Andrew Thorpe (born 1962) is a British historian. He is Professor of Modern History and (from 2004 to 2007) was Head of History at the

University of Exeter , mottoeng = "We Follow the Light" , established = 1838 - St Luke's College1855 - Exeter School of Art1863 - Exeter School of Science 1955 - University of Exeter (received royal charter) , type = Public , ...

. He went on to be Exeter's Director of Research for Humanities and Social Sciences before moving to the University of Leeds in 2019. He is a noted historian on the British Labour Party and

Communist Party A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ...

particularly in the era of the

Communist International The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, was a Soviet-controlled international organization founded in 1919 that advocated world communism. The Comintern resolved at its Second Congress to "struggle by ...

, having been one of the few foreign, non-party historians to have had access to archives in Moscow following the

fall of the Soviet Union The dissolution of the Soviet Union, also negatively connoted as rus, Разва́л Сове́тского Сою́за, r=Razvál Sovétskogo Soyúza, ''Ruining of the Soviet Union''. was the process of internal disintegration within the Sov ...

. Historian Helen McCarthy calls Thorpe "One of the historical profession’s leading authorities on British party politics in the twentieth century." January 2009 saw the publication of Thorpe's new work titled ''Parties at War'', which examined all the major parties in Britain during the Second World War. The subject of the book has been the topic of his taught undergraduate module of the same name at the

and is the product of over five years research. Reviewer

Keith Laybourn Keith Laybourn (born 13 March 1946) is Diamond Jubilee Professor of the University of Huddersfield and Professor of History. He is a British historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century specialising in labour history and the work ...

calls it a "pioneering work" stating: :What Thorpe has done is examine more than 250 collections of regional and constituency records drawn from the Labour, Conservative and Liberal parties, and examined what occurred in the wartime period of political truce. Although he admits that the records cannot be balanced absolutely, statistically, or in some representative manner, he has produced what is surely going to be the standard work on wartime British politics during the Second World War." Reviewer Duncan Tanner states, "As a result of this unparalleled research effort, Thorpe convincingly refutes the claim that the Conservatives were uniquely distracted by the needs of the country .e. that the Conservative Party withered away, contributing to their election defeat of 1945, because Conservatives were engaged in waging the war whilst Labour were engaged in party politics Currently Professor Thorpe is working on the biography of Labour leader and Nobel prize winner

Arthur Henderson Arthur Henderson (13 September 1863 – 20 October 1935) was a British iron moulder and Labour politician. He was the first Labour cabinet minister, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934 and, uniquely, served three separate terms as Leader of th ...

. In September 2019 it was announced that Professor Thorpe will become the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures at the

University of Leeds , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

as well as becoming Professor of Modern History from 1 January 2020.

Works

*''The British general election of 1931'', Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991 *''Britain in the 1930s: the deceptive decade'', Oxford: Blackwell/Historical Association, 1992 *''The Longman Companion to Britain in the Era of the World Wars, 1914-1945'', London: Longman, 1993 *''A History of the British Labour Party'', London: Macmillan, 1997; 2nd edition: Palgrave, 2001 *''Britain 1916-1940'', Bedford: Sempringham Press, 1998 *''International Communism and the Communist International, 1919-43'', Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998 *''The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920-1943'', Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000 *''Parties at War: Political organization in Second World War Britain'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009

References

External links

* Cold War historians British historians Academics of the University of Exeter 1962 births Living people Labor historians {{UK-historian-stub