David Hackett Fischer wrote a book, Historical Fallacies, where he enumerated all the various fallacies he had seen and was seeing being committed. He devoted a chapter to fallacies of causation. Some of them are classic logical fallacies.

There's post hoc, propter hoc ( This came before, so it caused this to come after) . Because we humans love to see human agency in everything, and expect famous events to have big effects, this has resulted in some wild notions. Fischer was delighted to list all the things that were said to have been caused by the defeat of the Spanish Armada: England gaining a foothold in the Americas, Spain's empire declining, England ruling the oceans, England having a literary renaissance....but none of them could be linked to that, if they even happened- there's no successful English settlement in the New World before 1613 for example..

There's cum hoc ergo propter hoc ( with this, therefore because of this) This is also summarized as "correlation is not cause".Stringing together all sorts of correlations are possible,and quickly reduce to the absurd, Along with the spread of automobiles there's a fad for milkshakes, therefore automobiles caused the fad. Most heroin addicts are found to have drunk a milkshake, therefore milkshakes caused heroin addiction. Put together, the spread of automobiles caused heroin addiction.

This is a problem which is encountered in the general history of inventions, with people wanting to knock things into to categories: did the invention of something create the market for it, or did the emergence of a market make it inevitable that something would be invented to fill it? Stories of inventors tend to be written as heroic, falling into the first category, but there are examples all over the map for this. Sometimes it seems pretty simple- you could look at Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin and say that, given the market for cleaned cotton and the simple mechanics of the device, it was bound to have been figured out by somebody. On the other hand, a lot of the things Edison invented ( and he invented a lot of things) created a market that hadn't existed ( like the phonograph) or created none at at all ( like the concrete piano). But sometimes it's not simple. There was, for example, a period of 20 years in which there was a real need, a real market, for a working steamboat, especially in the early US, yet the steamboats of several inventors ( Rumsey, Fitch, Morey, Symington) failed. After Fulton successfully developed one, there was a very real resulting boom in transportation on the rivers of the US, and a very real impetus to the growth of the cotton plantations in the south. On examination, the unsuccessful early steamboat projects failed not from being unworkable designs ( Fulton's design shared quite a lot with Symington's even used the same engine) but from lack of development, with their inventors being too poor, or hampered by being too isolated, or not having access to improved steam technology, chose a bad initial place to operate........a whole variety of things.

Trying to make it a simple story, therefore , of cause and effect is rather difficult. Fischer suggested simply avoiding it if at all possible ( one of the many, many, many things he said we should avoid- maybe too many) I haven't read Kurlansky's book ( yet) but if he wanted to avoid doing the same for paper and print, I for one would give him the benefit of the doubt