No. The Romans never would have allowed an industrial revolution. They knew all about aqueducts, but they didn't even bother using water power to mill grain, because that would have undermined too many powerful people whose economic might was backed by the slave economy.
The whole "Dark Ages were backwards after Rome collapsed" story overall is a historical meme pushed by motivated reasoning and poorly backed by facts. Even "collapse" is dubious. If Rome was really on the cusp of industrial revolution, why didn't Byzantium bother to finish the job any time in the next 1,000 years?
Slave labor may have caused a massive employment problem for the lower tiers of the non-slave population, but it sure did not cause Romans to skimp on water powered grain mills.
I just read Bryan Ward-Perkins’s “The Fall of Rome” and it argues pretty persuasively that the era after the fall was materially worse off than during the Roman Empire. Specifically the quality and quantity of manufactured artifacts and dwellings in the archaeological record appears to fall off substantially. Not to mention there’s some evidence (eg graffiti fragments) that indicates literacy also declined in this period.
Sure, there was progress after the roman times, and sure, Dark Ages weren't really that dark, I totally agree. Scientific progress in particular kept going forward. But as a whole, the sheer quantity of civilization went down when the roman empire split, in measurable ways.
Helen Dale wrote an interesting series of alternate history novels set in an industrialized Roman Empire 2000 years ago. Archimedes survived the Second Punic War to revolutionize Roman science. Then Stoic philosophers led a movement that abolished slavery, thus giving an incentive to use machinery. Seems plausible, but who knows?
Why The West Rules, by Ian Morris - pretty much a continuation of Guns Germs and Steel that takes over where GGS ended: Eurasia rules because geography, but why Europe and not China?
Part of the book is a system of points that tracks civilization progress, and it peaks in Roman times but fails to reach exponential.
> Part of the book is a system of points that tracks civilization progress
In what units? I'm curious to see how he managed to fit a something as complex as "civilization progress" into one dimension without pulling numbers and definitions out of thin air.
But it's not necessarily that the system is "correct", it's more like it allows you to make falsifiable predictions. Say you want to track the health of a culture over 1000 years, or of several cultures based on a certain variable (like degree of deforestation, or climate). In order to have anything other than subjective opinions, you need to have an objective measuring stick that can be reproduced by other people independently.
You may chose average lifespan, child mortality, average daily calories, put them in a weighted sum, and track that.
It doesn't make it The correct measure, of course. But it's something that anybody else can try and check independently, and instead of saying "deforestation sucks for health" you'll say "the health index took a steep dive 50 years after the last tree was felled on Easter Island". That's falsifiable - somebody else can do the math and say "no, it's wrong: people lived longer and ate more, with less child mortality".
