With all these advantages, why did the industrial revolution happen in Europe instead of Asia?
Disclaimer: I don't know English history well enough to put together a better explanation, but I'm sure this has been the subject of a number of PhD theses. Maybe someone can point to a source that goes into better detail.
The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians.
I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens.
Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits.
Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't.
Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.
Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.
The early moderns are also interesting because of the wage issue, which is not quite what it seems. It is known that wages were high following the Black Death, and this created room for mercantile economics powered by double-entry bookkeeping, rather than tributary ones, to take over the political economy. Everything in the modern period becomes a bit more of a business. However, the political class then moved to lower wages and adopted such as part of early merchantalist theory - keep them lean and hungry so they work hard.
This attitude encouraged the development of impressment, indentured servitude and chattel slavery: the easiest way to move a worker's wages off the books was to turn them into property. Thus by the mid 1600's, you already have a world where the populace has been disempowered and coerced into the project of colonial nation building(a means of putting more assets on the books - claim the rights), and the backlash to that powers an interest in developing liberalism in the 1700's, which coincides with the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Smith. There's a lot of history that coincides with "and then this philosopher published a very relevant work".
The underlying political thing of early modern Europe, of course, was the disunification. The inventors and scholars in this period are always fleeing from a noble that they pissed off and finding refuge somewhere else. A unified Europe would have had more opportunities to surpress technologies, as occurred in China throughout its history.
None of that forms a complete hypothesis, and it doesn't even touch on the "why Britain specifically" question, but it gets it away from being a "Europe so great" anaysis.
[0] http://blog.mmi-direct.com/machining-history-lathe-the-mothe...
So why did it start in Britain, rather than the United States or post-revolutionary France?
To be fair, I think freedom and individuality are part of the story, but that story is more sociological than philosophical. In part, I wonder if it is a consequence of the reformation and counter-reformation, which arrived at an accommodation in which the populace was allowed some freedom in how it conducted itself, so long as it did not challenge the authority of the state.
First and foremost was easy access to coal. Energy is really where wealth is at. Coal and iron make modern steam engines and rail and trains possible at all. Get that ball going and the possibilities become endless and feasible.
Secondly was not so much economics but financial structure. England had already well-established notions of corporations and stock trading, which made venture fund raising a lot more accessible than loans.
Whatever labor costs might have been, any level of automation would have greatly improved productivity.
That said, perceived labor costs are important. Where slavery operated, the perception of cheap labor made economies less likely to industrialize -- the antebellum American South is representative of this.
Additional factors include having a middle class, a venture/enterprising culture (think East India company), a permissive government, and other things. Perhaps even the background of recent civil wars and religious strife might have helped, I don't know.
Link: https://www.withouthotair.com/c1/page_6.shtml
Relevant paragraph: "Something did happen, and it was called the Industrial Revolution. I’ve marked on the graph the year 1769, in which James Watt patented his steam engine. While the first practical steam engine was invented in 1698, Watt’s more efficient steam engine really got the Industrial Revolu- tion going. One of the steam engine’s main applications was the pumping of water out of coal mines. Figure 1.5 shows what happened to British coal production from 1769 onwards. The figure displays coal production in units of billions of tons of CO2 released when the coal was burned. In 1800, coal was used to make iron, to make ships, to heat buildings, to power locomotives and other machinery, and of course to power the pumps that enabled still more coal to be scraped up from inside the hills of England and Wales. Britain was terribly well endowed with coal: when the Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting in coal under Britain was roughly the same as the amount sitting in oil under Saudi Arabia."
If I had to pick one factor: I’d say the breakup of feudalism in Europe, in which a lot of hierarchies were thrown upside down, was probably the most important factor. If you read accounts of Chinese science, you often see things like “but then that fell out of favor in the court, and was abandoned.” In a society where everyone has a specific place, and roles and hierarchies are rigid, there isn’t much room for invention and change because it’s going to be seen as threatening rather than as an opportunity by the people one step above you. That would be my guess.
As an example, China had imperial examination[1] for government jobs since 607 - a system not seen in the West until modern times. Ancient Rome built concrete buildings that their descendants couldn't replicate for centuries, yet they failed to start Industrial Revolution.
The short version is that the Song dynasty appeared to have all the precursor technology needed for industrialization by the 12th century, but then just didn't. The most commonly held view is probably that society and economics is as important than technology, and that while they at that point had the kind of metallurgy that Europeans could only dream of until the late 18th century, what they didn't have was labor shortages and capitalism, which were what made industrialization something people wanted to actually do. But this is by far not the only proposed explanation.
In general, because of the recent history of the west appears like it, I think we are far too predisposed to view of development as a linear progression towards something, that history has a direction, and that direction is up. For most of history, for most societies, this hasn't really been true. As many societies have spent as long stagnating or even regressing as have advanced. It's just that so long as one advances, eventually it's going to influence it's neighbors, either by taking them over or by having them frantically play catch-up to not be taken over, and so the whole thing has a direction.
This leads to my pet theory for why Europe: Because Europe has managed for almost the entirety of it's history to avoid being conquered by a single empire, so everyone was always afraid of their neighbors, yet there was a solid enough foundation of international law that everyone wasn't at war with all their neighbors all the time. This created both a backdrop that forced states to push to be more powerful, even over entrenched interests, and the conditions where the best way to do this often enough wasn't beating up your neighbors and taking their stuff.
"Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of superior intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions."
For example the mediterranean region had 5(6?) domesticated animals and had wheat,barley oats and spelt grains. Asia had rice.
The North Americans in contrast, had no domesticated animals and didn't get maize until shortly before the Europeans arrived.
That has slowly over ages created culture that put premium on technological progress.
China has been an empire for much of her history. Being an empire does not help in the technological advancement. But fierce competition helps.
What other things are at play, for example, in Japan's bonkers hight population across history?