David Steele (1934 – 17 June 2019) was a British

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...

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 , ...

who focused on nineteenth-century British political history.Dr David Steele
(2 July 2019), University of Leeds website. Retrieved 18 April 2021.

Academic career

Steele taught briefly at

University College Dublin University College Dublin (commonly referred to as UCD) ( ga, Coláiste na hOllscoile, Baile Átha Cliath) is a public research university in Dublin, Ireland, and a member institution of the National University of Ireland. With 33,284 student ...

before becoming a

Senior Lecturer Senior lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and Israel senior lecturer is a faculty position at a university or similar institution. The position is tenured (in systems with this conce ...

in Modern History at the

. He remained at Leeds for 34 years until his retirement in 1999. Steele's 1974 work on the

Irish Land Acts The Land Acts (officially Land Law (Ireland) Acts) were a series of measures to deal with the question of tenancy contracts and peasant proprietorship of land in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Five such acts were introduced by ...

, ''Irish Land and British Politics'', grew out of his doctoral thesis. Michael Bentley ranked Steele's 1999 biography of

Lord Salisbury Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (; 3 February 183022 August 1903) was a British statesman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times for a total of over thirteen y ...

with Andrew Roberts's work as the best guides to Salisbury's life. G. R. Searle said Steele's biography "brings out alisbury'sprogressive impulses".G. R. Searle, ''A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 874.

Selected publications

*''Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant-Right and Nationality, 1865–1870'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). *''Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). *''Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography'' (London: University College London Press, 1999).

References

1934 births 2019 deaths Academics of the University of Leeds British historians {{UK-historian-stub