrial revolution,

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about 80% of the world’s population
was engaged in farming

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to keep itself and the other
20% of people from starving.

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Today, in the United States,

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less than 1% of people
list their occupation as farming.

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I mean,

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we’ve come so far that we don’t
even have to farm flowers anymore.

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Stan,

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are these real, by the way?

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I can’t tell if they’re made
out of foam or digital.

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So what happened?

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TECHNOLOGY!

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Here’s my definition:

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The industrial revolution was
an increase in production

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brought about by the use of machines
[get ready to man-suit up, Skynet]

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and characterized by
the use of new energy sources.

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Although this will soon
get more complicated,

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for our purposes today,

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industrialization is NOT capitalism—

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although, as we will see next week,

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it is connected to modern capitalism.

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And,

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the industrial revolution
began around 1750 and

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it occurred across most of the earth,

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but it started in Europe,
especially Britain.

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What happened?

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Well, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

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The innovations of the
Industrial Revolution

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were intimately interconnected.

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Like,

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look, for instance,
at the British textile industry:

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The invention of the flying shuttle
by John Kay in 1733

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dramatically increased the
speed of weaving,

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which in turn
created demand for yarn,

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which led to inventions like the Spinning
Jenny

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and the waterframe.
[& later, Princess Leia bun sock hats]

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Soon these processes were
mechanized using water power,

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until the steam engine came along
to make flying shuttles really fly

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in these huge cotton mills.

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The most successful steam engine
was built by

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Thomas “They Didn’t Name
Anything After Me” Newcomen

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[is that Dutch?]

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to clear water out of mines.

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And because water was
cleared out of those mines,

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there was more coal to
power more steam engines,

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which eventually led to

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the fancying up of the Newcomen
Steam Engine by

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James “I Got a Unit of Power and
a University Named After Me” Watt,

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[Farnsworth's raw deal tops, even still]

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whose engine made possible not
only railroads and steamboats but

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also ever-more efficient cotton mills.
[the touch, the feel… of technology]

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And, for the first time,

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chemicals other than stale urine,
[you must be kidding]

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I wish I was kidding,

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were being used to bleach
the cloth that people wore—

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the first of which was sulfuric acid,
[sounds super chafey]

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which was created in large quantities
only thanks to lead-lined chambers,

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which would’ve been impossible
without lead production

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rising dramatically right
around 1750 in Britain,

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thanks to lead foundries
powered by coal.

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And all these factors came together
to make more yarn

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that could be spun and bleached
faster and cheaper than ever before,

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a process that would eventually
culminate in

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$18 Crash Course Mongols shirts.

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[no exceptions!&$%# ] [ha]

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Available now at DFTBA.com.

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Thanks, Thought Bubble,

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for that shameless promotion of our
beautiful, high-quality t-shirts available

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now at DFTBA.com.
[TeamCrashCourse: lousy with subtlty]

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So, the problem here

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is that with industrialization
being so deeply interconnected,

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it’s really difficult to figure out why
it happened in Europe,

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especially Britain.

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And that question of why

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turns out to be one of
the more contentious discussions

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in world history today.

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For instance, here are some Eurocentric reasons

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why industrialization might have
happened first in Europe:

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There’s the cultural superiority
argument that basically holds

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that Europeans are just better
and smarter than other people.

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[somebody explain Mr. Bean then]

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Sometimes this is formulated as Europeans
possessing

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superior rationality.

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By the way, you’ll never guess

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where the people who make this
argument tend to come from—

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unless you guessed that
they come from Europe.

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And then, others argue

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that only Europe had the culture of
science and invention

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that made the creation of these
revolutionary technologies possible.

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Another argument is that freer political
institutions encouraged innovation

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and strong property rights
created incentives for inventors.

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And, finally, people often cite
Europe’s small population

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because small populations
require labor-saving inventions.

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Oh,

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it’s time for the Open Letter?

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[it's not the yellow chair he's rolling
over to so I just can't bear to look.]

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An Open Letter to the Steam Engine.

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But first,

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let’s see what’s in
the secret compartment today.

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Oh, it’s a Tardis.
[you're welcome, Whovians]

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Truly the apex of
British industrialization.

