Jevons Paradox: Unraveling 18th-Century Complex Industries Introduction Imagine you are a time traveler with one mission: prevent the Industrial Revolution from ever happening. What would be your strategy? Destroy the Newcomen steam engine in 1712? Would one single Londoner notice? Well, not at first. But the miners in Manchester would. Slowly but surely, the effects of missing steam engines in coal mining would emerge: production of coal and other minerals would plummet and production in coal and mineral-dependent industries would decline; Britain’s ten-fold increase in coal production from 1750 to 1850 would vanish; textile manufacturing would stagnate; despite the introduction of the coke-fired blast furnace, without the steam engine, the exponential growth of iron production fueling additional industries would also disappear; and finally, no steam locomotives or steamships rise from the beginning of the 19th century to revolutionize transportation. Boats of European immigrants bob across the ocean at the mercy of the winds, and the central plains of America host the migrations of buffalos for a bit longer still. What I’m illustrating in this drama is not the essentiality of the steam engine to the Industrial Revolution, but rather the unprecedented magnitude of interconnectedness of industries and elements which fostered the exponential economic growth that has sustained until even today. One might even argue that the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century could qualify as an ‘X-Event’. X-Events In ‘X-Events: The Collapse of Everything,’ John Casti argues that excessive layers of complexity create fractures in society, ultimately leading to collapses. But how does a society even get to a point from which to collapse in the first place? The 1700s, arguably, was the site of exponential growth of the economy, distinct from all previous centuries. By relying on the principles of Casti’s book, on how complex entities and phenomena collapse, I believe we can gain perspective on how they rise. Casti outlines 7 ‘faces of complexity’, but we will work with three: Emergence (a part cannot represent the whole), Red Queen Hypothesis (evolution must be necessary to survive), and Incompleteness (logic alone is not enough for explanation) (Casti, 2012, p. 57). With ever-increasing complexity layering atop society in the 1700s, the Jevons paradox likewise emerges. Jevons paradox states that higher efficiency in systems consuming resources results in an increase in demand for resources. Ultimately, through this

lens, we’ll look not for how one element impacted the economic growth of the 1700s but how those elements interacted with each other to create the complexity fostering sustained development in a way distinct from previous centuries, building layers of complexity that make our current world possible. Slavery 12.5 million people. This figure’s significance depends on the historical context around it. 5000 years ago, this was the human population on Earth. By the 1700s, it was the estimated number of slaves transported during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. However, slavery was not a novel practice, thriving since the agricultural revolution. Ancient Sumer, the first recorded civilization in the world, was thought to be the birthplace of slavery. So what made the trans-Atlantic slave trade distinct from millennia before? During the Industrial Revolution, the slave trade went global, whereas previously it had remained continental, with significant slave populations rarely being shipped across vast oceans. Approximately 6.5 million slaves were traded during the 18th century alone, representing more than half of the total. While African people were exploited as slaves in the Americas to harvest cotton, the African people were purchased with Indian cotton shipped to We

st Africa to be used as currency for buying slaves. Cotton production was both the product and the currency, perpetuating the exploitive labour systems that sustained its increasing demand and thus increasing production. The principle of emergence is evident here, as the supply chain also includes the demand for cotton and demand for textile production in England, one factor alone cannot explain this dynamic, it's the emergent relationship between the exploitation of African people that