Arthur Marwick


Arthur John Brereton Marwick was a British social historian, who served for many years as Professor of History at the Open University. His research interests lay primarily in the history of Britain in the twentieth century, and the relationship between war and social change. He is probably best known, however, for his more theoretical book The Nature of History, and its greatly reworked and expanded version The New Nature of History. In the latter work he defended an empirical and source-based approach towards the writing of history, and argued against the turn towards postmodernism. He believed firmly that history was "of central importance to society".

Early life and education

Marwick was born on 29 February 1936 in Edinburgh, the younger son of William Hutton Marwick, an economic historian, and his wife, Maeve Cluna, Brereton. His parents were Quakers. He was educated at George Heriot's School, Edinburgh, and at the University of Edinburgh, before undertaking postgraduate research at Balliol College, Oxford. His Oxford thesis, on the Independent Labour Party, was awarded a BLitt, but not a doctorate.

Career

Marwick worked as an Assistant Lecturer in History at the University of Aberdeen in 1959–60, before becoming a Lecturer in History at the University of Edinburgh in 1960. In 1969 he was appointed the first Professor of History at the newly established Open University, where he remained until his retirement in 2001. From 1978 until 1984 he served as Dean and Director of Studies in Arts at the Open University. He also held brief visiting professorships at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Stanford University, Rhodes College, the University of Perugia and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
From 1995 to 1998 he served as co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary History.

Scholarship

Marwick was a left-wing social and cultural historian, but critical of Marxism and other approaches to history that he believed stressed the importance of metanarrative over archival research. He was also a critic of postmodernism.
One of his most influential books, The Deluge, dealt with the transformations in British society brought about by the First World War. Its main thesis was that the war had brought about positive and lasting social changes. Despite its terrible tragedies, Marwick believed that the sum result of the war was that Britain was a better place to live in the 1920s than in the period before the war.
He also published two books on historical perceptions of human beauty – Beauty in History and It: a History of Human Beauty – in which he attacked the feminist argument that beauty is merely a social construct. His first book was heavily criticised by feminists, including Angela Carter, who sarcastically proposed as a subtitle: "Women I have fancied throughout the ages with additional notes on some of the men I think I might have fancied if I were a woman."

Taxonomy of sources

Marwick analysed at length different types of historical evidence, distinguishing between "facts" and sources, primary and secondary sources, and different varieties of primary source. He also distinguished between "witting" and "unwitting" testimony; that is, between the overt and intentional message of a document or source, and the unintentional evidence that it also contains.

War and social change

Marwick analysed the social changes that result from total war in terms of four different "modes", or dimensions:
Marwick had a flamboyant and outgoing personality. A. W. Purdue described him as "alternatively, wonderful, outrageous and dangerous to know. Kind and supportive to colleagues, he was an heroic drinker but not always fun after the first few drinks." Jonathan Meades called him "the very picture of baba-cool, with his daringly arty shirt, negligently loose foulard and his beardy grin for which the only word is that late Sixties shocker 'mellow'". His colleague Clive Emsley, however, recalled a more complex character:
He had many girlfriends and lovers, but never married. He had one daughter, Louise.

Principal works