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Saudi Arabia encompasses large deserts, and industrial goods have a low "value to weight" ratio. The goods that are likely to be shipped across such deserts have a high value relative to their weight, such as cinnamin, silk, and precious metals. At the time of the Industrial Revolution (in Europe), most people of Saudi Arabia were still nomadic. People who ...

By the time the rest of the world was "industrializing", riba had become fully illegal in Islam and Muslim states. It's unclear that interest was always illegal or to what degree. For instance, in the Constitution of Medina, Jews were more or less allowed a state within a state, following their own religious laws & traditions, so if Arabian Jews were ...

Europe and East Asia didn't industrialize at the same time. In all of East Asia, probably the first country to Industrialize was Japan, and that didn't happen until the right around the beginning of the 20th century, nearly a century after the process started in Western Europe. So really you have to compare with Europe. The big advantage here was simply ...

Paul Kennedy argued in The Rise and Decline of the Great Powers that Europe was criss-crossed by geographic barriers such as rivers and mountain ranges, leading to many different political entities and distinct cultures/nationalities, leading to political and military competition and technological innovation. The large empires of Asia, situated on large ...

There the sustained pre-industrial productivity growth is the great surprise, particularly since it concerned a major sector of the economy and reached back perhaps four centuries before the onset of the industrial revolution. The rates of total factor productivity growth were substantially higher than the 0.1 per cent or less that characterized ...

I'm not sure it was military revolution that drives industrial revolution. There are several theories which try to explain the cause of industrial revolution. Barrington Moore, for example, proposed that it was the rise of the merchant class and the fall of feudalism which leads to mass production (which will lead again to three different political systems, ...