History

Sunil Amrith, professor of History at Yale University, will be awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2022. The award honours his search for the historical origins of the great inequality that exists between and within countries as well as the connection that he has identified to the impact of climate change. 

The Heineken Prizes are the Netherlands’ most prestigious international science prizes. Every two years they are awarded to five distinguished researchers. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is responsible for the nomination and selection process. During the first week of June, a 2022 laureate will be announced every weekday. Previous laureates of the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History include Lorraine Daston (2020) and John McNeill (2018). The award was established in 1990 by Alfred H. Heineken.

About the study
Amrith studies the history of South and Southeast Asia. He is interested in the transnational connections between these two regions, focusing mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among other things, he has studied the large-scale migration around the Bay of Bengal, and the circulation of cultural, religious, and political ideas that followed. He also focuses on the history of the environment in this region, and the relationship between climate and water cycles around the Indian Ocean. He recently wrote the book Unruly Waters, in which he explains why monsoons and rivers play such an important role in the history of South and Southeast Asia. The recurring theme in his work is the effect of imperialism and colonialism on the inequality between and within countries.  Again, he makes the connection to environment: Amrith is researching how climate change affects socioeconomic issues such as migration and inequality. He explains: ‘Our current environmental crisis is best understood in relation to a history of increasing inequality, both between and within countries. Moreover, we can better equip ourselves to understand the challenges we all face if we listen to and learn from the widest possible range of voices, including those that have been marginalised or silenced.’ 

Jury praises Amrith’s new perspective on environmental history
‘Unruly Waters is an extraordinary broadening of the history of the Indian subcontinent, from a whole new perspective,’ says the jury, with chair Judith Pollmann, historian, and professor of early modern Dutch History. Amrith combines political, social, and cultural insights, micro and macro perspectives. In doing so, he combines administrative and popular sources, such as film and drama. In addition, he ties his research to the perspective of the individual and the way in which life is affected by climate. For example, he makes a connection between colonial exploitation and climate change in India. This new approach to issues such as ecology, migration, politics, health, and climate makes Amrith a leader in the field of environmental history. 

About Sunil Amrith
Sunil Amrith (Kenya, 1979) grew up in Singapore and then moved to the United Kingdom to study history at Cambridge University. He received his PhD in history from the same university in 2005. After working briefly as a researcher at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was appointed lecturer at Birbeck College, part of the University of London. In 2015, he was appointed Mehra Family Professor of South Asian History at Harvard University. Since 2020, he has been Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. In addition to the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History, awards he has received include the John F. Richards Prize, the Infosys Prize in Humanities, and the MacArthur Fellowship.

Video

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2020 to Lorraine Daston, director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin and visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Daston is receiving the prize for her study of the development of the concept of objectivity and the transformation she has brought about in the history of science.

Daston offers new perspective on “truth” and “objectivity” in science
Lorraine Daston is considered one of the most eminent historians of her generation. From the outset, her publications have had a major influence on the research agenda in the discipline of the history of science. She has shown how the scientific approach to acquiring knowledge is highly dependent on the period in which it is developed. Her entire work is an investigation and clarification of the moral economy of science.

History of objectivity
Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (1998), the book Daston wrote together with Katharine Park, investigates the role of passions such as wonder, curiosity, pleasure, or horror in the study of nature. It opened up the discipline of the history of science to cultural history, the arts and literature, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, and led to the authors receiving the Pfizer Prize.

In the also award-winning Objectivity (2007), Daston and co-author Peter Galison studied the historical development of what were considered to be the right ways to acquire knowledge, from the eighteenth century to the present day. They did so on the basis of illustrations in scientific atlases from a wide range of disciplines. In their book, which was widely acclaimed in both the humanities and the hard sciences, the authors show that the core scientific concept of “objectivity” has a history and that principles regarding the formation of knowledge have developed in interaction with ideas about what characterises a scientific researcher.

In 2018 Daston published her essay Against Nature, in which she attempts to explain why people appeal to nature in order to justify moral arguments. We view nature as a model and ideal, from which we wish to derive standards and values. Deviations from natural order are considered unnatural and often wrong. According to Daston, this is a persistent misconception: all standards are based on an order, but nature is too multiform for us to derive a clear-cut order from it.

Rules and the modernity of science
Daston’s current projects include a “history of rules”, which traces how rules evolved from models to algorithms over many centuries. She is also re-examining the relationship between science and modernity, posing the question how the sciences and modernity became so strongly associated with each other, and with what consequences for their public image.

