Trade shifted to seas from land. Beyond the obvious economic impact, this highly reduced the flow of information, new knowledge, etc. to Asian societies (sans t

Trade shifted to seas from land. Beyond the obvious economic impact, this highly reduced the flow of information, new knowledge, etc. to Asian societies (sans the various ports, of course). Beyond that, Europeans, beginning with the Dutch and the English, incorporated the emerging financial and merchant classes into the governing/elite class. This both enabled scaling effective reach of central governments, and also affected the inclusion of a larger (though still minority) subset of the populations (families) to be stakeholders in the governing system. Finally, from a Marxist point of view, the transition from feudalism (which remained the norm in Asia) to capitalism was an advancement that (as we can see) hugely contributed to production power of Europe. This historic progression, in conjunction with the greater class mobility that it afforded, provided meaningful social utility to creative, productive, competent people. [And p.s. so this couple of hundred years head start which resulted in industrialization in Europe, placed the rest of the planet behind a very steep curve. As we can see with the experiment in China, Asians/whoever can only catch up on that curve when the capitalist class in Europe (West) decides, for whatever reason, to massively transfer capital, technology, and know how (which is how China went from Maoist basket case to Superpower status in 30 years, and of course the Chinese Communist Party deserves credit for taking full and effective advantage of this completely historic opportunity).]