An industrial revolution for the entire Earth?

What if the industrial revolution hadn't been limited to the US and Western Europe? What if the British and French Empires had allowed it to spreed the Middle East, Africa and Asia?

What impact would that have had on the World? Could we instance have seen and less religious Middle East?
 
What if the industrial revolution hadn't been limited to the US and Western Europe? What if the British and French Empires had allowed it to spreed the Middle East, Africa and Asia?

What impact would that have had on the World? Could we instance have seen and less religious Middle East?

The Industrial Revolution wasn't limited to the US and Western Europe by some shadowy conspiracy of Rich Elites (tm). The United States, Britain, and France didn't sit down one afternoon over tea and croissants and decide "I say, old chap...I think it's time for us to industrialize, wot?" "Oui!" "Heck yeah!". It was (as most 'revolutions' are) the result of a whole web of social, economic, and technological factors. Absent any one of those factors, and the Industrial Revolution won't happen. It's rather like the "Fire triangle" of "Fuel, Heat, Oxygen"....you can have any two of those available in perfect safety, but when all three coexist, you get a sudden state-change that can be quite shocking and violent.

If the social, technological, and economic precursors had been present in Africa and / or the Middle East, nothing the British, Americans, or French could do could stop an industrial revolution. If they weren't present, nothing the Great Powers could do would start one.

Given the magnitude of the economic, technological, and social changes needed to allow an industrial revolution, it's almost impossible to predict how Africa or the Middle East would have developed.
 
I think you can get an industrial revolution and scientific revolution in East Asia contemporaneous with OTL's, although it would have an odd feedback effect, percolated by Jesuits and then Enlightenment philosophers.

A very, very, weird world.
 
The industrialisation has spread to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That's what's happening right now. We are currently living through the largest economic transformation that has ever happened in history.
 
The industrialisation has spread to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That's what's happening right now. We are currently living through the largest economic transformation that has ever happened in history.
Sure, but I think the idea is "suppose the Qing are building steamships contemporaneous with the British?"
 
The Industrial Revolution wasn't limited to the US and Western Europe by some shadowy conspiracy of Rich Elites (tm). The United States, Britain, and France didn't sit down one afternoon over tea and croissants and decide "I say, old chap...I think it's time for us to industrialize, wot?" "Oui!" "Heck yeah!".

Britain and other colonial powers certainly did have a deliberate policy of deciding to prevent industry in her colonies, however. They openly boasted of how they had turned Bengal from a textile center into a place that purely exported raw materials to England. Since independence, most colonies had one generation of bad policy as they got to grips with how to govern, and now the second generation is rapidly catching up with the West.
 
I didn't mean to imply that the British (or any of the other colonial powers) didn't *hinder* industrialization...my point was that industrialization would (did, and does) happen when certain conditions apply, and doesn't happen if they don't. Given that, and given that there were plenty of pools of very smart, driven people not under foreign rule, I think the P.O.D. for this sort of timeline is going to have to be a bit further back than 'Because The British Said So'. It's going to require serious changes in the cultures and economies of the alt-universe industrial nations, and without some idea of what those changes are (because they will almost certainly be far-ranging), it's very hard if not impossible to forecast future developments.
 
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