[ramblerouser]

>How does military might factor in?

I don't think that sentence is grammatically correct.

The study does a poor job of explaining why there are so many roads in Turkey and most of the middle east, and yet such little development there. Such a stark contrast between western Europe and the Islamic world casts doubt on the idea that the roads played the dominant economic factor over the past two millennia.

[scatters]

"military might" is a noun phrase (adjective + noun), "factor in" is a verb phrase (verb + preposition). Hopefully this helps your parse.

[jobigoud]

Not a native speaker but shouln't it be "how might the military factor in"?

[netsharc]

Here "might" is a noun meaning "strength", not the verb https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/might

It can even be replaced 1:1 with strength, so "How does military strength factor in?"

[toyg]

Differences weren't that stark before the industrial revolution, a boat that the Islamic world clearly missed for a number of reasons.

The other big factor is Suez. The channel basically killed Euro-Asian land routes that had been maintained for thousands of years.

[dredmorbius]

"Military might" == "military strength".

Rewritten: how might one consider the strength of armies?

[megaman22]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)

The impact of the Mongol conquest almost cannot be overstated.