Was Roman industrialisation ever a possibility? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

Why do you expect that it was an inevitability? It isn't as though Industrial Revolutions are a dime a dozen across history, and the Industrial Revolution that began in England rested upon some very peculiar economic, political, social, and even environmental conditions. It is difficult to imagine industrialization happening with enclosure, for example, which was in many ways set off by the Black Plague, which could only have occurred as it did because of the Mongol conquests, ect ect.

As for your question, the direct answer is no, the Romans did not posses anything like the technological capability for large scale mechanized factories. Watt's engine was the culmination of almost two thousand years of experimentation of steam, and the small Roman aeolipile was at the beginning of it. Scholars of the Roman economy have often tried to come up with a more complex solution that relies on the nature of the Roman elite--a strand proceeding from Moses Finley, for example, suggests that the nature of the Roman class system precluded the possibility of the sort of bourgeoise middle class that was the basis of Industrial Revolution. This case is somewhat overstated, as the Roman elite was interested in things like capitalist investment, but there wasn't anything like an early industrialism to invest in. To go back to my first paragraph, the reason why British manufacturing was so desirable in, say, the thirteen American colonies was because of the combination of extermination of prexisting forms of craft-work via extermination and purposeful government action to stunt the development of American industry. This wasn't the case in the Roman empire--to take one example, the development of Gallic ceramics in the first century essentially replaced the distribution areas of Italian ceramics in the northwest provinces--had the imperial family and Senate promulgated a series of Pottery Acts banning the manufacture of pottery in Gaul history may have run differently, but they did not, so it did not. Even then, though, an emerging industrial capitalist class would have run into the technology barrier.