The Unbound Prometheus

Abstract

For over thirty years David S. Landes's The Unbound Prometheus has offered an unrivalled history of industrial revolution and economic development in Europe. Now, in this updated edition, the author reframes and reasserts his original arguments in the light of debates about globalisation and comparative economic growth. The book begins with a classic account of the characteristics, progress, and political, economic and social implications of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, France and Germany. Professor Landes here raises the much-debated question: why was Europe the first to industrialise? He then charts the economic history of the twentieth-century: the effect of the First World War in accelerating the dissolution of the old international economy; the economic crisis of 1929–32; Europe's recovery and unprecedented economic growth following the Second World War. He concludes that only by continuous industrial revolution can Europe and the world sustain itself in the years ahead.

Technology and economic theory

“…As is well documented, he describes the evolution of capitalism across different regimes for organising processes of transformation, from manufacture to modern industry. Manufacture required the bringing together within one location various independent crafts, while subdividing these 26 A by no means exhaustive includes Gille, 1986;Singer, Holmyard and Hall, 1958;Klemm, 1959;Usher, 1929Usher, , 1954Landes, 1969, Mokyr, 2002, Hughes, 2004 For a fascinating account of mechanical invention and the development of power technology in medieval times see White, (1962). 28 This is a central theme in modern evolutionary growth theory Winter, 1982, Nelson, 2005) and in the earlier writing of Simon Kuznets (1954Kuznets ( , 1971Kuznets ( , 1977 29 See in particular, Rosenberg (1982), chapter 2.…”

Ideal-Type Narratives for Engineering a Human Niche

“…While complexity makes achieving agreements a more complicated process, the process itself is known. When applying engineering sciences and geosciences to shape an economy, people then also conceive how to operate the intersections of their activities with the biogeosphere [61][62][63][64]. Considering earth systems dynamics, which are non-linear with feed-backs, an iterative path-dependent decision progress may be appropriate [65].…”

Perspectivas y debates acerca de la formación profesional, las capacidades, y las perspectivas de innovación

“…Marx (1867) described the role of machinery and large scale industry, characterised by rapid increases in the capital-labour ratio, application of science to the capital goods sector, and an intensified division of labour in production. Subsequently, economic historians have demonstrated the role of particular occupations in innovation, such as the critical role of craftspeople in the genesis of the Industrial Revolution through their incremental improvements to machine tools, metallurgy, armaments, printing machines and steam engines (Landes, 1972). For example, an eighteenth century English wood worker was responsible for developing a marine chronometer sufficiently accurate to enable the precise calculation of longitude, which unpinned the subsequent growth of international trade and colonial empires (Sobel, 1995).…”