What’s required to produce those things at a scale that matters is a transformation of social relations that frees up a bunch of people and forces them to do new, alienating work. It’s not enough to have good techniques, you need to fill a nasty city with people who have to be there using them to make a hundred new ships a year.

As with your katana example, technology was not unique to Europe. Many of the things they ended up using to dominate the world came from China, the Arab world, etc. But they had incentives to escalate the use of expensive technology and a social base that was suddenly uprooted by a new form of market relations that killed the previous ways people met their needs.

Economies are, at their core, a social phenomenon, not a technological or resource system. So I wouldn’t discount technology and such as contributors but I don’t think they are the main cause of the transformation Europe experienced.