Sorry if this has been asked before but I couldn't find it in the FAQ. Can someone summarize what bottlenecks forced technology to advance at the rate it did (worldwide)? In 2500 BC civilization was organized enough to build pyramids. By antiquity we had large empires with infrastructure, understanding of complex mathematics and mass production. Why did it take until the 18th/19th century for modern technology to arise? Seeing the rate of how technology has advanced since then, what held back development of these technologies before the industrial revolution?
You have to keep in mind that the "flashy" technologies were only a small part of actual technological development.
For one, during the classical era, the very impressive building projects were mostly prestige projects constructed through massive undertaking of labor and capital. The Pyramid and the Coliseum do not so much indicate technological sophistication but rather the sophistication of the states building those projects.
So basically what's being missed are the technologies which actually makes economies productive. For instance, the agriculture of ancient Egypt for Rome are far far less efficient than the agriculture of the 17th century. Innovations like the Heavy plow, two/three-field system, or the horse collar (all inventions of the Middle Ages) are far less "flashy" than big building projects but much more important to actual society.
So basically there is a tendency of viewing technological advance as "static" in pre-industrial times without appreciation for how far things actually did get between say 2500 BC and 1500 AD.
Humanity's net knowledge of technology doesn't progress automatically, like people thought evolution worked in the 19th century, nor does it advance like the tech tree of a videogame. For basically the entirety of humanity's existence people lived as hunter-gatherers; agriculture is a minor footnote to our chronology, and industry barely a speck. The steady increase in technological development over the past two thousand or so years in the West is a strange exception to the historical rule. Moreover, technology wasn't nearly as abandoned at the close of Antiquity as people often suppose, and the Middle Ages were far from the barren intellectual wasteland people often suppose. The states which succeeded the Roman Empire weren't nearly as wealthy or centralized, which limited their ability to engage in the really big show-stopper construction projects like the pyramids, but that doesn't mean there was no advancement - far from it, in fact. Frances and Joseph Gies' Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel provides a (somewhat dry) but overall fairly solid introduction to the technology of the Middle Ages.
Historian Niall Ferguson has argued that the Industrial Revolution was closely linked with a financial revolution that occurred at the same time. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the growth of mercantilism meant that complex credit systems needed to be adopted to keep the large trading networks and colonial plantations, particularly of the English and the Dutch, running smoothly. During the nineteenth century high finance really took off in Europe (think Rothschild) and easier access to capital meant that those of the entreprenuerial persuasion were far more likely to turn ideas into reality. In essence, complex financial systems are essential to real economic growth and innovation because capital can be transferred from those who don't need it to those who do. It doesn't matter how organised a society is, if those who can really make a difference don't have access to the means to do so, that society will remain relatively stagnant.