Archaeologists Find Athenian Naval Base

[Thumpalumpacus]

China also had a major pullback from exploration, which was a driver for European technological innovation.

1. Rome wasn't known for the kind of exploration that drove European technological innovation 1200 years after the fall of Rome.

Which is why I specified "European" and not "Roman".

2. It wasn't just the exploration that drove European technological innovation, it was a combination of a ruthless devotion to the economic exploitation of what it had explored, as well as the demographics that provided the people who would go and exploit at vast risk to their own lives, and a economic system which made the capital required for this exploration available, that drove the technological innovation.  China didn't have the latter two in the fifteen century, when she pulled back from exploration.  So if China didn't pull back, and beat Europe to America, then I suspect China would not have found enough people willing to colonize, or hitched its financial system to colonization, to be able replicate the sort of conditions that allowed European exploration to become European scientific revolution.

Yeah, I wasn't saying that exploration was the only driver of technology, nor was I delving into the reasons behind European exploration.

Again, I submit Western scientific revolution is a highly contingent event that was dependent on many independent factors dovetailing by sheer chance.  The chance of it happening anywhere else, at any other time, was low.   The probability of it eventually happening in Europe from the perspective of 1200 AD, 1300AD, right up to 1491AD, was low.

Of course it was contingent. All history is.