askchapo

Europe had a host of material conditions that led it to this position. It is relatively resource poor, and was constantly strapped for hard currency because the trade routes with the rest of the known world were mostly one way: Chinese people didn't want a wool shirt from England, but English lords wanted silk and spices and porcelain.

This led to robust and relatively stable networks of credit that allowed nobles to engage in increasingly sophisticated and expensive versions of war and exploitation because they had to in order to keep up with their neighbor, who was trying to do the same thing. Because they were always in debt they had to keep doing more expensive things to secure more resources to pay back creditors, and build institutions to manage their money and regulate finance to keep everything from collapsing.

Eventually some landlords on an island found themselves in a new social relation to their tenants, where it was in their best interest to let them make their own living somewhere else instead of farming, and charging rent instead of feudal dues. This put everyone else on the same track or they risked being priced out of their lands and titles by a new class using a new form of socialized labor.

Essentially Europeans had to compensate for their economic disadvantages in ways that drove them to invent systems that created more productive capacity extremely quickly. I got most of this from The Origin of Capitalism, Graeber's book on Debt, The Verge and Hell on Earth. But that's my elevator pitch when I talk to people about this.

Edit: Since you read the Verge I'll just add, I think it's missing class analysis, it is looking at a set of economic structures and observing that they tend in a direction without tying it to social relations of production. I heartily recommend Wood's The Origin of Capitalism on that point specifically.