About the laureate
Lorraine Daston was born in East Lansing, Michigan in 1951. She studied the history of science and philosophy at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. She has held various visiting positions, including in Paris, Vienna, Oxford, and Chicago. From 1990 to 1992, she was a professor and director of the Institute for the History of Science at the Georg August University of Göttingen (Germany). For the next five years, she was Professor of History and History of Science at the University of Chicago. From 1995 to 2019 she was the director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Although she now officially holds emerita status, Daston is still very active in both Berlin and at the University of Chicago.

Her work has been recognised by numerous awards. She received the Pfizer Prize on two occasions, the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, the Schelling Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Lichtenberg Medal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Luhmann Prize of the University of Bielefeld. In 2018 she received the Dan David Prize. Daston is a member of several academies including Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences (Paris) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2018 to John R. McNeill, Professor of History at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. (USA).

Storyteller and investigator of unparalleled vision
John R. McNeill received the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History for his important work in integrating two recent branches of the study of history: global history and environmental history.
John McNeill is best known for his book Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (2000), in which he tells the story of human activity during the previous century and its impact on the Earth. He describes how economic, demographic, social and technological changes influenced every aspect of the Earth’s environment; conversely, he shows how the natural environment has often had a dramatic impact on the course of human history. In McNeill’s view, however, the changes that took place in the 20th century were on an unprecedented scale.
As he often does, McNeill drew inspiration from many different disciplines, including the natural sciences, earth science, the technical sciences, archaeology and agricultural science. In doing so, he helped to integrate two recent branches of the study of history: global history and environmental history.
His work is exceptional for the apparent ease with which he weaves centuries, continents, cultures, scientific disciplines and languages into a single narrative, and for his unparalleled ability to draw from sources in all these fields.
Thanks to his unique perspective, fellow historians have new questions to investigate. His lucid, precise, sparkling writing style, humorous and erudite, has enchanted scores of readers.

Researcher
John R. McNeill was born in Chicago (IL, USA) in 1954. After receiving his Bachelor’s from Swarthmore College in Swarthmore (PA, USA) and spending a year teaching Geography and Economics in Athens (Greece), he completed his Master’s in History at Duke University in Durham (NC, USA). He earned his PhD at the same university in 1981 for his study of the relationship between the French and Spanish empires and their Atlantic colonies in the 18th century.
McNeill became a member of the History faculty at Georgetown University in Washington DC (USA) in 1985. Since 1985, he has also taught at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, a centre for research and teaching on global affairs.
He became a professor at Georgetown University in 1993. Furthermore he had visiting appointments in New Zealand, Paris and Oslo. As an historian, he serves on various environmental boards and committees.
NcNeill is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous honours and awards, including two Fulbrights, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Toynbee Prize and the World History Association’s Pioneer of World History Award.

Article
— Interview with John McNeill in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2016 to Professor Judith Herrin, Emeritus Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s College London (UK).

A leading role in history for the Byzantine Empire
Judith Herrin received the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History for her pioneering research into Medieval cultures in Mediterranean civilisations and for establishing the crucial significance of the Byzantine Empire in history.
Herrin has a huge international reputation as a researcher and as an author of popular books on history. Her work is characterised by four main themes:

• The first consists of a detailed comparison of eastern and western attitudes towards religious images in the early Middle Ages. Her book The Formation of Christendom, which was first published in 1987, has become a standard reference work.
• The second theme is the political, economic and social history of Byzantium: the Medieval Roman Empire (330–1453) of which Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) was the capital. Herrin’s book Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empirewhich was published in 2007 has also become a standard work that has already appeared in twelve languages.
• A third theme consists of archaeological field research into traces from the Byzantine period in Greece, Cyprus and Istanbul.
• In the fourth theme, she uses her own methods to examine the role of ordinary women in Medieval society.

The jury praises Herrin’s ability to convert archive studies and field research into a broad vision that is rich in detail. Her work paved the way for a non-theological view of the influence of Christendom on Medieval society. Thanks to Herrin, the place of the Byzantine Empire in history is now assessed at its true value and thanks to her tenacity, the many varied contributions made by women to Byzantine society are now appreciated.

