What is the place of Europe in the world and the global economy? You assume that it held a central cultural and economic place for the last 700 or so years. Most global historians, however, would tend to disagree with such a long duration of European hegemony. If you want to read more on this topic then I would suggest you look at books like After Tamerlane by John Darwin. He argues that for most of the last 1000 years the ‘Eurasian story’ so to speak has been one of empires competing for dominance in the central landmass and control of the land based trade routes which flowed east to west. Looked at from this perspective, Europe, because of its remote position in the far west, appears peripheral – a land of fragmented kingdoms of little larger geopolitical significance. The change came because of the opening of the Atlantic world and the development of trade routes which allowed Europeans to circumvent the Eurasian empires. This is not to underrate Europe – a lot of interesting things happened there – but they were not, as you say, the shapers of world history from 1200 onwards.

With that dealt with let’s turn to the meat of your question – when and why did Europe begin to diverge from the rest of the world? There are some historians who would place the beginning of the divergence at a relatively early stage, such as Robert Moore. Moore argued that, in The Formation of a Persecuting Society, that what made Europe distinctive from the rest of the world from a relatively early period was not technology or military might but the ability to persecute marginalised groups like Jews, lepers and heretics. This persecution legitimised the rule of elites and allowed them to spread their power more thoroughly throughout society, thus laying the foundation for more powerful state structures later down the line. The Arab and Chinese worlds, by contrast, did not engage in similarly systematic persecutions. This is the argument that he makes, even if I don't agree with it.

However, many historians who study divergence place the Europe's 'take off' at a much much later stage. They point out, that for most of the medieval and early modern period Europe was an afterthought in a Eurasian economy dominated by China, India and the Arab world. In terms of population, economic might and scientific achievement they were the main players. Europeans, when they appeared, were minor traders in spices and other commodities. The change, as historians like Kenneth Pomeranz have argued, came with the formation of European, and particularly British, empire in the new world. According to Pomeranz the most important effect of this was that colonies grew huge amounts of food required to sustain European economic growth and allowed labour and land to be freed up in Europe for industrialisation. Further, as the British exported labour to the colonies, it spurred the creation of labour saving technologies to farm back home. In other words, empire allowed Europeans to extract huge amounts of resources from the rest of the world, the profits from which were then ploughed into industrial enterprises while also making such enterprises a viable substitute for manual labour. This is just one explanation, other historians have pointed to the development of systematised property rights, scientific institutions, luxury consumption and of course chance. I lay out here one perspective, although it is the one that I happen to find most convincing, to give a sense of the breadth of the debate.

In closing however, I think that it is worthwhile to stress again the relative lateness of European divergence from the rest of the world. British industrialisation took off, at the earliest, in the 1750s and did not become widespread on the continent until after the Napoleonic wars. Even with the rise of industry, most people continued to earn their living as they always had before – from the land. As such, divergence, while it had huge consequences, should not be overstated – it was a centuries long process which by the 1880s culminated in a world system dominated by European powers.