“look at how England shifted from a relatively poor nation into the economic and financial powerhouse of Europe due to the commercial and industrial revolutions”. That’s what I was getting at. England prospered due to policies and technologies that gave it an advantage over the rest of Europe. I’m not asking “what if we gave every country the steam engine at the same time” (although it sounds interesting), but rather “was there way for Russia or another country to get where England got first”?

Oh, I see what you mean. Well, sure, the Dutch and the French had a lot of the necessary components, and if a few 17th-19th century wars had gone the other way and England/Britain wasn’t able to grab the lion’s share of world markets, they might have been able to pull it off. If Germany had developed political features – the Zollverein, tariffs, state support for infrastructure, and the German model of higher education – earlier than it did, then it probably would have overtaken the UK rather quickly.