French torpor

From John Michael Greer´s blog:

>>>Sam, there’s actually been some discussion of that among historians. Any number of political shifts in British history could have prevented the industrial revolution from happening, since that depended more than anything else on the ability of the merchant class to amass the huge amounts of capital that made building the first factories possible, and that in turn depended on factors both internal (the government and the nobility permitting that concentration of wealth rather than confiscating it) and external (the complex chain of events that allowed European countries to seize control of maritime trade in slaves, sugar, tobacco, and other high-value products worldwide and cash in to a gargantuan degree).

>>>If the Industrial Revolution hadn’t happened, Britain would likely not have had the economic resources to resist Napoleon, and Europe would have been united into a single empire with its capital in Paris. Lacking abundant energy from coal, the discoveries of the scientific revolution would have been interesting curiosities; technology would have stagnated around the level of 1600; the French Empire would have settled into the same sort of torpor as the Ottoman, Mughal, and Chinese empires of the same period, and eventually it would have been fallen in the usual manner, probably sometime in the 2200s or 2300s. Our technology enabled us to rise faster but it also means that we’re falling sooner.