Here, engels claims:

If the technique, as you properly say, is for the most part dependent upon the state of science, then so much the more is science dependent upon the state and needs of technique. If society has a technical need, it serves as a greater spur to the progress of science than do ten universities. The whole of hydrostatics (Torricelli, etc.) was produced by the need of controlling the mountain streams in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We only acquired some intelligible knowledge about electricity when its technical applicability was discovered. Unfortunately, in Germany, people have been accustomed to write the history of the sciences as if the sciences had fallen from the sky.

Is this a widespread belief among historians of science and a focus of their scholarship? Was history of science done differently in the past (as engels claims in the last sentence)?

Also what books would you recommend that focus on how scientific thought developed in connection to certain economic needs and how the wider social conditions of society affected scientific thought and its development?