"First" is the wrong way to go about it. Industrialization, as one historian has said, was a "peculiar path," and was by no means inevitable in Europe itself. The better question is "Why did Europe industrialize at all rather than succumb to Malthusian pressures like China did?," which is a very good question and which still has no clear answer.
And of course, the question then devolves to "Why did China not develop Mercantile capitalism?"
But they did. As the final book on Harvard's series about Imperial China,
The Great Qing: China's Last Empire by William T. Rowe, points out, eighteenth-century China was the single most commercially developed nation on earth. Historian Gilbert Rozman has also done important work on preindustrial urbanization patterns and market development, and that research, too, suggests that China was the first nation on earth to reach the most highly developed state of market integration possible without industrialization (this was achieved in China by around 1500, decades to a century earlier than the economic centers of Europe).
which allowed advances in a range of disciplines especially science from the the 15th century onwards.
The impact of science on the early (eighteenth-century) Industrial Revolution is greatly overstated.
London and Amsterdam were paying the highest wages in the world by 1700.
The question of Jiangnan vs. English wages has been fiercely disputed recently, with the side positing that the two were largely equal still a strong contender.
European smithing and metallurgy had finally reached the quality required to build steam engines.
The technical
capacity to build steam engines was always there, including in China (where the basic ingredients were present arguably by Han times).
4. Calvinist culture being more lax on usury allowed for people to make larger loans. Capitalism really took off once usury stopped being seen as taboo.
China had no usury taboo.
Peas. There was a significant shift in the European diet during the 11th and 12th centuries involving a move to legumes as a staple. This lead to a far higher iron content and subsequent increase in life expectancy. However far more importantly it caused a significant drop in infant and maternal mortality during childbirth allowing allowing fewer women to produce the same number of adults. This lead to smaller family sizes and a greater concentration of wealth.
Legumes were not the most important staple in eighteenth-century England.
- Manorialism : give individual / nuclear family its own private property
China also had individual private property.
- Consanguinity Law : prevent creation of clans and tribes
China also had no "tribes" and no clans beyond the extended descent groups that we see in Early Modern Europe's "banking families" as well.
Add literacy to the equation.
Eighteenth-century Burma had the highest literacy rates on earth due to universal compulsory education in Buddhist monasteries, outstripping even England. Chinese literacy rates were also comparable to Europe as a whole.
With these five elements combined you can industrialize.
Eighteenth-century China seems to have had all five. Excess cash? It was frequent for the Qing emperors to not collect taxes from the majority of provinces simply because the government was so rich and cost-efficient. China's developed areas, from Beijing to Hangzhou, are also flat and integrated by the Grand Canal and the three river systems. China had all the raw goods it needed, from Hainan sugar to Siberian furs, and its people -- the world's largest consumer market -- had a literacy rate comparable to Europe.
OTOH, China had a more static and rigid Confucian culture that resulted in stagnation and decline over time.
Give me specific examples of this, because it's a false and discredited trope.
the hemisphere centred on Europe included almost all the habitable land area. In that sense Europe is indeed "the centre of the world"
The hemisphere centered on the Middle East contains a greater proportion of the world's population than the one centered on France.