Michael Postan

Sir Michael Moissey Postan FBA (Hebrew: מיכאל מואיזי פוסטן‎‎, Russian: Моисей (Муня) Ефимович Постан; 1898, Tighina - 1981, London) was a Jewish Bessarabian-British historian.

He was born in Bendery, Bessarabia, and studied at the St Vladimir University in Kiev, leaving the USSR after the October Revolution and settling in the UK. He had positions at University College London and at the London School of Economics, before being appointed Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, from 1937. He was known as an economic historian of medieval Europe.

The multi-volume Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire was a large project he planned, and it was largely completed under his editorship.

I: The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages 2nd edition 1966, editor

II: Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages (1952) edited with Edward Miller and Cynthia Postan

III: Economic Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages (1963) edited with E. E. Rich and Edward Miller

IV: edited with E. E. Rich and Edward Miller

V: (1977) edited by E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson

VI: The Industrial Revolutions and After (1966) edited with H. J. Habbakuk

VII: The Industrial Economies: Capital, Labour and Enterprise (1978) edited with Peter Mathias, Part 2 extending to the United States, Japan and Russia

VIII: The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies (1989) edited by Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard

Family

He married first the historian Eileen Power. After her death, he married Lady Cynthia Rosalie Keppel, daughter of the 9th Earl of Albemarle, with whom he had two sons.

Works

• Studies in English Trade in the 15th Century (1933) with Eileen Power
• The Historical Method in Social Science An Inaugural Lecture (1939)
• British War Production (1952, HMSO). (Part of the History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Civil Series)
• Carte Nativorum: A Peterborough Abbey Cartulary of the Fourteenth Century (1960) with C. N. L. Brooke
• Design and Development of Weapons : Studies in Government and Industrial Organisation (1964) with D. Hay and J. D. Scott. HMSO (Part of the History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Civil Series)
• An Economic History of Western Europe 1945 - 1964 (1967)
• Fact and Relevance: Essays on Historical Method (1971)
• The Mediaeval Economy and Society: Economic History of Britain, 1100-1500 (1972) Pelican Economic History of Britain 1
• Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (1973)
• Mediaeval Trade and Finance (1973)