I agree there was a struggle for equal rights in the West, which shows the hypocrisy of early-modern philosophers. But I'm not so sure there would have been a universal yearning for freedom and dignity without the Enlightenment and the other Western revolutions of modernity.
The social norms all around the world for thousands of years were monarchy, imperialism, and feudalism. Norman Cantor makes this point in The Civilization of the Middle Ages:
"The social structure of the ancient Near Eastern societies [aristocracy], once established, was perpetuated in the Hellenistic empires that replaced the old Near Eastern dynasties after the conquest of the Near East by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE. The Hellenistic empires were conquered, in turn, by the Romans in the second and first centuries BCE; by and large, the Romans also perpetuated the Mediterranean social structure they had found.
"The exploitation of serfs by their lords then, was not an invention of the Middle Ages. Medieval people inherited the rule of lords over peasants; they knew no other way of life or alternative organization of rural society. It was natural to them that a few lords should own all the land while the mass of peasants toiled their lives away--that was the nature of society. Medieval people did not give this social structure a second thought...
"To understand medieval people, one must understand the burden of the enormous past of Mediterranean society. We do not feel such a burden today, but it was heavy upon our ancestors even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until the twelfth century, at least, medieval people were not even conscious that it could ever be thrown off. Their way of life had always been there; to reject it was to disappear into primitivism, into the void of barbarism. Under these circumstances, it is remarkable that anything ever changed in the Middle Ages...Medieval social theory, at least before the twelfth century, was entirely a justification of the existing system, and even in this respect medieval people inherited a tradition from early Mediterranean civilization."
I believe this situation was largely comparable in India, China, Africa, and the native American civilizations.
You seem to be taking the "woke" postmodern view, though, that there was nothing so special about what we call modernity (the Protestant Reformation, the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and the American and French Revolutions).
I'd be curious what you have in mind when you say there were "many parts of the world with egalitarian/socialist/female-honouring type of values." Are you speaking only of small tribes that were hangovers from the hunter-gatherers? Or were their egalitarian civilizations before Western modernity? Or are you talking about subversive value systems, such as Gnosticism that weren't institutionalized?
