These are not mutually exclusive hypotheses. Maybe you needed most of these things because the leap into modernity was in fact highly unlikely. It needed a great deal of luck.
> Martin Wolf: 'These are not mutually exclusive hypotheses. Maybe you needed most of these things because the leap into modernity was in fact highly unlikely. It needed a great deal of luck.
I do not know whether or not Cosma Shalizi <http://bactra.org> wants to acknowledge intellectual paternity over this idea or leave it at the church door for the nuns as an unwanted bastard—he characterizes it as one of his "flights of fancy", not even a conjecture, and certainly not even an improper unscholarly hypothesis let along a proper scholarly hypothesis—but one way to read the large arc of human history is that the ca. 1600 Gunpowder Empire is the most probable climax ecology for the post-agricultural revolution East African Plains Ape. The road from the evolution of we homines sapientes sapientes to an eventual agricultural revolution seems clear and likely, as does the path from Sumer to something like the realm of Kanuni Sultan Süleyman.
But thereafter?
Instead of attributing words and thoughts to Cosma, let me ask DiaBrowserChatBot to outline the hypothesis, drawing on the true ASI that is the collective human Mind:
Think of it this way: if you “ran history many times,” holding biology constant but letting geography, chance, and politics vary, the most likely long‑run outcome after the agricultural revolution is not industrial let alone post-industrial modernity, but something like the Ottoman–Safavid–Mughal world scaled up and frozen in place: big agrarian states, organized around gunpowder militaries, taxing peasant agriculture and running relatively stable extraction machines for warrior‑elites.
In that frame, what happens 1500–1900 in Europe is not the “natural culmination” of human social evolution but a very low‑probability escape path from a much more probable attractor.
1. “Climax ecological state”: left alone, ecosystems tend to converge on relatively stable, self‑reproducing configurations. Given:
- post‑Neolithic agriculture,
- the technologies of metal, horses, and then gunpowder,
- and the incentives of ambitious primates who like status and surplus,
the natural equilibrium you get is:
- large, territorially extensive empires;
- built on cereal agriculture;
- run by military‑bureaucratic elites with cannon, muskets, and fortresses;
- periodically fighting each other and rising/falling,
- but never escaping the fundamental Malthusian logic of pre‑industrial agriculture.
That is the “gunpowder empire (and borderlands)” world he’s talking about: late Ming/Qing + Mughal + Ottoman + Safavid + Romanov, plus their steppe and hill‑people peripheries. In his probabilistic metaphor, that’s where the “East African Plains Ape” tends to wash up once you give it agriculture and a few millennia. Big agrarian states, organized around gunpowder militaries, taxing peasant agriculture and running relatively stable extraction machines for warrior‑elites, rising and falling, with slow technological change offset for a while by decreasing farm size from rising Malthusian populations, and then at some point population stabilizes as land productivity begins to decline via evaporation induced salt poisoning and other ecological exhaustion mechanisms.
2. Why it looks so “natural” from an Allen/Crone/Wyman perspective:
- Consider Robert Allen's "Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction": In it, the “great empires” (Ottoman, Qing, Mughal, etc.) are successful solutions to the agrarian problem set. They keep order, extract surplus, and run for centuries. There’s no inherent “failure” in them not industrializing; industrialization itself is the oddity.
- Consider Patricia Crone's "Pre-Industrial Societies": According to it, most Eurasian “high civilizations” converge on a similar pattern: capstone agrarian empires with strong kinship structures, status hierarchies, and relatively stable Malthusian dynamics. Western Europe is weird precisely because it fails to settle into that pattern.
- Consider Patrick Wyman's "The Verge": It stresses how in one corner and only one corner of Eurasia-Africa (the Dover Circle) you get a contingent, tangled critical juncture—gunpowder wars, oceanic finance, printing capitalism, weird confessional fractures—that sets up an entirely new regime of growth.
Thus the “most probable” long‑run attractor, given agriculture and gunpowder, is a planet of Allen‑style “great empires.” The actually observed path—Dover Circle + coal + late marriage + high wages + seaborne empires → modern economic growth—is a large deviation from that attractor.
3. The large‑deviation twist:
- There is some ensemble of possible historical trajectories.
- Most of them converge on “gunpowder empires (and borderlands)” cycling forever.
- A small measure of trajectories “escape” into sustained modern growth: you need continuous scientific revolution, institutions that redirect surplus into capital accumulation, political fragmentation without conquest, access to coal, global markets, etc.
