A few months ago I made a thread on India industrialising in the Gupta Era (a lot of key inventions would have been missing at the time, so yes it would require a lot of handwaving and an early POD to achieve). Somebody replied to this thread saying that it would be hard to do in part because the global economy was contracting at the time. The idea of an industrial revolution complete with steam engines, factories with assembly-lines and sewing machines for textiles failing is an extremely hard one for me to properly visualise, and I don't think I'm the only one. How does one go about having an alternate history in which an industrial revolution begins and then either stagnates or actively goes backwards? What economic trends, resource shortages, ideologies, social systems and government policies could come together to make this happen?
How advanced could a world be while having its conditions cause it to stagnate economically and technologically for centuries? I was thinking of making a private, personal worldbuilding project in which technology would be stuck at a ~1900 level more or less permanently, how could this be achieved?