07-30-2006, 01:03 PM
Quote: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.
Interesting. The very article (and current book - Wind, Water, Work: Ancient And Medieval Milling Technology (Technology and Change in History) - ISBN 9004146490) by Lucas was what discouraged me the most in recent years in the studies of comparisons between medieval and ancient waterpower, despite about the current well of interesting articles and research on water power in antiquity, and especially what I view as not the overhyping of medieval hydropower but the underhyping of ancient hydropower. Lucas' argument is very problematic for several reasons.
The first main point has been well known for years, and is not related to his main theory. Few big developments had appeared for millenia in the hydropower field since the first overshot wheels appeared - the issue was primarily the widespreadness of hydropower, and some minor practical developments like the crank. It is rather odd to disparage someone for adapting a practical mechanism rather than inventing it themselves, when the subject is the use, rather than the appearance of, the mechanism - much like the writers of "Black Athena" attempted to argue that greek civilization "stole" technology from the perceived black african egypt they wrote about, as if it was possible to actually remove technology from another culture by starting to use it yourself. Also, as Bach notes, few real claims of a really big growth in industrial uses of waterpower pre-15th century (although most studies tend to connect the rise of it with the groundwork of the commerical "revolution"(a tired word
) of the 13-14th centuries) have been made - so partly, we are looking at a strawman argument.Lucas' way of treating number of documented "industrial" wheels in medieval europe is highly contrived. For example, he decides that fulling mills are not examples of medieval industry - despite the fact that the first documented fulling mills appear in the 10th century and that the textile industry always was the most widespread and important industry in medieval and modern times - and the first to gain from the benefits of the real industrial revolution. He also has a serious problem of an apparent lack of access to articles treating the german, scandinavian, eastern european and spanish medieval "industrial" waterpower phenomenon - not including several important and well-documented areas in his survey - most especially those (excepting parts of spain) that went from a tribal cultural area to a developed quasi-urbanized area during the middle ages, as opposed to the areas where romano-greek civilization and urbanization was established during roman times. His attempt to thoroughly study the waterpower phenomenon in medieval europe, and to sort the solidly documented "industrial" sites from the possible sites, is laudable, but his methodology is questionable and far from complete (something he partially admits himself).
He then does something I regard as the most serious flaw in his article (and book) - he compares the medieval world (excepting again, for some reason, the contemporary muslim and greek-orthodox sources from the latin western ones, as if they did not exist at the same time in the same region) to the ancient world, after having made his perhaps too heavily censured study on the medieval period, without applying the same kind of filter to the ancient sources. This is extremely problematic and a severe methodological flaw - in his comparison, he includes every archaeological and historical (even from poetry and similar sources) record he can get his hands on from the ancient world (including recent enthusiastic but still completely circumstantial articles on roman-era tidal mills and metallurgically related waterpower - it is not that it may not have existed, it is just that under the standards Lucas himself applies to his medieval material, they would have not even been considered for inclusion), without questioning their authenticity the same way he questions the medieval examples. This more or less makes his comparison meaningless, or at least set up in such a way as to make his conclusions irrelevant.
This is really sad, as the last few years of studies on ancient waterpower and technology in general have been highly interesting and illuminating. I eagerly await a book on the subject where the author includes a broader geographical region and a more meaningful comparison than Lucas has produced. I fear, however, that far more groundwork - especially in the middle east and north africa on medieval muslim/orthodox christian hydropower, and especially the byzantine terriories, plus a less enthusiastic and more thorough study on chinese technology and its diffusion westwards (and back) than Needham produced, is necessary before something like that can be produced. Also, if comparative studies in english on medieval society is going to have any real meaning in the future, the overconcentration on anglo-french and italian sources for medieval archaeology we've been suffering under for...well, forever, is going to have to be broken soon - as Volker and Felix also notes. This applies as much to archaeology and history in general as to technological history - some areas are more "popular" than others in ancient archaeology as well - just look at the vast amount of biblical archaeology going on.
