In a world similar to Earth, how can I realistically prevent the industrial revolution from occurring as an event?
It's a little-known fact that the Chinese almost arrived at an industrial revolution (as well as a global empire) in the 15th century. And then ... a dynasty came to an end. The new emperor and the Confucian bureaucracy on which he depended for power felt threatened by new inventions and foreign influences. So they banned them! It became a capital crime to build or operate any ocean-going ships of the sort that had reached India and Africa and probably discovered America.
And so China slumbered for the next few centuries while its "barbarians" advanced technologically, and was powerless when they in turn navigated around Africa and India.
This may not be unique. You could argue that the Eastern Roman empire (later the Byzantine empire) failed to progress beyond the technologies of Rome for similar reasons. The Ottoman empire which succeeded it, likewise. It may be that an Industrial revolution is a rarity in the realm of alternative histories, rather than a near-inevitability, and requires some very special social conditions that were present in Protestant Europe and lacking at all earlier opportunities.
The original Arab Caliphate was yet another once-vibrant civilisation whose rulers legislated it into stasis and decline.
So there's my answer backed by real world history. Fear of the destabilizing effects of the new. Fear of losing power, influence, and control.
We kind of had a movement like this with the Luddites. They lost.
Alternate history:
The first major steam boiler explodes in the middle of a major city, causing a great loss of life and killing an important and greatly beloved political and religious leader.
There is a great public outcry at the death of this leader, and the surviving inventors of the steam engine have to go into hiding to avoid being lynched.
In a normal government overreaction, the rulers decided to ban all research into steam and automation, with heavy fines for anyone caught dabbling with it, and other governments, fearing similar unrest follow suit.
Any new technology or idea that reminds people of this steam automation is stigmatized and smothered.
Existing companies, fearing what automation could do to their business models, actively work to strengthen the anti automation laws with larger fines, harsher penalties, and active legal punishment for inventors.
Kolaru has made a very important observation: the Industrial Revolution was not inevitable, and it is much more likely for your story that the civilization will be agrarian and static rather than industrial and dynamic.
Consider that in the First century AD, Hero of Alexandria created simple steam and atmospheric engines (some of which were used as temple "props" to do things like automatically open doors to worshippers), and several books on the subject of these machines survived to the present. Romans could also build devices which we would recognize as clockwork, and the waterwheel and crank mechanism were known to them. Much of the basic technology existed, but it was not widely adopted or improved upon. Culturally, the Romans (and the Greeks before them) considered science to be a hobby, and technological devices were mostly considered rich men's playthings.
Flash forward to 1500 and the Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta had developed a form of assembly line in the "Arsenal", had advanced accounting/book keeping and a high degree of literacy, and was quite open to outside influence as a major trading empire. They also had a relatively merit based public administration and government, but no industrial revolution was sparked there either.
The question as to why England was able to begin an industrial revolution when many other nations with similar circumstances could not or did not is still somewhat mysterious. Obviously a combination of science, technology, culture and even resources (England was facing "peak wood" as most of the native forests had been cut for firewood, charcoal making or ship building, so they turned to coal as an alternative energy source) was involved, but the exact mix isn't easy to determine, and there is little agreement as to why the process could become self sustaining in England when it didn't take off elsewhere.
So perhaps the focus of your story could be not how to suppress an industrial revolution, but rather how to start one....
Simple answer: religion.
Create your religion in such a way that iron becomes the symbol/root/instrument of evil. Without iron, our modern world wouldn't exist as we know it. For one, we wouldn't have steel, cars, or even metal pickaxes. Maybe we would be using something else (wood?), but nothing is as prevalent, useful, and durable as iron.
Alternatively, do what I did for one region of a recent world: make stone sacrosanct. Defacing rock or stone -- including the cutting, painting, shaping, or mining of stone -- was outlawed by the theocratic society. Without the ability to mine the ground, you can't produce any metals.
Though the industrial revolution tends to bring thoughts of big ironworks and steam engines, it started much earlier than that. Waterwheels were powering greater industrialization - canals and artificial waterways were created not only to facilitate transport, but to move water for power as well. In the late 18th century, leather belts transferred the power from the waterwheel to rows of equipment in the same sweatshop conditions we would see in the later half of the 19th century.
It isn't iron or steam which caused the industrial revolution, though it certainly helped power it to even greater feats, but it was the organization of production. The greater emphasis on larger groups of coordinated and specialized workers (and the development of the joint-stock company to fund it) boosted productivity at a much faster pace than ever known before. Fortunately for this topic, the industrial revolution having a cultural cause means cultural reasons for preventing it are as easy as retarding the shift which allowed it.
Inhibit the formation of capitalism and corporations, and you delay the industrial revolution. If the culture is committed to the ideals of every man being his own master - ever man works for himself - you destroy much of the gains from gathering together in specialized jobs. Additionally, if you prevent seeking diverse sources of funds for investing in new businesses, such that a man would only fund his enterprise from his own existing wealth or perhaps just from family, and there simply isn't an investment in growing productivity.
