Quote from Sapiens: “History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”

In this quote he isn't talking about historians, but history in general. Taxation, commerce and the spoils of war are only possible when there is some surplus to tax, trade or fight wars about.

The review on Amazon is hardly convincing and wrong too. The first steam engines did use condensing steam creating a vacuum, but first the steam had to be let into a cylinder, pushing a piston.

Whether you call the use of water power a revolution or not is a judgement call. If the textile manufacturers kept on using water power, it severely limited production to certain places and only during those time that there was enough water to power the mills.