David S Landes
Biographic Data
| ID | 212192 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David S Landes |
| GIVEN NAMES | David S |
| FAMILY NAME | Landes |
| SIGNATURE | LANDES D S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University Press |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4477-0173 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 68 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 193 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1948 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Marshall McLuhan’s theory of attention
In light of surging cross-disciplinary interest in rethinking the conceptions of attention and attention economy, this article conducts an archaeology of Marshall McLuhan’s concepts in order to construct a theory of attention implicit in his media paradigm. McLuhan’s most attentional concepts are explained (such as figure/ground and cliché/archetype) and synthesized into an integrated account of his idea of attention, which I call ‘eco-formed att…
Invention of Enterprise
The Invention of Enterprise
Whether hailed as heroes or cast as threats to social order, entrepreneurs--and their innovations--have had an enormous influence on the growth and prosperity of nations. The Invention of Enterprise gathers together, for the first time, leading economic historians to explore the entrepreneur's role in society from antiquity to the present. Addressing social and institutional influences from a historical context, each chapter examines entrepreneur…
Richesse et culture
Why Europe and the West? Why Not China
In the history of technological development, why didn't other regions keep up with Europe? This is an important question, as one learns almost as much from failure as from success. The one civilization that was in a position to match and even anticipate the European achievement was China. China had two chances: first, to generate a continuing, self-sustaining process of scientific and technological advance on the basis of its indigenous tradition…
In Defense of Huntington
Fouad Ajami, Richard Betts, George Borjas, Stephen Bosworth, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Eliot Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, Michael Glennon, Mariano Grondona, Lawrence Harrison, Robert D. Kaplan, Richard Lamm, David Landes, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Minxin Pei, Lucian Pye, Stephen Rosen, Peter Skerry, Tony Smith, James Q. Wilson, Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of Huntington, Foreign Policy, No. 145 (Nov. - Dec., 2004), pp. 4+6+8-10
The Unbound Prometheus
For over thirty years David S. Landes's The Unbound Prometheus has offered an unrivalled history of industrial revolution and economic development in Europe. Now, in this updated edition, the author reframes and reasserts his original arguments in the light of debates about globalisation and comparative economic growth. The book begins with a classic account of the characteristics, progress, and political, economic and social implications of the …
Reply to Peer Vries and Om Prakash
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The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
Journal Article The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. By David S. Landes. (New York: Norton, 1998. xxii, 650 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-393-04017-8.) Get access Marc Egnal Marc Egnal York University, North York, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 85, Issue 4, March 1999, Pages 1558–1559, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568281 Published: 01 March …
Geography as Destiny
Science, Technology, and the British Industrial "Decline," 1870-1970 . David Edgerton
Some further thoughts on accident in history
Some Further Thoughts on Accident in History
Some further thoughts on accident in history
Crafts is a brilliant and ingenious cliometrician. He has developed numerical measures and estimates, repeatedly corrected and refined them, and told us much about aggregate aspects of British industrial growth. We are all in his debt. I am pleased to see that, on the basis of newer figures, he has now abandoned some of his earlier belief in Anglo-French parity (in rate of industrial growth and readiness for technological change) in the eighteent…
What Room for Accident in History
There is a kind of historiography that I would call optative: history as it might have, must have, should have been.' One would not expect to find much of it in economic history, a branch that likes to pride itself on hard reasoning and exact proof; but we have it here as well. The classic instance is the debate over the social consequences of the industrial revolution (optimists versus pessimists). Both sides have been generous and ingenious in …
The Pulse of Time
The Pulse of Time
Book Reviews The Pulse of Time: Galileo Galilei, the Determination of Longitude, and the Pendulum Clock. BySilvio A.Bedini. Florence: Leo S.Olschki, 1991.Pp. xiv+ 132; illustrations, notes, appendixes, index. L 40,000.00 (paper). The opening of the world to oceanic navigation at the end of the 15th century was at once opportunity and challenge. From the start, it was apparent that access to distant lands was an avenue to wealth and power. Such ac…
Favorites of Fortune
David S. Landes Introduction: On Technology and Growth I. Technology Robert W. Fogel The Conquest of High Mortality and Hunger in Europe and America: Timing and Mechanisms Paul A. David The Hero and the Herd in Technological History: Reflections on Thomas Edison and the Battle of the Systems Rudolf Braun The Docile Body as an Economic-Industrial Growth Factor Wolfram Fischer The Choice of Technique: Entrepreneurial Decisions in the Nineteenth-Cen…
Empires of Time
Empires of Time
