Livingstone, I presume

24 results back to index


pages: 341 words: 111,525

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher

airport security, blood diamond, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, failed state, Live Aid, Livingstone, I presume, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade

In the Victorian era, Stanley was the world's best-known journalist, famous for the scoop of the century - tracking down the Scottish explorer, David Livingstone, in November 1871. The soundbite he came up with was as glib and memorable as any a modern spin doctor could conjure. Stanley's `Dr Livingstone, I presume,' greeting remains so dominant that it has overshadowed his much greater and more significant achievement. It came on his next epic trip to Africa between 1874 and 1877, when he solved the continent's last great geographical mystery by mapping the Congo River. Commissioned jointly by the Telegraph and an American newspaper, The New York Herald, he hacked his way through a swathe of territory never before visited by a white man, crossing the Congo River basin and proving that the continent's previously impenetrable hinterland could be opened up by steamboats on a single, huge river.

The RGS had many friends in Zanzibar and they would have sought to block any freelance attempt to track their man. Stanley was right to be suspicious of some of the stuffier attitudes within the RGS. After finding Livingstone in November 1871 at the small settlement of Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, where the 'Doctor Livingstone, I presume?' greeting scene was played out, the two men spent four months together. But Stanley could not persuade Livingstone to return to Zanzibar. So he returned by himself, carrying a bundle of thirty letters and a journal written by Livingstone as proof that he had found the explorer. This was not enough to silence the sniping from many senior members of the RGS.

A Royal Navy officer, Commander Verney Lovett Cameron, had been the first European to explore the river. Cameron was one of the great `what if' figures of African exploration, an adventurer of no less ambition than Stanley, but who somehow never quite staked his own place in the public's imagination. He never came up with a soundbite as memorable as `Dr Livingstone, I presume?' Cameron actually beat Stanley to this spot by two years. He, too, had heard tales from the Arab slavers about an immense river somewhere out there to the west. And he, too, was willing to trek through the bush for week after week to check if it were true. But, unlike Stanley, he failed to make the river descent.


pages: 311 words: 89,785

Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure by Julian Smith

Beryl Markham, blood diamond, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Pepto Bismol, Scramble for Africa, trade route

At the lakeshore Stanley pushed through crowds of people and saw a pale, gray-bearded man sitting under a mango tree. He briefly considered running over and embracing him but then decided to walk over deliberately. He took off his hat and uttered one of the most famous lines in journalism: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Except he probably didn’t. As Tim Jeal, Stanley’s biographer, writes, the explorer probably thought up his immortal phrase months later. Livingstone didn’t record it in his account of the meeting, and Stanley tore the relevant pages out of his own journal. Either way, the words stuck and helped make Stanley a household name once he returned home.

International Journal of African Historical Studies 7, no. 1 (1974): 69–84. Paice, Edward. Lost Lion of Empire: The Life of Cape-to-Cairo Grogan. London: HarperCollins, 2001. Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912. New York: Random House, 1991. “People of Africa’s Past: Ewart Grogan.” Travel Africa, no. 11 (Spring 2000). Pettitt, Clare. Dr. Livingstone, I presume?: Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, and Empire. London: Profile, 2007. Roberts, Chalmers. “A Wonderful Feat of Adventure.” World’s Work, January 1901. Rocco, Fiametta. The Miraculous Fever-tree: Malaria, Medicine and the Cure That Changed the World. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Royal Geographical Society.


The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps by Edward Brooke-Hitching

digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, Livingstone, I presume, Thales of Miletus, trade route, UNCLOS

It was a gruelling, three-year mission into the interior of Africa, in which the pair suffered all manner of tropical diseases: several times Burton fell gravely ill and Speke went temporarily blind – he also lost his hearing for a time when a beetle crawled into his ear and he tried to fish it out with a knife. When Burton became too ill to move, Speke continued solo and identified Lake Victoria as the true source in 1858 (much to the disbelief and protest of Burton). The pair feuded for years until in 1874 Henry Morton Stanley (deliverer of the famous and probably invented line ‘Doctor Livingstone I presume?’) circumnavigated the lake and confirmed Speke’s findings. This finally laid the Moon Mountains myth to rest, but the discussion was now as to which mountains served as its basis. In 1940, the writer G. W. B. Huntingford made the case for the range to be identified with Mount Kilimanjaro, but was ridiculed by his peers, though Sir Harry Johnston had made the same argument in 1911, as did Dr Gervase Mathew in 1963.


