My issue with Tom Holland's Dominion

[Jane379]

My main issue was that I think Christianity has been keen to how Britain has developed but clearly other factors must have been in play.

Ethiopia has been Christian for a very long time but a very different society was produced there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Orthodox_Tewahedo_Church

Christianity in Palestine doesn't seem to necessarily moderate views : Christian Palestianian Arabs are also very likely to be anti Semitic or to get mixed up in extreme movements. Aggressive nationalism isn't necessarily softened in that case. Nor in the case of Lebanon where the Christian Phalangists have been as aggressive towards civilians as the other side
Nor does Coptic Christianity in Egypt appear to necessarily produce more moderate outcomes : in fact Coptic women there in some ways have more problems than Muslim (it is harder for a Coptic woman than a Muslim one to get a divorce, for one - I'll elaborate below).
India has had St Thomas Christians for a very long time who generally accepted the caste system (separated pews etc)
Is Western Christianity different (maybe Greek philosophical influences from Aquinas etc play a role?). Maybe. But Christianity didn't prevent fascism in Italy or Spain, or Nazism either. Maybe Protestantism is different (more emphasis on individualism? Ban on cousin marriage as discussed in books like The WEIRDEST People in the World). But then that was also present in Germany.

I think the influence of Christianity is definitely a major reason why Britain has developed as it has. But clearly it's produced very different outcomes in different places and Holland should have dug into this. Has British Christianity developed in a particularly positive way? And if so, how and why?

I have no idea who Tom Holland is, but I would say the UK developed as it did despite religion. UK development is really down to geology.

This from memory, not definitive. Places such as Coalbrookdale. Where all the bits needed for an industrial revolution all just happen to be. Iron ore, limestone, wood for charcoal ( and coal later), and flowing water for power. We have all that on an Island. Plus tin/ lead etc.

For sure religious conditions played a part. The reformation etc. And social conditions such as Magna Carta. But the main bit was geology.

I grew up non-Christian but in my middle years I'm seeing how much it has done for the West spiritually and materially. You make a fine point OP, I guess Holland didn't discuss the huge effect of Protestantism. Protestantism originally was all about the individual reading his/her bible and understanding for themselves. That led to mass literacy and individualism. Additionally there was the idea that the elect would be known by their fruits: living a moderate abstemious life, hard work, making money, giving to charity. Another massive idea.
Greek and Roman learning, too were made accessible due to schools teaching children Latin and Greek and that knowledge to the Protestant work ethic.
We take it for granted but it's amazing.

Sorry, I've been really busy the past few days but this is a great reply! I'll write more tomorrow but for now I'll say that the geological explanation makes a lot of sense to me...good point re the Magna Carta too.

Thank you, I agree strongly with this. I'm partly Catholic by heritage myself and do see a lot of good in Catholicism but arguably it has often played a more restrictive role with regard to social progress (see Italy, Spain, Ireland, in some ways France and Latin America, arguably most prominently now Poland).

Would be interesting to look at Orthodox Christianity also: I know less about it but certainly in Russia now it seems to have been co-opted by hierarchy (and I think was in the Tsars' time though need to check).

I wonder if one reason Tom Holland was not more explicit about this was that the recent uptick in conversions seems more Catholic and Orthodox, and if he had more explicitly said 'Protestantism' rather than just 'Christianity' it might have upset some people.

Re Greek and Latin though : I think this slightly compresses the history than is actually the case.

Greek and Latin weren’t introduced by Protestantism — they were already central to elite education in medieval Western Europe.
What did change with Protestantism in some regions was the purpose of classical learning: Reformers often valued Latin and sometimes Greek/Hebrew for direct engagement with scripture. But this built on an existing tradition rather than replacing something new.
It’s also worth noting that access to this kind of education was for a very long time highly restricted — mainly elite boys. Broader access developed much later.

I am not an academic or not, just an Engineer with an interest in the history of engineering.

I do think however that many of the academics looking at stuff like this do miss out a lot of practical things. They are "thinking at too high a level" sort of thing. I don't mean that in a negative way, not at all.

My way of thing about why did the UK develop/have the industrial revolution, is to reverse it, and ask why not somewhere else?

And that leads me to the Needham Question. He asked why modern science and technology was not born in China. And there are loads of academic papers on his, and they nearly all miss geography/geology.

