It wasn't a good history when it was written, and has not gotten any better.

It has been a while since I read this book and threw it across the room, but there are two things which I found especially bad. First, he simplifies the process of invention: he ignores how many inventions and inventors fail, how often inventions have to be developed, often by many people, over long periods of time, and he ignores how for an invention to succeed there was a market, a reception for its use ( for example, if Newcomen hadn't set up the first steam engine next to a coal mine where it could be run off the coal chips that couldn't be easily transported , it never would have been cost effective). Burke's inventions appear suddenly, as if by magic. Second, he almost comically exaggerates their positive effects: he summarizes the European world before Gutenberg as naïve, stupid, emotional, and pathetic so he can attribute all the Renaissance and civilized thought to the printing press.

I looked around a little to see how it was received at the time, and my reaction was not unusual. A brief review by Deborah Fitzgerald here is a pretty good summary. She points out something that I hadn't noticed: he used Alistair Crombie as an advisor. Crombie did a really classic book on the history of early science: Augustine to Galileo: The History of Science AD 400-1650. That's well worth reading. I wonder what Crombie thought of Burke, when Burke had published....

Fitzgerald, D. (1987). Isis, 78(3), 432-433. Retrieved May 3, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/232006

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For a history of technology, there are piles of books- it's a very detailed field, so you should expect diverse publications on special topics. However Daniel R Headrick's Technology: A World History is a good read, has lots of illustrations, and solid research and tries to be less Eurocentric in its approach: which Burke never bothered to do. Oxford University Press also published A Short History of Technology from the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900. , by T. K. Derry and Trevor I. Williams. It's old, but still good for a basic narrative, and used inexpensive copies abound.

EDIT: As it had been some time since I looked at this book, I decided to look again. Here are some notes I made while doing a random sampling.

p.23 Burke is channeling Edward Gibbon, barbarian hordes spread across the Roman empire destroying civilization, resulting in small feudal communities where illiterate lords rule illiterate peasants and money doesn't exist. “A small community might be fortunate to see one visitor a year”. Doesn’t specify, so I guess regardless whether Italy , Poland, or Kent, everyone tore down their cities, threw out all their coins, and nobody went anywhere.

p.56 The plague was over ( that’s right, over) , at the end of the 14th c., and “there was a new air abroad, a feeling of reckless joy at being alive. The survivors were rich, having inherited what the dead had left, so they went on a gigantic spending spree”. Looking at the Hundred Years’ War, it’s hard to find much reckless joy, though I suppose it might be called a spending spree.

p. 60 Modern western music began at the end of the 14th c. in Italy, and first employed the Pythagorean scale. He’s mentioned troubadors, and Gregorian chant, and Guido of Arezzo already, so this is very odd…I wonder what he thought they were using, were doing, for the previous few hundred years? He doesn't go into detail.

P 138-140 Circa 1550, " gunpowder had only been in use for about a hundred years" [ only off by a few hundred…] . “A new method of boring cannons was developed. This coincided with a cheaper way of casting guns from bronze, and the increased accuracy of the muzzle encouraged greater care in aiming and firing”. On reading further, Burke seems to think this was true because it was not until 1551 that Niccolo Tartaglia wrote his treatise on ballistics. So, the advent of consistent corned gunpowder and aimed artillery by the mid 15th century? Well, he can't point at a new invention or the writing of some new treatise to account for that. For Burke, that seems to mean it didn't exist.

P190 After a rather nice bit on Joseph Black and latent heat leading to James Watt’s steam engine improvements, and then a nice mention of Wilkinson’s cannon-boring improvements, “Wilkinson’s cannon-boring system became useful because with it Watt’s engines could be made with enough precision to be almost airtight. As a result, the engines used one third the fuel in any other engine. Everybody wanted one”.- I guess if everybody was a mine owner, that would be true.... Ah, then: the “sun-and-planet” gearing was not patented because a competitor had already filed for a patent on the simple crankshaft Boulton and Watt wanted to use, it seems somehow to have been the only way to make a steam engine into a rotary one- why, Burke does not explain. And one year after1781, when it was patented, “every graph on the British economy begins a sharp upward curve”. This is so very Burkean: point at an invention in one statement, then point at something improving in the following statement, and then just imply the first caused the second. So magical....

Right, that’s enough, ….I’m not going to throw it across the room this time, because it has to go back to the library.