Sidney Pollard

Sidney Pollard (aka Siegfried Pollak ; born April 21, 1925 in Vienna ; died November 22, 1998 in Sheffield ) was an authoritative British social and economic historian . In particular, his concept of regional industrialization was of lasting importance.

Life

His parents belonged to Judaism and had Galician roots. His father Moses Pollak had come to Vienna before 1914. The mother Leontine came to the city shortly after the beginning of the First World War , fleeing from anti-Semitic riots. The father was a traveling salesman, the mother had been a teacher before the marriage. The family's comparatively favorable financial circumstances made it possible for the son to attend the Zwi-Perez-Chajes school . This private school tried to give its students an awareness of the Jewish tradition and was therefore the target of anti-Semitic attacks early on.

After Austria was annexed to the German Reich in 1938, the family lost their apartment and the father was released. The family succeeded in allowing Pollard to travel to Great Britain on a Kindertransport . The parents, however, had to stay behind. In England he first went to an agricultural school, which prepared him for a later life in a kibbutz in Palestine . He also took correspondence courses. At the age of sixteen, Pollard went to Cambridge and worked in a plant nursery. In addition, he continued the correspondence courses and was admitted to the London School of Economics in 1943 .

First he volunteered for the British Army. In this context he has Anglicized his name. He remained in occupied Germany as an interpreter until 1947. After returning, he studied in London economics and graduated successfully after two years. He then did his doctorate with a thesis on the history of shipbuilding in Great Britain between 1870 and 1914.

At the University of Sheffield he taught from 1952 as an assistant lecturer. Since 1963 he was a full professor of economic history there. As an outstanding economic historian, he accepted numerous visiting professorships in Israel , the USA , the GDR , the Federal Republic of Germany and Australia . In 1971 he was appointed to the University of California, Berkeley . However, the authorities refused to give him a permanent work permit because of his temporary membership in the Communist Party . Therefore, he continued to teach in Sheffield.

In 1980 he took over the new chair for economic history at Bielefeld University. After retiring in Bielefeld in 1990, he returned to Sheffield. The local university honored him with an honorary doctorate in 1995. In 1998, the year he died, he was elected a member of the British Academy .

plant

It was characteristic of his way of working that, in addition to the Anglo-American research, he also pursued further research and his comparative approach. In his earlier work he devoted himself in particular to the social consequences of industrialization . The starting point was a 1959 work on the history of the labor movement in Sheffield . Subsequent studies on the history of trade unions and cooperatives also formed a focus of the work. His research on the development of modern management was significant in the mid-1960s.

Since the 1970s, he has had a particularly strong impact on industrialization research. He did not understand industrial development as a nation-state process, but rather described it as a regional phenomenon. In his book The Genesis of Modern Management (1965) he described the complexity of industrialization as well as the role of the manager and management methods. He published his first essay on regional industrialization in 1973. In 1981 his work Peaceful Conquest was published . With his reinterpretation he stimulated industrialization research like Alexander Gerschenkron's last time . In 1997, Pollard published his work Marginal Europe , in which he examined the decline of earlier industrial densification zones since the late Middle Ages.

Fonts

• The Genesis of Modern Management (1965).
• The process of industrialization 1750-1870 (1968).
• Industrial power and national rivalry 1870-1914 (1972).
• The end of the old europe 1914-1939 (1973).
• European economic integration 1815-1970 (1974).
• Region and industrialization. Studies on the role of the region in the economic history of the last two centuries (1980) (= Critical Studies on History , Vol. 42).
• Peaceful Conquest 1760-1970 (1981).
• Market, state, planning. Historical experiences with attempts to regulate and deregulate the economy , ed. with Dieter Ziegler (1992).
• From home work to the factory. Industrialization and Workers in Linen and Cotton Regions of Western Europe during the 18th and 19th Centuries , ed. with Karl Ditt (1992).
• Marginal Europe (1997).

literature

• Hartmut Berghoff and Dieter Ziegler : Obituary for Professor Dr. Sidney Pollard 1925-1998. In: Yearbook for Economic History 1/1999, pp. 207–209 ( online ).
• Hartmut Berghoff, Dieter Ziegler (Ed.): Pioneers and latecomers? Comparative studies on the history of Great Britain and Germany in the age of industrialization. Commemorative publication for Sidney Pollard on his 70th birthday (= publication. Working group German England Research. Vol. 28). Brockmeyer, Bochum 1995, ISBN 3-8196-0335-2 .
• Colin Holmes : Sidney Pollard, 1925-1998. In: Proceedings of the British Academy. 105, 2000, pp. 482-507 ( online ).
• Dave Renton: Sidney Pollard - A Life in history (= International library of twentieth century history. Vol. 2). Tauris Academic Studies, London 2004, ISBN 1-85043-453-0 .
• Richard H. Tilly : Pollard, Sidney. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (ed.): Biographical handbook of German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 2: Leichter branch. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 535-537.