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Swami's avatar

How important would you say the opening of three new (recently depopulated) continents were to the breakthrough in prosperity?

It seems we had four overlapping breakthroughs in agricultural productivity:

1) major improvements in productivity as illustrated by this and your last post.

2) the opening to Western Europeans of an order of magnitude more acreage, currently not being farmed in the Americas, Australia and various large islands

3) the introduction of new and substantially more productive crops (potatoes and corn) to Europe

4) the substitution of forest wood with coal (and eventually the replacement of pastureland for horses with oil for cars)

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J.K. Lund's avatar

Fantastic article. Food is energy, we need energy to maintain homeostasis. As you points us, to innovate, first one has to survive.

The key distinction between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution was the unlocking of fossil fuels, energy that could power our machines and augment human/animal physical capabilities.

What I find interesting is that both were "energy" revolutions, even we do not call them that.

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