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

U.S. reconnaissance aircraft patrolled the skies over the South Atlantic. Ships carrying antiaircraft rockets were at the ready, in the unforeseen event of Soviet sabotage. The commander of Task Force 88 sent his final coded message to the ARPA office at the Pentagon, a prearranged indication that the operation was a go at his end. “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” the commander stated clearly into a ship-to-shore radio microphone. The first test would take place on August 27, 1958. Although no one had a name for it at the time, Operation Argus was the world’s first test of an electromagnetic pulse bomb, or EMP. Halfway across the world, in Switzerland, a remarkable series of events was taking place.

Christofilos: His Contributions to Physics, 1–15. 12 “responsible people”: IDA-ARPA Study No. 1, 19. 13 “The group has”: IDA-ARPA Study No. 1, 19. 14 Brazilian Anomaly: Operation Argus 1958, 19. 15 so many moving parts: Ibid., 22-26. 16 missile trajectory: Ibid., 48; list of shipboard tests and remarks, 56. 17 “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”: Ibid., 34. 18 watched fireworks: Childs, 525. 19 “The President has asked”: Ibid., 521. 20 detection facilities: DARPA: 50 Years of Bridging the Gap, 58. 21 Wissmer examined Lawrence: Childs, 526. 22 had Harold Brown participate: Supplement 5 to “Extended Chronology of Significant Events Leading Up to Disarmament,” Joint Secretariat, Joint Chiefs of Staff, April 21, 1961, (unpaginated), York Papers, Geisel. 23 “I could never”: Childs, 527. 24 Christofilos effect did occur: Argus 1958, 65–68; Interview with Doug Beason, June 2014; “Report to the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack,” 161. 25 The telegram marked: Edward Teller, telegram to General Starbird, “Thoughts in Connection to the Test Moratorium,” August 29, 1958, LANL.


pages: 213 words: 68,363

Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel

cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Haight Ashbury, impulse control, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, systems thinking, trade route, traumatic brain injury

A firsthand description suggests what that role might be. The explorer and missionary David Livingstone was on a trip to Africa when he was attacked by a lion. (He is familiar to many by the understated greeting he received from Henry Morton Stanley when Stanley finally located the missing Scot: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”) Livingstone survived the mauling, and his account dramatically illustrates the role of endorphins in the body. The lion, he wrote, “caught me by the shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground together. Growling horribly close to my ear, it shook me as a terrier dog does a rat.


pages: 699 words: 192,704

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica) by Jan Morris

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centralized clearinghouse, Corn Laws, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

There he lay sick, penniless and exhausted, lost to the world, utterly out of touch with Europe, his mission a failure, his whereabouts one of the mysteries of the age: and there on November 10, 1871, Henry Stanley of the New York Herald, advancing into his camp beneath the Stars and Stripes, with his caravan of porters loaded with bales of food, tents, expensive equipment and ingenious accessories to African travel, walked through the wondering crowd of Arabs, took off his hat, and uttered one of the epic texts of the Victorian age, as sacred to the faithful as it was comic to the irreverent: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ ‘“Yes”, he said with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly.’ 5 Stanley was a Welshman. Born John Rowlands at Denbigh in 1841, he had run away from the workhouse at St Asaph, and shipped as a cabin-boy for the United States. There he was adopted by a kindly cotton-broker, Mr Stanley of New Orleans.

