Sarah Paine

Okay, so what's going on?

The Industrial Revolution started in England, or Britain more generally,

in the late 18th century.

It spreads to the continent after the Napoleonic Wars die down at the beginning of the 19th century.

By the mid-19th century, it had reached Asia.

And it's profoundly disruptive to traditional societies whose traditional security paradigms no longer work when they're facing the weaponry of the industrialized age coming at them.

And what the Industrial Revolution does and why it's so revolutionary

is it produces compounded economic growth.

Traditional societies are pretty stable.

But when you do compounding economic growth, the difference in power and wealth becomes stark between those who do and those who don't.

And it's also based

not only on technological changes, right, whether you've got all these fancy armaments and railways and telegraphs, but it's also based on institutions.

What are institutions?

They're how we organize each other.

So when you think of institutions, you think of the buildings where people are, but that's not it.

It's the people in there who are working on a shared project together, whatever, a shared area of activity.

And this is one of the hallmarks of Western civilization.

This is what the Romans figured out of institutions and laws, that this is a way of really harnessing people, and it's profoundly powerful.

So I'll go into all of that.

So Japan's looking at the world with this incoming...