The Industrial Revolution was due to network effects of the former including its impacts on maximizing the division-of-labor. The impacts weren’t as prevalent in the East and especially not in East Asia. Nick Szabo explained that due to the population explosion of patrilineal clannism, the East was forced to dedicate so much of their arable land to crops for feeding humans instead of pasture for feeding horses that their relative transportation costs increased exponentially. This caused the division-of-labor to regress in the East, for example to human porters instead of horses in East Asia! [Whereas, ]The Victorian era “Internet” in Western Europe even had a physical-transport communication network analogous to the electromagnetic-transport modern Internet.
China and the Chinese, 1920s
Einstein noted this in travel diary.