The industrial revolution was as much a product of economics as technology. If wages for lower-class workers hadn't been nearly so high, the technology might have come and gone without making much of a ripple.
The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians.
I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens.
Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits.
Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't.
Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.
Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.
I've studied the causes of the Industrial Revolution a little(in undergrad classes) and one of the points that stuck with me is that early-modern machining had greatly improved. Roman-era lathes were of a different character[0] and their limitations in accuracy and power were a major dependency to the development of other machined parts. As well, the Romans had a pre-Newtonian physics and mathematics, limiting the percieved applications of their inventions. There really is a lot that 1000-2000 years of background development gives you.
The early moderns are also interesting because of the wage issue, which is not quite what it seems. It is known that wages were high following the Black Death, and this created room for mercantile economics powered by double-entry bookkeeping, rather than tributary ones, to take over the political economy. Everything in the modern period becomes a bit more of a business. However, the political class then moved to lower wages and adopted such as part of early merchantalist theory - keep them lean and hungry so they work hard.
This attitude encouraged the development of impressment, indentured servitude and chattel slavery: the easiest way to move a worker's wages off the books was to turn them into property. Thus by the mid 1600's, you already have a world where the populace has been disempowered and coerced into the project of colonial nation building(a means of putting more assets on the books - claim the rights), and the backlash to that powers an interest in developing liberalism in the 1700's, which coincides with the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Smith. There's a lot of history that coincides with "and then this philosopher published a very relevant work".
The underlying political thing of early modern Europe, of course, was the disunification. The inventors and scholars in this period are always fleeing from a noble that they pissed off and finding refuge somewhere else. A unified Europe would have had more opportunities to surpress technologies, as occurred in China throughout its history.
None of that forms a complete hypothesis, and it doesn't even touch on the "why Britain specifically" question, but it gets it away from being a "Europe so great" anaysis.
The reason why the industrial revolution happened in the UK as it did is disputed by historians.
I would argue that high wage, while important as an incentive for industrial development, isn't a fundamental reason why the industrial revolution happens.
Why? Because the very idea of deliberate invention and continuous improvement must occur to a potential inventor. Otherwise, no invention will occur at all despite continual pressure and despite available low hanging fruits.
Once we have the idea, we can now invent as a whole category of deliberate activity. Only then can incentive drives what gets invented and don't.
Steam-powered machines were known to the Romans, and seen as a stupid novelty.
Steam engine in the Hellenistic period were nothing but toys. They can't do useful work.