Sidney Pollard

Sidney Pollard: A Life in History

Sidney Pollard was a pioneering labour historian. Almost single-handedly, he pioneered the study of economic management in history and the understanding of the economic processes by which regions are formed. As a labour historian, his contribution to the study of the marginalized in society was original and vital. His history was intimately connected with his personal life - from escape to Britain from Nazi-occupied Vienna on the Jewish kindertransporte, to work in Britain, the USA, Israel and apartheid South Africa.

Sidney Pollard: A Life in History was published by I. B. Tauris in December 2004. ISBN 1 85043 453 0

Peter Ackers, 'Sidney Pollard: A life in History', Labour History Review 70/3 (2005)

We have reached a point in British intellectual history when the post-war generation, who founded so many British academic disciplines, departments, journals and much else, have left the stage and in many cases died. In social science fields such as Industrial Relations, Economic History, Labour History, Occupational Psychology and Sociology there are new opportunities for disciplinary reflection, as Noel Annan's 'Our Age' passes from the scene. Intellectual furniture which my generation, now in middle ages, inherited and took for granted, now turns out to be much more recent in its design and construction. Before I came to this biography, I knew little about Sidney Pollard. I have the Genesis of Modern Management on my bookshelf, unread, and was vaguely aware of his work on the co-operative movement and Sheffield labour history. I enjoyed Dave Renton's timely volume, which will perhaps encourage me to dust down that volume. 

Full text from the Labour History Review website, here. 

Mike Haynes, 'Sidney Pollard', Socialist History 28 (2006), pp. 87-9.

Sidney Pollard was a prolific historian.  The valuable bibliography in Dave Renton’s biography runs to nearly 200 items without ephemera and unpublished materials.  But was Pollard worth a biography? He was an economic historian who wrote extensively on British economic history after 1750; the development of the labour relations and patterns of European industrialisation. He also tried to carry his arguments into the wider arena with sustained attacks on the de-industrialisation of Britain and what he saw as the malign influence of the City and the ‘banker’s mentality’. But few in Britain would have thought of him as being in the first rank of historians of his time. This is partly because although he addressed big themes his strength appeared to lay in a concern with details. There is no ‘Pollard approach’ save perhaps his work on European industrialisation and even here the strengths arise from the detail rather than the overall coherence. But the reception of Pollard’s work in Britain perhaps reflects something else. Renton quotes Eric Hobsbawm puzzling over Pollards ‘shameful neglect’, ‘I cannot entirely understand the reason. In my view he was certainly one of the most distinguished and original economic historians we have had in my lifetime’. Renton does not entirely explain this either. Perhaps Pollard just didn’t work hard enough or in the right ways to carry his arguments more forcefully? But perhaps a fuller explanation would also have to address the continuing way in which the visible part of British intellectual life still depends on a narrow circle focused on London, Oxford and Cambridge. Pollard, a child refugee from fascism in 1938, had some of the characteristics to make his mark here; his mistake (less obvious to those outside the UK) could have been to spend so much of his life in ‘provincial Sheffield’.

But even if Pollard had only been a talented and hard working historian his career would have been of some interest and Renton’s account takes us effortlessly through the development of British economic history in the fifty years after 1945. The book was only possible because Pollard’s papers were deposited at the University of Sunderland by his widow. Too often libraries in new universities have renamed themselves learning centres and refused or disposed of stock to make way for those computers which now look  increasingly redundant as more students buy their own. Sunderland too may have gone down this road but they appear not to have forgotten the importance of preservation and they deserve praise for this.

Not the least intriguing aspect of Renton’s account is the way in which it puts a personal side to some of the big names of British economic history. Pollard was in part a victim of the pettiness of occasionally lesser historians who disliked his politics whose left character they seemed to imagine was greater than it was. Few will failed to be moved by the account of the way in which a brief student flirtation with the British Communist Party as well as friendship with the GDR historian Jurgen Kuczynski, led to his moment of triumph being snatched away from him. This was the offer of a Chair at Berkeley in 1971. When he then faced US visa difficulties – perhaps not that great in comparative terms – they created an emotional storm,  bringing back his ‘orphaning’ flight from Austria and the loss of his parents in the concentration camps.

"My encounter has brought up, out of the forgotten traumas of the past, such horrors of queuing in offices, of being a second-class citizen, of fearing the decisions of capricious officialdom, as I never thought I still had in me, and I suffered an almost total collapse over it."

But he recovered his momentum to spend more years at Sheffield and to reap more international recognition with 10 years in Germany at Bielefeld before retiring back to the area had become his home.

Renton describes Pollard as ‘a socialist of sorts.’ But Pollard was also a theorist of sorts so that an evaluation of his contribution requires us to have a wider sense of how his work fits in. Since neither Pollard, nor Renton, nor this reviewer has a confident ‘big theory’ this is difficult. Renton finds it easiest to deal with Pollard’s contribution to the history of labour and management because here there is rough agreement on what the story is.  Renton is less positive about Pollard’s critique of the role of policy in British relative economic decline suggesting that ‘life itself’ has undermined Pollard’s argument for maintaining a strong manufacturing base. But it may not be this simple. Britain is still in the premier league of manufacturing powers. Moreover if its base has been slimmed further in relative terms than other advanced economies there may be an element of luck here rather than a model. In the same way that the Hong-Kong/ Singapore model is of limited relevance to most economies, Europe too possibly only has room for one offshore financial–service economy.  More challenging still, if problematic, is Pollard’s regional approach to industrialisation. This is possibly his least known contribution in the UK – a reflection of our parochialism – but it was the centre of his attention in his later years. Pollard saw industrialisation as a process of regional change within the developing global economy with nation states playing ambiguous intermediary roles. The difficulty, which he could not solve, was to clearly articulate the relationship of these three elements - region, state and global economy - but his sense of the importance of this problem remains to be built upon.

Faced with the modern avalanche of publications to which we all contribute I have found myself going back to older generations of historians. I have been continually surprised at how good they were. Arguments may sometimes be disagreeable, even plain wrong, the style and technique may be different but the real content is no worse and often better than what we all produce today. I suspect that in fifty years times those who find Pollard’s books and articles on dusty shelves will still feel the effort worthwhile and if they have been guided to them by coming across Renton’s biography of him on another equally dusty shelf, then potted and careless in writing and referencing though it occasionally is, it too will have served a longer-term purpose.