INDUSTRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NATIONALISM 271
the imperial bureacracy had the capacity, and why would it bother to save
something it already had too much of? China was overpopulated and
labor was cheap. If a lot of laborers were left at loose ends, whose job
would it be to deal with the resulting social disruptions? The bureacracy.
The one institution capable of industrializing China had no motive to un-
dertake it.
Likewise, Muslim inventors didn't think of using steam power to make
devices that would mass-produce consumer goods, because they lived in a
society already overflowing with an abundance of consumer goods, hand-
crafted by millions of artisans and distributed by efficient trade networks.
Besides, the inventors worked for an idle class of elite folks who had all the
goods they could consume and whose lot in life did not call upon them to
produce-much less mass-produce-anything.
It wasn't some dysfunction in these societies that generated their indif-
ference to potentially world-changing technologies, quite the opposite. It
was something working too well that led them into "a high-level equilib-
rium trap" (to borrow a phrase from historian Mark Elvin.^1 ) Necessity, it
turns out, isn't really the mother of invention; it's the mother of the process
that turns an invention into a product, and in late-eighteenth-century Eu-
rope, that mother was ready.
Steam engines evolved out of steam-powered pumps used by private
mine owners to keep their mine shafts free of water. These same mine
owners had another business problem they urgently desired to solve: get-
ting their ore as quickly as possible from the mine to a river or seaport, so
they could beat their competitors to market. Traditionally, they hauled the
ore in horse-drawn carts that rolled along on parallel wooden tracks called
tramways. One day, George Stephenson, an illiterate English mining man-
ager, figured out that a steam pump could be bolted to a cart and made to
turn the wheels, with appropriate gearing. The locomotive was born.
England at this point brimmed with private business owners competing
to move products and materials to markets ahead of one another. Anyone
with access to a railroad could get an edge on all the others, unless they too
shipped by train; so everyone started using railroads, whereupon everyone
who had the means to build a railroad, did so.
Likewise, after James Watt perfected the steam engine in the late eigh-
teenth century, clever European inventors figured out how to mechanize