R. H. Tawney - The Academic Historian

The Academic Historian

Tawney’s first important work as a historian was The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912). He was elected Fellow of Balliol College in 1918. From 1917 to 1931, he was a lecturer at the London School of Economics. In 1926 he helped found The Economic History Society with Sir William Ashley, amongst others, and became the joint editor of its journal, The Economic History Review. From 1931 until retirement in 1949, he was a professor of economic history at the LSE and Professor Emeritus after 1949. He was an Honorary Doctor of the universities of Oxford, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, London, Chicago, Melbourne, and Paris.

Tawney's historical works reflected his ethical concerns and preoccupations in economic history. He was profoundly interested in the issue of the enclosure of land in the English countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in Max Weber's thesis on the connection between the appearance of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. His belief in the rise of the gentry in the century before the outbreak of the Civil War in England provoked the 'Storm over the Gentry' in which his methods were subjected to severe criticisms by Hugh Trevor-Roper and John Cooper.

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) was his classic work and made his reputation as an historian. It explored the relationship between Protestantism and economic development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tawney “bemoaned the division between commerce and social morality brought about by the Protestant Reformation, leading as it did to the subordination of Christian teaching to the pursuit of material wealth”.

The Oxford historian Valerie Pearl once described Tawney as having appeared to those in his presence as having an "aura of sanctity". He lent his name to the Tawney society at Rugby School, the R. H. Tawney Economic History society at the London School of Economics, the annual Tawney Memorial Lectures (Christian Socialist Movement) and the R. H. Tawney Building at Keele University. Adrian Hastings wrote: “Behind the list of major publications was the mind of a man tirelessly guiding government, Labour movement, Church and academic community towards a new society, at once fully democratic, consciously socialistic and fully in accord with Christian belief. In effective intellectual terms it is doubtful whether anyone else had remotely comparable influence in the evolution of British society in his generation”.