Was it a lack of manpower? Was it geographic circumstances? Why couldn’t civilizations like, say, Babylon or Rome have an Industrial Revolution?
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Without scientific revolution first, industrial revolution could not have happened. Scientific revolution fundamentally changed not only how we think about the world, but also how we approach problem-solving in general. They just plain didn’t have the cognitive tools to build an industrial revolution.
How ancients approached engineering is quite different to how we do it today, blindly repeating tried and true methods was the way to go for most of human history. They didn’t work out from first principles if a project was going to work or not, they just copied a previous success. If you didn’t have a old wise guy to tell you how he did it in his day, you were shit out of luck. But the old wise guy also didn’t know why his project succeeded and someone else’s failed, he could only tell you the steps to copy, including the all important sacrifice of a goat that he learned from his own old wise guy.
Other reasons were lack of concentrated expertise and resources, general low levels of education, lack of tools to make the tools to make the tools etc.
That sort of issues resulted in incredibly slow technological progress compared to what we have today. It took lifetimes to stumble on something completely novel, now we do something completely novel every single day.
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