Scadrial industrial revolution

[agrabes]

I'll just add that in terms of urbanization, even in the west there were a lot of factors.  For example in the early years of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, a lot of the reason you saw people migrate to the cities was that there was only so much land to go around.  If a family has 5 or 10 children, which would have been common for those days especially in a farming family, if you're the youngest kid will you have any land to farm?  You can farm with your parents and siblings, but you don't get a life of your own.  Granted, you might be a serf or peasant who works common land for the local nobility so the concept of your own private land doesn't even exist.  But the point being, you can't just start your own farm on your own land because land is passed down through generations.  So you need to do something else to earn a living.  And for many people, they did various odd jobs like weaving and sewing and making furniture, etc (the OG cottage industry).  But as industrial production began, it was so much cheaper than these locally hand crafted goods that people could no longer earn a living.  And the large rural population could no longer support itself on the land available, so many people left the farms to go in search of a job in the cities.  They had no choice, it was starve or take a terrible factory job.

I think in terms of Scadrial, I see it going very similar to the US today.  Rural areas are dying out.  Family farms are gobbled up by megafarms (which might still be run by a family, but with many employees as well) as the younger generation moves toward more urban areas for job opportunities and to find a romantic partner, etc.  I grew up on a family farm and it's something I've experienced firsthand.  In Scadrial, I'm sure that as technology improved there were fewer people necessary to run the farms and the rural youth got more and more connected with the urban life and started to want the perks that come with it.  It seems simple to me.

[cometaryorbit]

Right, part of what I was thinking was that "only so much land to go around" wouldn't have applied in Scadrial a century plus ago-- most of the land wouldn't have been used until very recently.

You are right about the reasons for migration to urban areas more recently, but I don't think that really started until post WWI and became more so post WWII -- after "modern conveniences" and the technology to have those megafarms both existed -- a level of technology Elendel hasn't hit yet, much less at the beginning of their industrial revolution.

I think it makes more sense to assume that they were never 80%+ farmers like late 18th century US, that the crazy productivity of the land let them have lots of people doing other jobs even right after the Catacendre, and they probably built back to the ~1800ish level pretty fast.

Harmony does complain about their slow advancement in SoS so perhaps it's not as parallel to our Industrial Revolution's timeline as I was thinking.

*The Basin is most of a circle maybe 450-500 miles in diameter so 225-250 miles in radius and about 150,000-200,000 square miles for the whole circle; but it's not 100% land, so it's probably something like 120,000-160,000 square miles. Given the extreme productivity of the land, when the population was only a couple million (say 200 years post Catacendre) it must have been mostly uncultivated.

[+Oltux72]

On 1.6.2022 at 2:08 AM, agrabes said:

I'll just add that in terms of urbanization, even in the west there were a lot of factors.  For example in the early years of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, a lot of the reason you saw people migrate to the cities was that there was only so much land to go around.  If a family has 5 or 10 children, which would have been common for those days especially in a farming family, if you're the youngest kid will you have any land to farm?  You can farm with your parents and siblings, but you don't get a life of your own.  Granted, you might be a serf or peasant who works common land for the local nobility so the concept of your own private land doesn't even exist.  But the point being, you can't just start your own farm on your own land because land is passed down through generations.  So you need to do something else to earn a living. 

There is always one dominant factor, though. In the olden days food production was limited by the availability of land. In the Americas it was farm labour. The Elendel Basin is yet another case. There the limit is demand. They could not sell more food.

On 1.6.2022 at 2:08 AM, agrabes said:

I think in terms of Scadrial, I see it going very similar to the US today.  Rural areas are dying out.  Family farms are gobbled up by megafarms (which might still be run by a family, but with many employees as well) as the younger generation moves toward more urban areas for job opportunities and to find a romantic partner, etc.  I grew up on a family farm and it's something I've experienced firsthand.  In Scadrial, I'm sure that as technology improved there were fewer people necessary to run the farms and the rural youth got more and more connected with the urban life and started to want the perks that come with it.  It seems simple to me.

Yes, but this process starts as soon as the additional workers are not needed. In the Basin this starts at a lower level of technology due to the land's fertility.

On 1.6.2022 at 5:35 PM, cometaryorbit said:

I think it makes more sense to assume that they were never 80%+ farmers like late 18th century US, that the crazy productivity of the land let them have lots of people doing other jobs even right after the Catacendre, and they probably built back to the ~1800ish level pretty fast.

That is not strictly speaking "let". It also forces it. A farmer's income has to come out of the price everybody else pays for food (leaving aside textile crops). If a farmer can feed X people, they have to pay 1/X of their wages to the farmer, if their wages are supposed to be the same.

