G. E. M. de Ste. Croix

Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Sainte Croix ( born February 8, 1910 in Macao; † 5 February 2000) was a British historian.

He left school at the age of 15 years. As a player, he was Under -16 champion of southern England, from 1930 to 1932, he joined every year at Wimbledon. In a less important tournament, he defeated Fred Perry. In 1932 he ended his tennis career.

It was not until the age of 37 he began studying and taught 1950-1953 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was then at New College, Oxford tutor, where he remained until his retirement in 1977.

In his strongly influenced by Karl Marx works, Geoffrey de Ste Croix presented consistently on the side of the working and oppressed sections of the population and moved significantly from the up therefore prevailing conception of history (especially in Western industrialized nations ), which likely reflected the position of the upper class. His book, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War is regarded as one of the standard works of the Peloponnesian War.

In 1981 he published The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, which covers a wide range from archaic times to the late antiquity and ends with an attempt to explain the case and Fall of the Roman Empire. It includes a detailed study of the Greek society based on Marxist concepts such as class, mode of production and exploitation. Ste. Croix concludes that a very small group ( 2-3% of the total population) may be referred to as an exploiting class (especially landowners ) who (eg slaves ) offset by a larger group of exploited wage laborers and forced laborers. In between, formed a sort of middle class by far the largest group, which consisted mainly of small farmers, craftsmen and merchants. The largest population group exploited very rarely wage laborers or slaves and were exploited (especially in the ancient democracies ) very rarely from the small upper class. Ste. Croix also points out that our view of antiquity is disproportionately influenced by the literary works of a small group of upper class.

Works (selection)

• The Origins of the Peloponnesian War. Duckworth, London 1972, ISBN 0-7156-1728-1.
• The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests. Duckworth, London 1981, ISBN 0-7156-1701- X.
• Athenian democratic origins and other essays. Edited by David Harvey and Robert Parker, Oxford University Press, 2004.