I’ve just been catching up with my Facebook lurking, and therefore have only just come across this: I started listening and didn’t stop until it did. And I learned a lot. I really like how Davies writes, and am particularly looking forward to reading his book about the history of the horse, which I trust … Continue reading Diabolical Davies
I seem to recall a lecture, given by Steve Davies at the IEA just before Covid and the political reaction to Covid started spoiling all our lives, in which he warned that modernity might be stopped in its tracks or worse by some unforeseeable disaster, and that we should watch out. And I’m pretty sure … Continue reading Steve Davies: Four new technologies to be optimistic about
The Wealth Explosion by Stephen Davies is not just about the when and where of that kink in the graphs. It is also a description of what that transformation in human affairs consisted of, not just materially, and in how people thought and felt and behaved. In an early chapter, “The Way We Once Lived … Continue reading Stephen Davies on the Growth of Sympathy
I continue to struggle to find ways of communicating my enthusiasm for Stephen Davies’s new book, The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity. But I now think I know one of the reasons why I am struggling. When you want to enthuse about a book on an historical subject, you probably want also … Continue reading Stephen Davies on the eflorescences that were stopped and on the eflorescence that was not stopped
Stephen Davies is my sort of libertarian historian in many ways, and in particular in not denying the historic importance of the predator class in times gone by. It is one thing to regret the enormous power held by predators, and the comparative powerlessness of producers – the power of the taxers and the impotence … Continue reading Stephen Davies on Ruling Classes and Industrious Classes
In his new book, The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity (see also this excerpt and this excerpt), Stephen Davies argues that the Wealth Explosion of his title happened, in Europe rather than in any the other places where it might have happened, because in Europe, uniquely, nobody was in a position to … Continue reading Stephen Davies on the Habsburg failure to dominate Europe
Much as I would like to replace the late Findlay Dunachie, I don’t think I’m cut out to be a book reviewer. It takes too much focus. While you’re doing it, you can’t afford to get stuck into reading anything else. When it comes to book blogging, blog postings provoked by some particular thing in … Continue reading Stephen Davies is writing a horse book
For a while now, in among doing other stuff, I’ve been reading The Wealth Explosion by Stephen Davies. It’s very good. And, I just got emailed about an event at which Davies will be spaking about this book, at the IEA this coming Thursday. After I’ve been there and done that, I intend to do … Continue reading Stephen Davies on how the New World gave the Old World food and money
I have recently been reading The Wealth Explosion by Stephen Davies. Its subtitle is “The Nature and Origins of Modernity”. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to think about why the “modernity” that the world now enjoys happened where it did and when it did. In particular, Davies asks, why did modernity not happen … Continue reading Stephen Davies on “the most rapid and sustained technological innovation anywhere in the world before the later eighteenth century”
I just spent all my blogging time on another Samizdata posting, about Stephen Davies, the historian, who works for the Institute of Economic Affairs. I included this photo in that posting: I took this photo with my very first digital camera, a Minolta Dimage EX. I chose this camera because it offered the strange – … Continue reading A flash photo of Stephen Davies