- Those escape paths are low‑probability in the space of all possible worlds, even if, conditional on our path, historians can narrate them as “inevitable.”
So in his story we are living in the low‑probability fluctuation: a rare path that escaped the gunpowder‑empire attractor into modernity. The “climax state” is the thing that would have happened in most runs of the tape.
4. Why this matters for teaching the "European Miracle": The moral, intellectually, is:
- Don’t treat “Europe industrializes and dominates the world” as the obvious endpoint of some Whiggish civilizational ladder.
- Treat gunpowder empires as the normal high‑complexity agrarian solution, and modern economic growth as the contingent outlier.
- In your synthetic line—“successful agrarian empires solve the Malthusian problem set so well that they become vulnerable when a coal‑and‑commerce regime appears elsewhere”—you’re essentially translating the attractor/large‑deviation language into economic‑historical prose.
So “the gunpowder empire is the most probable climax ecological state of the East African Plains Ape” is shorthand for: absent a long string of very specific accidents and configurations, our species doesn’t get railways and R&D labs; it gets Qing+Ottoman+Mughal‑type states, forever, until geology or epidemiology (volcanoes, pandemics) knock the whole structure down.
The gunpowder empire as the equilibrium. Modernity as the oddity:
After all, the breakthrough to real, sustained economic growth required an extraordinary conjunction of conditions. You needed not just a scientific revolution, but one that kept renewing itself instead of burning out; not just commerce, but a political economy that systematically rewarded ploughing surplus back into productive capacity. That in turn meant a large region with advanced scientific knowledge and printing; at least proto‑capitalist institutions; enough political and ideological fragmentation that no single state could strangle science or markets; yet enough internal order to build large-scale research and industrial establishments; ideologies that valorised reinvestment rather than buying estates or building cathedrals; cheap, accessible energy sources like coal; and both export markets (to make scale pay) and import markets for primary goods.
Take away much of this—say a successful Habsburg, Bourbon, or Vasa hegemon, or a Reformation that ended by re‑imposing religious unity—and the whole thing looks far less likely. It is, in other words, a highly improbable stack of coincidences.
See Ernest Gellner’s "Plough, Sword and Book", especially ch. 6.
One might argue that the recent rise of autocratic China creates a modernised form of those gunpowder empires. Thus, the Chinese have worked out what the West did and then found a way to inject as much of that "progress" as they need to create a modernised Ming state. One might also argue that such a state may not not do as well as the West did. But it increasingly appears as though the West is going to end up with predatory autocracy, too. Liberal dynamism might then turn out to be a relatively brief interlude between periods of arbitrary despotism. It is of course also possible that AI will create an entirely new economic and political order in which human are simply redundant.
Humanities and social science scholars unfamiliar with maths (except economists) technology and science always assume that it was the change in social relations that must have been decisive. But only Europe happened to discover scientific method and its potential for applied technological innovation. 'It was the technology stupid'. Temporarily this diverted status competition from domination to production. Domination is now making a comeback fuelled by increasing inequality and submission of US democracy to money and the tech oligarchs, and the success of populist politics made possible because those alive last time round who remember what happens are now all dead, in much the same way as 2008 could happen because there was nobody left who could remember 1929. But while autocratic domination might have been static, it was never stable because communications were so slow. Giving local rulers enough autonomy to rule effectively also inevitably gave them enough power to mount a challenge. Meanwhile at the centre, absolute power inevitably invited contests to usurp it. Hence regular massacres, turmoil and 'regime change' at the top. Thus the really worrying thing is that Xi style centralisation is perhaps possible with electronic comms and technologies like face recognition. That leaves only autocrats 'crashing the plane' as the best chance of escape from their rule.
I agree that it was the technology, but what produced the technology? There social relations and psychological orientations rule:
> John MacInnes: Humanities and social science scholars unfamiliar with maths (except economists) technology and science always assume that it was the change in social relations that must have been decisive. But only Europe happened to discover scientific method and its potential for applied technological innovation. 'It was the technology stupid'. Temporarily this diverted status competition from domination to production. Domination is now making a comeback fuelled by increasing inequality and submission of US democracy to money and the tech oligarchs, and the success of populist politics made possible because those alive last time round who remember what happens are now all dead, in much the same way as 2008 could happen because there was nobody left who could remember 1929. But while autocratic domination might have been static, it was never stable because communications were so slow. Giving local rulers enough autonomy to rule effectively also inevitably gave them enough power to mount a challenge. Meanwhile at the centre, absolute power inevitably invited contests to usurp it. Hence regular massacres, turmoil and 'regime change' at the top. Thus the really worrying thing is that Xi style centralisation is perhaps possible with electronic comms and technologies like face recognition. That leaves only autocrats 'crashing the plane' as the best chance of escape from their rule.
