Like imperialism and trade, science was more a result of economic growth than a cause.
All this remains to be shown …. But understand the main point here: even today … a great deal of economic growth in a country has little or nothing to do with science. The spread of economic growth to places like Brazil or Russia or India or China uses some science-based technologies, such as cell phones, but uses also a great many merely technology-based technologies free of much input from science …. And the international spread of growth has intensively used the social “technology” of bourgeois dignity and liberty.
Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 360-361.
Surprised? (I was.) Not convinced? Before rejecting McCloskey’s thesis read all ten pages of chapter 38 (“The cause was not science”), pp.355-365 or, better yet, read the entire book.