Naomi Lamoreaux
Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics and of History
Naomi Lamoreaux, B.A. SUNY–Binghamton, Ph.D. The Johns Hopkins University, faculty member at Yale since 2013, after a career at Brown University and UCLA: You are an American economics historian, specializing in U.S. business and technology history—so interdisciplinary that you have been integral to two primary departments—with an additional courtesy appointment at the Yale School of Management.
Your first book was a triumph and predicted the success of your career. The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904, explains why a great wave of mergers appeared in the time period you cover; it also explains the extent to which the U.S. economy was changed by this development. The praise for this book represents the kind all your work has received. Critics called it “a model of good economic history and of good scholarship,” “beautifully balanced by a thorough reading of the history of the period with a plausible economic theory of the events,” and “certain to become the standard work on the great merger wave of the late nineteenth century.”
Your next book, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England, also was praised for the depth of its research, the quality of its writing, and its creativity, craft, and continuing relevance. In the American Historical Review, Edwin Perkins wrote, “This thin volume packs a powerful message. . .Because banking issues so often intersect with politics in this era, every scholar who delves into U.S. history during the nineteenth century should become familiar with the broad outline of Lamoreaux’s revisionist thesis.” Hugh Rockoff, in the Journal of American History, predicted it would become a classic, and it has.
The praise generated by the publication of these books has continued throughout your work—for the nine other books you have edited and for the scores of articles on business and economic and financial history you have written. For all your work, it is no surprise that you have been awarded many National Science Foundation grants and numerous prizes, which include the Alice Hanson Jones Biennial Prize, both the Henrietta Larson and the Arthur H. Cole article awards, the Harold F. Williamson Prize for an outstanding business historian in midcareer, the Cliometrics Award for exceptional support to that field, and the Business History Conference’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Particularly notable is the way you are praised for your writing: “short, clearly written and us[ing] simple models to great effect,” “readable and persuasive,” and “a lively essay that demonstrates that banking history does not have to be dull” are among the plaudits that repeat.
You’ve served your profession in innumerable ways: advisory boards; editorial boards; boards of directors; steering committees; search, nominating, program, and organizing committees; and prize, fellowship, and review committees. You coedited the Journal of Economic History from 1992 to 1996, a major undertaking, and served a term as president of the Economic History Association. Shortly after you arrived at Yale, you accepted the role of Chair of History for a five-year term, during which fine appointments were made and the department took a transitional step into its future.
You now live in Michigan, where you are a Senior Research Scholar at the University of Michigan and where you say you have found a congenial and happy home in the law school, thus extending the focus of your interdisciplinary work to law! Your Yale colleagues know that your excellent contributions will continue. And they are very grateful that you came here, bringing so much to Yale, which you leave a stronger, better place.