I think the graph says it all: "something" happened in the 1500s that allowed or caused our industrial and scientific revolution along with the Enlightenment.

I think the graph says it all: "something" happened in the 1500s that allowed or caused our industrial and scientific revolution along with the Enlightenment. The Romans, Babylonians, Mongols, Chinese, Persians, and probably the Incans and Mayans had large productive organized societies for hundreds or thousands of years but industrialization happened in non-empires across multiple countries in a relatively short span of time. It seem like industrialization was a result of the more fundamental discovery of the scientific method than time, organization, or empires. This was combined with the symbiotic need for power (to pump water out of mines, initially) and ability to supply it with engines that were newly possible from scientific experimentation in metallurgy and machining. Possibly gunpowder was the trigger since it required better machining and metallurgy that allowed engines. Middle Earth presumably had the same problem with finding the initial conditions for scientific and industrial revolution, possibly amplified by the Enlightenment being impossible; mysticism and religion were real and active in the world and so pure scientific rationalism was doomed to fail, leaving the alchemists and would-be magicians in charge of "research". Humanity only narrowly escaped that trap, it seems.