Obituary: Lennart Schön
纪念经济史学家伦纳特·舍恩，回顾其关于瑞典工业化内外因素互动及外债规模的研究贡献。
With barely six months to his 70th birthday Lennart Schön passed away in January this year. Many colleagues remember Lennart for his placid manner, pertinent comments, and scholarly engagement. This they experienced at several occasions, not the least in connection with the Seventh Conference of the European Historical Economics Society 2007, in Lund, which Lennart hosted as the then president of the Society. As his close colleagues we knew that he was seriously ill but his optimism, fighting spirit and humour kept him going, and he gave his lectures in the autumn semester 2015 and continued with research until the Christmas holidays. Though stopped in the deed, Lennart had pursued research over half a century. In his doctoral dissertation (1979) about the emergence of the factory system in Swedish cotton textiles, Lennart uncovered that this took place before the surge in exports of sawn timber and iron, so much emphasized in previous research. This finding laid a basis for his emphasis, in several publications throughout his life, of the internal factors in Swedish and Scandinavian industrialization. This notwithstanding, he did not deny the importance and influence of the international economy. On the contrary, industrialization as well as the further development of the Swedish economy was seen by Lennart as an interaction between internal and external factors. A decade after his doctoral dissertation Lennart, in a project headed by Erik Dahmén and financed by the Swedish Debt Office, again uncovered evidence that changed conventional wisdom. It was the magnitude of the Swedish foreign debt before the First World War that had been underestimated by previous historians. The finding meant that capital imports were an important contribution to Swedish industrialization and this, moreover, corroborated Lennart's previous emphasis of the domestic market.