A. J. P. Taylor (March 25, 1906–September 7, 1990) (full name Alan John Percivale Taylor) was a renowned British historian of the 20th century. Taylor was probably the best-known British historian of the century and certainly was the most controversial.
Born in Southport, Merseyside, brought up in Lancashire, and educated at various Quaker schools and the Bootham School in York. In 1924, Taylor went to Oxford to study modern history. His parents held strongly left-wing views, which Taylor inherited. In his youth, he been an member of the British Communist Party. After leaving the Communists, Taylor was an ardent Labour Party supporter for the rest of his life, through this did not stop him from writing an gushing and fawning biography of the Conservative Lord Beaverbrook. Despite his break with the Communists, Taylor visited the Soviet Union in 1934 and was much impressed. Throughout his life, Taylor had a soft spot for the Soviets. Likewise, Taylor was bitterly anti-American, blaming the United States for the Cold War, which he was opposed to. In the 1950s-1960s, Taylor was one of the leading lights of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Taylor graduated from Oriel College, Oxford. After working briefly as an legal clerk, Taylor went to Vienna to study the impact of the Chartist movement on the Revolution of 1848 in Vienna. When Taylor's topic turned out to be unfeasible, he switched to studying the question of Italian unification, which resulted in his first book, The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847-49. Taylor's main mentors in this period were the Austrian-born historian Alfred Francis Pribham and the Polish-born historian Sir Lewis Namier. The opposing influences of Pribham and Namier can be seen in Taylor's 1941 book The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918. The first edition reflected Pribham's favorable opinion of the Habsburgs, the second and much-reworked edition of 1948 shows the influence of Namier's unfavorable views about the Habsburgs.
Taylor went on to lecture in history at Manchester University before becoming a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford in 1938, a post he held until 1964. After 1964, Taylor was an lecturer at the Institute of Historical Research, University College of London, and the Polytechnic College of North London. Until 1936, Taylor was an opponent of British rearmament as he felt an re-armed Britain would ally itself with Germany against the Soviet Union. After 1936, Taylor strongly criticized appeasement, an stance he would disallow in 1961. His speciality was Central European, British and diplomatic history, especially the Habsburg dynasty and Bismarck. Taylor held fierce Germanophobic views. In 1944, he was temporarily banned from the BBC following complaints about a series of lectures he gave on air in which he gave full vent to his anti-German feelings. In his book, The Course of German History, Taylor argued that National Socialism was the inevitable product of the entire history of the Germans going back to the days of the Romans.
He was one of the first television historians. Taylor had an famous rivalry with Hugh Trevor-Roper, whom he often debated on television. In 1954, he published his masterpiece, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918, and he followed it up with The Trouble Makers (1957), a critical study of British foreign policy, and the controversial The Origins of the Second World War, which earned him a reputation as a revisionist.
He also wrote significant introductions to British editions of Ten Days that Shook the World, by John Reed, and The Communist Manifesto, writing from a virulently anti-communist position. It might be noted that Taylor was an advocate of a treaty with the Soviet Union, something that has been tied to his apparent support of Appeasement in his work on the road to the Second World War.
Taylor lived in Disley, Cheshire for a while, where Dylan Thomas was his guest; he later provided Thomas with a cottage in Oxford so he could recover from a breakdown. Taylor possessed a magnificent literacy style, which allowed to get away with many of his more frivolous ideas such as that First World War 's major cause was the wrong turn taken by the chauffer of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. His views were those of a professional contrarian.
Books
- The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918, 1941, revised edition 1948.
- The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918, 1954.
- The Origins of the Second World War, 1961.
- War by Timetable, 1969.
- Beaverbrook, 1972.
- Bismarck: The Man and Statesman, 1955.
- The course of German history: A survey of the development of Germany since 1815, 1946
- Europe: Grandeur and Decline
- Germany's first bid for colonies 1884-1885 : a move in Bismark's European policy, 1938.
- How wars end
- The Italian problem in European diplomacy, 1847-1849, 1934.
- The Trouble makers : dissent over foreign policy, 1792-1939, 1957.
- English History 1914-1945 (Volume XV of the Oxford History of England), 1965.
- A Personal History, 1983.
- An Old Man's Diary, 1984.
Reference
- Burk, Kathleen Troublemaker: the life and history of A.J.P. Taylor New Haven : Yale University Press, 2000.
- Martel, Gordon (editor) The origins of the Second World War reconsidered : A.J.P. Taylor and the historians London ; New York : Routledge, 1999.
- Sisman, Adam A. J. P. Taylor: a biography London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994.