De Landa - Nonlinear History Brief

Coal (energy-rich ore): mineralization that organic matter can undergo when the corpses of plants and animals accumulate under water in the absence of oxygen, the microorganisms that would normally remineralize them and recycle them in the ecosystem cannot operate; hence these deposits do not rot. Instead, compressed and carbon-enriched, they eventually petrify. England was the first to truly capitalize on this artifact, subjecting it to intense exploitation and fueling the industrial revolution.

Industrial Age - not a result of human society having reached a new "stage of development" (a new mode of production) or of its having climbed further up the ladder of progress, but, rather as the crossing of a bifurcation where previous autocatalytic dynamics (subject to negative feedback) came to form self-sustaining autocatalytic loop.

technology - not viewed as evolving in a straight line. Mass production techniques in all their forms were only one alternative among several. Explanation needed as to how they came to dominate the development of new machinery.

Fossil fuels: Begins with steam power and moves to electricity.

In the 1800s, furnaces and factories tended to locate near coal supplies or in places with good access to transportation. Complexes mushroomed everywhere with seemingly no systematic relation to one another. Mining areas expanded and rural milieu crystallized into a densely urban one.
Hohenberg and lees remind us, it was not as if society as a whole had reached a new stage and every region now moved in lockstep toward this type of industrialization

Industrial development is like biological evolution, which not only lacks any progressive direction, it does not even have a consistent drive toward complexification: while some species complexity, others simplify

Areas that industrialized more slowly and maintained their ties to traditional craft skills developed methods of production that were scattered and small in scale but highly sophisticated, with a complex division of labor and a high degree of market involvement.

Two trajectories for the evolution of industry: large-scale, energy-intensive industry and small-scale, skill-intensive industry. While the former gave rise to functionally homogeneous towns, in many cases controlled by their industrial hierarchies (the factory town), the latter was housed in small settlements, with a more heterogeneous set of economic functions and less concentrated control. Antimarket institutions took over only one type of industry, that which, like themselves, was based on economies of scale.

Also varied in terms and form of their expansion. Coal-based industrial communities spread with total disregard for previous land-use patterns in contrast with small towns that housed decentralized industries meshed with their surroundings. The expansion of industrial zones had lasting ecological impact, such as water diversion into sinkholes, depressions, and cracks left in the wake of mining operations.

These links to faraway supply regions, plus the lack of systematic relations between services and size of settlements, placed these towns within the Network system rather than within the Central Place hierarchies.

Nonetheless, as important as they were, autocatalytic loops of technologies were not enough to create a self-sustained industrial takeoff.

One possible explanation is that autocatalytic loops need to achieve a threshold of complexity before they acquire the resilience and versatility needed to overcome diminishing returns.

EXAMPLE: Hence, what made nineteenth century England a special place was the formation of a more complex, self-maintaining circuit of triggers and flows which included a number of other catalytic elements in addition to technology and big business: a national market, a stable bank and credit system, extensive long-distance trading networks, a growing agricultural sector to feed the expanding population, and, of course, the population itself, which provided raw labor and skills.

mercantilism- It involved not only the removal of internal tolls and tariffs, but the construction of a communications network (roads, canals, mails) to allow commands (and traded goods) from the capital to reach the whole country. In addition to a nationwide market, an intensification of foreign trade and the proliferation of links between gateway cities all over the globe were also necessary ingredients.

"catalytic information," that is, information capable of bringing together and amplifying flows of energy and materials.
--> a machine is nothing but the congealed muscular energy that went into its production.

In short, the energetic inputs to large-scale production processes required complementary inputs of catalytic information in order for the Industrial Revolution to become a self-sustaining process.

The Industrial Revolution, in turn. affected in several ways the future growth of cities. One of the revolution's intensified flows, the flow of cast iron, triggered the beginning of the metallization of the urban exoskeleton as the industrial regions of England began to use iron frames to bulld fireproof textile mills

The mechanics and engineers of these American cities created the technology that would by 1850 allow the U.S. railroads to surpass the British railway system in terms of mileage of wrought-iron rails. If bridges and factories in America were still being built out of timber, the transportation system of the new nation-state was undergoing an even more intense metallization than England's. More importantly, the technology developed in England (locomotives and railway construction techniques) was largely unsuitable for the long distances and difficult terrain of the United States, and so it could not simply be imported but had to develop locally in novel
ways.

American railroad success relied on "command hierarchies"; the Army and corporate interests used to systematically standardize practices.

joint-stock company - separation of ownership from control: the owners are a dispersed group of stockholders, and control of the company passes from the owner-entrepreneur to the professional manager (managerial hierarchy).

These companies began a process of enormous growth in America by swallowing smaller companies.

Whatever the reasons for the delay in Britain, the process of separation of ownership from control and the wholesale replacement of markets with hierarchies were particularly clear in urban settlements in the United States.

The population of commercial institutions inhabiting American cities underwent an intense wave of internalization of markets by hierarchies. This integration took one of three forms: backward vertical integration, which meant that a manufacturer absorbed its suppliers of raw materials; forward vertical integration, which resulted in the incorporation of a firm's distribution system; and, finally, horizontal integration, which involved taking over other firms in the same industrial specialty.

As with earlier intensifications, it was the interplay of several innovations (electricity and electrical products, the automobile and its internal combustion engine, plastics and other synthetic materials, steel and oil) that allowed this intensification to sustain itself.

It is also important to keep in mind that this new web of interlocking technologies did not replace the old one. Although coal lost ground to oil in this century, even as late as the 19605 coal still accounted for half of the world's energy consumption, and its reserves were less depleted than those of oil.

New York and Chicago in particular experienced an intense electrification and metallization, which resulted in the birth of the skyscraper, an urban form unique to the United States, prior to World War II.

Electric motors in turn allowed elevators to transport people vertically through these huge towers. Chicago pioneered the use of steel and electricity in the construction industry, catalyzed by the great fire of 1871, which destroyed the city's commercial center and literally cleared the way for innovative building techniques to be applied.

But if electricity and steel acted as centripetal forces, making possible the intense human and machine concentrations represented by the new megacities, the internal combustion engine and the automobile had a centrifugal effect. allowing people to move out of central cities into rapidly growing suburban areas. Automobiles, say Hohenberg and Lees, "acted as a solvent rather than a cement to the urban fabric."

1920 also marks the moment when the growth of central cities was surpassed by the growth at their fringes, the moment urban deconcentration began to intensify.

City Killing: One factor contributing to the depletion of urban autocatalytic dynamics was the unprecedented mobility of large corporations, which, having internalized the benefits of economies of agglomeration, could move headquarters and production facilities with relative ease.
"It was the big firms, with the big production units out of town, which ousted the little men".

Transactions of Decline: A loss of positive feedback. Any government policy that redirects the flow of imports. Taxing urban centers to sustain rural subsidies, the promotion of trade between large and small cities since a large city will attempt to transform a smaller city into a supply zone - all potential city killers.

Western cities became painfully aware of their long dependence on cheap energy (dependent on global supply zones) - 1970s.

The switch from the self-taught inventor of the nineteenth century to the industrial laboratory of the twentieth, with its staff of technical university graduates, involved a reversal in the balance of power between informal and formal knowledge.

many corporations have now become truly independent of any particular country, much as decades ago they became independent of cities.

Human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow different routes of development, not of a unilinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products.