Why no Roman industrial revolution?

There's another route to an industrial revolution that might have happened - steel. The British industrial revolution was built from iron, not steel. Mass production of steel didn't appear until the 1880s, with the Bessemer converter. This was half a century after the deployment of successful railroads. Iron and steel was known to the Roman empire. The steel wasn't very good, even by the standards of antiquity, but it was good enough for short swords and some tools. They got…

Well, commenters made some decent points, but the real issue is that you need a reason, a seriously good reason, to legitimize the expense involved in building an engine. In the case of The Industrial Revolution, this was pumping water out coal mines, and air in to them. Coal was needed as other heat sources had been largely depleted (or nearly so) in Britain. People generally like being warm. This kind of pressure required the existence of a large population…

Extremely convenient summary, from the first real paragraph of the article: > As we’ll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution – a great many of the preconditions were missing – but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship. (In theory, the HN title should include "(2022)". In practice - how much has the Roman Empire changed since…