Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (1969), 566p.
This is the classic study that argues that technological innovation was a major cause of the industrial revolution. Prometheus Unbound is an expansion of volume six in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe published in 1965. Although it covers all of Europe, as well as the entire period from 1750 to the 1960s, its discussion of the British industrial revolution is a very useful account of the topic. Moreover, since it covers Europe as a whole, it provides a broad context to the wider debate on why Europe was the first region of the world to industrialize and why the West retained industrial primacy in the world right through the 20th century. With the rapid growth of Asian economies since the late 20th century, the debate on the origins of Western economic primacy, and whether or when this primacy would move to East Asia in the future, rekindled the debate. In 1998 Landes published a major contribution to this topic with his The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor (1998). The latter book restates and updates his earlier argument within a world-historical perspective.
Prometheus Unbound remains a classic book on the role of technological innovation as an important reason for Europe’s industrial revolution and Britain’s premier role in its origin. Landes offers a detailed and learned study packed with fascinating details on each of the leading industries in the British industrial revolution. He draws upon a vast variety of sources in many languages, as can be seen in his extensive bibliography, which, unfortunately, is missing from this volume, but can be found in the Cambridge Economic History version. In addition to serving as a source of information on technological innovation, Landes’ substantial discussion of Britain contains a more general explanation of the broader social and political factors that made Britain the first industrial nation. Landes does not have much faith in theoretical economic explanations of economic growth. In this respect, he remains an old school economic historian, who is firmly rooted in an empirical tradition and is suspicious of “the construction of simple explanatory models and prefers the “wholeness of reality, however complex it may be.” Instead of a grand theory, he favors what he calls a “plausible” argument that finds the roots of technological innovation and economic growth in Britain’s scientific culture, its representative form of government, its geographic position, and the popularity of scientific experimentation and application. Above all, he argues that Britain’s industrial revolution was an outcome of the “scope and effectiveness of private enterprise” that ensured “the rational manipulation of the human and natural environment.”
Landes definition of the industrial revolution is still widely quoted. He argues that an “interrelated succession of technological changes” was “the heart of the Industrial Revolution:” “(1) the substitution of mechanical devices for human skills (2) the substitution of inanimate power—in particular steam—for human and animal strength; and (3) the marked improvements in the getting and working of raw materials.” According to Landes, this is what “marked a major turning point in history. To that point, the advances of commerce and industry, however gratifying and impressive, were essentially superficial: more wealth, more goods, prosperous cities, merchant nabobs…In the absence of qualitative changes, of improvements in productivity, there could be no guarantee that mere quantitative gains would be consolidated. It was the Industrial Revolution that initiated a cumulative, self-sustaining advance in technology whose repercussions would be felt in all aspects of economic life.” Prometheus Unbound is the classic argument, told with fascinating empirical detail, that technological innovation led to a self-sustaining growth of productivity that is the chief characteristic of the industrial revolution.