Why didn China go through an industrial revolution during the Tang, Song, Ming, or Song dynasties?
I can answer that in one word, Jeff: “competition.” The Industrial Revolution, the Age of Exploration and the advances in weaponry in Europe were the direct result of competition. Rivalries among nations meant that European countries had to either progress or fall victim to more powerful neighbors. Even if it were possible to argue that things like, say, the invention of the steam engine were not the direct result of international competition, they nonetheless were the indirect result of the fact that nations that did not keep pace, like Spain, fell behind. That’s why it happened first in England. In China, by contrast, emperors of most every dynasty took the attitude that we already have everything we could want. There’s no need to search for better ways of doing things because they might cause harm by upsetting order. With no competition from the rest of the world, no one felt any need to change. When, for example, in the Fifteenth Century Chinese marine technology advanced to the po
