It is a fascinating question, isn't it? Why specifically did the left edge of Europe, and basically no one else, take over the world?

I totally get that the New World just didn't stand a chance because by some quirk there are basically no domesticatable animals native to the Western hemisphere. Imagine trying to bootstrap yourself to the iron age without the horse, cow, pig, chicken, sheep, goat, donkey, dog or cat. So when Cortez landed on the Yucatan with steel weapons and armor, firearms, horses etc. he encountered civilizations on par with the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, and that was the most advanced it got in the New World.

But the Old World, AfroEurAsia, had been in contact with each other basically forever. Why was it that Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Great Britain became world dominating global superpowers when, say, Japan, Korea, China, Southeast Asia or India didn't? I can understand why the coastal and island nations on the left edge of the "world" might invest in sea power and start sailing the world...why didn't the coastal and island nations on the right edge do the same?

Yeah the Western empires grew to global supremacy via colonization which is still echoed in the present day, the United States of America, former colony of Great Britain, is still the most powerful and influential nation on Earth. Britain sailed so we could fly. Why didn't anyone else in the world do the same?

Well, it seems that Western Europe had a lethal combination of three things that no one else in the world had:

• Vested interest in sea power. Relatively small home countries with huge amounts of coastline, boats are important.
• Knowledge of, and desire for, foreign made goods. They knew of the existence of Asia, knew of silk, porcelain, spices etc. And wanted to go get them for themselves. Meanwhile the Asians didn't really want anything from Europe they didn't already have.
• Extroverts. Everybody else was focusing on their own territories and consolidating internal power, maybe duking it out with neighbors. The Japanese, a race of people congenitally incapable of doing anything halfway, took their isolationism to such an extreme that travel abroad was outright illegal. Meanwhile in Britain, traveling abroad was a possible punishment for a crime.

So it turns out that in the entire world, only the Western Europeans had the means, motive and personality to travel the world by ship. Asians and Africans had the means, but not the motive or personality, and nobody in the New World had the means. Fast forward a few centuries and the result is the petrodollar.

It was the black death.

It caused wages to rise due to the reduction in available labour force, and increased social mobility (through the amount of positions it left available) and personal wealth of the survivors (through inheritance and looting), kick-starting the renaissance.

From there, it was all dominoes. More wealth allowed more commerce and innovation (here's where the naval technology comes in), which led to the discovery and ransacking (and eventual colonisation of America) which led to more wealth and commerce and innovation and social mobility, which led to less social stability, wars, more innovation, a series of political, social, and industrial revolutions, a vicious circle of runaway capitalism devouring everything in its path, the ideal of eternal growth, and the raping to death of the only world we have.

No black death, we'd probably still be living in the middle ages (with better plows and bigger cathedrals, sure, there was still plenty of innovation back then), and complaining about the cold instead of the ever rising heat.