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Dear Steam Engine,

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You know what’s crazy?

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You’ve really never been
improved upon.

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Like this thing,

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which facilitates time travel,

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probably runs on a steam engine.
[Eye of Harmony > steam engine, ftr]

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Almost all electricity around the world,

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whether it’s from coal
or nuclear power,

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is just a steam engine.

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It’s all still just water and heat,

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and it speaks to how truly revolutionary

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the Industrial Revolution
was that since then,

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it’s really just been evolution.

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Best Wishes,
John Green

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So, you may have heard any of
those rationales for

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European industrialization,

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or you may have heard others.

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The problem with all of them,

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is that each time you think
you’re at the root cause

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it turns out there’s a cause
of the root cause.

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[not unlike the show LOST]

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To quote
Leonardo diCaprio, James Cameron,

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and coal mine operators,

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“We have to go deeper.”
["Context is everything." -John Green]

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But, anyway, the problem
with these Eurocentric why answers,

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is that they all apply to either
China or India or both.

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And it’s really important
to note that in 1800,

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it was not clear that Europe
was going to become

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the world’s dominant manufacturing
power in the next hundred years.

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At the time,

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China, India, and Europe were
all roughly at the same place

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in terms of industrial production.

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First, let’s look at China.

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It’s hard to make the European
cultural superiority argument

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because China had been recording
its history since before Confucius,

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and plus there was all that
bronze and painting and poetry.

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It’s also kind of difficult to make a
blanket statement that

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China was economically
inferior to Europe,

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since they invented paper money

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and led the world in exports of
everything from silk to china.

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I mean, pre-Industrial Revolution,

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population growth was the
surest sign of economic success,

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and China had the
biggest population in the world.

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[were my flowers just assaulted by educational
exuberance?]

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I guess that answers the question
of whether they’re digital.

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[better be in stock at thinkgeek.com, mr.
green. just saying...]

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It’s also difficult to say that China
lacked a culture of invention

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when they invented
gunpowder, and printing, and paper,

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and arguably compasses.

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And China had more free enterprise
during the Song dynasty

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than anywhere in the world.

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Some argue that China
couldn’t have free enterprise

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because they had a long history
of trying to impose monopolies

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on items like salt and iron.

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And that’s true,

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but when it comes to
enforcing those monopolies,

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they also had a long history of failure.

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So really, in a lot of ways,

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China was at least as primed for an
Industrial Revolution as Britain was.

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So, why didn’t it happen?

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Well, Europeans—

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specifically the British—

00:07:05.710 --> 00:07:07.630
had two huge advantages:

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First, Coal.

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When you trace the story of improved
transportation, or communication,

00:07:11.940 --> 00:07:13.220
or industrial efficiency,

00:07:13.220 --> 00:07:14.840
or better chemical manufacturing,

00:07:14.840 --> 00:07:17.210
it always comes back to coal,

00:07:17.210 --> 00:07:20.360
because the Industrial Revolution
was all about using different forms

00:07:20.360 --> 00:07:22.070
of energy to automate production.

00:07:22.070 --> 00:07:22.460
And,

00:07:22.460 --> 00:07:24.900
England had large supplies of coal
that were near the surface,

00:07:24.900 --> 00:07:26.419
which meant that
it was cheap to mine,

00:07:26.419 --> 00:07:29.889
so it quickly replaced wood
for heating and cooking and stuff.

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So, that encouraged the British
to look for more coal.

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The only problem with coal mining,

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aside from it being,

00:07:33.889 --> 00:07:34.350
you know, like,

00:07:34.350 --> 00:07:35.050
deadly and everything,

00:07:35.050 --> 00:07:37.040
is that the coal mines flooded
all the time.

00:07:37.040 --> 00:07:39.000
I guess coal mining is also
a little problematic for, like,

00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:39.340
the health of,

00:07:39.340 --> 00:07:39.750
you know, like, the planet.

00:07:39.750 --> 00:07:41.080
["Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Know what I mean?"]

00:07:41.080 --> 00:07:41.250
But,

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because there was all this incentive
to get more coal out of the ground,

00:07:43.699 --> 00:07:46.800
steam engines were invented
to pump water out of the mines.

