Cause of death Pulmonary illness Notable students Paul Dukes Years active 1938–1984 Children Lucy Seton-Watson | Occupation Historian Nationality British Name Hugh Seton-Watson | |
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Full Name George Hugh Nicholas Seton-Watson Born 15 February 1916 ( 1916-02-15 ) London Known for Russia and Eastern EuropeNationalism Died December 19, 1984, Washington, D.C., United States Parents Robert William Seton-Watson Books The Russian Empire - 1, From Lenin to Khrushch, Neither War Nor Peace: T, Nations and States: An Enquir, The Decline of Imperial | ||
George Hugh Nicholas Seton-Watson CBE, FBA (London, England, 15 February 1916–Washington, DC, US, 19 December 1984) was a British historian and political scientist specialising in Russia.
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Early life
Seton-Watson was one of the two sons of Robert William Seton-Watson, the activist and historian. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, from where he graduated in 1938.
War-time activities
After working for the British Foreign Office in Belgrade and Bucharest at the start of the Second World War, Seton-Watson joined the British Special Operations Executive. Interned by the Italians after the fall of Yugoslavia to the Axis in 1941, Seton-Watson was repatriated to Britain, and later posted to the British special forces in Cairo, where he remained until 1944. In January 1944 he moved to Istanbul where he performed intelligence activities among the refugees coming from the Balkans.
Academic career
Seton-Watson wrote most of his first major work, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918–1941 in Cape Town while on his way from Italy to Britain after the fall of Yugoslavia, finishing it in Cairo during the battle of El Alamein in 1942.
In 1945 he was appointed praelector in politics at University College, Oxford. In 1951 he was appointed to the chair of Russian history at the University of London, where he remained until 1983, exercising a major influence over British and American understandings of Russia during the Cold War. He subsequently became the Professor Emeritus of Russian history.
Beginning in 1957 at Columbia University, he regularly visited institutions in the United States to lectures and conduct research. During a three-month fellowship, beginning in October 1984, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars he became ill with pulmonary problems and was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital where he died three weeks later.
Work
After publishing The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855–1914 in 1952, Seton-Watson published his most famous work, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 in 1967. This became the standard history of late imperial Russia for a generation.
Seton-Watson's Nations and States: an Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (1977) made a fundamental contribution to the study of nationalism, though later overshadowed by the success of Benedict Anderson's more theoretical Imagined Communities.
The New York Times Book Review called him "the outstanding authority on the satellite countries of Eastern Europe".
Honors
Seton-Watson received a DLitt from Oxford in 1974 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex in 1983. In the 1981 New Year Honours he was appointed CBE.