the heavy plow and Mediterranean in short

China and India may have had larger populations, but they were mostly inland peasants packed together in agriculturally rich regions living off grain, Europe and the Med however were spread out with access to different resources and connected by sea trade, which they could bring to manufacturing and trade centers, and it was a huge area connected by the time of the high middle ages when cogs regularly transported wine and venetian glass to the north sea and the Hanseatic league could furnish Flemish metallurgists with Russian timber and low impurity iron ore from Scandinavia.

This beehive of activity outpaced other cultures. An Indian or Chinese merchant could hug the coast a bit and bring materials to the mouths of major rivers, but it was never on the scale of what was happening in Europe. Italy reclaimed its position as the center of Mediterranean trade and here the renaissance began, soon the Dutch renaissance began at the mouth of the Rhine and said agriculturally rich regions took off with manufacturing.

Reddit says the Romans never had an industrial revolution because of slavery, but the opposite is true, it requires a lot of labor and the more labor the higher the economy of scale and efficiency and in turn the widespread manufacturing of things that would otherwise have been limited and unprofitable. All the time artisans and businesses sought ways to improve efficiency with all these resources at their disposal triggering the positive feedback loop between economic growth and investment in technology.