A World Without Engines: Life Before the Great Rewiring

On the fifteenth day of October in the year 1700, a rice farmer named Chen Wenlin rose before dawn in the Yangtze Delta, as his family had risen before dawn for seventeen generations. The air hung heavy with the humidity that late autumn brought to the marshy lowlands south of Nanjing, and the first mist was already forming over the paddies that stretched, geometric and patient, to the horizon. Chen would work until the light failed, as would his wife, his aging parents, and his four children old enough to bend their backs to the water. Like the vast majority of humanity in this year—one hundred and seventy years before James Watt patented his separate condenser, one hundred and twelve years before Richard Arkwright strung together his first water-powered cotton spinning frames in Cromford, ninety-six years before the first hiss of steam escaped from Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric engine at a Welsh coal mine—Chen Wenlin lived in a world where the most sophisticated machines were windmills, waterwheels, and the humble spinning wheel, where the fastest messages traveled no faster than a horse could carry them, and where a single season of bad weather could mean the difference between survival and starvation.

This was the world before the Great Rewiring, and it is essential that we understand its texture before we can appreciate the magnitude of what was about to transform it. The year 1700 sits at a peculiar historical crossroads: the medieval world had not yet fully receded into the past, while the modern industrial age remained an undreamed-of future. In between lay a civilization of astonishing sophistication, one that had developed complex financial instruments, international trade networks, sophisticated artistic and literary traditions, advanced agricultural techniques, and impressive engineering accomplishments—yet it was a civilization fundamentally constrained by a single, unyielding fact: almost everything that human beings needed to survive and prosper had to be produced by human or animal muscle, supplemented by the unpredictable caprice of wind and water. The energy that powered this world came almost entirely from the sun, captured first by photosynthesis in crops and forests, and then consumed by the bodies of humans and the animals they tended. When we speak of the Industrial Revolution as a transformation in energy sources, we are speaking of humanity's successful escape from this ancient dependency—a dependency so omnipresent that its very universality rendered it invisible to the people who lived within it.

The demographic reality of 1700 tells us much about the limits of this pre-industrial world. Of the approximately six hundred and seventy million human beings alive on Earth at the turn of the eighteenth century, roughly eighty-five percent drew their livelihoods from agriculture in its various forms—growing crops, tending livestock, fishing the rivers and coastal waters. This figure had remained remarkably stable for millennia, hovering between eighty and ninety percent for most of recorded history, and it would remain so until the very decades when the transformation we shall chronicle in this book began to reshape the economic landscape of Britain and, eventually, the world. The concentration of humanity in agricultural labor was not a sign of backwardness or stagnation but rather a direct consequence of what economists have come to call the "energy budget" of pre-industrial societies. Growing food consumed the vast majority of available human labor because the productivity of agricultural work was appallingly low by modern standards. A medieval English farmer might produce, on a good year, perhaps four to five times the grain he had planted; a Han Dynasty Chinese rice cultivator, working the fertile soils of the Yangtze basin with techniques refined over centuries, might achieve ratios of return that seem almost miraculous by comparison, yet even the most productive agricultural systems of 1700 rarely generated surplus sufficient to liberate more than a small fraction of the population from the land.

The remaining fifteen percent of humanity in 1700 were engaged in what we might loosely term the "secondary" and "tertiary" sectors of the economy—handicraft production, commerce, religious practice, governance, and the provision of services. But this characterization requires immediate qualification, for the boundaries between agricultural and non-agricultural labor were far more porous in the pre-industrial world than our modern categories suggest. The Chinese farmer Chen Wenlin, for instance, supplemented his rice cultivation with silk production—the worms fed on mulberry leaves grown in the corners of his paddy fields, and the careful work of tending the larvae and reeling the fine threads from their cocoons fell largely to the women of the household during the slack season between harvest and planting. His family ate rice and vegetables grown on their own land, supplemented by fish from the ponds that dotted the Delta and the ubiquitous soybeans, transformed through careful processing into a dozen different foods: the tofu that accompanied most meals, the soy sauce that flavored them, the fermented paste that provided essential protein through the long winters. Chen's household was simultaneously a farm, a food-processing operation, a textile workshop, and a small commercial enterprise, selling surplus rice and silk at the periodic markets that brought the scattered farmsteads of the Delta into periodic contact with the larger currents of regional and even international trade.

This integration of agricultural and manufacturing activity was characteristic of virtually all pre-industrial economies, and it complicates any simple accounting of the "percentage" engaged in farming. When we look at the textile trades, for example, we find that in many regions of Europe and Asia, the line between farmer and weaver was essentially non-existent. The English countryside of 1700 was dotted with cottages where the spinning of wool and the weaving of cloth provided crucial supplementary income for families whose primary occupation was agriculture. A Lincolnshire sheep farmer's wife might spend the winter evenings transforming the raw fleeces from her husband's flocks into yarn suitable for the looms of the East Midlands; a Yorkshire smallholder might combine the cultivation of his few rocky acres with the production of coarse woolens that would eventually find their way to markets in London or beyond. The famous "putting-out" system of medieval and early modern Europe—where a merchant-capitalist would distribute raw materials to rural households and collect the finished products for sale in urban markets—depended precisely on this dual identity of the rural population as both farmers and part-time artisans. The wool and cloth trade that would eventually help fund Britain's industrial transformation had its roots in this ubiquitous combination of agricultural and industrial activity.

The Persian bazaars that lined the ancient trade routes of the Safavid Empire presented yet another variant of this same pattern. In Isfahan, the capital city that Shah Abbas the Great had transformed into one of the wonders of the seventeenth-century world, skilled artisans worked alongside merchants and craftsmen from across Eurasia, producing the famous Persian carpets that were traded along the Silk Road to the courts of Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, and eventually the workshops of European collectors. The carpet weavers—men and women, often working from their homes in the labyrinthine quarters of the old city—combined their craft with the cultivation of the sheep whose wool provided their raw material, the tending of the gardens and orchards that supplemented their income, and the small commercial transactions that kept their families connected to the larger economy. The bazaar itself was a marvel of pre-industrial commerce, a covered market wher