Document Type
Journal Article
Abstract
In 1934 and 1935, Lewis Mumford and Marc Bloch published two very different pioneering works in the history of technology, Technics and Civilization and “Avènement et conquêtes du moulin à eau,” the first an ambitious attempt to trace the development of technology in human civilizations over several thousand years, the second a historical overview of the development of milling technology from Greco-Roman times to the end of the Middle Ages.1 What was to prove an extraordinarily influential thesis about the development of medieval technology appeared in both publications, namely, that the second half of the European Middle Ages witnessed a rapid increase not only in the number of mills powered by water and wind but also in the range of industrial processes to which waterpower and wind power were applied. These phenomena were, according to Mumford and Bloch, emblematic of a medieval revolution in the use of power technology that laid the foundations for what happened in the Industrial Revolution several hundred years later and helped to explain how European society was subsequently able to transform itself in the way it did.
ANZSRC / FoR Code
2202 HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SPECIFIC FIELDS
Publication Details
Lucas, A. R. 2005, 'Industrial Milling in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: A Survey of the Evidence for an Industrial Revoluation in Medieval Europe', Technology and Culture: The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 1-30.
{NB: item deleted 26 June 2009}