00:07:46.800 --> 00:07:48.990
And because those early steam
engines were super inefficient,

00:07:48.990 --> 00:07:52.560
they needed a cheap and abundant
source of fuel in order to work—

00:07:52.560 --> 00:07:53.380
namely, coal,

00:07:53.380 --> 00:07:56.310
which meant they were much more
useful to the British than anyone else.

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So steam engines used cheap British
coal to keep British coal cheap,

00:07:59.800 --> 00:08:01.650
and cheap British coal
created the opportunity

00:08:01.650 --> 00:08:04.270
for everything from railroads to steel,

00:08:04.270 --> 00:08:06.620
which like so much else in
the Industrial Revolution,

00:08:06.620 --> 00:08:08.509
created a positive feedback loop.

00:08:08.509 --> 00:08:10.979
Because they run on rails,
railroads need steel.

00:08:10.979 --> 00:08:12.910
And because it is rather heavy,

00:08:12.910 --> 00:08:13.789
steel needs railroads.

00:08:13.789 --> 00:08:15.620
Secondly, there were Wages.

00:08:15.620 --> 00:08:17.380
Britain (and to a lesser extent
the Low Countries)

00:08:17.380 --> 00:08:20.830
had the highest wages in the world
at the beginning of the 18th century.

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In 1725, wages in London were the equivalent
of 11 grams

00:08:23.639 --> 00:08:24.669
of silver per day.

00:08:24.669 --> 00:08:26.000
In Amsterdam, they were 9 grams.

00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:29.360
In Beijing, Venice, and Florence,
they were under 4.

00:08:29.360 --> 00:08:30.840
And in Delhi, they were under 2.

00:08:30.840 --> 00:08:33.149
It’s not totally clear why
wages were so high in Britain.

00:08:33.149 --> 00:08:33.409
Like,

00:08:33.409 --> 00:08:35.769
one argument is that the Black Death
lowered population so much

00:08:35.769 --> 00:08:37.169
that it tightened labor markets,

00:08:37.169 --> 00:08:39.759
but that doesn’t explain why
wages remained low in, like,

00:08:39.759 --> 00:08:40.709
plague-ravaged Italy.

00:08:40.709 --> 00:08:43.349
Mainly, high wages combined
with cheap fuel costs meant

00:08:43.349 --> 00:08:46.600
that it was economically efficient for
manufacturers to look to machines

00:08:46.600 --> 00:08:48.399
as a way of lowering their
production costs.

00:08:48.399 --> 00:08:49.970
To quote the historian Robert Allen:

00:08:49.970 --> 00:08:54.779
“Wages were high and energy was cheap. These
prices led directly to the industrial revolution

00:08:54.779 --> 00:08:59.860
by giving firms strong incentives to invent
technologies that substituted capital and

00:08:59.860 --> 00:09:01.439
coal for labor.”

00:09:01.439 --> 00:09:01.670
Stan,

00:09:01.670 --> 00:09:04.949
I’m a little worried that people are still
going to accuse me of Eurocentrism.

00:09:04.949 --> 00:09:05.379
Of course,

00:09:05.379 --> 00:09:07.740
other people will accuse me
of an anti-European bias.

00:09:07.740 --> 00:09:09.269
I don’t have a bias against Europe.

00:09:09.269 --> 00:09:10.399
I love Europe.

00:09:10.399 --> 00:09:12.420
Europe gave me many of
my favorite cheeses

00:09:12.420 --> 00:09:13.839
and cross-country skiing

00:09:13.839 --> 00:09:15.429
and Charlie Chaplin,

00:09:15.429 --> 00:09:17.529
who inspired today’s Danica drawing.
[big ups, Modern Times. you endure]

00:09:17.529 --> 00:09:19.889
Like, the fact of coal being
near the surface in Britain

00:09:19.889 --> 00:09:22.410
can’t be chalked up to
British cultural superiority.

00:09:22.410 --> 00:09:24.110
But the wages question is a little different
because

00:09:24.110 --> 00:09:27.040
it makes it sound like only Europeans were
smart enough to pay high wages.

