Marginal Revolution: Why did it take so long for humans to have the Industrial Revolution?
… More generally, extended periods of economic growth require that technologies of defense outweigh technologies of predation. They may also require that the successful defender, at the same time, has good enough technology to predate someone else and accumulate a sizable surplus. Parts of Europe took a good deal from the New World and this may have mattered a good deal.
Building a strong enough state to protect markets from other states is very hard to do; at the same time the built state has to avoid crushing those markets itself. That's a very delicate balance. China had wonderful technology for its time and was the richest part of the world for centuries but never succeeded in this endeavor, not for long at least.
England was fortunate to be an island. Starting in the early seventeenth century, England had many decades of ongoing, steady growth. Later, coal and the steam engine kicked in at just the right time. English political institutions were "good enough" as well and steadily improving, for the most part.
Christianity was important for transmitting an ideology of individual rights and natural law. As McCloskey and Mokyr stress, the Industrial Revolution was in part about ideas.
There are numerous other factors, but putting those ones together — and no others — already makes an Industrial Revolution very difficult to achieve. It did happen, it probably would have happened somewhere, sooner or later, but its occurrence was by no means easy to achieve. The Greeks had steam engines, proto-computers, and brilliant philosophers and writers, but still they did not come close to a breakthrough.
One question is how long the Roman Empire would have had to last to generate an Industrial Revolution and don't mention the Eastern Empire smartypants.
If you are asking why the Industrial Revolution did not occur in the Mesozoic age, or other earlier times, genetic factors play a role as well.
As one commenter notes, let us not forget scientific-rationalism. The West arrived at the idea that nature operates in an ordered way. The West stopped anthropomorphizing nature. Natural processes were not the workings of capricious gods or of fate.
Another frequently overlooked aspect of Christianity was the valuation of human labor. More than 1,000 years ago Benedictine monks began fanning throughout Europe, functioning as economic development catalysts. They helped improve farming methods and in the development things like waterwheel technology. This valuation of the individual and his/her labor as opposed to seeing people merely as fodder for the King's agendas was critical.
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