It's very hard to generalize thousands of years of history across the planet, but here are a few main points I end up emphasizing when I teach on the history of science and technology:

• The "scientific revolution," much less the industrial revolution, have tended to obscure our understanding of the larger trends. These two "revolutions" are the exception and not the rule: they are very particular to the situation of early modern Europe, with its particular political makeup and its particular cultural history. Which is to say, one should not assume it is the "norm" and instead look at why it happened in Europe when it did and then also use that to compare with other places.

• One of the reasons these things evolved in Europe the way they did was because of the way in which power accumulated (and did not accumulate) in the European context. Which is to say, in Europe you basically have mid-sized states becoming the "norm" of how power was distributed. Not hegemonic states that ruled everything, and also not splinters of little kingdoms. That produces certain types of conflicts and opportunities: there is enough capital and political power to support, say, colonization and economic innovation, but not so much political power that any single organization can call the shots for the whole place. So you get interesting dynamics where, for example, the Dutch will innovate economically in one way to give themselves a competitive advantage, which will spur the British to innovate another way, and both are doing it as a way to check the French, and so on. This kind of mid-level competition seems to have been a potent engine for innovation in a number of states (even if it made for a rather chaotic and dangerous life for a lot of the people living in said states).

• All complex societies have some form of knowledge production and technical application. These things are not necessarily linked (even in Europe, the connection between science and technology is much more recent than people realize — they were largely independent for most of this history). It is something of a tautology to say that said societies produce the kinds of knowledge production and technical applications that they require. So the Mayans had fairly complex mathematics, astronomy, and astrology — and they also were experts at irrigation technology. They do not seem (so much as we know) to have done any of these things "for their own sake" — they believed this all to be "practical" work. One finds that this is sort of the "default" mode for knowledge/technical work in most societies. Pursuing knowledge "for its own sake" is a highly indulgent and unusual approach (and it is telling that the one society that became famous for doing so — Ancient Greece — was able to do so in part because it was built on a slave economy). So to again flip the question, the real thing to ask is, why'd Europe go down a different path? And the answer is that their society, for a variety of complex reasons and over several centuries, ended up putting a value on a more aggressive form of knowledge production, and on more aggressive forms of technical innovation. What distinguishes Europe from the others is not so much that they had knowledge or technology, but that they began to see this knowledge and technology as a means to an end far beyond their present condition, as things to innovate for their own sake.

• The question of "why wasn't there a scientific revolution in China?" is of course difficult to answer because it is a hypothetical. But the standard answers given today are along these lines: China for most of its history was under a single state, and that state did value certain types of knowledge production and technical work, but that all of that work had to be done in the service of the state. The state itself was not interested in innovation for its own sake, but needed practical applications of things for its functioning. The result is, as has sometimes been quipped, that China had sciences but no science: it had lots of very smart people thinking about a lot of interesting topics (including abstract ones), but nothing bringing it together as a community or as something being pushed forward on its own momentum. The idea of a "scientist" — an identity separate from one's role in the state bureaucracy — was apparently unknown. So you have a lot of interesting work if you look at the history of Chinese science (and there is a lot to look at there!), but you don't end up with a coherent drive towards knowledge, and in some cases there are concrete examples of them losing knowledge because it was essentially embodied in a single person or two and once those people died, nobody else picked it up.

This is a necessarily incomplete answer. The textbook I use when I teach, which I find pretty good on these topics, is McClellan and Dorn, Science and Technology in World History. It tries to cover numerous civilizations. Some of these questions are unanswered and maybe unanswerable — we know some of the information about the New World civilizations but we lack a lot both because many did not write things down and also because the conquest of the Americas meant there was a lot of destruction.

The one thing I would emphasize again is that the European case is itself very complicated — more than most people realize. It is not a simple progression of Great Minds and Good Ideas as it is often portrayed (the old Copernicus-Galileo-Kepler-Newton lineage thing). It is really about institutions, practices, and changing habits of the mind, and it really took several hundred years before the idea of what we now consider to be modern science (and modern technology) really became commonplace. Stephen Shapin's The Scientific Revolution is an excellent place to begin if one wants to understand more deeply these sorts of matters. Again, if one is interested in the global case, one must also examine the European case closely, because it is really quite unusual and not to be taken for granted as any kind of inevitable or default mode.