00:09:27.040 --> 00:09:29.170
But here’s one last thing to consider:

00:09:29.170 --> 00:09:31.929
India was the world’s largest
producer of cotton textiles,

00:09:31.929 --> 00:09:34.490
despite paying basically
the lowest wages in the world.

00:09:34.490 --> 00:09:37.199
Indian agriculture was so productive
that laborers could be supported

00:09:37.199 --> 00:09:38.369
at a very low cost.

00:09:38.369 --> 00:09:40.189
And that,
coupled with a large population

00:09:40.189 --> 00:09:41.850
meant that Indian textile manufacturing

00:09:41.850 --> 00:09:44.110
could be very productive
without using machines,

00:09:44.110 --> 00:09:45.639
so they didn’t need to industrialize.

00:09:45.639 --> 00:09:46.899
But more importantly from
our perspective,

00:09:46.899 --> 00:09:48.339
there’s a strong argument to be made

00:09:48.339 --> 00:09:51.529
that Indian cotton production
helped spur British industrialization.

00:09:51.529 --> 00:09:54.610
It was cotton textiles that drove
the early Industrial Revolution,

00:09:54.610 --> 00:09:57.600
and the main reason that Britain
was so eager to produce cottons

00:09:57.600 --> 00:09:59.939
was that demand was incredibly high.

00:09:59.939 --> 00:10:01.059
They were more comfortable than
woolens,

00:10:01.059 --> 00:10:02.420
but they were also cheaper,

00:10:02.420 --> 00:10:05.139
because cottons could be imported
from India at such a low cost.

00:10:05.139 --> 00:10:05.600
So,

00:10:05.600 --> 00:10:07.329
Indian cottons created the market

00:10:07.329 --> 00:10:10.209
and then British manufacturers
invested in machines

00:10:10.209 --> 00:10:11.970
(and imported Indian know-how)

00:10:11.970 --> 00:10:14.959
to increase production so that
they could compete with India.

00:10:14.959 --> 00:10:17.439
And that’s at least one way
in which European industrialization

00:10:17.439 --> 00:10:19.329
was truly a world phenomenon.

00:10:19.329 --> 00:10:22.300
For those of you who enjoy
such highly contentious and thorny,

00:10:22.300 --> 00:10:25.069
cultural historical debates, good news.

00:10:25.069 --> 00:10:25.279
Next week,

00:10:25.279 --> 00:10:26.329
we’ll be talking about capitalism.

00:10:26.329 --> 00:10:27.339
[can't wait to read the comments
section for that one. yes i can]

00:10:27.339 --> 00:10:29.079
Thanks for watching, I’ll see you then.

00:10:29.079 --> 00:10:29.619
Crash Course is

00:10:29.619 --> 00:10:31.040
produced and directed
by Stan Muller.

00:10:31.040 --> 00:10:32.759
Our script supervisor
is Danica Johnson.

00:10:32.759 --> 00:10:34.869
The show is written by my
high school history teacher,

00:10:34.869 --> 00:10:36.160
Raoul Meyer, and myself.

00:10:36.160 --> 00:10:38.360
We are ably interned
by Meredith Danko.

00:10:38.360 --> 00:10:40.600
And our graphics team is
Thought Bubble.

00:10:40.600 --> 00:10:41.600
Last week’s phrase of the week was

00:10:41.600 --> 00:10:42.879
"New England Revolution"

00:10:42.879 --> 00:10:46.850
If you want to suggest
future phrases of the week,

00:10:46.850 --> 00:10:48.139
you can do so in comments

00:10:48.139 --> 00:10:48.809
where you can also guess
at this week’s phrase of the week

00:10:48.809 --> 00:10:50.089
or ask questions about today’s video

00:10:50.089 --> 00:10:52.759
that will be answered by
our team of historians.

00:10:52.759 --> 00:10:53.329
Thanks for watching Crash Course.

00:10:53.329 --> 00:10:53.559
Special shout out to our only known platinum-selling
artist viewer,

00:10:53.559 --> 00:10:53.600
Lupe Fiasco.

00:10:53.600 --> 00:10:54.480
And as we say in my hometown,

00:10:54.480 --> 00:10:58.480
don’t forget My philosophy, like color
TV, is all there in black and white.