Peter Brock (historian)

Life

Peter Brock was born in 1920 on Guernsey, Channel Islands. Although he came from a military family, he rejected this tradition. While studying at Exeter College, Oxford, he came under the influence of pacifist ideas, particularly those of Bart de Ligt.

During the Second World War, he declared as a conscientious objector and was briefly imprisoned. He spent the rest of the war on alternative service, including working in a hospital.

After the war, Brock worked with a Quaker relief mission to Germany and Poland, sparking his interest in Eastern Europe. After the mission ended, Brock took graduate study at Jagiellonian University, receiving a doctorate in history in 1950.

But, unlike many of us, Peter was not content to specialize in the history of just one country. He received a second doctoral degree in history from Oxford University in 1954 with a study that resulted in the publication of The Political and Social Doctrines of the Unity of Czech Brethren in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries (1957), which married his interest in pacifism to his interest in east central Europe, something he would continue with studies of examples of pacifism in the region. From Czech history he went on to studies in the history of Lusatian Sorbs, Kashubs, Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Hungarians, some of which were collected in Folk Cultures and Little Peoples: Aspects of National Awakening in East Central Europe (1992) and The Slovak National Awakening: An Essay in the Intellectual History of East Central Europe (1976). As a dedicated historian, Peter did not let the necessity of learning another language deter him from using primary sources on a topic that interested him. When I once expressed admiration for his ability to learn Hungarian, he replied with characteristic self-deprecation but without a touch of irony that he could only read Hungarian, not speak it.

Brock later emigrated to Canada and settled there, working at the University of Toronto from 1966.

Brock's work on the study of peoples in Eastern Europe included detailed studies of the history and culture of the culture of the Poles, Czechs, and Ukrainians. Brock often learned the languages of the culture he was studying in order to read source material in these languages.

Brock's studies on pacifism included a trilogy of books, Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War (1968),Pioneers of the Peaceable Kingdom (1970), and Twentieth-Century Pacifism (1970). The last book, appearing as the Vietnam War protests had revived public interest in pacifism, was "a critical and popular success". By 1973, historian Robert Scharf said that "Professor Brock has become a recognised authority on pacifism in our Western civilization", while political scientist Martin Ceadel stated "[n]o ideology owes more to one academic than pacifism owes to Peter Brock. That the scope and richness of this historical tradition can now be recognized is largely the result of Brock's sympathetic and dedicated scholarship, which was begun when pacifism was an unfashionable subject."

A revised edition of the third book, Pacifism in the Twentieth Century was published in 1999 with Nigel Young.