Greek/Spartans will disagree.(see Battle of Marathon, 450 BC)

Charles Martel will also disagree(see Battle of Tours, 732 AD)

As for the main story of the thread -

I always see Britain crucial to this point.
- Coal helped strongly to lead to the industrial revolution
- the reformation allowed the scientific enlightment of scotland and england to go fairly untouched.

One thing that strikes me is always ''why didn't the romans do what europe did 1000 years later''.

One of the main factor is that around the 1700, religion had took it's rightful place(not completely, but was on the way), as a moral force. When Christianity became much less a political factor and more of just a morality issue, it opened the lid to science. I wouldn't blame it all on religion however, as without them it's very likely that slavery would have lasted much longer and education would have taken a lot longer to get installed amongst the lower classes.

The Romans on the hand, stuck to hard polytheism all the way. Things worked that way, because the gods made it that way, and thats it. Obviously there's other factors(romans were technologicly behind to asia almost the entire way, but thats another debate).

Regrettably, although this is a very common answer, it lacks much support in the historical record, and it's really just a nicer and dressed up form of "Europeans were smarter." After all, most of the "ancient knowledge" and scientific ideas Europeans discovered/rediscovered in the 1400s-1600s came from the East. Furthermore, people did not simply wake up and decide to be more rational one day. There were a lot of additional economic and ecological factors that came to bear. Europeans were still lagging behind the Islamic and East Asian world militarily and scientifically 100 years after the Columbian Exchange.

Jared Diamond, Alfred Crosby, and a few others deal with this pretty well. Their thesis, in short, is: easier diffusion of agriculture/more domesticable species -> more communicable diseases -> easier diffusion of disease -> easier diffusion of technology -> favorable technology and ecology relative to New World societies

As to why the Arabs and Chinese did not get involved, there are a couple factors:
1. Europe's relative proximity to the New World (about twice as far from China as from Europe, nearly inaccessible from the Middle East).
2. Europe seeking the resources that China and the Islamic World already had (after all, what Columbus was really looking for and what Spain was interested in was a faster route to the East); there was not as much of a "push" factor for the Arabs, Indians, and Chinese, since they were already getting rich on internal commodities.

Constantine the Great disagrees with you.

Yea, he certainly disagree with him, but by that time, now there was no time for tech research, as hordes and hordes of barbarians started pouring on roman frontiers like zergs

The adoption of Capitalism.

What do you take by capitalism? Did this actually happen and European society took off?

Eh, sort of. "Capitalism" is probably overemphasized relative to the role of industrialization and the social effects of the economic power of the "middle class." What we traditionally call the "market economy" was very slow to emerge and calling it a "free" market is inaccurate in the utmost. States (and quasi-State actors like the VOC and British East India Company) were the biggest actors in economic policy for quite awhile. In some ways, merchants were less restrained in China because the State was not particularly involved in their affairs (but this meant they didn't get the favored status that European merchants did, either).

Once industrialization kicked in, though, and the capitalist mode of production kicked in, that sort of sealed the deal for Europe, but it was a long-term development, and only the last step in a very gradual chain of events.

actually China die around that time
the manuchian take over China
manuchian are like mogos
only interest in horse riding and archiving.

what about greeks defeated persians?

I'd say the top two reasons are the development of the scientific method and individualistic philosophies of the Enlightenment that made the industrial revolution possible. With industry came exports and with exports surpluses and with surpluses capital and with capital capitalism and with capitalism came a massive resource advantage and high incentive for innovation.

development of the scientific method

Egypt, Nubia, China, and Japan disagree with that...

China is such a huge place that I don't think they were interested in Manifest destiny. I believe one of their rulers/emperors wanted to start a large navy but died and it was abandoned.

I think the answer really lies in both the desire to conquer and the achievments of those Western scientists.

It's been touched upon already, but being mistaken for gods by some of the richest (rare-earth metals wise) peoples on Earth (native Americans ldo) had to help quite a bit.

one interesting theory is that europeans interbred more with the bigger brain, more musical but slower runner neanderthals.

http://io9.com/5822357/confirmed-all...rt-neanderthal
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/7/1957

The industrial revolution could have been started by Hero of Alexandria, but it wasn't. Why? From what I've read, the Romans inherited Greek technologies and had all the necessary components to develop a steam engine, with all that implies. But the very idea of a steam engine involves having fuel with certain properties, materials with certain properties and other considerations that just weren't easily accessible to them.

link to fascinating book on this issue.
http://books.google.com/books?id=l9q...page&q&f=false

The printing press, from wikipedia:

Maybe the invention of the printing press is a factor the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication which permanently altered the structure of society: The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation and threatened the power of political and religious authorities; the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class. Across Europe, the increasing cultural self-awareness of its peoples led to the rise of proto-nationalism, accelerated by the flowering of the European vernacular languages to the detriment of Latin's status as lingua franca.

The Latin alphabet proved to be an enormous advantage in the process because, in contrast to logographic writing systems, it allowed the type-setter to represent any text with a theoretical minimum of only around two dozen different letters.

Western printing presses, although introduced in the 16th century, were not widely used in China until the 19th century. China, along with Korea, was one of the last countries to adopt them.

In some ways, necessity really is the mother of invention. Timber was plentiful in the Roman Mediterranean (or within the empire's borders and on its periphery) for fuel, but became rather scarce in 18th century Britain. The search for coal went part and parcel with the development of the steam engine there.

Yes, but that's in part because they already had their own block printing that was available. The earliest printing "press" actually originated in China. However, China, and the Ottomans as well, didn't exploit the printing press as widely as the Europeans, in part for culturally idiosyncratic reasons, and being politically stable and unified countries (while Western Europe was not) proved a disadvantage in competing with European printers.

Read the book "Guns Germs and Steal".

It has allot to do with domestication of animals. Most of the animals that humans were able to domesticate come from europe and the middle east. This gave easy protein and allowed for the animals to plow the crops (large scale farming). It also gave the europeans immunity to many of the diseases live stock cary. The Europeans spread these diseases as they moved through out the world.

Why was Japan more/less the only none-Euro country to industrialize and expanded during the 19th century?

They were mentored by the Dutch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangaku

"Through Rangaku, Japan learned many aspects of the scientific and technological revolution occurring in Europe at that time, helping the country build up the beginnings of a theoretical and technological scientific base, which helps to explain Japan’s success in its radical and speedy modernization following the opening of the country to foreign trade in 1854."

A combination of geographic isolation, relative small size (neither of which China had), political and cultural cohesion (partly a function of the previous), strong centralization of power, relatively forward-thinking by the winning segment of the political class, and a certain amount of luck.

Are we counting Turkey as part of the Euro-sphere for this discussion? Because the Ottomans were considerably ahead of many segments of Eastern Europe during this period in terms of industrialization.

Being so American-centric I always forget about the Ottoman Turks.

because we're the first to come up with things. if it wasn't for all the military inventions and world explorations, europeans would never be as dominant as they have been in history.

in other words, we are inventive and smart. we're those damn socialists with those superb living standards that everyone is trying to become now.

The Chinese came up with a few things though eh?