IN MEMORIAM: Peter Brock

Canadian Slavonic Papers, Mar-Jun 2007 by Dyck, Harvey, Rossos, Andrew

(1920-2006)

A preeminent authority on East European history and the world's foremost scholar on the history of world-wide pacifism, Peter Brock, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Toronto, died at his home on Sunday, 28 May 2006, at the age of 86. Engaged in scholarship until the end, his last two books were published in the final months of his life, one on Polish history, which he co-edited,' and the other on grass-roots resistance to war.2

Peter Brock was the author, co-author or editor of 30 scholarly books and a large number of articles.3 No other historian of Eastern Europe has equalled his sensitive and incisive treatment of so many of the peoples of the area. His contribution to the evolving field of the history of pacifism was even more crucial. "No ideology," wrote Oxford political scientist Martin Ceadel, "owes more to one academic than pacifism owes to Peter Brock. That the scope and richness of this historical tradition can now be recognized is largely the result of Brock's sympathetic and dedicated scholarship, which was begun when pacifism was an unfashionable subject."4

Peter Brock was born in 1920 on the Channel Island of Guernsey, United Kingdom. On both his mother's and his father's side he comes of distinguished military stock. Already as a child, however, he seems to have begun to buck the family's military tradition. A favourite story of his wife, Carmen-his loving companion and support for more than three decades-was that younger members of the family were expected to address grand-papa as "general," and regularly did so, whereas Peter always called him simply "grandfather."5

As an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1930s, Peter came under the influence of secular pacifism, much in the air at the time, but it was not until the onset of the Second World War that his views began to cohere under the intellectual influence of Bart de Ligt, a Dutch pacifist.6 Peter took his stand as a conscientious objector, was briefly imprisoned, which he described in an autobiographical memoir composed after his retirement.7 He served out the rest of the war on alternative service, mainly in an English hospital. Meanwhile he had been strongly drawn to Quaker ideas about war and social justice, although remaining religiously, as he said, "a little bit of an outsider."

After the war, he was accepted for work with Quaker relief, first among displaced persons in Western Germany and then in devastated Poland. This was his introduction to Eastern Europe. When the Quaker mission was closed, Peter Brock chose to remain in Poland and undertook graduate study at the Jagellonian University in Cracow. He left Poland with his first doctorate in history and a lifelong attachment to Poles and their culture. After completing a second doctorate in history at Oxford University, Peter Brock taught at the University of Toronto for the one year, 1957-1958, then successively at the University of Alberta, Smith College, and Columbia University. He returned to the University of Toronto in 1966, and it became his home. In 1991, the University recognized his exceptional scholarly leadership and achievements by awarding him the highest distinction it could confer, the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.

Peter Brock was remarkable as a leading historian of Polish and East European history because of his curiosity, respect for, and knowledge of many different peoples. Best known for his work on the Poles, he was also a historian of the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Kashubs, the Lusatian Sorbs, the Slovaks and the Ukrainians. In each case he acquired enough of a command of their often difficult languages to ferret out important patterns of their past through the study of sources. His writing concentrated, though not exclusively, on populist and nationalist ideas and movements that aimed in modern times at freeing peoples from the tutelage and domination of elites and empires. He was inclined to take his stand with the socalled "little peoples" of the region, its underdogs. Remarkably, his writings have often helped to restore to an ethnic community or social group part of its faded voice or even lost memory. Eastern Europe, a minefield for less sure-footed scholars, was Peter Brock's first scholarly love. It was also the almost exclusive area of his teaching. Over the years, students in this area have expressed admiration for him as a devoted guide to learning and source of great inspiration.8

What elevated Peter Brock from the ranks of fine historians and placed him among a handful of the truly outstanding, was his central role as a historian of worldwide pacifism. Well over half of his scholarship was devoted to this area of study. His earliest work on pacifism was a ground-breaking study of peace ideas and movements among the Czechs in early modern times.9 In a series of original studies he then turned to the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic.10 Coincidentally his work on pacifism appeared just as anti-Vietnam war sentiment in the USA was crystallizing into what became, over the following years, a triumphant crusade. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the strength of war resistance grew, Brock's next book on the subject, Twentieth Century Pacifism, was addressed to the more general reader and university student. ' ' A critical and popular success, an expanded edition, co-authored with Nigel Young, appeared in 1999.12