"[5] White was determined to study medieval history from his first year of college, inspired by Stanford University professor Edward Maslin Hulme.
[1][3][7] However, in 1933 while at work in Sicily, upon news of the Reichstag fire, he decided growing conflict in Europe would interfere with his access to archival source materials for that research and therefore he sought a new direction.
He wrote that the utilization of animals in Classical antiquity was inefficient due to limitations of the technologies of their period, particularly the lack of horseshoes and a bad horse harness design.
White pointed to new methods of crop rotation and plowing and tied them to the rise of manorialist collective farming and the shift in European prosperity and power from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe.
He concluded: "The chief glory of the later Middle Ages was not its cathedrals or its epics or its scholasticism: it was the building for the first time in history of a complex civilization which rested not on the backs of sweating slaves or coolies but primarily on non-human power" and he credited this as well as Western primacy in technology to Western theology's "activist" tradition and "implicit assumption of the infinite worth of even the most degraded human personality" and its "repugnance towards subjecting any man to monotonous drudgery.
White contended in the first section of the book that the stirrup made shock combat possible, and therefore had a crucial role in shaping the feudal system.
[17] He believed this motivated Charles Martel to accelerate confiscation of church-held lands to distribute to his knights, who could then bear the cost of expensive horses themselves to support him in battle.
[citation needed] However, White stood by his claims based on personal experience, saying, referring to his military academy training, "I learned to ride bareback and have detested horses ever since.
[20] White dedicated Medieval Technology and Social Change to the memory of French historian Marc Bloch and it represented the influences of his Annales school.
In the book's preface, White posited that "Since, until recent centuries, technology was chiefly the concern of groups which wrote little, the role which technological development plays in human affairs has been neglected," and further that "If historians are to attempt to write the history of mankind, and not simply the history of mankind as it was viewed by the small and specialized segments of our race which have had the habit of scribbling, they must take a fresh view of the records, ask new questions of them, and use all the resources of archaeology, iconography, and etymology to find answers when no answers can be discovered in contemporary writings.
[22] P. H. Sawyer and R. H. Hilton wrote the most scathing of the early reviews, beginning with: "Technical determinism in historical studies has often been combined with adventurous speculations particularly attractive to those who like to have complex developments explained by simple causes.
[2][28] He won the Dexter prize from the Society for the History of Technology for Machina ex Deo in 1970 and was named a Commendatore nell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana the same year.
[26] White was an historian, but had also earned a master's degree at Union Theological Seminary and was the son of a Calvinist professor of Christian ethics,[4] and considered religion integral to the development of Western technology.
He believed man's relationship with the natural environment was always a dynamic and interactive one, even in the Middle Ages, but marked the Industrial Revolution as a fundamental turning point in our ecological history.
Nevertheless, he also suggests that the mentality of the Industrial Revolution, that the earth was a resource for human consumption, was much older than the actuality of machinery, and has its roots in medieval Christianity and attitudes towards nature.
He concludes that applying more science and technology to the problem will not help, that it is humanity's fundamental ideas about nature that must change; we must abandon "superior, contemptuous" attitudes that makes us "willing to use it [the earth] for our slightest whim."
White's ideas set off an extended debate about the role of religion in creating and sustaining the West's destructive attitude towards the exploitation of the natural world.