"For Scotland I sing,
the Knox-ruined nation,
that poet and saint
must rebuild with their passion."
-from the poem For The Islands I sing, by George Mackay Brown
There's an interesting counterfactual, Why no Roman Industrial Revolution? (this essay lists some links as a starting point on the topic). I would say the arguably pretty close victory of the Union forces over the Confederates is informative: slavery and land ownership can produce powerful forces defending the status quo around them, but, technology outpaces them, and in any extended war will win out. See also the Axis forces which embraced slavery, against the Allies that pursued science for advantage.
The salutory case is, why the country that invented gunpowder, magnetic compasses, and canal locks, which Francis Bacon called the cornerstones of the Modern Age, was not where the Modern Age began - namely, China, which has had the largest cities in the world through most of human history. The work of Joseph Needham on this has led to this being referred to as the Needham Question. The Chinese Treasure Ships of the 1400s reached at least as far as Yemen, and possibly as far as South America. After the death of the Yongle Emperor who ordered them, the civil powers took greater control than imperial ones, and as Wikipedia puts it "local authorities and elites had economic interests antagonistic to the central state control of commerce, since the state-sponsored maritime enterprise had been key to counterbalancing localized private trade". China turned away from most foreign trade despite highly prized goods, seemingly as a way to reduce foreign influences, and shifts in power that could come through the wealth generated. So basically, the highly unified Chinese state was able to prevent change. We see a similar thing in Japan under the unified and powerful Tokugawa Shogunate, which ejected Christian missionaries and ended nearly all foreign trade by central decree.
Compare those to the 'disunited states' of Europe. Weber famously in his 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism', related the changes to the ethics of Protestantism about working in the world, but it is more than a century old and there are many issues with his ideas to modern eyes. Jared Diamond in his 'Guns Germs and Steel' makes the case constant warfare, specific diseases especially cholera and smallpox, and specific mineral resources gave Europe a huge edge when making contact with new regions - it's estimated 95% of the population of North America was wiped out mainly by disease soon after European contact, so many the reforestation impacted global temperatures. But there are issues, like Africa having the world's largest mineral resources (like supplying nearly all the gold used in the pre-Modern era), and plenty of warfare, and plenty of diseases - the early sea trade to China had a lot to do with East Africa too.
Jonathan Haidt talks about the difference between cultures mainly focused on herding, versus agrarian ones that depend on rice and wheat and so on. The first tend to have honour cultures and feuding, like Afghan hill tribes who saw off the USSR and more recently 20 years of US occupation. Then you have ancient Mesopotemia, Egypt, and China, with seasonal floods and natural irrigation, who produced the first cities, the first writing. Europe has a very varied landscape, and even at it's most unified under Ancient Rome they hadn't taken a lot of Northern and Eastern Europe. Areas that Goths and Vikings later came from, showing the danger. It's said that after the fall of Rome no average citizen lived as well until London in the 1720s, a staggering gap. Europe had lots of pastoral and agrarian cultures intermixed. The many small principalities prevented resistence to change, because those who changed in ways that gave substantial military or economic advantage, won wars. The rise of banking in Venice, despite the Christian prohibition against usury, is a really clear example of this. And the real end of the supremacy of Spain and Portugal who began the era of Colonialism, was the adoption of joint-stock companies by Britain and the Netherlands to manage the risks of spice-trade voyages - this despite the wealth involved gradually ending feudalism, and the power of land owners.
Joseph Tainter in 'The Collapse of Complex Civilisations' points to a somewhat gloomy prospect. He suggests perturbations will come along, natural disasters, climate change, and especially the using up of resources and destabilising of conditions. Each time that happens, a civilisation must typically get more complex, and as they do so the human-made parts of the challenges get harder. Trust across a society can often be hard to quantify until there's a crisis. I suggest that reforms due to Magna Carta and the English Civil War, gave Britain a definitive edge in political stability over France. China has faced periods of floods throughout it's history when everyone had to labour to address the challenge, and the Netherlands similarly always faced floods, and undertook huge land reclamation projects. Japan has always faced more earthquakes than anywhere else, followed by mass mobilisation to find bodies and rebuild. These activities helped build yrust, like the 'Blitz Spirit' in Britain. Ancient Rome did not rebuild, could not reconstitute itself meaningfully, or absorb the new rulers like China did the Mongols - that is what Tainter calls 'rapid simplification', or civilisational collapse. And, it's not the exception, it's the norm. It seems the challenges get exponentially harder. Things that tend to drive them, like a tragedy-of-the-commons in regard to resources, sudden changes in climate, and scaling up of military conflicts, look to be converging on us in unprecidented ways, and that's without even considering the threat of a nuclear winter. Which regions have relative equality and trust, will likely be the ones that can face the changes - I think of the failure of trust on racial lines during and after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, as emblamatic.
In summary, a balance between stability and instability is needed. Relative equality, and widening participation in politics and government, give long lasting benefits. Like Scottish universities were open to people who weren't baptised Church of England unlike Oxford and Cambridge, and responded to new subjects and the needs of industry much sooner instead of holding to an outdated Classical education in Greek and Latin based on looking backwards. There are patterns, trends. But I think of Archimedes, DaVinci, or The Wizard of Schenectady, and it strikes me that above all offering capable people opportunity to innovate, is the biggest cumulative factor. And, I wish it seemed like we were getting better rather than worse at it. And if we can't tackle accelerating rises in inequality then almost the only things that changed that trajectory in the past will happen: pandemics, war, or civilisational collapse.
