Francis Thompson (historian)

Francis Michael Longstreth Thompson FBA (born 1925) is an English economic and social historian.

The son of Francis Longstreth Thompson, he was educated at Bootham School, York And Queens College, Oxford, taking his PhD in 1956.

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 is 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.

Works

• Victorian England: the horse-drawn society; an inaugural lecture (1970) at Bedford College
• English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963)
• The Rise of Suburbia (1982) editor
• Horses in European Economic History: a preliminary canter (1983) editor
• The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 (1988)
• The University of London and the World of Learning, 1836-1986 (1990)
• The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 (1990, three volumes) editor
• Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain 1780-1980 (1993) Ford Lectures
• Landowners, Capitalists and Entrepreneurs (1994, editor)

Further reading

• Christine S. Hallas, "Thompson, F.M.L." in Kelly Boyd, ed. (1999). Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, vol 2. Taylor & Francis. pp. 1189–90. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)
• N. B. Harte, ed. Land and Society in Britain, 1700-1914: Essays in Honour of F.M.L. Thompson (1996).

External links

• Page at The Institute of Historical Research