The Society was very sorry to learn of the death, in July, of the historian Peter J. Marshall (1933-2025). Peter’s association with the Royal Historical Society spanned more than 50 years.
Elected a Fellow in 1969, Peter served as a member of the Society’s Council between 1983 to 1987, thereafter becoming Vice President until November 1991. He returned to the Council in November 1996 as the Society’s President and held this position for four years.
In this article, Peter Mandler, who served on the RHS Council with Peter from 1998, remembers Peter Marshall’s extensive and very considerable contribution to the Royal Historical Society, both during and after his term in office.
Peter was one of the most eminent historians of his generation. He certainly won all the accolades – elected a Fellow of the British Academy, one of the authors in the late 1980s of the first national curriculum for history, appointed a CBE by the Queen for services to history, as well as of course his terms as a Vice President and then President of the Royal Historical Society, the latter from 1996 to 2000.
Those honours were tributes to his public service, and his public spiritedness, but also to the quality of his scholarship – one of the first generation of historians of the British Empire to begin to detach themselves from a more personal or political interest in the empire and to see it more objectively and in the round. His work focused mostly on the history of India and the ways in which the British Empire did not displace but largely worked through indigenous systems of rule; he was also always interested in ideas about empire, and particularly about the ideas of Edmund Burke in the late-eighteenth century, both about India and about the Americas.
Not that his approach to empire was purely detached: he liked to remind people that he was born in Calcutta under British rule, he relished his CBE with the words British Empire in the title; but he was not sentimental and he could see the ridiculous as well as sometimes the sinister side of empire. I recall well a story he told with typical ironic amusement, of the year he spent in Kenya on national service in the early 1950s, watching Colonel Sydney La Fontaine parade through the heat and dust of his district in his ludicrous military dress uniform with the high hat topped by ostrich plumes. Peter knew then that that world was on its last legs, and he was right.
It was instantly clear to me that the Society was then in the midst of a significant transition and that Peter was driving it.
I was lucky enough to be appointed Honorary Secretary of the Royal Historical Society – essentially, the President’s aide-de-camp, or dogsbody – halfway through Peter’s term as President. It was instantly clear to me that the Society was then in the midst of a significant transition and that Peter was driving it.
The Society had always been a promoter and publisher of historical scholarship but in a rather clubby way, its leadership drawn from a fairly tight circle, mostly of British historians – the last non-metropolitan historian to serve as President before Peter was Robin Humphreys, the Latin Americanist, in the late ‘60s – and a lot of its time had been spent on set-piece lectures, prizes, elections to the Fellowship and its library housed at UCL.
The Society had fallen behind in recognising the diversity of the discipline and the profession and the need to advocate for it with policymakers and university leaders; the History at the Universities Defence Group (HUDG) and the Campaign for Public Sector History (PUSH) had been set up in the 1980s as campaigning bodies to fill the gap.
The period in which Peter was most active as a statesperson for his profession – from the late ‘80s to the early 2000s – was a time of generational change … he dragged the Society literally into the 21st century.
The period in which Peter was most active as a statesperson for his profession – from the late ‘80s to the early 2000s – was a time of generational change as his generation was beginning to give way to baby boomers like me, much more expressive, impetuous, full of ideas for change.
On the whole Peter put himself on our side and – in his sober, low-key way, often more effective than the full-frontal assault – he dragged the Society literally into the 21st century, updating its antiquated procedures, engaging it with schools and the media and popular history, and helping to make it the vigorous and credible advocate for serious history amongst ever widening audiences that it is today.
Peter’s own specialism in imperial history might have been an impediment – some of the younger, so-called ‘new imperial’ historians felt he was not sufficiently anti-imperial or attuned to the discordant interests of coloniser and colonised. (Though his work was all about teasing out those disparate interests, and showing how they could conflict but also how they could mesh.) Even at the height of those professional conflicts, he maintained warm relations with the younger generation and kept together a network comprising people of all views.