Researcher
Judith Herrin was born in 1942 in the United Kingdom. She gained a bachelor degree at Newnham College in Cambridge (UK) and was awarded a PhD in 1972 at the University of Birmingham (UK).
As a committed European avant la lettre, she received tuition at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, the École pratique des hautes études in Paris and the Institut für Byzantinistik und Neugriechische Philologie in Munich.
During her career, she was appointed to many positions and received frequent fellowships and grants in Europe and in the US. Between 1991 and 1995, she was the Stanley J. Seeger Professor of Byzantine History at Princeton University (US). From 1995 to 2001, as Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, she headed the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London.
Herrin has received various honours for her work, including the Médaille d’honneur from the Collège de France and the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour from Greece.

Article
— Interview with Judith Herrin in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2014 to Aleida Assmann, Professor of English Literature at the University of Konstanz (Germany).
Professor Assmann received the prize for her ground-breaking contribution to the study of the ‘cultural memory’ of nations and other types of human communities.

Researcher
Aleida Assmann was born in Bethel, near Bielefeld (Germany), on 22 March 1947. She studied English and Egyptology at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen and obtained her PhD in both disciplines in 1977. In 1993, Assmann became professor of Anglistik en Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaften at the University of Konstanz (Germany). She has travelled abroad frequently for guest professorships, for example at Rice University (Houston), Princeton, Yale and the University of Chicago in the United States, and the University of Vienna in Austria.
She has published hundreds of essays, books and collections of articles on English literature, cultural memory and ‘remembrance’. She is member of the Academies of Science in Brandenburg, Göttingen and Austria, and received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo in 2008.
In 2009, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Max Planck Society presented Assmann with a Max Planck Research Award (€ 750,000). In 2011, she received the Ernst Robert Curtius Prize for essays from the University of Bonn Society.

Research
Each of us has recollections of the past. How we deal with the present depends on which events we remembered and which ones we forgot. The same is true for groups of people, for communities, and for entire nations: some events are stored in their ‘collective memory’, while others fade over time.
Aleida Assmann is a pioneer in what has become a distinct discipline: the study of one particular kind of collective memory, which she has named ‘cultural memory’. It is the study of how societies deal with their past through cultural expression, for example the news media, literature, the visual arts, music, buildings and monuments, and remembrance days. Some memories are passed on culturally to new generations; others are mostly ignored and thus ‘forgotten’.
Together with Jan Assmann, her husband, Aleida Assmann has helped establish a successful discipline, an ‘anthropology of remembrance’ that connects literary studies with historical science, anthropology, psychology, theology, and neuroscience. Their conceptual framework has been accepted and adopted worldwide.
Assmann recognised, for example, how Germany’s ‘cultural memory’ after the Second World War was dominated by feelings of guilt about Nazism and the Holocaust. In other countries and times, art and culture have typically allowed space for more positive self-reflections.
Assmann’s work raises interesting questions about how cultural memory can be modified for political or moral purposes. She has often participated in public debates on how societies can best deal with historical disgrace – neither by covering it up nor by getting stuck in guilt.
In Germany, she stressed the importance of using the annual national commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz both to ensure that Germans remember the Holocaust and to highlight how human rights are now part of the country’s political and moral foundation.
For the same reason, Assmann has joined the campaign to make 8 May a remembrance day commemorating World War II and the Holocaust all across Europe, in part to unite Europeans in a shared vision of a peaceful future.

Article
— Interview with Aleida Assmann in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

Video

Geoffrey Parker has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2012 for his outstanding scholarship on the social, political and military history of Europe between 1500 and 1650, in particular Spain, Philip II, and the Dutch Revolt; for his contribution to military history in general; and for his research on the role of climate in world history.
Geoffrey Parker practices a transnational type of history and began doing so long before it became fashionable. Based on his in-depth study of a wide range of archival records, often spanning many different countries and languages, he arrives at innovative historical analyses that transcend national borders.
This was already true of Parker’s very first publications, in which he studied the rise and fall of Spain’s global empire between 1550 and 1650. Viewed within a broader context, the Dutch Revolt took place at a time when Spain had joined forces with allies Italy, Switzerland and the Southern Netherlands to battle Britain, France, Germany, the northern Dutch provinces and Scandinavia for world dominance.
In Parker’s analyses, Spain ultimately lost that battle not because of a series of disparate rebellions by the Dutch, but because its government and economy were unable to continue supplying its enormous army with adequate transport, accommodation, uniforms, food and payment.
Parker’s best-known book, The Military Revolution, builds on the work of fellow historian Michael Roberts. Roberts had proposed that European methods of warfare (for example firearms, strategy and tactics) changed fundamentally at the end of the sixteenth century, creating the need for trained standing armies and nation states. According to Parker, that change explains the global expansion of the West in territory and power. Although this analysis remains controversial, Parker’s work has in any event ensured that this crucial period of European history can no longer be discussed without considering the military perspective.
It is characteristic of Parker that he studies military history from a European, transnational perspective and relates it to events elsewhere in the world.
Parker employs the same broad perspective in his study of another topic that has long intrigued him: the influence of climate change on world history. In 1979, long before the greenhouse effect became a popular concept, he described how the “Little Ice Age” in around 1600 not only resulted in splendid Dutch and Flemish paintings of winter scenes, but also in political, economic, intellectual and social change in many places.
It is a topic that Parker intends to continue exploring in the years ahead, spurred on by recent climate changes.

