I came across this blog post today (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/05/long-another-industrial-revolution-taken-place.html) and something about it doesn't sit quite right. The author is not a professional historian but an economist, and among other things, seems to assume the inevitability of an "industrial revolution."
How do historians define the industrial revolution? Is there a real way we can rate different civilizations based on how close they came to an industrial revolution? Is that whole post just total bogus?
First, I often read Marginal Revolution, and an important caveat I'd about everything Tyler Cowen writes is that his knowledge is very broad, but not especially deep. The same can be said about some of the things I'm writing here so I might not be the best person to write this comment.
An important thing to keep in mind is that there were two industrial revolutions. The First Industrial Revolution started in the late 18th century in England. It consisted of major improvements in iron and steel making, the invention of the steam engine and above all improvements in textile making technology. To a surprising extent, the first industrial revolution was neither science intensive of capital intensive. In fact, much of the metallurgical technology was discovered by the Southern Song in the 12th and 13th centuries. Similarly, primitive steam engines were known to the Ancient Greeks, Romans and in the ottoman empire. Much of the concepts behind major inventions in textiles were known in places like India. It's just that given wages were so low, few people had an incentive to try to truly mechanize these processes. All of these businesses needed little in the way of capital, and many of the entrepreneurial strategies of the early industrial revolution like the putting out system had equivalents in places like Gujarat or Japan. I think it's plausible that the first industrial revolution could have happened in a lot of places. Of course, the fact that it didn't suggests either there was something unique about Europe in the late 18th century, or just sheer luck.
However, the second industrial revolution is a very different question. The main differences is that starting in the late 19th century, people started to apply scientific knowledge, especially that of chemistry and electricity, to economic problems. While places like India and Japan had a solid grasp of technology (agricultural productivity per unit of land was higher in Japan and China until well into the 19th century) , they had limited understanding of the science behind this making it hard to replicate many of the advances from the late 19th century onwards. Moreover, much of the institutional change such as joint stock companies, or modern banks didn't exist in China or India which would have been necessary to finance to expansion of the railways or massive modern steel and chemical plants. I'm not saying that this wasn't possible in other places, just that there was nowhere that was on the verge of accomplishing this anywhere other than Europe.
The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850, Joel Mokyr
India, Modernity and the Great Divergence: Mysore and Gujarat (17th to 19th C.), K Yazdani