Peter with Jinty Nelson (1942-2024) who succeeded Peter as President of the Royal Historical Society in November 2000. Royal Historical Society archive
Before he was President, Peter had already taken a lead in pushing (sometimes gently, sometimes less so) for a more outward-facing role for the Society and for rapprochement with some of the alienated parties in HUDG and PUSH. Money was found to fund a small programme of grants for postgraduate research and a monograph series, which had been founded by Geoffrey Elton but had gone dormant, was revived to publish early-career research. As President, Peter had more freedom – and also a lot more time, as he had taken early retirement in part to allow him to do this new job properly.
A galaxy of new initiatives unrolled under his direction. The Society’s longstanding collaboration with the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) in compiling annual bibliographies of British history was taken to a new level with funding from what was then the Arts and Humanities Research Board, digitising the many decades of annual volumes into a consolidated database – first as a CD-ROM, then as an online resource, permitting regular updates. An annual lecture in what we would now call public history was initiated with Gresham College and after his premature death in 1999 renamed in honour of the historian Colin Matthew.
The Society engaged with the relatively new Research Assessment Exercise and was able to advise the funding councils … on the overall formation of the exercise in ways that accommodated the often-marginalised humanities.
Another partner, recruited by Peter, was History Today which co-sponsored a prize and a publication for the best Master’s dissertation in history. Peter developed a close relationship with Sarah Tyacke, the Keeper of the Public Records, and brought the Society into the world of data protection, freedom of information, and the thirty-year rule. The Society engaged with the relatively new Research Assessment Exercise and was able to advise the funding councils not only on history personnel but on the overall formation of the exercise in ways that accommodated the often-marginalised humanities, an important policy departure that has kept the Society at the forefront of advocacy for the humanities ever since.
Peter’s association with the Society continued long after his Presidency, not least with his generous provision of the annual RHS Marshall Fellowships, begun in 2005, to support early career researchers to complete a doctorate in history. More than 25 historians have benefited from this programme, run jointly by the Society and the IHR, and Peter maintained a close interest in recipients’ research, including that of the two PhD students who received Fellowships for 2024-25.
I sat through a lot of committee and council meetings when Peter was in the chair and could observe the masterly way in which he both took advice and built consensus.
I have probably forgotten many other important initiatives. What I have not forgotten is Peter’s inimitable style. I sat through a lot of committee and council meetings when Peter was in the chair and could observe the masterly way in which he both took advice and built consensus. He would open up a subject and ask for colleagues’ views – he seemed to know just the right length of time to collect those views, just the right length of time to pause, just the right length of time then in which to propose his resolution, and just the right length of time to pause again before taking silence as consent.
Peter was always master of his brief, had always anticipated trouble or opposition, and nearly always got the result he wanted – and then, whether or not it was the desired result, he knew how to act on it. If his own temperament and generational instincts inclined him to slow the pace of change, his keen sensitivity to the way the wind was blowing – and the direction the bulk of his colleagues were shifting – impelled him to embrace change, and his tact and obvious integrity accelerated it.
In early 1999, a few months after I took office, I wrote an email to Pat Thane about Society business, at the end of which I said: ‘I’m finding my RHS job strangely compelling. Among other pluses it gives me regular contact with congenial, intelligent and professionally responsible people, which I don’t otherwise get in my anomic London life. Also I feel already that I am doing something useful. And finally,’ I concluded, ‘Peter Marshall is a complete sweetheart.’
About the author
Peter Mandler FBA was President of the Royal Historical Society between 2012 and 2016 and President of the Historical Association (2020-23).
Prior to his retirement at the end of the academic year 2025, Peter was Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge.
His many publications include The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (2020) and the co-edited, The Modern British City, 1945-2000 (forthcoming, November 2025), with Simon Gunn and Otto Saumarez Smith.
As President of the Society, Peter J. Marshall delivered four lectures on the theme of ‘Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century’ which were subsequently published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1998-2001). These articles are now available free to read until 31 October 2025 thanks to Cambridge University Press.
HEADER IMAGE: Peter Marshall in his garden at Braughing, Hertfordshire, courtesy of his family.
