Sir Michael Moissey PostanFBA (24 September 1899 – 12 December 1981)[1] was a British historian. He was known informally as Munia Postan.[2]
Biography
Postan was born to a Jewish family in
Bendery, in the
Bessarabia Governorate of the
Russian Empire, and studied at the
St Vladimir University in
Kyiv, leaving Russia in 1919 after the
October Revolution and settling in the UK. He held positions at
University College London and at the
London School of Economics, before being appointed Professor of Economic History at the
University of Cambridge, from 1937. He was known as an economic historian of medieval Europe.
Eric Hobsbawm notes he was one of the best lecturers at Cambridge, adding, "Though passionately anti-communist, Postan was the only man in Cambridge who knew Marx, Weber, Sombart and the rest of the great central and East Europeans, and took their work sufficiently seriously to expound and criticize it."[3]
II: Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages (1952) edited with
Edward Miller and Cynthia Postan
III: Economic Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages (1963) edited with E. E. Rich and Edward Miller
IV: The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Volume IV: The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited with E. E. Rich and Edward Miller
V: The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Volume V: The Economic Organization of Early Modern Europe (1977) edited by E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson
VI: The Industrial Revolutions and After (1966) edited with
H. J. Habbakuk
VII: The Industrial Economies: Capital, Labour and Enterprise (1978) edited with
Peter Mathias, Part 2 extending to the United States, Japan and Russia
VIII: The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies (1989) edited by Peter Mathias and
Sidney Pollard
An Economic History of Western Europe 1945 - 1964 (1967)
Fact and Relevance: Essays on Historical Method (1971)
The Medieval Economy and Society: Economic History of Britain, 1100-1500 (1972) Pelican Economic History of Britain #1
Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (1973)
Medieval Trade and Finance (1973)
References
^Miller, "Postan," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online
^Calladine, Chris (November 2015). "Richard Goodwin at Peterhouse". Cambridge Journal of Economics. 39 (6): 1497–1505.
doi:
10.1093/cje/bev055.