We are not too far apart.

I don't entirely discount the notion that European geography has some relative advantages and makes a contribution to European history. It was an interesting thought and I believe I encountered it once before somewhere but I have long forgotten where.

Similarly, your idea of competition surely plays a role. It forced Britain to develop a strong navy, for instance; and this required innovation and the efficient operation of organisations and systems; plus it provided protection for maritime commerce. The Napoleonic Wars also saw the development of credit/finance in London, using loans that have only recently been paid off.

But I tend to think internal development independent of outside relationships had more of a say.

Take Britain, for example, which was able to evolve in its own direction over long time periods because it is an island. In this way, it is similar to Japan.

I am not saying the system afforded the system. I am saying something more like the Darwinian model of gradual evolution was in play. And not evolution in a single direction led by visionaries with a blissful end society in mind. Those that tried to do so had ideas we might find monstrous in practice (think Utopia). The direction of progress becomes evident only in hindsight. Just like you get a wing on a bird or an insect only as a result of intermediate steps that may have had a completely different purposes at the time. So you get a secular, democratic structure of government from changes that may not have been directed to that end but ended there anyway.

For example, Henry VIII wanted a new wife because he didn't much fancy the first one or believe in her ability to deliver a son. From this step and a few in between, England ends up with an Anglican church and a monarchical defender of the faith. This in turn creates the environment for an English portion of the scientific revolution untroubled by Catholic dogma. The scientific revolution (and other developments) lead towards the industrial revolution.

In retrospect, this looks like a ladder from A to B through directed steps. But at the time, no one foresaw where things were leading. They looked forward towards a bush of alternative choices in their future. Bloody Mary sought to reimpose Catholicism, for instance. Elizabeth I chose a protestant direction. Somewhere along the road we decided to believe according to individual conscience and it turned out that for most belief systems this is a stable model.

So people in the past always faced uncertainties and choices, just as we do when looking into the future. Sometimes they made poor ones, or ones that were part right and required development. Sometimes they found their way towards the open channel.

Similarly, Magna Carta wasn't explicitly designed to lead towards the English Bill of Rights and thence to the US version. But in retrospect we find elements in Magna Carta which were intrinsic to them both: the implication that the monarch/administration is not above the law but subject to it; the idea that an individual's freedom is protected by various guarantees, such as habeas corpus.

Folks like More, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, Mill, Smith and Marx lived through these times and thought they glimpsed historical, economic and philosophical themes. They expressed them as principles and systems. But actually, history employs many forces and you don't want to assume you can gather them all up and deliver a perfect model for all time.

But you can look backwards easily enough and see the problems we solved fairly well in England. Things like imposing dogmas, letting a single person accrue too much power for too long, demanding adherence to a single religion, treating people unequally have mostly turned out to be bad or costly ideas over the long run.

Instead, we managed to build a system which evolved away from these things. The thing that operates flexibly and yet retains a measure of custom for the British is a constitutional monarchy with decisions made through a secular parliamentary democracy which provides freedom under the rule of Anglo-Saxon law.

So it is easy to see that imposing God's law through sharia and imposing government through a caliphate and defining a superior religion through the state and such things are just the making of mistakes we managed to solve previously. They are everything we escaped from by removing ourselves from the clutches of catholicism. And then some.

France went down a different path in its journey from A to B. Early on, it did not restrain the powers of its monarchy. The construction of Versailles is not conceivable in an English setting. The French people gradually came to resent the arbitrary expression of monarchical authority and the concentration of wealth in the aristocracy. They took a step forward via revolution and the imposition of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, alongside the terror. This was followed by a series of Republics. It ended up in a fairly similar place to Britain, but in a republican system and with a species of Roman law and the assumption of guilt rather than innocence. The French system is also more aggressively secular than the English one (which absorbed the church into, rather than removing it from, a role in government).

Meanwhile, the catholic church itself was forced to evolve. The scientific revolution is one thing that caused it to do so. It moved away from a dogmatic model that imposed the notion that the universe must conform with catholic ideas to one in which the Bible is defined as allegorical where its narrative doesn't match our observations.

The USA crystallised its ideas towards the latter part of this process. That is, once divorcing the state from the church and the idea of individual freedom under the law had gathered strength. And so the founding fathers imputed these ideas and others into the US constitution. They knew where they got their philosophy. But the folks who create mythologies like to impose the narrative that they had unique and novel insights into human behaviour. I think they were brave to found a country on them. But they were adopting the ideas which were broadly current in eighteenth century thought.

Thus, in my view, like others in this period, they misconstrued a key element of the narrative of Western civilisation. Which is that to venture into the future, you need to retain the ability to change to suit your environment, sometimes rapidly. Writing things down for all time is a dangerous game.

If Darwin had lived a century earlier, I have no doubt that the US constitutional document would have been written differently. But because he didn't, contemplation of the meaning of nineteenth century evolutionary ideas are omitted. Thus, gradual change can be difficult in a country born within the scope of the most seemingly benevolent and enlightened, but nevertheless largely fixed ideas.