Technological determinism is back on the agenda—with a vengeance. Fundamental to modern economic growth, argues Joel Mokyr in this important and provocative new book, is the upsurge in the stock of “useful knowledge” that characterizes the last two and a half centuries. Not only has humanity acquired much more knowledge but the costs of accessing it have plummeted over the same period, thanks largely to new communications and transport technologies.

At the heart of Mokyr's thesis is a carefully construed identification of two types of useful knowledge and the relationship between them. Propositional knowledge (episteme or Ω) he defines as a society's collective understanding of the natural world, acquired through both the observation and classification of phenomena and the discovery of regularities or “natural laws” that describe their operation. Prescriptive knowledge (techne or Λ), comprises all the techniques available for the manipulation of nature: at any time, only a small sub-set of these instructions or recipes is in use, and an addition to the set is “an invention.” If Ω is knowledge “what,” Λ is knowledge “how,” and a technique cannot exist without an epistemic base, however narrow, in Ω. This is the crux: “the wider and deeper the epistemic base on which a technique rests, the more likely it is that a technique can be extended and find new applications, product and service quality improved, the production process streamlined, economized, and adapted to changing external circumstances, and the techniques combined with others to form new ones” (p. 14).

Mokyr insists that propositional knowledge is broader than “science”: it encompasses everything from folk wisdom about health and the weather to “engineering knowledge” (empirically derived formulae and procedures, based on classical mechanics and simple chemical reactions). Nevertheless, it is “science” that he privileges in his account of the widening and deepening of the epistemic base, which is at the root of modern economic growth. In particular, it is the emergence of a virtuous circle between episteme and techne in the mid-nineteenth century that he identifies as the key to the sustainability of that growth. What made the Industrial Revolution revolutionary was that, unlike all previous cases of economic growth, it did not fizzle out: the accelerating symbiosis of knowledge production tipped “the balance of the feedback mechanism from negative to positive” (p. 33).

In effect, Mokyr relegates the Industrial Revolution (1780–1830) to a preliminary (proto-scientific) phase, overshadowed by the “Industrial Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century. This cultural phenomenon provides the historical bridge between the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and the Second Industrial Revolution, which stemmed from the new intellectual resources offered by organic chemistry, metallurgy, electrical science, and thermodynamics. In the footsteps of Peter Mathias (“Who Unbound Prometheus: Science and Technical Change, 1600–1800,” in Science and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), Mokyr contends that the bridge was constructed less from new discoveries, more from new experimental methods, a novel faith in the intelligibility and tractability of nature, and a utilitarian (Baconian) ideology that recruited natural philosophy to the service of manufacturing and commerce. Thirty years on, Mokyr is able to embody this more subtle link in the networks of progressive manufacturers and natural philosophers that criss-crossed western Europe (most fruitfully in Britain), thanks to the research of historians such as Margaret Jacob (Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Larry Stewart (The Rise of Public Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). What merited fuller examination here were the means by which this ferment of largely amateur scientific activity struggled during the nineteenth century (especially in Britain) to achieve recognition and financial support from the state, the universities, and industry. Exploration of the social context in which science and technology developed after 1800 diminishes, however, in inverse correlation with the author's emphasis on its increasing economic importance. There is always a danger too that this stress on “applied science” may lead to an underestimation of the difficulty of invention and of the elements of design and technical skill that it involves.

In a book that cries out for a closer engagement with the work both of other economic historians of the industrial revolution (especially J. R. Harris, Kenneth Pomeranz, and E. A. Wrigley) and of social historians of science and technology, it is a pity that Mokyr proceeds to pursue his ideas about knowledge at the expense of his thesis about the role of science and technology in industrialization. In chapter 4 he offers an ingenious, but ultimately unconvincing, contribution to the debate on the origins of the factory, which locates it in a concentration of in-house expertise. Chapter 5, while ignoring most of the relevant demographic and labor history, links the falling employment participation rate of married women with the early-twentieth-century decline in infant mortality, via the housewife's wholesale adoption of the germ theory of disease: newly enlightened mothers simplistically swept and scrubbed their way to healthier babies (and exhaustion).

Mokyr returns to the plot in the final two chapters, with a theoretically insightful (if empirically sometimes outdated) exploration of the role of institutions in either promoting or resisting the adoption of new technologies. Ultimately, he acknowledges that the acquisition of useful knowledge involves not only “a game against nature,” but is also “part of the social game of people against one another” (pp. 284–85). An appreciation that such power games might influence the configuration of new knowledge at the point of its generation, not merely filter it at the stage of innovation and diffusion, could allow a fertile rapprochement between economic historians and students of science and technology.