Further reading
The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659. The logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (Cambridge, 1972).
The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988).
Felipe II: la biografía definitiva (Barcelona: Planeta, 2010), 1383 pp.
Success and failure during the first century of the Reformation, Past and Present 136 (1992), 43-82.
Crisis and catastrophe: the global crisis of the 17th-century reconsidered, American Historical Review 113 (2008), 1052-79

Biography
Noel Geoffrey Parker was born in the United Kingdom on 25 December 1943. He studied history at Christ’s College Cambridge. In 1968, he received a PhD from Cambridge, where he had studied under Sir John H. Elliott. Since that time, he has lived around the world, wherever his interests have taken him.
In 1972, he moved to Scotland after accepting a position at the University of St Andrews. After serving as a visiting professor in Canada and Japan, Parkermoved to the United States in 1986, where he has taught at the University of Illinois, Yale University and, since 1997, Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
Parker enjoys world renown. He has received honorary doctorates from the Catholic University of Brussels (Belgium) and the University of Burgos (Spain). He is a fellow of the British Academy, the Spanish Real Academia de la Historia, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.
Parker’s books have a devoted readership beyond the world of historical research. His best-known works are Military Revolution, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, Felipe II (a classic work on King Philip II of Spain) and The Spanish Armada.
The author of 36 books, more than a hundred publications of historical research, and hundreds of lectures in different languages given on four continents, Parker has had an enormous impact on the study of history, both in Europe and beyond.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Geoffrey Parker in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video

Professor Rosamond McKitterick was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2010 because she has fundamentally changed how we view the Carolingians and the interplay of politics, religion and scholarship in their time.
Historians long assumed that – following a lengthy period in which very few northern Europeans could read or write and ideas were transmitted orally – literacy began to revive once again in the eleventh century. Rosamond McKitterick upended this image completely with research that was initially considered highly controversial. Her method combines meticulous analysis of original manuscripts – not only the text itself, but also how it was created and to which other texts it refers – and a wide-ranging view of history. Based on this method, she has argued that literacy in fact revived some three centuries earlier than assumed, during Charlemagne’s reign.
McKitterick has presented plausible evidence showing that many children went to school in Carolingian times and that literacy had infiltrated far down the social pyramid. Princes issued written orders, noblemen gifted libraries to monasteries, and former slaves were given a written document as evidence that they were freemen. Contrary to earlier notions, it appears that the written word was crucially important in both ecclesiastical and secular society as far back as the eighth century.
In her later work, McKitterick fleshed out this new image of the Carolingians. Drawing on meagre source material, she has managed to sketch a surprisingly complete picture of Charlemagne and his empire, of how people then regarded their own past, and of how politics, religion and scholarship were interrelated.

Key publications
McKitterick R.D. 1983. The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians. Longman Publishing Group, London
McKitterick R.D. 1989. The Carolingians and the Written Word. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
McKitterick R.D. 2004. History and Memory in the Carolingian World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
McKitterick R.D. 2006. Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame
McKitterick R.D. 2008. Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
McKitterick R.D. 1983. The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians. Longman Publishing Group, London
McKitterick R.D. 1989. The Carolingians and the Written Word. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
McKitterick R.D. 2004. History and Memory in the Carolingian World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
McKitterick R.D. 2006. Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame
McKitterick R.D. 2008. Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Biography
Rosamond Deborah McKitterick was born Rosamond Pierce in Chesterfield, UK, in 1949. She spent part of her youth in Australia and completed an honours degree at the University of Western Australia in Perth. She then returned to the UK, where she received the degrees of M.A., Ph.D., and Litt.D. from the University of Cambridge. After a year in Munich, she became a lecturer and then received a Chair in Medieval History at Cambridge University. She is also Professorial Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Rosamond McKitterick is regarded as a brilliant but also accessible researcher and teacher. Young medievalists flock to work with her and, after obtaining their degrees, many of them find academic posts all around the world. This has given rise to a McKitterick school in historical research, an approach that, far from being uniform, manifests itself in publications exploring a variety of different subjects and methods. Alongside her own impressive list of publications, these works attest to the inspiring example set by this original historian, who is now at the height of her career.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Rosamond McKitterick in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video

