Industrial Revolution in Joriscia

The Industrial Revolution in Outer Joriscia, known in Vaestdom as Mechanisation (High Secote: Ustrojtĭstvo), was a period of intensive technological, social and economic development beginning in the mid-18th century and continuing through the 19th. The beginning, end, causes and exact distinguishing qualities of the Industrial Revolution as opposed to previous periods are a matter of broad academic debate in Messenia and elsewhere, particularly in the Joriscian context. Technological development in Outer Joriscia and its export to Messenia was a driving factor in industrialisation there.

History

In native historiography, the industrial revolution in Joriscia is broadly divided into three stages. The first stage, termed 'petty industrialism', was distinguished by gradual increases in productivity and demand taking place over the course of the 17th and earlier 18th centuries, in particular the spread of factory models of production in the urban regions of the Rashimic Littoral and above all Lacre. Although this period saw few of the great technological breakthroughs characteristic of the machine revolution proper, the Great Deforestation, the establishment of a more centralised and interventionist Neritsovid state and the expansion of Joriscian trade combined to effect a dramatic shift in the economic life of the subcontinent. Both demand and supply were fed by the steady growth of the Zavarudsk, in particular Neritsovid Serania, and the rising tempo of three-way trade between western Ascesia, the Tondaku and Joriscia. Coal (from Lefdim) began to be used as a source of power for the first time, and – crucially – the Lacrean textile industry began its long rise to dominate the Joriscian fabric trade. The later Neritsian state invested heavily in infrastructure in the interior of the continent, making the upper reaches of many rivers navigable, building canals and clearing jungle.

The road to industrial revolution proper, however, only began with the breakup of Great Neritsia in 1700. This ushered in a new era of intra-Joriscian state warfare of a kind that had been almost entirely absent over the previous two centuries. Although the economic effects were necessarily diverse, the steady emergence of a new form of warfare built around professionalised standing armies cranked up demand for fabrics and metals and provided a further fillip to infrastructure development. The initial response was to pursue extensive rather than intensive growth, but from the 1760s onwards, innovations in Lacrean textile factories and foundries pushed up productivity, helped to some extent by a widespread culture of literacy and the filtering through of basic scientific knowledge developed during the previous century by Pechet Boards and other experimentally inclined Scholars. In particular, Lacrean fabrics – already a market leader – came to dominate the Joriscian market. The new states' unwillingness to erect maritime tariff borders against one another, one surprisingly durable legacy of late Neritsovid fiscal policy, facilitated this dominance during the first crucial decades of industrial growth; by the time that Terophan introduced protection in 1814, its own textile industry had effectively disappeared. By the 1830s, Lacre was a fabric superpower and the only Joriscian country to make extensive use of steam engines in industry. It was also the leading producer of iron, although here its lead was less pronounced thanks to the continuing vitality of the Azophine metal industry. Terophan, meanwhile, remained a largely agrarian and artisanal economy.

The balance of industrial power was shaken, although not entirely overturned, by the Great Peninsular War (1837-1845). Although political turmoil in Pestul and Inetsograd was the spark that set off the continental conflagration, Azophin itself saw relatively little fighting compared to Lacre, and Spytihnev the Arbitrator's campaigns demanded huge quantities of metal and fabric that Azophine industrialists were only too happy to provide. The breathing space afforded by the war allowed Azophine production to close the gap and, following the inevitable postwar depression of the Unhappy Peace (approximately 1845-1854), to usurp Lacre's leading position. Over the next forty years, it would largely be Azophin that spearheaded new technologies, particularly in the development of steel and the construction of continent-spanning railways. Nonetheless, Azophin was never to enjoy the unchallenged economic hegemony that Lacre had exploited during its early years. Lacre itself was still a major industrial power, and Terophan too had begun its own halting industrialisation effort, which was to bear fruit towards the end of the century. So had the newly created Azophine Serania, with consequences that were to dog policymakers in Inetsograd for the next century. Even more ominously, the major Messenian powers had taken steps to exclude Joriscian manufactures from their markets with the Messenian repudiations and graduating law, ushering in the Industrial Revolution in Messenia. The overall effect, although delayed, was deflationary: many traditional manufactured products became steadily less profitable as the century drew on. As industrialisation accelerated in both Joriscia and Messenia, the returns rapidly diminished.

Towards the end of the 19th century, invention and innovation were increasingly driven by Scholarly endeavour rather than by factory-floor mechanics, and above all by those associated with the Strong Externalist current. Azophin was able to bolster its own flagging position by drawing on advances in these areas to take an early lead in the chemical and electronics industries. But it was above all in Terophan, where the Mstislav Lazarov government pursued a belated and ambivalent economic modernisation drive, that this tendency to prove most successful. Terophan had already displaced Azophin in these highly technical industries by 1911, when the coronation of Vsevolod the Great marked the beginning of a new kind of state-directed economic growth. The period of Ustrojtĭstvo is generally agreed to end with the thoroughgoing reorganisation of production according to the methods of mass production spearheaded in Terophan.