Eric Lampard

Obituary:

We are sad to announce the death of Eric Edwin Lampard, Professor of Economic History and Historical Demography Emeritus at Stony Brook University, New York in April 2023.

Eric had celebrated his 100th birthday last September with former colleagues, students, relatives, and friends in Look Park, Northampton, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Originally from the UK, Eric attended the London School of Economics in 1941-42 at Grove Lodge, Peterhouse, Cambridge to where it had been evacuated owing to the war.  During the war he served in the Home Guard, Cambridge University Senior Training Corps, and the Royal Marines in brigade artillery units and combined operations. He served in the Atlantic, European, and Southeast Asian theatres, ending his combat duties at Singapore Naval Base, Seletar, in 1945-46. Returning to LSE in September 1946, he was elected student secretary of Passfield House, Cartwright Gardens, Holborn, the school’s first experience with dormitory life. Among Eric’s distinguished teachers at LSE either before and/or after his war service were R.H. Tawney, H.J. Laski, Herman Finer, W.I. Jennings, F.J. Fisher, Lionel Robbins, and Nicholas Kaldor.
   
In August 1948 Eric was awarded the BSc (Econ) degree (2 upper div.) While at LSE during and after the war, Eric was a member of the LSE Hockey Club. Meanwhile, he had obtained a position as instructor in history at Cornell College, Iowa, in the USA. Eric went on to study at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where in 1954 he completed a Ph.D. in economic history and land economics with his dissertation on “The Rise of the Dairy Industry: A Study in Agricultural Change, 1820-1920.” This study was awarded the David Clark Everest Prize in Economic History and was published by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin Press in 1963. Eric was also awarded a post-Doctoral Fellowship in Economic History at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954-55 where he studied inter alia with Simon Kuznets and Dorothy Thomas, publishing “The History of Cities in the Economically-Advanced Areas,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol 3 (1955), pp. 81-156 (later reprinted in several other publications.) In 1957 he published Industrial Revolution: Interpretations and Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association 1957) pp.40. In Cities and Markets: Studies in the Organization of Human Space Presented to Eric E. Lampard, Rondo Cameron and Leo F. Schnore eds. University Press of America, Lanham, Md, New York, and Oxford, 1997) pp.372, his published bibliography then listed 43 publications. Eric also received appointments from such research enterprises as Resources for the Future, the Brookings Institution, and the National Research Council. During 1968-73 he served as American Review Correspondent for The Economic History Review (UK) and directed the Graduate Program in Economic History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison to which he had returned in 1959-70.

In the course of his long academic career, Eric also taught at City College of New York, Columbia Univ., Smith College, and the University of Wisconsin and was a visiting professor at Stanford, Harvard, and Yale Universities. He also contributed “Structural Changes: Introductory Essay” to Inventing Times Square, William R. Taylor ed., pp. 15-35, 372-75. (New York: Russel Sage Foundation 1991), republished by Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1996, as a paperback.

- originally published by the London School of Economics and Political Science