Note that industry revolution only emerged in Europe, thousands of years after being populated. Moreover, most of the world, at the time of industrial revolution, showed no sign of transforming toward industrial revolution.
This indicate that industrial revolution is not inherent to any human society. In fact a lot of human societies seem stable on the long run (e.g. tribal societies) and are likely not to tend to industrial revolution (nor to any other major changes).
With this in mind, it is more relevant to look at what is necessary for a industrial revolution to happen. Here is a non exhaustive list.
You can see that the list is surely not complete, simply because it does not make clear why China or the Ottoman Empire, for example, did not enter the industrial revolution before Europe.
Investigate Ordnung - real world reasons why Amish, and similar groups, shun advances?
Religion, tradition, fear, family, etc... tons of reasons why groups refuse this or that... apply those reasons to a more "global" scale.
Imagine trying to start an industrial revolution amoungst the Amish. Consider trying to change clothes worn... convince the elders to stop using horses to plow the fields... use a machine to weave cloth.
And a good quote about the values and whats important to them:
By giving up individuality and any thought of selfishness, they embrace God's
will by serving others and submitting to Him. To the Amish, Gelassenheit is
seen in all of the following aspects of Amish life:
Personality: reserved, modest, calm, quiet
Values: submission, obedience, humility, simplicity
Symbols: dress, horse, carriage, lantern
Structure: small, informal, local, decentralized
Ritual: baptism, confession, ordination, foot-washing.
— The Riddle of Amish Culture, Donald Kraybill, Johns Hopkins UP, 1989, p.26.
Look at some of the reasons as too why the Amish won't use new items. Vanity. Connections to the outside world = loss of connection with the local community. Reasons to not visit your neighbor.
Technology
Modern technology is used selectively by the Amish for fear that it may weaken the family structure.[12] If any equipment does not maintain principles of Gelassenheit, it is banned. Anything which could promote sloth, luxury or vanity is strictly prohibited. Because 120-volt electricity connects to the outside world, it violates the Amish idea of separation from society. Owning an automobile could be a sign of status and it would promote vanity and competition between the church members; a direct violation of Gelassenheit's value of modesty. A telephone in the house would be a temptation to stay at home speaking to a friend rather than walking or taking a buggy ride to visit a neighbor.
Our modern free education system available in most parts of the developed world was really to provide a basic level of educated work force for the industrial revolution. Without a basic ability to read, write and add up your work force is much much less productive even in a factory.
Perhaps a cultural norm where only the highly affluent were allowed education and no popular movement for free education every got off the ground.
Perhaps religion prevented it (it did for quite a while here).
Perhaps most of the population is very dim and can't be educated to a sufficient level (Neanderthal)
That's easy. A culture which does not value the advantages that an Industrial Revolution would bring more than it dislikes the disadvantages/costs of an Industrial Revolution. Consider how the Industrial Revolution (IR) played out in western civilization. Pay diverged widely from the actual value of the work being done because society saw people using machines as 'not doing real work' and not being as deserving of compensation in scale with the value they created through their use of machines. This had tremendous consequences that are still affecting us to this day.
For instance, factory owners refused to pay adolescent workers a wage which would make them able to raise a family. This was new. This was catastrophic. The lower class was put into a position such that if their adolescent children had a baby (which was how it worked for tens of thousands of years), people would literally starve to death, either the baby or someone else in the family. This invented, for the first time ever, a practical need for families to treat adolescents as second-class people and to try to suppress their sexuality (since they had no widely available effective birth control).
That required a monumental amount of change in society. Sexuality wasn't just something you could start telling adolescents to ignore. They grew up with their life suffused with sexuality from the day they were born. Only the high upper class had separate bedrooms, everyone else slept, and screwed, in common rooms. Since there was no danger of children procreating, and no significant near-universal danger of adolescents procreating leading to starvation or privation, sex was seen as just a bodily function, and not something one hid from family or friends. So not only did adolescents need controlled, but children, for the first time ever, had to be separated from sex.
So, as a matter of self-preservation, most all of society set about trying to destroy sex. Home architecture changed, with bedrooms separating children and adults being introduced. The church, with the help of the opportunistic medical profession, started teaching about the moral and physical lethality of masturbation. The only thing in the Bible that could be loosely interpreted as having something to do with masturbation was the story of Onan, and that was always taught as "see what happens if you disobey an order from God", but it was re-framed as "see what happens if you spill the seed" and then generalized to cover all forms of masturbation for everybody. Then the doctors piled on and assured everyone it would make you go blind, grow hair on your palms, turn you insane, then kill you.
Families started trading children because they feared they would not be able to beat their own children savagely enough to control them ('save' them). Art had to be censored or, mostly, destroyed, with the Victorians famously destroying so much historical artwork that to this day people think prudery pre-dated the IR (Pompeii shows us different, however, preserved where they couldn't get at it - penis-shaped door-knockers, vagina windchimes, pornographic frescoes in the public buildings, sex toy shops in the merchants area, erotic statuary on the street and all). Schooling had to be extended, as many factory owners simply didn't want younger workers, and the machinery made everyone so productive that fewer jobs were needed to meet the same demand, so 'high school' came about, along with the very beginning of treating adolescents like large children.
