This article, like many, grossly oversimplifies the industrial revolution to the adoption of the steam engine and similar capital investments. Steam engines were not the industrial revolution, nor were they the cause. Most of these technologies were evolutionary improvements on other technologies that predated the industrial revolution, and the industrial revolution began before their wide adoption. The industrial revolution enabled steam engines, bessemer furnaces, automated looms, and other such technologies, not the other way around.

The industrial revolution is really a series of several major upheavals in life which occurred in discreet stages across a rather long time period. You have the scientific revolution that leads to a steady stream of invention and, more critically, refinement which in turn allows machines and processes to be steadily improved over time instead of the haphazard slip-faults of earlier progress. You have the agricultural revolution which both enables massive population growth and frees up large portions of the population to live and work in urban centers. You had the development first of the cottage system, then the british factory system, and then the american factory system, which changed both how goods were produced and how society was structured. There is the metrology revolution which, while building off the scientific revolution, was really more of a political and economic change, and enabled the development of machine tools and economical precision parts. And you have the birth of modern economics and the rise of the capitalist class as a dominant element in society, which really made large capital investments viable. None of these things depended on the steam engine, most preceded the wide adoption of the steam engine. Likewise for the other technologies that typically come to mind when thinking of the time period.

The article also fundamentally mischaracterizes other time periods. The Romans were actually quite big on adopting new technologies that would save labor. They were an extremely pragmatic people, and they viewed their reliance on slave labor as undesirable. Especially in late antiquity after their conquests mostly stopped, and as they were frequently troubled by civil wars, labor was actually a major issue. They would have gladly adopted a working steam engine. The issue was that, being pragmatic, they weren't big on developing technologies that didn't have clear practical applications. The development of what would become Watt's steam engine took roughly 200 years of people screwing around with what was essentially a toy, which they mostly did as a means of signalling to their peers that they were sufficiently wealthy that they could dilly-dally on nonsense. It wasn't just the steam engine itself, important technical challenges like precision machining of bores all had to be figured out, it took a whole culture of people pursuing useless invention to make progress, as opposed to one or two hyper fixated polymaths. And even Watt's steam engine wasn't that good, it would be decades more before people started, for example, putting them on ships.

Next, while I'm sure the book has more, the data the article presents seems to be a very week evidence in support of its thesis. London wages, when normalized for prices, don't jump relative to other nations until after 1825. At the normally accepted start date of 1750 for the industrial revolution (even though the groundwork was being laid long before this), London wages were typical for northern europe, lower than those in Amsterdam had been in the past several centuries, and they were falling. Prices for coal in London were typical; prices nearer the coal mines were low but there is no comparison made to other cities outside Britain that were near to coal production sites. For the wages to price of capital, the whole of England is compared to two cities which weren't even particularly notable industrial centers when their respective nations first started to industrialize. The analysis of supply side factors seems much more focused on inventors than on the process of invention, which is inherently collaborative and multifaceted. It seems from the quotes at the end that the book is far more conservative in its claims, so perhaps this is sufficient, but again I feel it is ignoring a lot.

Finally, I am generally critical of any analysis that asks why the industrial revolution started in Britain, as opposed to elsewhere, and treats it as a unique, solitary data point. Obviously it can only happen for the first time once, but many nations have industrialized, and every time it has been a process spanning decades if not centuries, starting in some regions while reaching others later. While no doubt each example has its idiosyncrasies, for example there's a world of difference between the industrialization of Meiji Japan and Communist China, there are nevertheless patterns that repeat. Any convincing theory as to why the industrial revolution started in Britain ought to predict how industrial revolutions begin and spread in general, or at least explain why it needs to be considered separately. I can't really blame an english speaking historian for focusing on a region whose primary sources are all in english, but if you're going to call something a global perspective, I expect more.