Jonathan I. Israel was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2008 for his vitally new perspective on the history of the Enlightenment.
Some scholars believe the Enlightenment began with eighteenth-century French philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, whereas others trace its origins to England and to Newton and Locke. But these theories have been altered by the work of British historian Jonathan Israel, who emphasises the significance of what went before: the early, radical phase of the Enlightenment, dominated by the ideas of the philosopher Spinoza (1632-1677).
In Israel’s view, Spinoza played a key role in the emancipation movement on which our modern, secular, democratic and tolerant society is based. His philosophy led directly to the French Revolution’s notions of freedom, equality and brotherhood. The Enlightenment was a single, pan-European movement, according to Israel. It is ideas that make the difference in history, he believes. Not everyone agrees with Israel, but his themes are of special relevance to many contemporary discussions.
Israel had already caused quite a stir outside his discipline with his writings on the Dutch Republic.

Examples of key publications
Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550-1750, Oxford, 1985
Jonathan Israel, Dutch primacy in world trade, 1585-1740, Oxford, 1989
Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806, Oxford, 1995
Jonathan Israel, Conflicts of Empires: Spain, the Low Countries and the Struggle for World Supremacy, 1585-1713, London, 1997
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750, Oxford, 2001.

Biography
Jonathan Israel (London, 1946) studied history at Cambridge University and took his PhD at Oxford. He concentrated on the early modern history of Europe, initially at the University of Hull and then at University College London, where he became the first non-Dutch professor of Dutch history. He became a professor at Princeton in 2001.
Israel is extraordinarily productive and has written authoritative books about such wide-ranging topics as Jewry in early modern European history, colonial politics in Mexico, and world trade in the age of mercantilism. He is also a keen debater of contemporary issues. He knows eight European languages, including contemporary and seventeenth-century Dutch.
In 2007 Israel was granted a Fellowship by the Royal Library of the Netherlands and gave the Royal Library Lecture, Failed Enlightenment. Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands (1670-1800), which can be heard on the Royal Library website.
Israel is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was granted an honorary professorship at Amsterdam University in 2003 and, one year later, was made a Companion of the Order of the Dutch Lion, an honour seldom conferred on foreigners.

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Jonathan Israel in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video

Professor Joel Mokyr was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2006 for his research into the origins of the modern industrial economy.
Why are some societies innovative and others not? That is the key question in the fertile and influential work of Joel Mokyr, who has published on European and world economic history. In his view, knowledge and technology play a crucial role. Starting with his first study of the industrial revolution in the Low Countries, Mokyr pioneered what is now known as ‘New Economic History’. He draws from many different disciplines, ranging from demographics to cognitive psychology, and in this way offers relevant insights into the present, for example the origins of the knowledge society. Mokyr has shown that there is an unmistakeable relationship between Europe’s Industrial Revolution in the late 18^th and 19^thcenturies and the intellectual movements of the previous centuries. Without that knowledge base, the modern industrial economy would not have evolved. Mokyr also makes clear that if that knowledge base is too narrow, economic development will eventually grind to a halt.

Further reading
Mokyr, J., Industrialization in the Low Countries, 1795-1850, New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1976
Mokyr, J., The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, New York en London: Oxford University Press, 1990
Mokyr, J., The gifts of Athena: Historical origins of the knowledge economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002
Mokyr, J., Long-term economic growth and the history of technology, in: Ph. Aghion and S. Durlauf (eds.), Handbook of Economic Growth, 1113-1180, Elsevier, 2005

Biography
Joel Mokyr (1946) was born in Leyden, the Netherlands, but migrated to Israel at an early age and is now an American citizen. He studied economics and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and received his doctorate at Yale in 1974 for his dissertation on the economic history of the Low Countries.
In the same year he accepted a position at Northwestern University (Illinois), where he has worked ever since. He is currently a Professor of Economics and History and, since 1994, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences.
Mokyr is an undisputed world authority in his field. He is or has been a member of the editorial boards of the leading journals of economic history and is the editor in chief of the five-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History.
Mokyr is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. A number of his books, many of which are suitable for a wider readership, have been translated and he has received numerous awards for his publications. Mokyr is well-known for his enthusiasm, his wide-ranging outlook and his ability to inspire other researchers.

