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I know it's been discussed before, but in an ATL where there was no Mongol Empire, could Song China industrialize? We know it had many features that favor industrialization: high wages, coal production, relatively low military spending, a relatively limited government, relatively fast technological advances, population growth. My understanding is that it was also a non-Malthusian society: at the Song-Yuan boundary both population and living standards declined, whereas in Europe the population collapse a few decades later led to a rise in living standards.
In such an ATL, is it at all plausible that China industrialized early? How about Abbasid Baghdad? In either case, how early is early - would a 14th-century industrial revolution have been likely, or would it have taken another 300 years as between OTL's Columbian Exchange and European industrial revolution?