history

Yeah, also because for a long time the limiting factor to steam engines was not the fact that we didn't know we could extract work from boiling water, but that we didn't have good enough metallurgy to build any kind of decent pressure vessel.

Besides, we're Marxists. A large part of the reason why the steam engine took off when it did was because the material conditions of western Europe favored improving efficiency in extracting surplus value from workers, when previously it wasn't necessary or particularly well rewarded.

There's a lot of things like that where some technology or other is really, really, really old, but they didn't have the right combination of materials, worksmanship, and material needs for it to take off like it did at some other place or time in history. Like everyone in the Americas knowing how wheels and axles work, but not bothering with carts because they weren't useful enough when they didn't have large draft animals to pull them, along with like the Inca having roads that go straight up and down mountains that were navigable for people on foot and llamas, but would never accomodate horses. Meanwhile they were making fiber bridges far in excess of anything seen in Europe because of those same mountains.