And that's just a small part of how it affected sex! (I used that because it's the area I'm most knowledgeable about) Society also changed massively by switching from expecting every product to be a unique thing, most often personalized, and available in a large variety, to a much smaller range of items being available in larger numbers and all mostly cookie-cutter identical. A cultural reverence toward artistry and craftsmanship could hold back an IR for a long while.
Every social change has costs and disadvantages alongside any benefits it provides. You can only choose to accept or reject both as a package. Obviously, it's not really "choice" and whenever I say "society" did something, I do not mean to imply some grand conspiracy or even widespread conscious action. That's just how the actions of as large and heterogenous a group as 'society' is spoken of (when I talk about these changes, people often misunderstand and think I'm talking about some kind of Illuminati guiding civilization... I'm just talking about cause and effect. Pressures are put on a group of people, individually they work with what they have and try to solve their personal problems, and on the large scale, "a society makes a choice").
They took our jobs!
A cultural reason for the industrial revolution not happening could simply be that people don't like industry. If the people of this world care more about items being handcrafted by a human and less about money, reproducibility, and large scale manufacturing, then it's plausible the industrial revolution will never occur there.
There are some good answers, but let me add my two cent ...
According to my history teacher, the industrial revolution happened in Britain because "in Italy there are volcanoes. In Britain no, so they had coal and could start the industrial revolution"
Give your people teachers like that and they'll never see the industrial revolution. If you want to limit the impact you could make the situation improve over time (e.g. bad teachers get extinct).
Well, the Amish would be culturally opposed to the industrial revolution. Maybe it's a religious/spiritual philosophy decision like the Amish.
Religion is kind of the eternal handbrake on the Choo-Choo Train of Progress:
"Brethren, we are gathered here today to try this poor, unfortunate creature for heresy. Yea, though our duty is plain, yet it is right that the charges be read out and the evidence presented, that all may see with open eyes how this sad wretch has been led astray by the Evil One. The Evil One, I say before you now, has put thoughts of folly and wickedness into this man's head - has caused him to stray from the Safe Path onto the Way of Sin and Degradation - has caused him to take up with the Foul Beasts of Naughtiness - has caused him to produce the evil Press That Prints Upon The Page - and who, sadly, has left us no choice but to cleanse him in the Fires of Righteousness. Brother Arthur - wilt thou please anoint the accused with the Sauce of Barbecue? And does the Sauce of Barbecue stick to his flesh? It DOES?!? BRETHREN! The Sauce of Barbecue sticketh to the flesh of the accused, indicating that he is guilty, Guilty, GUILTY!!! QUICKLY - LASH HIM TO THE SPIT OF REMONSTRANCE AND LAY HIM ABOVE THE COALS OF PENITENCE!! PUMP UP!! PUMP UP THE COALS THAT HIS SKIN MAY CRISP AND HIS FLESH MAY COOK SLOWLY - AND ALL THE WHILE KEEP BASTING!!!"
It's not how to stop the Industrial Revolution, it's how did it start in the first place?
When you have plenty of people to do the work, why bother building machines? But in the mid-14th century, the plague wiped out 60% of the European population. There were no longer enough people to get the jobs done. So the investment in technology took place.
The easiest way is to restrict the abundance of energy supply.
The Industrial revolution required massive amounts of cheap energy to work. Some say that it was because the coal fields in the north of England were practically lying on the ground that the steam engines were built. You couldn't get as much power from burning wood or from horses pulling wheels as you could by simply picking coal up off the ground and throwing it into a furnace, and those early steam engines were very inefficient so you needed a lot of energy.
There were power sources such as waterwheels already in existence, but they are particularly static in nature, and only available in certain locations. Also windmills provide reasonable amounts of power but again, aren't the easiest of things to use. Nobody would have a railway locomotive powered by water or wind. You have to have coal.
So - get rid of the coal. No power = only small scale industrialisation in limited locations.
To answer this, You need to understand the factors that caused the industrial revolution.
Now, The first two needs are slightly less important then the bottom two (when delaying an industrial revolution). A society that doesn't encourage improvement of ideas or the free unregulated exchange of information along with a government that discourages the above should easily delay an industrial revolution until such a time the above factors are available.
note: the above factors were all taken from the BBC documentery "Why the industrial revolution happened here"
It's obvious that in Scotland, people are miserable, unhappy, do nothing but work, and they invented the entirety of the modern world. ("The Enlightenment" and "Industrial Revolution" were just minor passing issues born in Scotland.)
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_inventions_and_discoveries )
Whereas. Go to the tropics and everyone's happy, well-balanced, has sex all day, and eat the world's best food (mangos, lobsters, etc) all day. They don't bother inventing anything. Why would you?
There are any number of popular books and scholarly studies on this.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10400419.2018.1411571
Some say that everything was invented in Scotland because of the weather, religion, bad food, etc.
But it's pretty obvious it's just the weather.
And you're there. They'll never invent anything. They'll have happy sex and eat lobster all day.
