Sidney Pollard was a pioneering labour historian who influenced the gret luminaries in the field, E.P. Thompson and E.J. Hobsbawm. Almost single-handedly, he pioneered the study of eceonomic management in history and the understanding of the economic processes by which regions are formed. As a labour historian, his contribution to the study of the marginalized in society was original and vital. His history was intimately connected with his personal life - from escape to Britain from Nazi-occupied Vienna on the Jewish kindertransporte, to work in Britain, the USA, Israel and apartheid South Africa.
David "Dave" Renton is a British academic historian and barrister.
He was born in London in 1972. His great aunt was the marxist historian, Dona Torr. His grandfather was the shoe designer Kurt Geiger. One uncle was an activist in Equity, the actors' trade union, while another was the Conservative MP Tim Renton, Baron Renton of Mount Harry. He was educated at all-boys private boarding school Eton College where he became a member of the Labour Party. He then studied history at St John's College, University of Oxford.
Renton received his PhD from the University of Sheffield for a thesis on fascism and anti-fascism in Britain after the Second World War (The attempted revival of British Fascism: Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1945-51) that was turned into the book Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the 1940s. He also became an academic historian and sociologist, teaching at universities including Nottingham Trent, Edge Hill and Rhodes University and Johannesburg University in South Africa.
Since 2009 Renton has practised as a barrister at Garden Court Chambers in London and has represented clients in a number of high-profile cases, especially concerning trade union rights and the protection of free speech.
He was for twenty-two years (1991-2013) a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and he has published over twenty books on fascism, anti-fascism, and the politics of the left.
I’m not particularly interested in economic history, but especially chapter 2 was extremely helpful understanding my family history (just discovered cousin connection to Sidney Pollard).