Well, there are lots of places the Industrial Revolution didn't happen, and times.

And there's the case that when it did finally happen, in England in 1800, it was so utterly compelling that it spread around the world within a few years.

My view increasingly is that threading the industrialisation needle required a pretty specific set of bootstrapping steps, any one of which out-of-sequence could put the kibosh on the whole affair.

I've been looking at the genesis of the industrial revolution (and moreso, its opposite, the potential conclusion of it and general collapse of industrialised technological society) for the past five years. Joel Mokyr's been studying the concept for rather longer, and has been editing a rather attractive series through Princeton University Press on the subject, including books by himself, Gregory Clark (UC Davis, A Farewell to Alms), Robert J. Gordon (Northwestern, The Rise and Fall of American Growth), and others. Recommended.

I've been looking at the dynamics of technological mechanism, and am settling on roughly nine:

1. Fuels, energy storage, and prime movers.

2. Materials, properties, and abundances.

3. Power transmission and transformation.

4. Specific process knowledge (what's conventionally seen as "technological knowlege").

5. General systemic knowledge (what's conventionally seen as "scientific knowledge", to which I add history and geography).

6. Information acquisition, processing, transmission, and storage.

7. Organisational systems: governance, business organisation, financial systems, military organisation, accountancy, courts & laws, religion, ethics, and moral codes.

8. Dendritic systems: Transport networks, communications networks, cities, nations, trade and commercial networks, information systems, knowledge-as-web (see James Burke), social networks.

9. Sinks and unanticipated consequences. What Mokyr calls in another recent piece (WSJ) "bite-back".

Looking at this, Rome had some elements (strong social structures, fairly strong material systems), but was profoundly lacking in others -- Italy has virtually no domestic coal, and had been stripped of much of its native wood (Rome imported wood heavily, and there's a reason for the stone architecture), and the empire lacked a positional numerical system and all the computational capacity that entails.

From some of my recent reading, much of it Vaclav Smil's Energy in History and Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power (which draws heavily on Smil, though also others), a few points become clear:

1. As Mokyr notes, Britain was not subject to successful foreign invasion after 1066 -- in fact World War II was the first time in nearly 900 years that London came under direct attack, and even then there was no actual substantial foreign invasion. Whilst mainland Europe was discovering itself in the 18th and 19th centuries, England was busily inventing commerce and industry.

2. Coal. There are four great coal beds throughout the world, with England sitting atop the remnants of one. That continued through parts of Europe, most especially France, a small portion of northern Spain and Portugal, Germany, and Silesia. The US has an absolutely massive deposit (about 1/4 the global total), actually stemming from the same Carboniferous-era forest system as the North American and European plates were joined some 300 million years ago. The fourth is in China, and smaller deposits are found in Australia and South Africa. Industry required coal. (Mokyr and Clark's comments notwithstanding, from other references in this thread.)

3. Geography. England's island status not only afforded it protection from invaders, but access to trade, both from within the island and from the Continent. With most significant settlements near the coast, goods could generally move throughout the island. This was crucial, as until canals (hard to create) and railroads (required iron, or better, Bessemer steel to avoid split rails, and steam traction), overland transport was not viable (see Smith's Wealth of Nations for a comparison of ship and wagon transport from Scotland to London, and realise that Smith himself travelled on horseback over several weeks when he ventured to London for university).

4. Colonies. England could count on its possessions for raw materials, food, and as an opportunity to export its excess population. Imports included the critical goods of lumber (short in England), food, sugar (dense carbs), tea (whose heating provided purified water), pitch (for sealing ships), Irish grain (which continued to be exported through the Irish Potato Famine of the 1850s, during which the island's population fell by half), and Indian saltpeter (crucial for gunpowder). These proved to be an interlocking set of pegs that provided England with key advantages.

5. A set of strongly self-serving economic principles. A highly illuminating insight to how "free trade" was viewed in 1870s England vs. the United States is provided by way of the highly prescient Wikipedia Edit War of 1874: the British publishers of Chamber's Encyclopaedia included an exceptionally indignant EDITORIAL STATEMENT (busted capslock key included) concerning the "extensive alterations" made by their American printing partners to certain key articles, beginning with Free Trade (either "the most important and fundamental truth in political economy" or "a dogma of modern growth, industriously taught by British manufacturers and their commercial agents". The British view was at odds not only with the American, but also the French and German, nations which followed quite deliberate government policies of industrialisation, similar to China's or Korea's of current times, as expounded by Frederick List's "National System". For more: https://redd.it/4xe2k1

England's lead didn't hold, however. By the late 19th century it was challenged by both France and Germany, which had caught up quickly (thanks in large part to their own native coal endowments), and rapidly began to fall behind the United States, which had not just coal but the lubricant of the second explosion of the Industrial Revolution: oil.

That's another story.

I Rome had succeeded (or China, or Persia, or the Mayans), I suspect one consequence might be we'd be now well into discovering the intracacies of long-term remediation from industrial CO2-induced greenhouse warming of the planet.