As for Stanley himself, ‘what would I not have given for a bit of friendly wilderness, where, unseen, I might vent my joy in some mad feat, such as idiotically biting my hand, turning a somersault, or slashing at trees, in order to allay those exciting feelings, that were well-nigh uncontrollable’. He did control them, however, not wishing to ‘detract from the dignity of a white man appearing in such extraordinary circumstances’, and so gave his folk-phrase to the language—‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’. Livingstone, it seemed, did not in the least wish to be rescued. Now that fresh supplies were at hand, he wanted only to complete his task. Stanley had other duties to perform, and taking Livingstone’s precious journals with him, and bidding an affectionate and respectful goodbye to the old man, in March 1872 he left for the coast to sublimate his scoop—which very rightly made him celebrated throughout the world.


pages: 341 words: 87,268

Them: Adventures With Extremists by Jon Ronson

Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, disinformation, friendly fire, Jon Ronson, Livingstone, I presume, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, the market place, Timothy McVeigh

Everywhere I go, I have policemen sitting with me. Now I have a journalist. And he wants to record me, to use my words against me in future days.’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘David Livingstone had a journalist along with him too.’ ‘Well,’ replied Dr Paisley, ‘he had a journalist who caught up on him. Mr Dr-Livingstone-I-Presume. And Stanley, as a journalist, took all the glory. As if Livingstone was lost!’ I felt that the best course of action, at that point, was to deride journalism. So I mentioned that Stanley lived to regret uttering those famous words, because the music-hall comedians of the time mocked him for it.


pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Labor-saving household products that included everything from the first electric iron and electric fan to the sewing machine and toaster were all patented and often publicized. Never mind that many of the products were years, even decades away from practical use, they showed what was possible with the power of electricity. The battery also found some unusual uses. It was said that the African explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame) carried a small battery during his 1870s African expedition that gave tribal leaders a shock when they shook hands in order to instill in them a sense of his superiority and power. When the trick received criticism, one defender wrote, “It is beyond understanding why fault should be found with this harmless and efficient method of teaching a truth.”


pages: 282 words: 89,266

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 by Stewart Lee

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, call centre, centre right, David Attenborough, Etonian, gentrification, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Livingstone, I presume, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, pre–internet, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Fry, trickle-down economics, wage slave, young professional

And is Gove’s view on the UKIP parents an honest one, born of heartfelt personal experience, or is it, given UKIP’s growing power, politically expedient to confirm to their supporters that they could make fit parents? Deep in a British Library vault, I found a set of late-1880s letters exchanged between the then prime minister, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, and the explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley. Stanley is famous for his catchphrase “Dr Livingstone, I presume”, which finally rang true after decades of irrelevance when, quite by chance, he encountered a physician of that name at Lake Tanganyika in 1871. The letters shed some light on both the possible inspiration for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic 1912 novel, Tarzan of the Apes, and on the current UKIP fostering controversy.


pages: 302 words: 96,609

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Big Tech, California gold rush, Cape to Cairo, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, energy transition, global supply chain, Google Earth, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, private military company, Scramble for Africa, social distancing, tech baron, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

He pitched The Herald on the nineteenth-century equivalent of a reality-TV search for Livingstone. He would send dispatches from the field and either find Livingstone or evidence of his death. Stanley eventually found Livingstone sick and weary at Ujiji in November 1871. According to his apocryphal account, he uttered the famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley spent four months with Livingstone and came to see him as the father he never had. Stanley felt inspired to finish Livingstone’s work by discovering the source of the Nile. On October 17, 1876, he saw the Lualaba River for the first time, at the opposite end of the Congo River system that Diego Cão discovered almost four centuries earlier.


pages: 325 words: 99,983

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

Stanley, a naturalized American of illegitimate Welsh origin, to search out and interview the famous missionary-explorer, one of Britain’s greatest heroes, who had not been heard from since 1866. After an epic march across ‘Fatal Africa’, Stanley tracked the shy Scots missionary in November 1871 to the shores of Lake Tanganyika where, on first meeting, he uttered the much parodied salute, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume.’ Thereafter, the threadbare Glaswegian became the kind of homespun imperial celebrity the Victorian media craved. Livingstone, in contrast to Stanley’s crude, and sometimes violent, racism, wanted to transform Africa’s prospects through a combination of trade and the Gospel. His actual achievements were limited, but in the longer term his mission and his myth had lasting consequences.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