Neither social nor psychological relations produced the discovery of scientific method. Like the ‘discovery’ of agriculture it was a one off and to a large extent accidental. The printing press meant anyone had access to it. That’s where the social relations come in. Only the science made permanent growth possible.
Likewise. I'd like to send the entire footnote to a few people who may tend to listen to me, but it's not easy to do that.
Maybe I'll lift the whole thing and send it, but the probability of their actually following it when its length is apparent is not encouraging. "A very short introduction to a short introduction to the understanding of the system we live in" is not encouraging.
"....ideologies that valorised reinvestment rather than buying estates or building cathedrals...."
I'm going to argue this, just a little bit. After all, Western Europe--admittedly, less inside the Dover Circle than outside it--is littered with massive cathedrals and palaces which are almost certainly unrivalled outside that cultural sphere (+Russia) in the level of exploitation for edifice construction they represent.
It's seems that your economic system must be exploitative enough that surplus (food+tax resources) is directed upwards, to permit a leisure class that can (though it may not) engage in philosophizing of the sort that led to the discovery/creation of e.g., the scientific method, rather than kept at the bottom to enable more population growth (cf. Asia)-- but not so exploitative that it provokes widespread revolt or leads to widespread premature death (starvation, exposure, illness).
So if you are one time-traveling person, in an alternate world “back then”, there is no one nudge that would tip the necessary states into forming an industrial-revolution attractor.
Well, conditional on all the other miraculous-European nudges having happened, it would be interesting to reach some conclusions with respect to which ones were still essential...
Alternative: A long Bradbury moment. Allusion is to an Australian skater who unexpectedly won Olympic gold when all of his more favored rivals crashed. In this view, escape from the Malthusian trap was the par outcome. But the depredations of Timur the Lame and Genghis Khan knocked most of Eurasia out of the race, leaving only the long-standing puzzle of China's failure to maintain its lead.
Hit return too soon. ‘How’ questions are probably easier and more illuminating. Along with Gellner I’d emphasise a monotheistic scriptural religion that was powerful enough to generate systematic logical reasoning but not so powerful as to enforce its own rule. That enabled the chance discovery of scientific method to have the impact it did. No science= no energy sources = no escape from agraria.
It remains the case that the proposition that it was bound to happen somewhere else if it did not happen where it did is an unsubstantiated guess. It is at least as plausible that it could only have happened where it did because it took a very unlikely set of coincidences. The truth is that we do not (and cannot) know.
I agree that this is possibly history's most fascinating puzzle. It seems clear that if the Industrial Revolution was going to happen anywhere else, it would have been in China. There is also indeed a view that the Southern Song dynasty was coming close and that the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty stopped it. From what I have read, this might have been true. But they were still quite a long way away from it.
I've always been impressed by the book "War, What it is Good For..." by the historian Ian Morris. He makes an unpopular, but rational argument, that war helps drive technological and civilizational progress. And Europe seems to have had more wars than other parts of the world:
(Although it's possible that Europe just has more RECORDED wars than other parts of the world, due to a historically high literacy rate.)
Basically gunpowder leads to cannons, and cannons require skill in mining and metallurgy. Skill in metallurgy leads to steam engines, railroads, etc. Of course the ancients were pretty skilled at metallurgy too, such as the Antikythera mechanism and sophisticated Roman plumbing valves. So why no industrial revolution in ancient Greece or Rome? I've always liked Bret Devereaux's explanation: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
But in my opinion, ancient Europe's POTENTIAL for an industrial revolution, combined with numerous wars between kingdoms (and later nation states) gave Europe a much higher probability of an industrial revolution, (perhaps greater than 50%?) than other regions of the world.
These are not mutually exclusive hypotheses. Maybe you needed most of these things because the leap into modernity was in fact highly unlikely. It needed a great deal of luck.
Yes:
> Martin Wolf: 'These are not mutually exclusive hypotheses. Maybe you needed most of these things because the leap into modernity was in fact highly unlikely. It needed a great deal of luck.
