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The Roman Empire in the west wound up under a series of non-Roman emperors, but the institutional memory and professional expertise that kept everything running didn't stick around, or was killed, enslaved, etc. The Roman Empire's continuity was in the eastern part of the Empire, and that may have something to do, also, with the fact that the Anatolian provinces and Egypt, with its trade with India, had for centuries generated a great deal of the imperial income.

The truth is, the Roman Empire did have an industrial revolution that fed from and led to the Roman military. The toldinstone guy discusses the pottery industry, but it wasn't just tableware, it was architectural prefabs, the aqueducts, the rest of the water and sewer systems, and probably stuff that slips my mind (that happens a lot).

There was also mining and processing, which again fed the needs of the military, but also the currency system, and metal was widely used for households and tools.

Defacto bribery was one of the methods used to keep the frontiers quiesent -- nothing like protection money, just providing goods to the backwoods rubes that elevated their rulers' status and were not available otherwise.

That book I'm still reading, "The Roman Empire in the Indian Ocean", is a good one btw. The scale of trade for stuff like various kinds of incense, spices (like pepper, which was shipped in the 10s or 100s of tons from the east), abrasive sand (that's how the Romans and the Egyptians before them shaped stones for construction), exotic animals, and other things that don't strike us as particularly industrial -- but the ships were numerous and had to be manufactured.