[hollerith]

One factor is that Northern Europeans made much more intensive use of animal power than the Chinese (or the Greeks of antiquity) ever did. If you are already using oxen or horses to pump water out of your coal mine, it is less of a leap to start using machinery to do it (because you will probably be able to re-use some of your laws, legal precedents and business practices for using the oxen and horses).

The Northern European's close relationship with the cow goes back about 7,000 years. Other cultures relied on cows for a large fraction of their calories, too, but the Northern Europeans were the first farmers to do it. I.e., they weren't nomads.

Once a farming culture gets good at keeping cows for calories, it is a short leap to using male cows (oxen) to help plow fields. And once you are doing that, it is a short leap to using them for transportation.

But more straightforwardly, the Industrial Revolution started when the Scientific Revolution was well underway. The first generation of European steam engines were inefficient, then they used the new science of thermodynamics to design steam engines that were twice as efficient.