I do not know whether or not Cosma Shalizi <http://bactra.org> wants to acknowledge intellectual paternity over this idea or leave it at the church door for the nuns as an unwanted bastard—he characterizes it as one of his "flights of fancy", not even a conjecture, and certainly not even an improper unscholarly hypothesis let along a proper scholarly hypothesis—but one way to read the large arc of human history is that the ca. 1600 Gunpowder Empire is the most probable climax ecology for the post-agricultural revolution East African Plains Ape. The road from the evolution of we homines sapientes sapientes to an eventual agricultural revolution seems clear and likely, as does the path from Sumer to something like the realm of Kanuni Sultan Süleyman.
But thereafter?
Instead of attributing words and thoughts to Cosma, let me ask DiaBrowserChatBot to outline the hypothesis, drawing on the true ASI that is the collective human Mind:
Think of it this way: if you “ran history many times,” holding biology constant but letting geography, chance, and politics vary, the most likely long‑run outcome after the agricultural revolution is not industrial let alone post-industrial modernity, but something like the Ottoman–Safavid–Mughal world scaled up and frozen in place: big agrarian states, organized around gunpowder militaries, taxing peasant agriculture and running relatively stable extraction machines for warrior‑elites.
In that frame, what happens 1500–1900 in Europe is not the “natural culmination” of human social evolution but a very low‑probability escape path from a much more probable attractor.
1. “Climax ecological state”: left alone, ecosystems tend to converge on relatively stable, self‑reproducing configurations. Given:
- post‑Neolithic agriculture,
- the technologies of metal, horses, and then gunpowder,
- and the incentives of ambitious primates who like status and surplus,
the natural equilibrium you get is:
- large, territorially extensive empires;
- built on cereal agriculture;
- run by military‑bureaucratic elites with cannon, muskets, and fortresses;
- periodically fighting each other and rising/falling,
- but never escaping the fundamental Malthusian logic of pre‑industrial agriculture.
That is the “gunpowder empire (and borderlands)” world he’s talking about: late Ming/Qing + Mughal + Ottoman + Safavid + Romanov, plus their steppe and hill‑people peripheries. In his probabilistic metaphor, that’s where the “East African Plains Ape” tends to wash up once you give it agriculture and a few millennia. Big agrarian states, organized around gunpowder militaries, taxing peasant agriculture and running relatively stable extraction machines for warrior‑elites, rising and falling, with slow technological change offset for a while by decreasing farm size from rising Malthusian populations, and then at some point population stabilizes as land productivity begins to decline via evaporation induced salt poisoning and other ecological exhaustion mechanisms.
2. Why it looks so “natural” from an Allen/Crone/Wyman perspective:
- Consider Robert Allen's "Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction": In it, the “great empires” (Ottoman, Qing, Mughal, etc.) are successful solutions to the agrarian problem set. They keep order, extract surplus, and run for centuries. There’s no inherent “failure” in them not industrializing; industrialization itself is the oddity.
- Consider Patricia Crone's "Pre-Industrial Societies": According to it, most Eurasian “high civilizations” converge on a similar pattern: capstone agrarian empires with strong kinship structures, status hierarchies, and relatively stable Malthusian dynamics. Western Europe is weird precisely because it fails to settle into that pattern.
- Consider Patrick Wyman's "The Verge": It stresses how in one corner and only one corner of Eurasia-Africa (the Dover Circle) you get a contingent, tangled critical juncture—gunpowder wars, oceanic finance, printing capitalism, weird confessional fractures—that sets up an entirely new regime of growth.
Thus the “most probable” long‑run attractor, given agriculture and gunpowder, is a planet of Allen‑style “great empires.” The actually observed path—Dover Circle + coal + late marriage + high wages + seaborne empires → modern economic growth—is a large deviation from that attractor.
3. The large‑deviation twist:
- There is some ensemble of possible historical trajectories.
- Most of them converge on “gunpowder empires (and borderlands)” cycling forever.
- A small measure of trajectories “escape” into sustained modern growth: you need continuous scientific revolution, institutions that redirect surplus into capital accumulation, political fragmentation without conquest, access to coal, global markets, etc.
- Those escape paths are low‑probability in the space of all possible worlds, even if, conditional on our path, historians can narrate them as “inevitable.”
