The Intellectual Legacy of Alan S. Milward

Abstract

who was driven by a compelling desire to understand the forces responsible for change in twentieth century Europe. Graduating in 1956 with a first class degree in medieval and modern history from University College London he went on to develop a method which was to characterize his research activity throughout the next fifty years and which was to place him apart from most other historians of his generation. This was to approach the writing of history by first of all understanding the relevant social science theories, whether they were of classical economics, political science, or sociology, before immersing himself in a wide range of national archives (due to his capacity to master a number of European languages) and economic statistics which were to provide the evidence against which he would test the existing theories. He thus combined the political historian's method of consulting the written record with the economic historian's use of statistical data and the social scientist's preference for general theory. On the strength of the resulting research methodology he produced a series of highly original histories of nineteenth and twentieth century Europe which tackled the big historical questions of his time: the nature of Nazism; of total war; of economic development in modern Europe; and the reasons for the sustained economic boom in Western Europe after 1945 and for the origins of European integration. In so far as his conclusions on each separate theme challenged the dominant theories they stimulated considerable debate. In what follows we will present a short summary of Milward's own views on each of these issues as an introduction to the wide debates which Milward's work has provoked. It is important to underline from the outset that due to constraints of space we can do no more than touch on these debates and on the historiographical context in which they took place. Our primary focus is on Milward's thought as it developed over fifty years of historical research. 1