In the days of horses and carts, it simply was not easy to bring resources together when they are 100's or maybe even 1000's of miles apart. Iron ore is at A, coal at B, limestone at C. Then there is refractory clay. Where is that. Wood for charcoal. That has to be hardwood really to get the energy density for smelting. Then we need fast flowing water to drive the bellows. So while China had cast Iron well before the west, did the cast Iron have an advantage over other materials given the massive effort needed to collect and transport the materials. Well no.

And there are clues linking geography geology to industry all over the UK.

Take the firth of Forth in Scotland. Lot of places with "Pan" in the name. And that is because that area used to export salt. Mainly to the low countries. They boiled sea water in pans to get the salt. And it happened there because of coal. Same sea water as Holland has. But that area had coal to fuel the pans, so that area exported salt. See the 16th century Culross Moat Pit coal mine for info on that.

It's the same with any tech breakthrough in the world. Various things started where the materials were.

Even way back in the stone age, materials were traded and shipped. And it started where the materials were. Grimes Graves in Norfolk is a good example. Neolithic flint mines. Flint was being exported in neolithic times, because that is where the flint was, and was fairly easy to dig.

So yup, geography and geology.

I've read a few things about Pelagianism and British Christianity - both in terms of whether there was something about British culture that influenced Pelagius's interpretation of Christian revelation, and in the other direction, if British Christianity remained somewhat Pelagian (despite officially submitting to Augustinian doctrine) and that pushed society in a different direction to the rest of Christendom (in the Magna Carta, democracy kind of direction).
But @RedTagAlan is right, this is all at the ideologocal level and there are alot of very different aspects of reality that would influence the direction culture / society takes. A geological history of Britain, so interesting and well beyond my ken.

Just to add, I read the stuff about Pelagianism decades ago and I can't remember who any of it was by. Maybe a fraught piece by John Stott who wanted Pelagius to be both wrong (for reasons of Evangelical dogma) and right (for reasons of patriotism)? No idea what it was called.

Yup. Over analysis ?

I don't even know what Pelagianism is.

Right, I just looked it up :-)

I try to see history through the eyes of the people at the time. There were no Bibles about, no printing presses. So while a few people were discussing high brow things, the masses were ignorant of it.

Roads for example. The Romans were good at roads. But after the Romans left we were terrible at them. And we need roads for industry to start. And I think that with the Romans, the UK really started to get into roads because of the needs of, or threat of, war. And if we look at the likes of the Wade roads in Scotland, they were built with what was available. That is, the road construction was dictated by where the gravel was located.

And, rambling a bit now, the UK had a rail network before a road network. And before the railways it was canals.

And I find that when I read many of these papers or articles about development, it is often forgotten that it is not easy to move 50 tons of coal from A to B in wagons when there are no roads.

With that in mind then, it could be said, and it's something I agree with, that the start of the industrial was the Bridgewater canal. And that came about because there was a Fuedal landowner who had coal, and wanted to get it to Manchester to sell for people to heat their houses.

Once we had a canal, we could move stuff. So then we got a canal boom. We could move US produced cotton from Liverpool to the areas of the country with fast flowing water that powered the water wheels and so on.

And our first steam engines were built to drain deep coal mines, that mined coal that was moved by canal. And that led to steam trains.

And this was going on just as people were starting to question religion. Just as landowners were seeing that they could make more money from the minerals under their feet than they could waving a bible at the peasants.

oh I sometimes fantasise the world continued wit canal travel.

Though if that had happened no doubt I'd actually think canals were horrible busy noisy things and roads were terribly romantic 🙃

Canals are still being built. But not in the UK though :-(

I agree though. It would be great to see a comeback.

Such an interesting discussion. I actually got my degree in Russian history (language too) and the revolutionary figure you want is Peter the Great. Russia was a very closed medieval society then, nobles and church alike. Peter the Great famously went to the West and learned shipbuilding in Holland and brought back Western knowledge plus lots of German and Dutch engineers to modernize Russia.That was the start. The Orthodox church was very obscurantist and Peter dealt with them too, ironically getting rid of their independence. Peter made Russia very hierarchical not less.
I think Orthodoxy was at its height under the Byzantine Empire.

Really interesting points, I'll hopefully be able to reply more tonight.

I do think certain branches of UK Christianity were good at promoting social responsibility: evangelicals in the 18th century like Hannah More were key to opposing slavery. Non Conformism was key to the early Labour Party.

And what caused this explosion of Christian denominations in the 19th century ?

My position is that there was a chain reaction. And each reaction feeds others. But key things need to happen to set it off.