So in his story we are living in the low‑probability fluctuation: a rare path that escaped the gunpowder‑empire attractor into modernity. The “climax state” is the thing that would have happened in most runs of the tape.
4. Why this matters for teaching the "European Miracle": The moral, intellectually, is:
- Don’t treat “Europe industrializes and dominates the world” as the obvious endpoint of some Whiggish civilizational ladder.
- Treat gunpowder empires as the normal high‑complexity agrarian solution, and modern economic growth as the contingent outlier.
- In your synthetic line—“successful agrarian empires solve the Malthusian problem set so well that they become vulnerable when a coal‑and‑commerce regime appears elsewhere”—you’re essentially translating the attractor/large‑deviation language into economic‑historical prose.
So “the gunpowder empire is the most probable climax ecological state of the East African Plains Ape” is shorthand for: absent a long string of very specific accidents and configurations, our species doesn’t get railways and R&D labs; it gets Qing+Ottoman+Mughal‑type states, forever, until geology or epidemiology (volcanoes, pandemics) knock the whole structure down.
The gunpowder empire as the equilibrium. Modernity as the oddity:
After all, the breakthrough to real, sustained economic growth required an extraordinary conjunction of conditions. You needed not just a scientific revolution, but one that kept renewing itself instead of burning out; not just commerce, but a political economy that systematically rewarded ploughing surplus back into productive capacity. That in turn meant a large region with advanced scientific knowledge and printing; at least proto‑capitalist institutions; enough political and ideological fragmentation that no single state could strangle science or markets; yet enough internal order to build large-scale research and industrial establishments; ideologies that valorised reinvestment rather than buying estates or building cathedrals; cheap, accessible energy sources like coal; and both export markets (to make scale pay) and import markets for primary goods.
Take away much of this—say a successful Habsburg, Bourbon, or Vasa hegemon, or a Reformation that ended by re‑imposing religious unity—and the whole thing looks far less likely. It is, in other words, a highly improbable stack of coincidences.
See Ernest Gellner’s "Plough, Sword and Book", especially ch. 6.
======
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One might argue that the recent rise of autocratic China creates a modernised form of those gunpowder empires. Thus, the Chinese have worked out what the West did and then found a way to inject as much of that "progress" as they need to create a modernised Ming state. One might also argue that such a state may not not do as well as the West did. But it increasingly appears as though the West is going to end up with predatory autocracy, too. Liberal dynamism might then turn out to be a relatively brief interlude between periods of arbitrary despotism. It is of course also possible that AI will create an entirely new economic and political order in which human are simply redundant.
Humanities and social science scholars unfamiliar with maths (except economists) technology and science always assume that it was the change in social relations that must have been decisive. But only Europe happened to discover scientific method and its potential for applied technological innovation. 'It was the technology stupid'. Temporarily this diverted status competition from domination to production. Domination is now making a comeback fuelled by increasing inequality and submission of US democracy to money and the tech oligarchs, and the success of populist politics made possible because those alive last time round who remember what happens are now all dead, in much the same way as 2008 could happen because there was nobody left who could remember 1929. But while autocratic domination might have been static, it was never stable because communications were so slow. Giving local rulers enough autonomy to rule effectively also inevitably gave them enough power to mount a challenge. Meanwhile at the centre, absolute power inevitably invited contests to usurp it. Hence regular massacres, turmoil and 'regime change' at the top. Thus the really worrying thing is that Xi style centralisation is perhaps possible with electronic comms and technologies like face recognition. That leaves only autocrats 'crashing the plane' as the best chance of escape from their rule.
I agree that it was the technology, but what produced the technology? There social relations and psychological orientations rule:
> John MacInnes: Humanities and social science scholars unfamiliar with maths (except economists) technology and science always assume that it was the change in social relations that must have been decisive. But only Europe happened to discover scientific method and its potential for applied technological innovation. 'It was the technology stupid'. Temporarily this diverted status competition from domination to production. Domination is now making a comeback fuelled by increasing inequality and submission of US democracy to money and the tech oligarchs, and the success of populist politics made possible because those alive last time round who remember what happens are now all dead, in much the same way as 2008 could happen because there was nobody left who could remember 1929. But while autocratic domination might have been static, it was never stable because communications were so slow. Giving local rulers enough autonomy to rule effectively also inevitably gave them enough power to mount a challenge. Meanwhile at the centre, absolute power inevitably invited contests to usurp it. Hence regular massacres, turmoil and 'regime change' at the top. Thus the really worrying thing is that Xi style centralisation is perhaps possible with electronic comms and technologies like face recognition. That leaves only autocrats 'crashing the plane' as the best chance of escape from their rule.
