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@seanbala

At the risk of being eurocentrist, I think there is one very convincing reason why the industrial/scientific revolution and the "enlightenment" (as we call them in the West) probably wouldn't have been replicated anywhere else: the movable type printing press.

The moveable type printing press dramatically decreased the cost of sharing information. Before the printing press, mass sharing information was prohibitively expensive, after it's cost drops to nearly nothing.

No other culture could have created a moveable type printing press because their writing system simply don't allow for it. To create a moveable type printing press in Chinese would require a warehouse of symbols for the press. Functionally it would have been easier for printers to just carve out their stamps one at a time -which is exactly what they did. Similarly, just looking at Arabic script and it's obvious why movable type printing press were never developed for Arabic, it just doesn't work. You can't do it.

Without the printing press you don't have the cheap mass sharing of information and you don't have an industrial revolution. (You also don't have a Protestant reformation, or an Atlantic slave trade, or an "age of discovery".)