On February 26, 1885, representatives from fourteen European nations concluded a marathon three-month-long conference in Berlin, during which they attempted to sort out their competing claims in Africa. At the time, 80 percent of Africa remained unclaimed by the colonial powers, but the so-called Dark Continent had started to attract considerable interest all over Europe, thanks in part to the sensational reports of explorers like Henry Morton Stanley (of “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” fame). For some Europeans, Africa seemed like a fantastical world, a primordial wilderness promising mystery and adventure. For others, it looked like one big gold mine, both literally and ­figuratively. For the 50 T he D rea m o f the L ab y rinth i­ncreasingly industrialized European powers, the temptations would prove irresistible.


pages: 422 words: 119,123

To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration by Edward J. Larson

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Livingstone, I presume, Scientific racism, the scientific method, trade route, yellow journalism

Also entering by way of Zanzibar, but no longer up to the rigors of such travel, Livingstone was sick, disoriented, and low on supplies somewhere in the eastern Congo River basin by 1870. Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-born journalist sent by the New York Herald to find him, reached the explorer in 1871. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley reported asking in an affected British understatement. “Yes, that is my name” came the reply that echoed around the globe.36 Hooked on the fame and money it brought him, Stanley returned to the region once more for the New York Herald and twice for Belgian King Leopold II, who wanted to claim and colonize the Congo.


pages: 427 words: 124,692

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald recognized the commercial potential of a world scoop and Henry Morton Stanley’s marathon journey to discover Livingstone’s fate was the result. Stanley’s celebrated greeting, when he eventually found Livingstone at Ujiji, in what is now western Tanzania – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – guaranteed the immortality of both men. Afterwards, they travelled together for a while, and then Stanley left Livingstone to continue his search for the source of the Nile. One year later, Livingstone was still in Africa, but by now he was a very sick man able to travel only if carried in a litter by his porters.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

I reached Livingstone House, an angular and imposing twenty-two-story building that was the city’s tallest when it was constructed under white rule and named after the Scottish missionary pioneer immortalized in Western imaginings of Africa through his encounter in 1871 with the British explorer Stanley (‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’). Today the skyscraper houses, among other things, Zimbabwe’s ineffectual anticorruption commission. Its proprietors were the same outfit that has snapped up another office complex across town and a hotel that is popular for weddings in the suburbs – the Queensway Group.46 The lobby at Livingstone House was only slightly less grand than that of Luanda One, the Queensway Group’s Angolan skyscraper.


pages: 419 words: 119,476

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

In 1885, Emin Pasha, the governor whom Gordon had personally appointed to office, withdrew further south, to Wadelai near Lake Albert, but was in imminent danger of capture by the Mahdi’s superior forces. The following year, Britain assembled the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, led by Henry Morton Stanley (of ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’ fame) and set about the rescue of Pasha. Major Edmund Musgrave Barttelot was one of eight public school-educated officers and gentlemen explorers who volunteered for the mission. As Stanley’s second in command, he was in charge of the rear column together with an Anglo-Irish gentleman explorer, James Sligo Jameson, an ancestor of the Jameson whiskey family.


pages: 412 words: 128,042

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

History echoes strongly in Kinshasa, with the roots of economic distrust and self-reliance down to the legacy of two men: a foreign colonial founder, and a home-grown dictator. THE KING, AND THE MESSIAH A ROYAL LIAR Kinshasa has lies and deception in its bedrock. The city was founded by Henry Morton Stanley, a journalist and explorer born in Wales, most famous for his reaction – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – when he found the Scottish explorer, long presumed dead, close to the modern border of Tanzania in 1871. Stanley returned to central Africa in 1874, publishing an account of his travels that sold well across Europe. Unable to finance a third trip in Britain he nonetheless set off again in 1879, this time funded by the International African Association (IAA), a company bankrolled and controlled by King Leopold II of Belgium.


pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

Over the next couple of years I read books including Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, and Stanley and Livingstone in Africa. When, after an eight-month arduous and dangerous search, Stanley found his quarry, the only European known to be in Central Africa, I thrilled to his incredible understatement, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” and I discussed the splendor of the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River with my father, who assured me (correctly) that they far surpassed our own Niagara Falls. Gulliver’s Travels was a special favorite, with its tiny Lilliputians, giant Brobdingnagians, talking horses, and finally the mysterious Laputa, a flying island in the sky supported by magnetic forces.


pages: 469 words: 146,487

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

I would have run to him, only I was a coward in the presence of such a mob – would have embraced him, only, he being an Englishman, I did not know how he would receive me; so I did what cowardice and false pride suggested was the best thing – walked deliberately up to him, took off my hat, and said: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume.’ It took an American to take British understatement to its historic zenith. When Stanley’s story broke, it dominated the front pages of the English-speaking world. Yet this was more than just a scoop. It was also a symbolic meeting between two generations: the Evangelical generation that had dreamt of a moral transfiguration of Africa and a new, hard-nosed generation with more worldly priorities.


pages: 440 words: 132,685

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross

Albert Einstein, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cotton gin, death of newspapers, distributed generation, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Livingstone, I presume, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, plutocrats, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, urban renewal, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers

When he tried to burnish his public image with exaggerated claims of progress in his laboratory, for example, he demonstrated a hunger for credit unknown in his earliest tinkering. The mature Edison, post-fame, is most appealing whenever he returned to acting spontaneously, without weighing what action would serve to enhance his public image. One occasion when Edison cast off the expectations of others in his middle age was when he met Henry Stanley, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame, and Stanley’s wife, who had come to visit him at his laboratory. Edison provided a demonstration of the phonograph, which Stanley had never heard before. Stanley asked, in a low voice and slow cadence, “Mr. Edison, if it were possible for you to hear the voice of any man whose name is known in the history of the world, whose voice would you prefer to hear?”


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

A Civil War veteran, a foreign correspondent, and an amateur geographer, Stanley in 1871 accepted an assignment from the New York Herald to find the missing Livingstone. Knowing that Stanley had fought on both sides in the Civil War gives some idea of his versatility. His quest through central Africa took six months, but he had succeeded by the end of the year, when he did in fact greet the missing missionary with the famous salutation “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Stanley and Livingstone became household names during the next few years. They stimulated the imagination, the curiosity, and the ambition of Europeans who had come to think of the entire globe as their domain. During the next six years Stanley continued to explore Africa, circumnavigating Lake Victoria.


pages: 603 words: 186,210

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time by Stephen Fried

Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, estate planning, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Ida Tarbell, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, indoor plumbing, Livingstone, I presume, Nelson Mandela, new economy, plutocrats, refrigerator car, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Louis Democrat: The article appeared in the April 16, 1867, edition. The reporter was Henry Stanley, who went on to his own renown as the journalist later sent to the jungles of Africa to find the lost Scottish explorer David Livingstone; it was he who spoke—or at least claimed that he spoke—the immortal words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” $4,485.22: Harvey, Nov. 28, 1868, entry, 1867 datebook, DHC. “physical disability”: July 1864 draft registry for St. Joseph, Mo., line 14, National Archives and Record Center. “Started out this morning”: Harvey, Jan. 7, 1869, entry, 1869 datebook, DHC. “equal parts spirits”: Harvey, undated entries, 1879–1880 datebook, DHC.


pages: 1,072 words: 297,437

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, clean water, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, surplus humans, the market place, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

His public was becoming anxious, so the New York Herald dispatched the journalist Henry Morton Stanley (who had emigrated from Britain to the United States at the age of seventeen) to Africa with the simplest of directives but the most challenging of assignments: ‘Find Livingstone.’13 Stanley found the doctor at Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in November 1871, and secured himself an entry in every dictionary of quotations with the greeting: ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume.’ Their meeting reinforced popular interest in Africa, while Stanley's report that Livingstone, already unwell, intended to continue his explorations of the Great Lakes prompted the Royal Geographical Society to dispatch a relief column, under the leadership of Verney Lovett Cameron, a naval officer who had sailed with Britain's anti-slavery squadron.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

