I would say France considering we were the most popular countries during multiples centuries, everybody looked up to us, the noble spoke French, they also tried to recreate Versaille (and others beautiful French architecture).
Also the Gothic architecture come from France and now is all over the world (the first building of many big American city are in Neo gothic, etc...
Noble from all over Europe used to speak French, dress in French fashion (and still today the French style is extremely trendy especially Dior and Chanel nowadays).
French style cafe is also very popular (see them everywhere on instagram and pinterest).
When it come to architecture, culture, fashion, food, etc... France did and still have a very big impact on the world.
There's also a pretty funny joke in France that say we have so many great things that everybody hate us cause they're jealous XD (one time a French king went to ask another king for military help so they invited him to eat in the most beautiful castle with the best food, wine, music and he became so jealous that he decided to side with our enemies against us cause he felt humiliated XD, and it's not even a joke, it's a real things.
Also British hymn "god save the king" is actually a French song that was invented when one of our king became severely sick and the British took it to their countries and made it their hymn.
There is no definitive answer to your question. The Indians and the Chinese greatly advanced the sciences in their progressive era and had a very important cultural impact, as did the Persians, the Ottoman Empire and other great civilizations.
And of course there are the Greeks and Romans.
Europeans took the diverse scientific and technical knowledge of these other civilizations and improved on it.
With the so-called scientific revolution and later industrialization, Europe reached a degree of development and power never equaled by any civilization in human history, and its cultural impact is just colossal.
After that, the USA, heir to the Europeans, underwent extraordinary development and made prodigious advances in science and other fields.
To sum up, I'd say that defining a single country as having had the greatest impact doesn't really make sense, because every great nation and civilization has had, in its moment of greatness, a very important impact on the development of science, etc., which has then been taken up by other nations, who in turn have advanced these inventions, techniques, etc., in a prodigious way.
But in the spirit of patriotism, I chose France 🤣
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If you look at history and present as a whole, these cultures contributed the most to inventions - Arab and Mediterranean empires (Ancient Egyptian to Roman, Greek, and Ottoman), Indian empires (ancient Hindu to Mughal and colonial Raj), and Chinese empires (Ancient China to modern China). I mean most contributions and world resources came from these geographical areas and these were considered the most advanced. The West was considered backwater for most of the centuries and only came to prominence in relatively modern centuries and that is the history we read where the likes to Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus "discover" places where native civilizations lived for centuries before they arrived. Little do people know that the compasses used by the West to navigate the seas during colonialism was an Arab invention. Christopher Columbus' navigator and attorney was a Muslim Moor from Spain. The spice they went for was from India. Alexander the Great moved his Empire towards India and got as far as Afghanistan because the East was where wealth lay. Machiavelli used much of his writing from reading Arabic political writing. We today would not know how to read Ancient Greek or Latin without the Arabs who translated it to Arabic. We consider ourselves the inheritors of Roman and Greek politics and culture and yet we have hundreds of years between us and them and did not even know those cultures until we started reading Arabic during the Enligtenment.
Whether it's positive or negative, the USA has always made a big (if not the biggest) impact whatsoever on the world.
Ze Germans, of course. 🇩🇪🇩🇪🇩🇪
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_inventions_and_discoveries
I think ancient China must have been on the list, along with “late” Byzantine Empire.
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