The Unbound Prometheus - Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present

David S Landes

ISBN 10: 052153402X / ISBN 13: 9780521534024

Edité par Cambridge University Press, 2008

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The Unbound Prometheus is one of those magnificent titles that sounds as though it ought to be engraved on a bronze plaque outside a power station. David S. Landes, never knowingly under-ambitious, takes on nothing less than the technological and industrial transformation of Western Europe from 1750 onwards, which means this book is essentially about how the modern world got built: by machines, furnaces, ideas, stubbornness, coal, capital, and an alarming number of people deciding that what society really needed was faster looms. This is economic history in its grand, muscular form. Not merely a list of inventions and dates, nor a dreary parade of smokestacks, but a serious, sweeping account of how technology changed production, industry changed society, and Europe reinvented itself in iron, steam, steel, chemistry, electricity, and organisational nerve. Landes writes with the kind of authority that makes one suspect he could explain the rise of textile mills, railway systems, and industrial capitalism while leaning against a blast furnace and never once losing his place. And what a subject. Here is the long, strange moment when human beings stopped being content with making things at the speed of hands, horses, and weather, and instead decided to reorganise civilisation around engines, factories, precision, and the increasingly persuasive argument that if one machine is good, six thousand machines are progress. The result, as this book makes gloriously clear, was not just more stuff. It was a complete rewiring of economic life, social structures, labour, cities, wealth, time, and expectation. Before long, Europe was not merely producing differently, but thinking differently too. Once you have railways and mechanised industry, it becomes rather difficult to go back to a nice quiet agrarian afternoon. The title?s Prometheus reference is wonderfully apt. This is the story of fire stolen, harnessed, multiplied, and put to work with spectacular results. Myth becomes metallurgy. Divine transgression becomes industrial policy. One can almost hear the clanking laughter of modernity in the background. Yet there is also a sly irony here: for all the heroic resonance of the title, industrial development is never a clean triumph. It is brilliance mixed with upheaval, ingenuity mixed with exploitation, invention mixed with soot. Progress, as ever, turns out to be marvellous from a distance and rather noisier up close. Landes is particularly good at making industry feel like drama rather than mechanism. Behind every machine lies competition, ambition, imitation, and the endless human urge to outbuild one?s rivals. Nations industrialise not because history politely asks them to, but because power, wealth, and prestige are all at stake. Technology here is not some neutral parade of gadgets. It is force. It shifts who dominates, who profits, who adapts, and who gets left blinking in the smoke. That gives the whole book a real pulse. You are not just reading about machines; you are reading about civilisation being re-engineered. This 2008 Cambridge University Press edition has exactly the right air of sober scholarly heft. It is the kind of book that looks entirely at home in the possession of an economist, historian, engineer, or one of those formidable readers who genuinely enjoy a chapter on industrial diffusion. It has academic dignity, but also that deeply satisfying sense of containing an enormous argument about why the world looks the way it does. A proper grown-up book, in other words, though happily not a dead one. As sold by Crappy Old Books in Good condition, this copy is perfectly suited to its mission. A book about industrial endurance ought really to show a little endurance itself. Perhaps it has already seen service on university shelves, in studies full of maps and pipe smoke, or next to readers who wanted to understand why Europe industrialised first and what that actually meant. Now it is ready for a new owner, who may be dra.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Unbound Prometheus - Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
• Éditeur: Cambridge University Press
• Date de parution: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 052153402X
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780521534024
• Reliure: Paperback
• Édition: 2ème Édition
• État de l'article: Good

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Synopsis

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.

À propos de l?auteur

David Landes is Emeritus Professor of Economics and History at Harvard University and the author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998).