It's purely down to economics, if you look at any country in the world you will have seen similar value for life around this stage in their industrial revolution. If you look at countries in the middle east or Asia that are economically developed, they are mostly comparable to Western countries. You look at the NIC's, they're mostly comparable to Western countries during their industrial revolution, because NIC's are still in their industrial revolution. If you look at accounts from Britain, Germany, France ect at the time, they were just as barbaric in the late 1800's and early 1900's as NIC's now, we were just the first countries in the world to industrialise.
It's a shame that the rapid urbanisation of industrialisation usually comes with some form of slave labour exploitation, a devaluing of life, and a culture where heretics can thrive, but essentially every large country has gone through this period in their development. After that, the kind of work available begins to switch to more skilled work, people become better educated, the con mans and heretics lose their target audience, and then a "civilises".
Of course, an easy way to speed this process up with simply less developed nations would be if developed countries stopped exporting their labour to less developed countries to exploit the weaker regulations and lower pay.
Obviously, it's quite different with the Middle East, many of these countries laid the foundations for modern science, and were quite advanced up until forced power changes, for example Iran was a very free and progressive country up until
the 1953 coup d'état (AKA Operation Ajax) that was instigated by the US to gain more power in the region, that eventually led to a strict Islamic regimes gaining power. Go back 80 years before British, French & US intervention weakened the power structures and Islamic extremists had very little power in the Middle East, wars since the 1940's in that region can more or less all be traced back to boundary changes/forced relocation's of communities by French and British empires.
