The historian Michael Hopkinson, who has died aged 72, made an immense contribution to the understanding of the Irish revolutionary decade, 1913-1923.
Born in 1944, he was the son of a Church of England clergyman and an only child; he grew up in Wolverhampton and went on to study modern history at Caius College Cambridge. He studied at Cambridge for his PhD on “The Irish Question in US Politics, 1919-22”.
In 1970 he moved to Queen’s University Belfast where he taught American history. In 1974 he took up a lectureship at Stirling University in Scotland where he later became reader in history; he remained there until his retirement in 2009.
While at Stirling, he taught Irish history and published his groundbreaking history of the Irish Civil WarThe historian Michael Hopkinson, who has died aged 72, made an immense contribution to the understanding of the Irish revolutionary decade, 1913-1923.
Born in 1944, he was the son of a Church of England clergyman and an only child; he grew up in Wolverhampton and went on to study modern history at Caius College Cambridge. He studied at Cambridge for his PhD on “The Irish Question in US Politics, 1919-22”.
In 1970 he moved to Queen’s University Belfast where he taught American history. In 1974 he took up a lectureship at Stirling University in Scotland where he later became reader in history; he remained there until his retirement in 2009.
While at Stirling, he taught Irish history and published his groundbreaking history of the Irish Civil War in 1988 under the title Green Against Green. As the political scientist Tom Garvin noted at the time, “Hopkinson has finally broken the taboo on research into this crucial event in Irish political history and has given us the first full-length, archive-based history of the Irish Civil War”.
Taking advantage of newly released British state and private papers, Hopkinson was then drawn towards the War of Independence and edited The Last Days of Dublin Castle: The Mark Sturgis Diaries (1999), dealing with the experiences of the Dublin Castle civil servant who was part of a revamped British administration in Ireland in 1920 and oversaw the maintenance of the truce the following year. In 2002, Hopkinson published The Irish War of Independence, based on extensive research in Irish, British, American and Australian archives. Again, he emphasised the importance of regional variations in the conduct of the IRA’s campaign and concluded the war was “more an intelligence triumph for the IRA than a military one”, as well as underlining the contempt and sectarianism that marked the attitude of some of the British political and military establishment towards Ireland.
He also contributed the opening two chapters to volume seven of Oxford’s New History of Ireland in 2003, covering the Treaty and Civil War periods. He wrote highly regarded entries on Tom Barry, Erskine Childers and Michael Collins for the landmark Dictionary of Irish Biography, published by Cambridge University Press in 2009.
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