In 1859 he sailed to New Orleans, jumped ship, and found a job with a rich trader called Henry Stanley, who eventually adopted him. Henry Morton Stanley fought on both sides in the American Civil War, then became a journalist, which led to his engagement by the legendary editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett Jr. (1841–1918), to find the missing British missionary David Livingstone (1813–73). ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’ – Stanley’s reputed greeting to the missionary when he finally caught up with him in 1871 in a remote part of Africa near Lake Tanganyika – entered legend as a classic example of cool understatement. In 1874 the Herald commissioned Stanley to trace the course of the river Congo from its source to the sea; starting out with a company of 356, he eventually arrived at the mouth of the river with only 114 left, none of them European.


The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...) by Dan Richardson, Daniel Jacobs

Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, disinformation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Livingstone, I presume, satellite internet, self-driving car, sexual politics, Skype, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

Guests included Lawrence of Arabia, who stayed here at the beginning of World War One, and at the end of the war, Australian soldiers celebrated with a massive pillow fight on the hotel’s grand staircase. Lord Carnarvon, who financed the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, died in his room here in 1923, supposedly a victim of the pharaoh’s curse, and other guests included American journalist Henry Morton Stanley, of “Dr Livingstone, I presume” fame. In 1941, Orde Wingate, the eccentric military genius who later led the British commandos known as Chindits against the Japanese in Burma, attempted suicide in his room here by stabbing himself in the neck with a Bowie knife. Luckily for Britain’s southeast Asian war effort, he failed.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Once imperial tastes had formed, people were unlikely to respond to pleas to ‘buy local’, as the Colonial Office learnt the hard way in the inter-war years.136 In the era of the ‘new imperialism’ in the 1880s–’90s, imperial symbols and slogans gained ground in advertising. The craze for African explorer H. M. Stanley (‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’) was an advertiser’s dream. Stanley appeared in ads for soap and Bovril, and sipped tea with the Emin Pasha in his tent at Kavalli, on the southern shore of Lake Albert. ‘Stanley: “Well, Emin, old fellow, this Cup of the United Kingdom Tea Company’s Tea makes us forget all our troubles.” Emin: “So it does, my boy.”’


Principles of Corporate Finance by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers, Franklin Allen

3Com Palm IPO, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, compound rate of return, computerized trading, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, equity premium, equity risk premium, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, fudge factor, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inventory management, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Larry Ellison, law of one price, linear programming, Livingstone, I presume, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the rule of 72, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, VA Linux, value at risk, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Could you apply the parity formula to a call and put with different exercise prices? 5. Put–call parity There is another strategy involving calls and borrowing or lending that gives the same payoffs as the strategy described in Problem 3. What is the alternative strategy? 6. Option payoffs Dr. Livingstone I. Presume holds £600,000 in East African gold stocks. Bullish as he is on gold mining, he requires absolute assurance that at least £500,000 will be available in six months to fund an expedition. Describe two ways for Dr. Presume to achieve this goal. There is an active market for puts and calls on East African gold stocks, and the rate of interest is 6% per year. 7.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Return to beginning of chapter BLANTYRE pop 17,300 One of Scotland’s most famous sons is David Livingstone, the epitome of the Victorian missionary-explorer, who opened up central Africa to European influence in the 19th century. After disappearing for several years during an expedition to the source of the Nile, he was famously ‘found’ by American newspaper reporter Henry Stanley in 1871, with the immortal words ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’. Visitors with an interest in Africa shouldn’t miss the absorbing David Livingstone Centre (NTS; 01698-823140; 165 Station Rd; adult/child £5/4; 10am-5pm Mon-Sat, 12.30-5pm Sun Easter-Dec), set in Livingstone’s birthplace, which tells the story of his life. In 30 years it’s estimated he travelled 29,000 miles through central Africa, mostly on foot – the sheer tenacity of the man was incredible.