Book Reviews Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures. By Anthony F. Aveni. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Pp. ix + 371; illustrations, notes, index. $24.95. Empires of Time is less about technology and technique than about culture. It deals with what we might call cosmic time, the time of the gods and the links between human societies and the heavens. It says much more about calendars than about clocks, much more about longer periods than …
The time of our lives
The Wilkins lecture, 1988 hand and mind in time measurement
I was dining some years ago at the Society of Fellows—a now venerable Harvard institution modelled largely on the Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge—and had the good fortune to be seated next to a handsome grey-haired gentleman by the name of Norman Ramsey. What do you do? I asked. I’m a physicist, he said. What kind of physics? I measure time. Imagine that, I said, it so happens that I’m writing a book on the history of time measurement. Well…
Quand l'historien se fait romancier
The Time Museum
Techniques et révolutions scientifiques
(1987). Techniques et revolutions scientifiques: L'exemple de la mesure du temps. History and Technology: Vol. 4, Science: The Renaissance of a History, pp. 531-541
The Unbound Prometheus
Journal Article D. S. Landes. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present Get access The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. By D. S. Landes. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Pp. x + 566. 70s. (cloth), 25s. (paper).) W. Ashworth W. Ashworth University of Bristol. Search for other works by thi…
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
Journal Article The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. By David S. Landes. (New York: Norton, 1998. xxii, 650 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-393-04017-8.) Get access Marc Egnal Marc Egnal York University, North York, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 85, Issue 4, March 1999, Pages 1558–1559, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568281 Published: 01 March …
Bankers and Pashas
What Do Bosses Really Do
If employers make so much money, why don't workers hire machines and expertise and make the money instead? This question has generated a large body of writing, including Stephen Marglin's much-cited article “What Do Bosses Do?” Marglin draws on history to argue that the employer, who added nothing to technical efficiency, used specialization of tasks to divide labor and impose himself as boss, thereby creating an artificial, unproductive role. Th…
French Entrepreneurship and Industrial Growth in the Nineteenth Century
The study of French enterprise and entrepreneurship is rewarding for two major reasons. In the first place, anything that will help explain the present weakness of French industry and commerce throws light in turn on one of the most important political phenomena of the last 150 years: the fall of France from hegemony under Napoleon to the position she holds today. Secondly, the history of French business and businessmen is significant precisely b…
Bankers and Pashas
Bankers and Pashas
Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism
One should distinguish from the start between the economic interpretation of imperialism and economic imperialism. The one is an explanation, an essentially monistic explanation, of an historical phenomenon. The latter is an aspect of the phenomenon itself: if imperialism is the dominion of one group over another, economic imperialism is the establishment or exploitation of such dominion for continuing material advantage. The definition assumes t…
What Room for Accident in History
There is a kind of historiography that I would call optative: history as it might have, must have, should have been.' One would not expect to find much of it in economic history, a branch that likes to pride itself on hard reasoning and exact proof; but we have it here as well. The classic instance is the debate over the social consequences of the industrial revolution (optimists versus pessimists). Both sides have been generous and ingenious in …
The time of our lives
Watchmaking
From its beginnings in sixteenth century southern Germany, Professor Landes traces the development of the personal timepiece industry to France, where the design of watches as items of personal adornment reached its peak; to England, where precision in timekeeping and rationalization of manufacture were developed to new heights; to Switzerland, where manufacture on a mass scale for a highly diverse market was attained; and, finally, to America, w…
On Avoiding Babel
More and more it seems that presidential addresses are an occasion for reflecting on matters of method and on the nature of scholarly disciplines. Perhaps this is because these addresses are usually given after dinner, and sated audiences are notoriously indifferent to specialized scholarship. But today we are inaugurating an innovation and have scheduled this talk for an earlier hour. This is not because we feared the membership would be too sle…
Factor Costs and Demand
Observations on France
A HISTORIAN is always uneasy when he writes of his own time. The present is too fleeting. It changes as his pen moves; it is transformed by the time his manuscript becomes the printed page—nothing at all like the past, which poses problems of its own to the scholar but at least has the decency to stay put
Vieille banque et banque nouvelle
Landes David Saul. Vieille banque et banque nouvelle : la révolution financière du XIXe siècle. In: Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, tome 3 N°3, Juillet-septembre 1956. pp. 204-222
Marshall McLuhan’s theory of attention
In light of surging cross-disciplinary interest in rethinking the conceptions of attention and attention economy, this article conducts an archaeology of Marshall McLuhan’s concepts in order to construct a theory of attention implicit in his media paradigm. McLuhan’s most attentional concepts are explained (such as figure/ground and cliché/archetype) and synthesized into an integrated account of his idea of attention, which I call ‘eco-formed att…
Geography as Destiny
