Name Francis Longstreth | ||
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Books English landed society in the nineteenth century | ||
Francis Michael Longstreth Thompson CBE FBA (13 August 1925 – 23 August 2017) was an English economic and social historian.
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Early life
The son of Francis Longstreth Thompson, he was educated at Bootham School, York And Queens College, Oxford, taking his PhD in 1956.
Career
He was Reader in Economic History at University College London in 1963. He became Professor of Modern History at Bedford College in 1968, and was from 1977 to 1990 director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
He was president of the Royal Historical Society from 1989 to 1993.
He was best known for English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963), which made the role of the landed gentry a high-priority topic for agrarian and political history. He also studied urban middle and working classes, and suburbia. He added to the long-standing debate on British class history by new emphasis on "respectability." Thompson argued that it operated across class boundaries and provided a powerful stabilizing counterbalance to the working class upheavals of Victorian society. His model of society contradicted the more commonly employed Marxist assumptions. He opened up a field that has attracted many younger scholars.
Death and legacy
He died on 23 August 2017, aged 92.