[reedwolf]

I can't help imagining an alternate history where a follower of Pythagoras stumbles across the mathematics underpinning universal computation. They or someone else creates a rudimentary programming language to fully express these ideas. Then Archimedes builds a mechanical computer to execute programs in that language. Perhaps Hero of Alexandria develops a steam-powered variant, and one of the successors of Alexander The Great puts the computer to use in warfare and conquers the world. Science is accelerated so that nuclear physics is discovered by the time Jesus is born...okay, enough for now.

[krilly]

I assume that people have debated this before, but... Why exactly did the industrial revolution happen when it did? And what factors could have caused it to happen much earlier?

[fao_]

This might seem rude or presumptuous, and I really don't mean to come across that way but I don't know another way to say it.

Go open a history book.

Seriously! Not enough people here, and (broadly) in computing circles, actually bother to obtain even basic undergraduate or pre-undergraduate knowledge about other fields, and yet they feel more than content to argue about a myriad of topics and to even form opinions and argue for them, based on this complete and utter lack of knowledge! There are too many people on this site and others arguing about, say, sociology, without even bothering to google about the topic, let alone opening up a sociology 101 textbook and skimming it, and it is blisteringly obvious (and extremely depressing) to people who have.

Any answer you have here can only be answered by someone who has studied the industrial revolution, anything else, and everything else, is pure conjecture. Unfortunately it won't be treated as such, because argument ex culo seems to be the norm for people inducted into computers or statistics.

A lot of the 'debates' here could be completely nullified (or raised to a higher level) if the people arguing about topics here actually took half an hour out of their day to read an introductory undergraduate text first, or even just opened up google and typed in their question first.

[grawprog]

Well, I haven't really studied this either, as the other commenter pointed out, without really adding anything helpful, but this link

https://www.historycrunch.com/causes-of-the-industrial-revol...

Has some history of the causes and it seems that the fall of mercantilism happening around the same time as the rise of capitalism, during a period of European imperialism, just after the agricultural revolution had a lot to do with it.