Some Further Thoughts on Accident in History
Debate the Ordering of the Urban Environment
Journal Article DEBATE THE ORDERING OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT: TIME, WORK AND THE OCCURRENCE OF CROWDS 1790–1835 Get access David S. Landes David S. Landes Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 116, Issue 1, August 1987, Pages 192–199, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/116.1.192 Published: 01 August 1987
Recent Work in the Economic History of Modern France
The Statistical Study of French Crises
Two major themes have been developed by Ernest Labrousse in his well-known works on prices and income. One, a reinterpretation of the origins of the French Revolution, does not concern us here. The other, a theory of an agriculturally determined business cycle, has recently been confirmed for the early nineteenth century by a young historian and student of Labrousse, M. A. Chabert, and forms the subject of this paper. Chabert's first work offered…
La Vie Ouvriere En France Sous Le Second Empire
French Entrepreneurship and Industrial Growth in the Nineteenth Century
The study of French enterprise and entrepreneurship is rewarding for two major reasons. In the first place, anything that will help explain the present weakness of French industry and commerce throws light in turn on one of the most important political phenomena of the last 150 years: the fall of France from hegemony under Napoleon to the position she holds today. Secondly, the history of French business and businessmen is significant precisely b…
The Statistical Study of French Crises
Two major themes have been developed by Ernest Labrousse in his well-known works on prices and income. One, a reinterpretation of the origins of the French Revolution, does not concern us here. The other, a theory of an agriculturally determined business cycle, has recently been confirmed for the early nineteenth century by a young historian and student of Labrousse, M. A. Chabert, and forms the subject of this paper. Chabert's first work offered…
The Paris Bourse
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La politique des travaux publics du Second Empire
La Naissance de la Civilisation Industrielle et le Monde Contemporain
Psychoethnography
French Corporative Theory, 1789-1948
The Statistical Analysis of Anglo-American Economic Development
There are times when these two volumes seem to repeat each other; common to each is a core of interest in investment and economic growth, and if the titles divide the terminology, the books share the territory. Nevertheless, each of the authors approaches the problem from his own point of view, and for all the overlap, there are wide areas of individual treatment. Moreover, even where both deal with the same questions, the evidence produced is us…
Vieille banque et banque nouvelle
Landes David Saul. Vieille banque et banque nouvelle : la révolution financière du XIXe siècle. In: Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, tome 3 N°3, Juillet-septembre 1956. pp. 204-222
Observations on France
A HISTORIAN is always uneasy when he writes of his own time. The present is too fleeting. It changes as his pen moves; it is transformed by the time his manuscript becomes the printed page—nothing at all like the past, which poses problems of its own to the scholar but at least has the decency to stay put
Reply To Mr. Danière and Some Reflections on the Significance of the Debate
We have reason to be grateful to Mr. Danière for bringing the thesis of Professor Labrousse to our attention once again. For this is not just an ordinary thesis. Since its statement in the thirties, it has become a staple of French historiography, shaping and informing the work of a whole generation of scholars. Such terms as “crise d'ancien type,” “crise de sous-production agricole,” and “économie des blés et des textiles” have become stock phra…
Second Reply
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Recent Work in the Economic History of Modern France
Bankers and Pashas
Bankers and Pashas
Bankers and Pashas
L'Économie Britannique et le Blocus Continental (1806-1813) . François Crouzet
Bankers and Pashas
Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism
One should distinguish from the start between the economic interpretation of imperialism and economic imperialism. The one is an explanation, an essentially monistic explanation, of an historical phenomenon. The latter is an aspect of the phenomenon itself: if imperialism is the dominion of one group over another, economic imperialism is the establishment or exploitation of such dominion for continuing material advantage. The definition assumes t…
A Chapter in the Financial Revolution of the Nineteenth Century
The terminal dates of this study are the year of the foundation of the Crédit Lyonnais and the year of the transfer of the management from Lyons to Paris. Until 1882, the siège social remained in the south, though from the late 1860's on, the initiative in the larger financial operations lay with the “ succursale ” in the capital. To satisfy the requirements of what Bouvier calls a two-headed direction, an extensive, daily correspondence was indi…
The Industrial Revolution on the Continent
Factor Costs and Demand
Documents of European Economic History. Vol. I. The Process of Industrialization, 1750-1870
An Economic History of Western Europe 1945-1964
Journal Article M. M. Postan. An Economic History of Western Europe 1945-1964 Get access An Economic History of Western Europe 1945-1964. By M. M. Postan. (London: Methuen, 1967. Pp.382. 42s. (cloth), 21s. (paper).) David S. Landes David S. Landes Harvard University. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 79, Issue 316, 1 December 1969, Pages 957–960, https://doi.org/10.2307/2229825 P…
History (37 works) · Political science (31 works) · Economics (25 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Law (17 works) · History (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Economic history (14 works) · Art history (9 works)