 

[Duxredux]

I'll add in another few thoughts as someone who grew up in suburbia and doesn't really know what it's like living on a farm. @agrabes can tell us how accurate this is, but it makes sense to me.

First, subsistence farming even on Scadrial isn't as simple as just picking food off of the ground if you're planning on being entirely self-sufficient. The only thing that gets easier is maintaining crops, everything else is the same. Raising livestock, building and maintaining a homestead, processing crops (sugar, wheat, cotton, etc.), making your clothing and other amenities like soap or spices. that all takes hard work and/or equipment. Harvesting lumber still has the usual time constraints on growth and labor. Either you're willing to figure out how to do it by hand and make your own tools to do the job or you bow to Elendel and deal with the tariffs and taxes to and begin selling your produce to get income for equipment. For perishable crops, depending on where you settled, you may need to use the trains or canals in order to get your produce somewhere you can sell it. If you have to sell your crops, then you have to compete with the farms that are optimized for profit that set the prices, even if they aren't the megafarms we see today.

Second, depending on how they have crops growing, farm owners who work with industrialized Elendel don't really need much by way of skilled labor. The crops themselves don't need to be cultivated, so they may only need to hire temporary laborers for the harvest. After they learn the changes to the world after the Catecendre, a harvester is a low-skill job and probably has very poor wages because you can almost certainly find a replacement for whomever you hire. In actuality, the ease of growing crops removes jobs for the same reason that automation removes jobs by taking away roles that humans originally filled. 

Third, if there is a surplus of food, then farmers will probably convert the land from growing crops to raising livestock or growing other cash crops such as tobacco, dyes, spices, cotton, things that in essence gain value from processing and trade with the city. Supply and demand would make crops or livestock that are harder to raise or process more valuable than crops that take no skill whatsoever than simply harvesting them, and so the agricultural sector would shift from what we see on earth. Historically, this is why you hear of massive sugar, indigo, tobacco, and cotton plantations, even though you can't subsist off of those.

 

You can still get food shortages if a large enough event disrupts an expected crop, particularly if the agricultural sector has balanced itself so that food isn't in excess in Elendel, meaning that food is produced at about the rate it is consumed. I don't have my books, but I think this is what Bleeder did when she broke that dam in SoS causing food prices including apples to skyrocket in Elendel.

Edited June 3, 2022 by Duxredux
added another thought

[cometaryorbit]

 

9 hours ago, Duxredux said:

First, subsistence farming even on Scadrial isn't as simple as just picking food off of the ground if you're planning on being entirely self-sufficient. The only thing that gets easier is maintaining crops, everything else is the same. Raising livestock, building and maintaining a homestead, processing crops (sugar, wheat, cotton, etc.), making your clothing and other amenities like soap or spices. that all takes hard work and/or equipment. Harvesting lumber still has the usual time constraints on growth and labor.

Hmmm, that's mostly true (though I'd argue livestock probably *are* easier than on Earth, there's probably a lot less trouble with drought, livestock diseases etc), and combined with the city bias of the starting population is probably enough to answer my original question.

They weren't all urban (about 1/5 were Terris who were largely herdsmen, and its specifically mentioned in HOA that villagers fled to both Luthadel and Urteau shortly before the end) but it's likely that reborn Scadrial was never 80%+ farmers as I first expected.

9 hours ago, Duxredux said:

 Second, depending on how they have crops growing, farm owners who work with industrialized Elendel don't really need much by way of skilled labor.

Absolutely true but only really applies once that industrialized city exists.

9 hours ago, Duxredux said:

  I don't have my books, but I think this is what Bleeder did when she broke that dam in SoS causing food prices including apples to skyrocket in Elendel.

Yeah sufficiently large scale sabotage could still cause food shortages.

What I was more talking about though was the idea that a small largely self sufficient community (on say the old Appalachian model) wouldn't face risks from natural crop failures as it would in RL eliminating one major reason for people in RL to migrate from their hometowns to big cities. Eg cotton boll weevil problems or Dust Bowl in US history.

But probably they never went through an era of being mostly small largely self-sufficient communities.

[+Oltux72]

On 3.6.2022 at 7:02 PM, Duxredux said:

Third, if there is a surplus of food, then farmers will probably convert the land from growing crops to raising livestock or growing other cash crops such as tobacco, dyes,

Fourth, they may not want to deal with you. The Great Houses of the Final Empire have in part survived. They see themselves as political entities, not  just economic entities. Part of their ideology and reason for being is to provide safety to their members. The idea of preferring to own your own farms and warehouses derives kind of naturally from that. Cash crops may be quite a lot less attractive than without them.

