Why Didn’t Europe Build Google?
And What That Actually Reveals About the History of Capitalism
Every few months the discourse resurfaces: Why didn’t Europe create Google, Amazon, Apple, NVIDIA, OpenAI, or Tesla? Why did Silicon Valley, not London, Berlin, Stockholm, or Paris, become the gravity well of digital capitalism?
The conventional answers are too shallow: “culture,” “risk-taking,” “entrepreneurial spirit,” “VC mindset,” “ambition.” These explanations flatter ideology, not history.
The real story is far deeper — and far more revealing about how capitalism actually works. Europe didn’t fail. The world economy was simply built in a way that made Silicon Valley’s ascent almost inevitable.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the foundations of modern capitalism were laid in Europe, but the system that governs global capitalism today is profoundly American. And that system rewards scale, speed, and financialised technological expansion in ways that Europe’s social-market model was never designed to match.
Let’s rewind the tape.
The First Industrial Revolution Was European. The Second Was American.
Europe industrialised first — but the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1940) rewrote the rules:
national markets became continental markets,
engineers became corporate researchers,
firms became managerial hierarchies,
consumption became mass culture.
This revolution happened overwhelmingly in the United States.
The U.S. built the first economy that was born scaled. Europe’s economies were brilliant but balkanised — divided by borders, currencies, legal regimes, and colonial entanglements.
The U.S., by contrast, had:
one vast unified market,
one currency,
one legal system,
massive natural resources,
and no neighbouring great powers to fear.
When capitalism moved from craft production to mass production — scale became a defining factor.
