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🌊 Ripple · counterfactual

What if the sanitation revolution had gone differently?

1858 · britain

Cities finally separate their sewage from their drinking water and pipe both.

If it had gone differently: Cities keep drinking their own waste; the urban death rate never falls and the great cities stay capped in size.

What it set up
  1. 1740Europe's population boom, Without a surplus of hands and mouths, there is no cheap urban workforce waiting for the factories.
  2. 1870The first globalisation, The world economy stays a patchwork of regions; no belle-époque boom, and no 1914 shock when it unwinds.

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