Meritocracy of Serving Capital

I'll take best warrior over divine right, at least that was still badass.

I was just contemplating that in another thread. I had a shower thought, trying to imagine if the ancient Greek religion had survived to the present day through the industrial revolution, how their system of "god of bread, feasts and wheelbarrows" thing would have handled internal combustion engines and email. I think we've concluded that Hephaestus would be the god of magnetos, distributors and spark plugs and that Mercury would probably rule over SMS and email.

CGP Grey made a video about why the Atlantic Exchange went the way it did; Europeans arrived in the Americas and steamrolled the native populations, partially with vastly superior technology and mostly with plagues. Well, people of the old world were more advanced technologically because almost all of the animals that were ripe for domestication are from Africa, Europe or Asia. It's a lot easier to bootstrap yourself to the bronze age when you have horses, oxen, cattle, donkeys, sheep, pigs, cats, dogs and silkworms, and not so easy when maybe you have llamas. You're not going to domesticate a moose or a bison on foot with wood and stone tools, hell we haven't domesticated moose with helicopters and machine guns. They literally didn't have the horsepower to climb the tech tree.

Why did the natives die of plagues but the arriving Europeans didn't? Plagues are animal diseases that jump to humans and then become endemic in large, dense population centers. No animal husbandry, there's no source of viruses in the first place and no dense population centers in which to become endemic. Thus no "Americapox."

That's why the Native Americans were doomed. Now what about the East? China, Japan, India, Korea, hell even the Middle East and North Africa, they had horses and cattle and such, all of them can lay claim to sophisticated cultures, they had their versions of science and philosophy...so why was the Industrial revolution peculiar to the British of all people? Portuguese and Spanish inventors patented steam powered machines before the British did, so why didn't the Industrial Revolution belong to Portugal or Spain, let alone India or China?

If I were to hypothesize, I think it was a Wright Flyer moment. I use the 1903 Flyer as an example of something that happened the instant it was possible and not a day before; The Flyer barely had enough power to weight that it basically couldn't fly in density altitudes above -600 feet. It barely lifted one Ohioan a few feet above Hatteras Island in the cold of December. They didn't have the engine in December 1902 and they didn't have the weather in November 1903, they flew in December the very day it became possible.

I think maybe 1700s Britain was just rich enough from all the Wooden Ships And Iron Men they'd done, and just barely socially mobile enough to allow people like Michael Faraday to exist. Hinduism or Confucian Buddhism won't tolerate a Michael Faraday.