Fifth, people are vicious at times and there is no such thing as a Basin police force. In fact the Great Houses have what amounts to private armies and they are taking casualties over three hundred years after the Catacendre. Being an independent farmer in a remote area may have security implications.

On 4.6.2022 at 4:12 AM, cometaryorbit said:

What I was more talking about though was the idea that a small largely self sufficient community (on say the old Appalachian model) wouldn't face risks from natural crop failures as it would in RL eliminating one major reason for people in RL to migrate from their hometowns to big cities. Eg cotton boll weevil problems or Dust Bowl in US history.

That works both ways, though. They have the Words of the Founding and a benign environment. Hence they will not neglect public health. Their cities never suffered something like the cholera epidemics of 19th century Europe.

On 4.6.2022 at 4:12 AM, cometaryorbit said:

But probably they never went through an era of being mostly small largely self-sufficient communities.

Indeed.

[cometaryorbit]

10 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

 That works both ways, though. They have the Words of the Founding and a benign environment. Hence they will not neglect public health. Their cities never suffered something like the cholera epidemics of 19th century Europe.

Yeah, this is true. My point was just that the pressures that in RL pushed people out of the farming communities largely wouldn't exist.

But I now see that was based on the probably wrong assumption that they'd had 200+ years of the vast majority of the population being small farming communities.

(I was assuming that if Elendel is analogous to 1910 New York then 300ish years of its history is analogous to the US from early colonial on. But the early history must have been very different. )

Edited June 7, 2022 by cometaryorbit

[+Oltux72]

On 7.6.2022 at 7:12 PM, cometaryorbit said:

Yeah, this is true. My point was just that the pressures that in RL pushed people out of the farming communities largely wouldn't exist.

You were right to ask why those communities never arose. Prior conditions cannot explain everything.

On 7.6.2022 at 7:12 PM, cometaryorbit said:

But I now see that was based on the probably wrong assumption that they'd had 200+ years of the vast majority of the population being small farming communities.

(I was assuming that if Elendel is analogous to 1910 New York then 300ish years of its history is analogous to the US from early colonial on. But the early history must have been very different. )

OK, now that raises a point. Scadrial has genuine aristocratic rulers. So why not an analogue of London or St. Petersburg or Berlin or Montevideo?

Only the architecture? Or is it a mental shortcut from equating the Roughs to the Wild West and hence the Basin to established North America?

[cometaryorbit]

1 hour ago, Oltux72 said:

OK, now that raises a point. Scadrial has genuine aristocratic rulers. So why not an analogue of London or St. Petersburg or Berlin or Montevideo?

Only the architecture? Or is it a mental shortcut from equating the Roughs to the Wild West and hence the Basin to established North America?

I thought the 1910 New York comparison was actually from Brandon, though I could be wrong.

I think it's not just a mental shortcut, the Wild West / US city contrast is intentional.

Alloy of Law was originally intended as a standalone, and puts a lot of emphasis on Wax's dual identity as a Roughs lawman and an Elendel lord and senator. We don't see a lot of the Outer Cities vs Elendel conflict stuff until later books, AOL is very much an Elendel vs Roughs/city vs frontier dichotomy.

Plus the Western genre is very much a US thing.

[+Oltux72]

On 31.5.2022 at 7:32 PM, cometaryorbit said:

Final Empire tech is weird/uneven. In the cities tech was 1800ish without gunpowder, yeah, and the canal system is similar. But did your average plantation skaa really make heavy use of draft animals, harvesting equipment, etc.? I got the picture of a much more hand tool dependent agriculture, especially from the description of dealing with ash problems in farming in HoA. It sounds like they were carrying the ash away with people not ox/mule carts.

I never addressed this point and it is very important.

Yes, plantation Skaa did not use these technologies, but tat is the very point. A manor lord with granaries very close to a canal can call up all hands for a few days to carry all the grain to the barges and to bring in the harvest on their backs. A family farm cannot do that. They are alone. As a family farmer you really need a higher level of technology and more equipment if you want to compete with large estates. And in that case the economy of scale is always on the side of the large farm.

Family farms nevertheless win in some places, because they have motivation on their side. But that matters much less on Scadrial. More seed grain needed? Who cares, it grows like weed? Less yield per acrage? Why bother, we have all the land we need. And that is the point, by removing land as a cost factor Sazed let the next cost factor dominate. At their leve of technology that was capital. And hence the people with the capital and the experience in running enterprises dominated agriculture. That necessarily turned out to be the nobles.