A Century Of Technological Change 1750 1851

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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In this revised, expanded edition of his critically acclaimed book, Eric Dorn Brose weaves a fabric from three histories that, until now, have been thought of as mutually exclusive. The history of technology, the history of science, and the history of economic development leading to the Industrial Revolution have been written to a very great degree as three histories. For decades historians of science and technology agreed with one another that until the 1900s there was little causative interaction between the subjects they studied. Moreover, economists treated science and technology as 'residual' factors that were important only to the extent that they could be measured. Few historians have attempted, as Brose does here, to demonstrate the relationships among science, technology, the economy, and general political developments. Incorporating much new research, Professor Brose continues his work of synthesising economic and scientific factors along with the role of social and political institutions. The result is an up-to-date, tightly written, and concise survey of the history of technology and science over four centuries. The narrative starts with the opening of the modern historical epoch around 1500 and ends with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and covers events in both Europe and the United States. Brose constructs his account from the standpoint of technological systems -- the idea that each epoch evolves a system to meet the material demands of society -- and the rise and fall of each such system within the period. This is a fine introductory overview of the interrelationships among science, technology, and society in the early modern and modern periods, and the impact of each upon the other.

A complete and well-planned account of the history of technology in Western civilization from pre-historic man to the present age of the computer.

Technological change is about more than inventions. This concise history of the Industrial Revolution places the eighteenth-century British Industrial Revolution in global context, locating its causes in government protection, global competition, and colonialism. Inventions from spinning jennies to steam engines came to define an age that culminated in the acceleration of the fashion cycle, the intensification in demand and supply of raw materials and the rise of a plantation system that would reconfigure world history in favour of British (and European) global domination. In this accessible analysis of the classic case of rapid and revolutionary technological change, Barbara Hahn takes readers from the north of England to slavery, cotton plantations, the Anglo-Indian trade and beyond - placing technological change at the centre of world history.