Book Review

Methods/Theory

Depending on temperament and training, historians often look at past developments from contrasting perspectives that focus either on discrete markers in the form of specific chronological ages or on a continuous process of change that reaches back and forth between well-known epochs. Textbook writers, for example, frequently create the impression that the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, culminating in Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687), was the product of a few solitary geniuses—Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Newton—whose discoveries were closely linked in time and space and owed little to earlier and essentially reactionary thinkers. This version forgets that medieval scientists such as Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, William of Ockham, and countless scholars at Chartres, Salerno, Padua, Toledo, and Oxford, not to speak of Arab or ancient scientists, paved the way to seventeenth-century science. The same is true of economic developments. What historians call the Industrial Revolution is usually dated to the mid-eighteenth century, with Britain taking the lead and other countries more or less straggling behind; but such conventional accounts neglect to inform us that economic developments are also part of a process that reaches back in time and cannot be limited to rigid chronological, geographic, or national boundaries.

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