I'd add a dose of social myopia. Even without slaves, you'd have to make everybody imagine a world taming forces. I believe up until Newton, the value of technology and its pace was very different. So people wouldn't align and go that deep into physics and engineering. It's a bit of a stretch for steam power, but another instance is electricity, a phenomenon which was known at the time but would require way too much desire and stack to master.

ps: This is something that distort my perception of the world. Somehow similar to the comma.ai birth, the owner believed the others were caught into a limited view of the world. It's possible that a lot of stuff that we dismiss because we believed in others are "limiting" our existence. But the brownian motion seems unavoidable for now.