Neither social nor psychological relations produced the discovery of scientific method. Like the ‘discovery’ of agriculture it was a one off and to a large extent accidental. The printing press meant anyone had access to it. That’s where the social relations come in. Only the science made permanent growth possible.
In a word, YES. That is precisely my thought, beautifully elaborated.
Likewise. I'd like to send the entire footnote to a few people who may tend to listen to me, but it's not easy to do that.
Maybe I'll lift the whole thing and send it, but the probability of their actually following it when its length is apparent is not encouraging. "A very short introduction to a short introduction to the understanding of the system we live in" is not encouraging.
"....ideologies that valorised reinvestment rather than buying estates or building cathedrals...."
I'm going to argue this, just a little bit. After all, Western Europe--admittedly, less inside the Dover Circle than outside it--is littered with massive cathedrals and palaces which are almost certainly unrivalled outside that cultural sphere (+Russia) in the level of exploitation for edifice construction they represent.
It's seems that your economic system must be exploitative enough that surplus (food+tax resources) is directed upwards, to permit a leisure class that can (though it may not) engage in philosophizing of the sort that led to the discovery/creation of e.g., the scientific method, rather than kept at the bottom to enable more population growth (cf. Asia)-- but not so exploitative that it provokes widespread revolt or leads to widespread premature death (starvation, exposure, illness).
So if you are one time-traveling person, in an alternate world “back then”, there is no one nudge that would tip the necessary states into forming an industrial-revolution attractor.
Well, conditional on all the other miraculous-European nudges having happened, it would be interesting to reach some conclusions with respect to which ones were still essential...
Alternative: A long Bradbury moment. Allusion is to an Australian skater who unexpectedly won Olympic gold when all of his more favored rivals crashed. In this view, escape from the Malthusian trap was the par outcome. But the depredations of Timur the Lame and Genghis Khan knocked most of Eurasia out of the race, leaving only the long-standing puzzle of China's failure to maintain its lead.
So, like, Survivor but for who gets the space to innovate?
Since it only happened once, it is implausible that it was bound to happen essentially everywhere at much the same time.
It could only have happened once, since the first place it happened got to rule the world and spread its technology everywhere.
Hit return too soon. ‘How’ questions are probably easier and more illuminating. Along with Gellner I’d emphasise a monotheistic scriptural religion that was powerful enough to generate systematic logical reasoning but not so powerful as to enforce its own rule. That enabled the chance discovery of scientific method to have the impact it did. No science= no energy sources = no escape from agraria.
History has an N of one so it’s far from clear that such ‘why’ questions reveal anything. How’questions are easier and
It remains the case that the proposition that it was bound to happen somewhere else if it did not happen where it did is an unsubstantiated guess. It is at least as plausible that it could only have happened where it did because it took a very unlikely set of coincidences. The truth is that we do not (and cannot) know.
Agree that we don't know and can't (at least, not for sure). More work on why China fell behind might help
I agree that this is possibly history's most fascinating puzzle. It seems clear that if the Industrial Revolution was going to happen anywhere else, it would have been in China. There is also indeed a view that the Southern Song dynasty was coming close and that the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty stopped it. From what I have read, this might have been true. But they were still quite a long way away from it.
I've always been impressed by the book "War, What it is Good For..." by the historian Ian Morris. He makes an unpopular, but rational argument, that war helps drive technological and civilizational progress. And Europe seems to have had more wars than other parts of the world:
https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1q88mmy/what_piece_of_land_have_the_most_people_died_for/
(Although it's possible that Europe just has more RECORDED wars than other parts of the world, due to a historically high literacy rate.)
Basically gunpowder leads to cannons, and cannons require skill in mining and metallurgy. Skill in metallurgy leads to steam engines, railroads, etc. Of course the ancients were pretty skilled at metallurgy too, such as the Antikythera mechanism and sophisticated Roman plumbing valves. So why no industrial revolution in ancient Greece or Rome? I've always liked Bret Devereaux's explanation: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
But in my opinion, ancient Europe's POTENTIAL for an industrial revolution, combined with numerous wars between kingdoms (and later nation states) gave Europe a much higher probability of an industrial revolution, (perhaps greater than 50%?) than other regions of the world.