Oops! All INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Explanation: Europe was actually a bit of a backwater in the medieval period, until the discovery (and looting of) the Americas. Even after that, Europe was not particularly ‘ahead’ of other cultures of the world (except navally, which the Euros genuinely excelled in). Even as late as 1700 AD, polities like the Mughal Empire, Qing China, and the Ottoman Empire were all legitimate challengers or even superior to European military and economic organization.

Europe, however, played ‘catch-up’ with a particularly cutthroat spirit - Europe, being divided between dozens of closely-neighboring polities who all hate each other, but are largely too equally-matched to overcome each other, invoked a spirit of ‘adapt-or-die’ to military matters. This resulted in the more economically-prosperous 16th and 17th centuries fueling a European cycle of war-by-trial-and-error, with the losers forced to adjust and the winners prevented from wallowing in complacency. Bloody as it was, it was also a significant accelerant to military - and to a lesser degree, economic (which generally takes longer than successful wars to show long-lasting effects) - innovation.

By the time ~1800 AD rolled around, this had snowballed into a monstrous advantage over the rest of the world, despite European material technology not yet being significantly greater than in, say, India or China. And thus began the 19th century, an era of colonialism and concessions enforced by European powers on the polities of the Old World, economic concessions fueling asymmetrical growth, and asymmetrical growth fueling Europe’s ability to extract concessions; resulting, in part, in the Industrial Revolution, which further ballooned Europe’s ability to do so to a point of near-total domination over the world.

As the organizational technologies Europe had developed spread and were adopted by other polities, the balance of power shifted back towards equality, and much of the world shook off the European yoke by the 1950s. Things are still… imbalanced now, but to a much lesser degree than they were in the 19th century, when a small expeditionary force of European soldiers could overthrow stable and prosperous kingdoms.