Michael Postan

Sir Michael Moissey Postan FBA (24 September 1899, Tighina – 12 December 1981, Cambridge) was a British historian.

Biography

He was born to a Jewish family in Bendery, Bessarabia, in the Russian Empire, and studied at the St Vladimir University in Kiev, leaving the USSR after the October Revolution and settling in the UK. He had positions at University College London and at the London School of Economics, before being appointed Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, from 1937. He was known worldwide as an economic historian of medieval Europe. Hobsbawn notes he was one of the best lecturers at Cambridge, adding, "Though passionately anti-communist, Postan was the only man in Cambridge who knew Marx, Weber, Sombart and the rest of the great central and East Europeans, and took their work sufficiently seriously to expound and criticize it."

He married first the historian Eileen Power. After her death, he married Lady Cynthia Rosalie Keppel, daughter of the 9th Earl of Albemarle, with whom he had two sons.

Works

• Studies in English Trade in the 15th Century (1933) with Eileen Power
• The Historical Method in Social Science An Inaugural Lecture (1939)
• British War Production (1952, HMSO). (Part of the History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Civil Series)
• Carte Nativorum: A Peterborough Abbey Cartulary of the Fourteenth Century (1960) with C. N. L. Brooke
• Design and Development of Weapons : Studies in Government and Industrial Organisation (1964) with D. Hay and J. D. Scott. HMSO (Part of the History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Civil Series)
• Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire

I: The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages 2nd edition 1966, editor excerpt and text search

II: Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages (1952) edited with Edward Miller and Cynthia Postan

III: Economic Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages (1963) edited with E. E. Rich and Edward Miller

IV: The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Volume IV: The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited with E. E. Rich and Edward Miller

V: The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Volume V: The Economic Organization of Early Modern Europe (1977) edited by E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson

VI: The Industrial Revolutions and After (1966) edited with H. J. Habbakuk

VII: The Industrial Economies: Capital, Labour and Enterprise (1978) edited with Peter Mathias, Part 2 extending to the United States, Japan and Russia

VIII: The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies (1989) edited by Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard

• An Economic History of Western Europe 1945 - 1964 (1967)
• Fact and Relevance: Essays on Historical Method (1971)
• The Medieval Economy and Society: Economic History of Britain, 1100-1500 (1972) Pelican Economic History of Britain #1
• Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (1973)
• Medieval Trade and Finance (1973)

Further reading

• Edward Miller, "Postan, Sir Michael Moïssey (1899–1981)" Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 3 Dec 2012