David landes biography

LANDES, DAVID SAUL (1924– ), U.S. economic historian. Born in New York City, Landes received a B.A. from the City College of New York in 1942 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1953. He taught economics at Columbia (1953–58) and Berkeley (1958–64). In 1964 he was appointed professor of history at Harvard, and from 1966 to 1968 directed its center for Middle Eastern Studies. Landes' principal studies were in the economic and social history of modern Europe with special reference to the Industrial Revolution and its social consequences, the history of business interests, that of banking in particular, and the general problem of economic development. His contributions in these fields include Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt (1958); The Rise of Capitalism (1966); The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe since 1750 (1968); and "Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism" in Journal of Economic History, 21 (1961), 496–512. In these and other works, Landes analyzed the character of technological development and the factors contributing to national and regional differences. On the subject of imperialism, he argued that it is the result of disparities of power, and not a function peculiar to capitalism. Landes was active in Jewish organizations.

After retiring from teaching, Landes was named Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard.

Other books by Landes include Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (1983) and The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998). In the latter, among other novel concepts, he makes a correlation between the economic level of a country and the way the country's women are treated.

Sources:Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2007 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.

Historian of Wealth, Poverty, and Development

David Saul Landes, Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University, died on August 17, 2013, at age 89, not long after the death of his wife of 69 years, Sonia T. Landes. Born in Brooklyn on April 29, 1924, Landes was educated in New York City’s public schools and at the City College of New York, from which he graduated in 1942. The following year he earned a master’s degree from Harvard, was drafted into the army, and was accepted into the Signal Corps. There he learned Japanese and worked as a cryptanalyst, decoding messages such as those sent after the atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a historical editor for the Signal Corps, he worked in Germany in 1945 and 1946 on the German plans to defend against the Allied invasion of Normandy.

After the war, Landes returned to Harvard, where he studied with Arthur H. Cole and Donald McKay, receiving his PhD in 1953. From 1950 to 1953, he was a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He then moved to Columbia University, first as an assistant and then as associate professor. In 1957–­58, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He was then appointed professor of history and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, a post he held until 1964, when he joined the Harvard faculty as a professor of history. He eventually held an appointment in the Department of Economics as well, and served from 1981 to 1993 as chair of Harvard’s Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, an undergraduate interdisciplinary honors program in history and the social sciences. In 1984 Landes became a senior fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows. At his retirement in 1996, he was the Coolidge Professor of History and Economics.

From the beginning, his research had a strong comparative element, e

David S. Landes, a renowned historian whose work focused on the complex dynamics of cultural values, technological innovation, and historical circumstance in economic development, died Aug. 17 at age 89.

The Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics Emeritus, Landes is arguably best-known for his book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” a historical treatise that explored the ways in which history and culture intersected to create the conditions that allowed some nations to prosper while others languished in relative poverty. The book has been hailed as a landmark work by other historians and economists, including John Kenneth Galbraith, who called it “truly wonderful. No question that this will establish David Landes as preeminent in his field and in his time.”

Citing examples as varied as the role air conditioning played in the development of the American south, to how using chopsticks may have helped Asian workers gain the manual dexterity needed in microprocessor manufacture, to the role of eyeglasses in making precision tools possible, Landes was able to illustrate the modern history and economics of Western Europe and the Middle East in a unique and highly accessible way.

Among the Harvard faculty members who worked with Landes was Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History Niall Ferguson, who received a lengthy message from Landes regarding an upcoming book.

“I had just finished the first draft of my history of the Rothschilds,” Ferguson recalled. “I returned from holiday to find a 95-page fax from David Landes, who had been asked to act as a reader, but in fact took on the role of my unofficial editor.

“His comments were so brilliant, so insightful and so helpful that I was humbled,” he continued. “It was the beginning of a friendship, but I always considered myself first and foremost his apprentice-cum-disciple, always learning from a master of economic history — and of life. ‘Other people work to live,’

David Saul Landes was among the finest economic historians of his age. He tackled the most important subject of his field: why some nations are poor whereas others are rich. His many volumes and papers, taken as a whole, form an ever-widening arc, from the specific to the general, from the national to the global. Toward the end of his career he returned to the specific, bringing the arc full circle. Interweaving the grand sweep of his work is the Landes notion that cultural distinctions temper economic and technical changes.

The scholarly work begins with a 1949 article on the entrepreneur and the French economy. Why French firms were smaller, more family-oriented, and less capitalized than the British, German, and American was, to Landes, due to the longer history of aristocracy in France. “Ideas once formed are as powerful as the strongest material forces.” He spent parts of the next decade on Bankers and Pashas (1958), his Ph.D. dissertation and first book, a story of international finance between French bankers and the Egyptian government during the 1860s. International finance allowed the Egyptian economy to ride high on the economic wave from the cotton famine induced by the American Civil War. But Landes’s account is less a tale of the cold calculus of French bankers than it is of personalities and greed. The carnival of credit that ensued would have been hilarious if not for the history of economic pain and bitterness that followed. The work, which began as part of Landes’s quest to understand the entrepreneur in French economic development, expanded the intellectual arc that is his legacy.

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