Heineken lecture
Mokyr’s Heineken Lecture ‘The Market for Ideas and the Origins of Economic Growth in Eighteenth Century Europe’ was published in an extended version in Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 4 [2007] nr. 1, p. 3-38

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Joel Mokyr in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video

Jacques Le Goff (1924-2014) was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History 2004 for fundamentally changing our view of the Middle Ages.
When Pour un autre Moyen Âge was first published in 1977, medievalist Jacques Le Goff had already done much to change the way we view the Middle Ages. Le Goff, dubbed ‘the Pope of the Middle Ages’ by the press and affectionately known as the ‘gourmand historian’ by his colleagues, is one of the most important representatives and pioneers of the ‘New History’, in which the emphasis in historical research has shifted from political figures and events to the history of mentality and historical anthropology. To put it in simple terms: what was life like for ‘the common man’?
This shift in perspective has led not only to studies on countless new subjects (such as the significance of the visual imagination), but also to new ways of looking at old ones. One of Le Goff’s great insights is that the 11th- to 13th-century Church was a totalitarian institution that successfully gave society meaning and direction by introducing the concept of Purgatory. Knightly discipline and the use of sermons and powerful visual images to disseminate the Church’s message among the masses made it possible for mere mortals to achieve the Christian ideal, provided they followed the Church’s teachings.
Le Goff is a prolific writer who has published works on politics, intellectualism, economics and the human body as well as a number of biographies. In addition to a life of St. Francis of Assisi, he has written a tome about Saint Louis that is more than a biography; it is a minute reconstruction of the mythologising of the French king and the exploitation of that myth. Le Goff has been an astonishingly creative writer for more than four decades, precisely because he connects new insights to established historical tradition.

Key publications
Le Goff, J., La Civilisation de l’Occident médiéval, Arthaud, 1964
Le Goff, J., Pour un autre Moyen Âge, Gallimard, 1977
Le Goff, J., La naissance du Purgatoire, Gallimard, 1982
Le Goff, J., Saint Louis, Gallimard, 1996
Le Goff, J., L’Europe racontée aux jeunes, Seuil, 1996
Le Goff, J., Truong, N., Une histoire du corps au Moyen Âge, Liana Levi, 2003

Biography
Jacques Le Goff was born in Toulon, France, on 1 January 1924. The son of a teacher – his father was a resolute anti-papist and his mother a strict, socially aware Catholic – Le Goff knew at the age of twelve that he wanted to be a medievalist. He joined the French Resistance during the Second World War and travelled to Prague, Oxford and Rome after it ended. In 1950 he was certified as a history teacher and became a teaching assistant in Lille, where he quickly succumbed to an insatiable desire to conduct research. He joined the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in the early sixties, serving as the director of studies from 1962 and teaching classes until he turned seventy. During this period, he succeeded his mentor Fernand Braudel both at the EHESS and as the editor-in-chief of the highly influential journal Annales.
Le Goff’s renown extends beyond his particular field of study. His many books are accessible to a broad group of readers and have won several awards, including the Prix Maurice Pérouse from the La Fondation de France (for popularising scholarship), and the Prix Gobert of l’Académie Française for Saint Louis. He is also a member of the Académie Universelle des Cultures, founded by Elie Wiesel, and member of the Comité Scientifique de la Recherche Universitaire. Le Goff, an agnostic and confirmed European, often takes part in topical debates (for example on the conflict between West and East), acts as a consultant (he advised the producers of the film In the Name of the Rose on monastic tonsures and the methods used to heat refectories) and displays his enthusiasm for his discipline on television. He is described as an excellent raconteur and epicurean, and is without doubt the most influential French historian alive today.
Jacques Le Goff died on 1 April 2014 in Paris.

Laudatio
— English
— French

Article
— Interview with Jacques Le Goff in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

Video