Lack of technological progress in late Roman Empire

[Eleatic Guest]

Oh, oh, I have just finished reading an article on the medieval use of water power which deals a s-e-r-i-o-u-s blow to the notion of a medieval 'industrialization' through extensive use watermills. I do not know how much the article by Adam Lucas has been reveiced, but it looks like that medievalists in future will have to cover their own backs, instead of making bold assumptions about the Roman technological level. The author really did a major survey of the complete 20th century findings on medieval mills and categorized them according to type, date of first appeerance and location.

The article is:

Lucas, Adam Robert "Industrial Milling in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: A Survey of the Evidence for an Industrial Revolution in Medieval Europe"
Technology and Culture - Volume 46, Number 1, January 2005, pp. 1-30

For anyone interested, let me know, I have a pdf.

Just his major points in brief:

1. The medieval mill technology was not particularly inventive. In fact, the major inventions had already been done by the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Chinese.

2. Mills were not as widespread as some medievalists have suggested. In fact, today only exist evidence for 400 industrials mills concerning a time span of 700 years and one whole fourth of the cited mills in the literature have actually no documentary. The vast majority of medieval mills have been according to Lucas conventional grinding mills.

3. Mill technology in Europe was not nearly as widespread as medievalists talking about a European industrialization like to think of. In fact, over 80% of all European medieval mills are found in England, France and Italy.

4. Mill technology in England was not that developed as raw numbers may indicate. In fact, England is just the best researched area, nevertheless all major mill innovations came from France.

Excerpts:

If we look more generally at a list of the technological achievements of the Hellenic Greeks and Romans, it is far longer and more impressive than some scholars have suggested. These achievements include: the chain of pots and the compartmented waterwheel for raising water; the doughkneading machine; the olive-crushing mill; the vertical- and horizontalwheeled
water mills; new olive presses; the reaping machine; horizontal looms; the barrow; riverboats; a range of wheeled vehicles; more effective hoists; better aqueducts, with water towers and lead pipes; hydraulic pumps; the use of brick and concrete in construction; a considerable variety of war machines; and the mass production of tiles, molded pottery,and bread

All of this evidence suggests that, rather than being an autochthonous irruption in medieval Europe from the ninth or tenth century onward, industrial milling had clear precedents in earlier civilizations. The fact that there were such precedents makes claims for medieval European exceptionalism look increasingly implausible. While a systematic review of the existing research and a thorough examination of the extant manuscript sources remain to be done, it seems increasingly likely that it was through Islamic Spain and the Byzantine Empire that a number of Roman, Islamic, and possibly Chinese innovations in industrial milling technology were conveyed to Western Europe from the tenth or eleventh century onward, providing a foundation for the train of developments that characterized the application of waterpower to industry in the European Middle Ages.30

For the whole of Europe between circa 770 and 1600, no more than four hundred industrial mills cited by proponents of the industrial revolution thesis could be authenticated.31 As these four hundred examples spread over a period of more than eight hundred years and more than dozen countries, the data clearly do not constitute a very large or representative sample. Furthermore, over 80 percent of the four hundred mills from French and English sources. If one includes the German and Italian kingdoms, 94 percent of the evidence comes from these four regions.While this is not necessarily a problem, for reasons that will be outlined shortly, none of the scholars who have tried to demonstrate that a pan-European technological revolution was taking place in the Middle Ages has ever noted
the biases in their data.32

Although it is historians of technology who have been the main advocates
for the medieval industrial revolution thesis, over 70 percent of documented examples of industrial mills cited by them have been drawn from the research of three social and economic historians.33 Only a little more than one hundred of the nearly four hundred mills were identified historians of technology, and of these the vast majority (90 percent) were identified by a single author, Bradford Blaine (table 1). This was surprising in view of the rhetorical importance attached to this thesis in the history
technology literature.

The medieval mills included in the table (over 1500 mills) were applied to almost thirty different processes, although, as with the smaller sample compiled by proponents of the revolution thesis, the majority of them (about 60 percent) are fulling mills.

By far the most abundant types of industrial mill in the sample for medieval Europe are fulling mills and forge mills, which account for 80 percent of the sample (table 3), with tanning mills, sawmills, and toolsharpening mills contributing another 12 percent of the total.38

Langdon found that only fifty-five of the 1,647 powered mills identified, or less than 3.5 percent, were industrial mills, and all were fulling mills.49

My own exhaustive analysis of the manuscript sources pertaining to more than thirty medieval English religious houses tends to support the findings of Langdon’s West Midlands study. On six English Benedictine estates between the late thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries, 10 percent of the mills were industrial mills.52 On five English Cistercian estates, more than 14 percent of the total number of mills were industrial.53 On the other hand, ten Augustinian houses recorded no industrial mills before 1348. It thus seems clear that while the Benedictines and Cistercians may not have been as keen on applying water mills to industrial uses as historians of technology have tended to claim, they were undoubtedly more involved in industrial milling than most of their religious brethren, and certainly more so than lay lords, at least up until the early fourteenth century

With respect to the earliest reliably documented industrial mills of various types (table 2) and the regions in which they were located (table 4): the earliest documented malt mill in medieval Europe dates to the second half of the eighth century in France, the earliest fulling mill to the middle of the
eleventh century in France,43 the tanning mill to early-twelfth-century France, the (waterpowered) hemp mill and the tool-sharpening mill to early-thirteenth-century France, the forge mill to the early thirteenth century in France, England, and Sweden,44 and the sawmill to the beginning of the fourteenth century in France.45 Other processes, such as cutting and slitting metal and minting coins, also appear to have been first adapted to waterpower by the French.46 The earliest evidence of blast furnaces similarly comes from France.47

I am no expert, but this looks seriously like a major reevaluation in the field of medieval water power. Now I am anxious to hear the opinions of our medievalists. What to make of this new survey?