Sidney Pollard

Sidney Pollard (aka Siegfried Pollak, * April 21, 1925 in Vienna, † 22 November 1998 ) was a significant British social and economic historians. In particular, his concept of regional industrialization was of lasting importance.

Life

His parents belonged to Judaism and had Galician roots. His father Moses Pollak had come before 1914 to Vienna. The mother Leontine came shortly after the start of the First World War, fleeing anti-Semitic riots in the city. The father was a traveling salesman, his mother had been a teacher before marriage. The relatively favorable circumstances of the family fortune made ​​it possible that the son was able to visit the Chajes secondary school. This private school tried their students an awareness of the Jewish tradition to mediate and was therefore an early target of anti -Semitic attacks.

After connection of Austria to the German Reich in 1938, the family lost their home and the father was dismissed. The family succeeded that Pollard could leave on a Kindertransport to the UK. The parents had to stay behind it. In England he came first on an agricultural school which prepared a future life in a kibbutz in Palestine. He also took correspondence courses. At the age of sixteen years, Pollard went to Cambridge and worked in a nursery. He also continued the correspondence courses and manage the recording in 1943 at the London School of Economics.

First, he volunteered for the British Army. In this context, he anglicized his name. He remained until 1947 as an interpreter in occupied Germany. After his return he studied in London economics and graduated after two years successfully. After he received his doctorate with a thesis on the history of shipbuilding in Britain between 1870 and 1914.

At the University of Sheffield in 1952, he taught as an Assistant Lecturer. Since 1963 he has been there a full professor of economic history. As an outstanding economic historian, he participated in numerous visiting professorships in Israel, the U.S., the German Democratic Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany and Australia. In 1971 he was appointed to the University of California, Berkeley. However, the authorities refused him because of his temporary membership in the Communist Party of the indefinite work permit. Therefore, he taught continue in Sheffield.

In 1980 he took over at the University of Bielefeld, the new chair of Economic History. After his retirement in Bielefeld in 1990, he returned to Sheffield. The local university honored him in 1995 with an honorary doctorate.

Work

Characteristic of his way of working was that he pursued alongside the Anglo-American also beyond research and its comparative approach. In his earlier works he focused particularly on the social consequences of industrialization. The starting point was a 1959 published work on the history of the labor movement in Sheffield. Also in the episode were studies on trade union and cooperative history a focus of the work. Significant was the mid-1960s his research on the development of modern management.

Since the 1970s he has particularly strongly influenced the industrialization research. He did not understand the industrial development as a nation-state process, but described it as a regional phenomenon. A first essay on regional industrialization, he published in 1973. In 1981, his work appeared Peaceful Conquest. With its reinterpretation he fertilized the industrialization research as last before Alexander Gerschenkron. In 1997, Pollard published his work Marginal Europe, in which he examined the decline of former industrial compression zones since the late Middle Ages.