The first rule to gaining wisdom is to forget everything you've ever learnt in school, particularly those related to history, social studies.
To remember how awesome the Poms
were from its classrooms... that's like a Chinese student asking what don't China invent first; or the Yank asking what countries they haven't liberated lately, why not.
Didn't Claudius drag a king or rebel queen from Brittania to Rome not too long ago? Both?
Weren't the Roman Republic a... Republic with the Senate and the "commons"? Didn't they steal it from the Greeks?
So how could a colony in the far flung corner of the empire invented anything?
They might have refined it. But that's not exactly along the line of the Chinese inventing gun powder, printing, paper, paper currency, the compass, propaganda.... now is it?