William Rubinstein

RUBINSTEIN, WILLIAM DAVID(12 August 1946- ). Historian. William Rubinstein (often known as Bill Rubinstein) was born in New York and was educated at Swarthmore College and Johns Hopkins University in the United States. He worked at Lancaster University in England (1974-5), the Australian National University in Canberra (1976-8), Deakin University in Victoria, Australia (1978-95), and at the University of Wales-Aberystwyth (1995- date). He has held chairs of history at Deakin and Aberystwyth Universities and is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences, and of the Royal Historical Society.

Rubinstein is unusual among historians in having published significant works in several unrelated fields of history. He is probably best-known for his research on wealth-holding and elites in modern Britain, making original use of the probate and other taxation records, in such works as Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution (1981; revised edition 2006) and Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain, 1750-1990 (1991), which argue for the importance of financial and commercial wealth and of the City of London rather than the industrial north in accounting for Britain’s economic development. This research provided much of the theoretical basis of the so-called "gentlemanly capitalism" school of economic historians. More recently he has co-authored (with Philip Beresford) The Richest of the Rich (2007), an account of the 250 richest-ever people in British history since the Norman Conquest.

He has also published widely in modern Jewish history, in such works as A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain (1996) and in a well-known controversial work, The Myth of Rescue (1997), which argues that the democracies could not have saved more Jews during the Holocaust. He has also published widely on Australian Jewish history. Rubinstein was President of the Jewish Historical Society of England in 2002-4 and was the editor of the articles on Britain and the Commonwealth (except Canada ) in the second (2006) edition of the standard reference work, The Encyclopedia Judaica.

Rubinstein also has a third area of interest, in unconventional history and topics discussed by "amateur historians" but ignored by academics. His Shadow Pasts(2007) examines such topics as the assassination of President Kennedy, Jack the Ripper, and the Shakespeare Authorship question. He also explored the topic of who wrote Shakespeare’s works in a book he co-authored with Brenda James , The Truth Will Out (2005), which argues that Sir Henry Neville (c.1562-1615), an Elizabethan Member of Parliament and Ambassador to France, was almost certainly the real author of Shakespeare’s works.

Bibliography

• The Biographical Dictionary of Life Peers
• The Myth Of Rescue
• Britain's Century: A Social and Political History, 1815-1905 (The Arnold History of Britain)
• Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution
• Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain, 1750-1990
• A History of the Jews in the English Speaking World: Great Britain (Studies in Modern History)
• Menders of the Mind: A History of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists 1946-1996 (co-author)
• Philosemitism: Admiration and Support in the English-speaking world for Jews, 1840-1939 (co-author)
• The Jews in the Modern World Since 1750 (co-author)
• Shadow Pasts (co-author)
• The Richest of the Rich (co-author)

External links

• Free text versions of several books
• Works on Amazon.co.uk