By finance I mean something like a national Bank and proto stock market. Early factories were often located very close to coal.
It's a key reason it started in the UK. Instead if say France. Tax also had something to do with it. Napoleonic wars UK outspent France something like 2-1with 1/5th the population.
The other thing to remember is that while the UK certainly is our prototypical Dickensian view of the Industrial Revolution it had other major affects outside of Europe. It very rapidly changed the United States from a largely agrarian society to an urban one and allowed the whole country to be connected by rail. It also moved the world away from coal as a fuel source to oil, when oil was drilled in Titusville PA in 1859. That said, by this point the industrial revolution was complete and it wasn't a revolution any more, it was just the way things were done.
For the UK the two big revolution things were industrial textile production and the steam locomotive. Suddenly you could get food from anywhere in the country within a day rather than weeks, or never. In fact the locomotive is probably what made fish and chips as popular as it is in the UK since you had to transport fish from the coast to somewhere else without having it be salted code.
Other thoughts: steam powered plows (its a steearble rig pulled by a steam engine, not a self driving tractor) are too expensive for a farmer to buy, but he can hire a crew to blow his fields with one which means he can get 30 acres per day done with a steam plow vs 2 acres per day with a traditional horse and plow setup. The crew goes to the next farmer the after a few days, so by the end of the month 1000 acres roughly are plowed. Instead of all of those farmers needing to grind out a month's work each, they wait a bit and by the end of the month they're ready to go. It has the added benefit of pontentially getting more than one harvest per field.
Steel mills also came a little later. Historians place the industrial revolution from the mid 18th to mid 19th centuries, the Bessemer process was introduced in 1857, right at the end of the period. Cast iron (and a specific meaning of wrought iron that was more of an alloy) was emblematic of the industrial revolution.
One the major features by the late revolution was cast iron architecture. Bridges, building frames, huge open air spaces like train stations and markets (look at London for some examples, there are dozens of them).
You have weapon &c technology around the Renaissance level, so good century or so behind the leading edge of the industrial revolution. Mass steel production would seriously impact that.
Of course, a wizard who wanted a fairly large amount of steel could get it, if not by conjuring it, by making a 'steel mill' of sorts work without all the attendant technology. Magically making up for deficiencies in the available processes. For instance, the 'puddling' process of iron could be done with stunning ease and efficiency by a 'magma elemental' or some such strong fire-immune creature.
It helps, but I suspect that more how a single wizard would get the same result as a factory using hundreds of goblins as cheap labour to shovel coal into the furnances.
Big monsters that are dangerous because they're big I'd expect to be kinda doomed. The kind of firepower that could be brought to bear in the period became substantial. At the end of the period you even had repeating firearms and even Gatling guns. A wizard able to magic his way past problems with earlier designs could bring similar things out even sooner.
Depends. Giants are just as capable of using technology. Imagine a giant arm field giant sized muskets? They don't need an artillery crew field a 12-pounder, a giant can dual wield them. In fact if I'm the leader of a country that borders giants I'd be finding ways to make fire giant Lord Slagpile into a Duke of whatever place so he's on my side and loyal to me.
Also, and I suppose this really matters to 5e, armies kept getting larger and larger as populations rapidly grew and urbanized. In theory, in 5e a hundred archers or so can kill a dragon - 100 men with muskets is lot easier to field.
Sure doesn, but I'm firmly of the opinion that D&D dragons are way to smart get offed like chumps. What's better for the banking industry than a dragon as the bank guard? Or the back stop for a paper currency. I mean fiat currency works wonders if you can say your actual wealth of a nation is protected by a bunch of dragons.
OTOH, by the same token, stealthy or shape changing or otherwise hard to track down monsters that used to be given away by their need or compulsion to kill people frequently could thrive in the largest cities, packed with nobody'll-miss-'em victims.
Like Dracula or the Wolfman?
Monsters that reproduce that way could rise to the level of plagues before coming to light.
