[jernfrost]

I think you are reading things between the lines which are not there.

It was never my intention to suggest that Europeans are inherently superior to others and that we have some unique ability of innovations.

Of course European advancements were built on advancements of those who came before us. Just as Chinese advancement today is built on advancements made by the west earlier.

I am merely stating a fact: European civilization was significantly ahead of the competition. And those innovations could not easily have been made elsewhere for cultural and geographic reasons:

1) Europe went through major paradigm shifts with1 the renaissance and enlightenment which was in large part possible in Europe because it was a divided continent. Many great thinkers lived on the borders between countries so they could flee to another one as soon as their ideas got unpopular with the rulers. Such a mechanism was not possible in other advance civilizations such as China, which was a big monolith. New ideas in such societies could easily be squashed.

Single rulers could easily retard progress for decades. Consider e.g. how one of the Chinese emperors forbid all sea travel and burned the fleet. The whole of Europe could never suffer such a profound setback because it had no single ruler. Any European nation engaging in such stupid policies would quickly learn of the stupidity of that as competing nations would race past them.

Europe represented a sort of semi-free market of ideas, which did not exist elsewhere to the same degree.

2) Europe had a clear advantage in geography. Using water wheels for power generation and rivers and canals for goods transport was significantly easier in Europe than China, India, Egypt etc where the waterflow varies too much through the year.

The first factories relied on inanimate power from waterwheels which was not easily constructed elsewhere in the world.

Later steam engines relied on cheap transport of large bulks of coal and ore. Britain e.g. had a geology that allowed building canals to mines to transport large bulk loads of coal cheaply. Outside of Europe there was limited possibility to do this.

I could go on, but there were simply a large number of factors that favored Europe. Hence European supremacy was not merely a fluke, and the other nations could not by random occurrence have leapfrogged Europe. The modern world relied on being brought to the rest of the world from Europe, unless it was going to happen much much later.

It does not mean what European did was morally right. It just means one should not delude oneself into thinking that without Europe all the other nations would be prosperous today.