There were maybe 4 shots at such a breakthrough: the height of the western Roman empire; China after their 4 great inventions, circa 1100 CE; the Islamic golden age; and the Renaissance.
I strongly disagree. Let’s say A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court visits those eras and attains supreme political power and has knowledge of all the wonders of the late 19th century and how to recreate them sequentially from stone tools.
His attempt to create an Industrial Revolution in all four cases would explode in his face. The explosion comes in the form of a sword jammed in his eye from an angry nobleman who, while appreciating the revolvers and electric furnaces, has a few issues with the emperor’s plan to use taxes to create new middle-class competitors capable of furthering the sciences. Not unlike what happened in the book, really.
And that’s ultimately the problem I have with the ‘the Industrial Revolution was a direct extension and synthesis of pre-scientific technologies into something more organized’. Because it ignores how if you don’t have the political prerequisites for an Industrial Revolution, whatever they are, it’s not happening. The Great Empire doesn’t give a damn about human evolution or the 500 million year time limit for the sun or even making sure its people can secure their own existence. It, as with all other autocracies without exception, cares about perpetuating itself and views political conditions such as ‘a legal system that protects entrepreneurialism’ or ‘a middle class with enough economic power to drive society’ as an existential threat.
Well, fair enough, how do we extract the Great Empire’s grip on Iron Age technological progress from humanity? In the real world, it happened quite by accident, over a period of centuries. And what’s more, the accident could only happen in the first place because of Earth’s unique geographic and evolutionary history.
So extracting the grip of Iron Age Empires off of its species’ throat is probably impossible without an extremely lucky black swan that checks the autocracy’s power in such a way that they don’t cannibalize and re-enslave the emerging middle class necessary for an Industrial Revolution.
We are NOT in agreement, because I claim that those other three times were NOT possible. They were false dawns that only appear plausible because people think that technological progress, given enough time, can overcome any systemic political barriers.
If you have a biology and/or technology-centered view of civilizational progress, what I say seems nonsensical. Nature finds a way and all and you have so many chances over millions of years. I am telling you that those chances NEVER existed and could never led to industrialization on their own terms.