The Most Famous

HISTORIANS from United Kingdom

This page contains a list of the greatest British Historians. The pantheon dataset contains 561 Historians, 62 of which were born in United Kingdom. This makes United Kingdom the birth place of the most number of Historians.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary British Historians of all time. This list of famous British Historians is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of British Historians.

1. Arnold J. Toynbee (1889 - 1975)

With an HPI of 70.70, Arnold J. Toynbee is the most famous British Historian. His biography has been translated into 58 different languages on wikipedia.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee (; 14 April 1889 – 22 October 1975) was an English historian, a philosopher of history, an author of numerous books and a research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and King's College London. From 1918 to 1950, Toynbee was considered a leading specialist on international affairs; from 1929 to 1956 he was the Director of Studies at Chatham House, in which position he also produced 34 volumes of the Survey of International Affairs, a "bible" for international specialists in Britain. He is best known for his 12-volume A Study of History (1934–1961). With his prodigious output of papers, articles, speeches and presentations, and numerous books translated into many languages, Toynbee was widely read and discussed in the 1940s and 1950s.

2. Bede (672 - 735)

With an HPI of 68.58, Bede is the 2nd most famous British Historian. His biography has been translated into 68 different languages.

Bede (; Old English: Bēda [ˈbeːdɑ]; 672/3 – 26 May 735), also known as Saint Bede, the Venerable Bede, and Bede the Venerable (Latin: Beda Venerabilis), was an English monk, author and scholar. He was one of the greatest teachers and writers during the Early Middle Ages, and his most famous work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, gained him the title "The Father of English History". He served at the monastery of St Peter and its companion monastery of St Paul in the Kingdom of Northumbria of the Angles. Born on lands belonging to the twin monastery of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow in present-day Tyne and Wear, England, Bede was sent to Monkwearmouth at the age of seven and later joined Abbot Ceolfrith at Jarrow. Both of them survived a plague that struck in 686 and killed the majority of the population there. While Bede spent most of his life in the monastery, he travelled to several abbeys and monasteries across the British Isles, even visiting the archbishop of York and King Ceolwulf of Northumbria. His theological writings were extensive and included a number of Biblical commentaries and other works of exegetical erudition. Another important area of study for Bede was the academic discipline of computus, otherwise known to his contemporaries as the science of calculating calendar dates. One of the more important dates Bede tried to compute was Easter, an effort that was mired in controversy. He also helped popularize the practice of dating forward from the birth of Christ (Anno Domini—in the year of our Lord), a practice which eventually became commonplace in medieval Europe. He is considered by many historians to be the most important scholar of antiquity for the period between the death of Pope Gregory I in 604 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church. He is the only native of Great Britain to achieve this designation. Bede was moreover a skilled linguist and translator, and his work made the Latin and Greek writings of the early Church Fathers much more accessible to his fellow Anglo-Saxons, which contributed significantly to English Christianity. Bede's monastery had access to an impressive library which included works by Eusebius, Orosius, and many others.

3. Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794)

With an HPI of 68.37, Edward Gibbon is the 3rd most famous British Historian. His biography has been translated into 74 different languages.

Edward Gibbon (; 8 May 1737 – 16 January 1794) was an English essayist, historian, and politician. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its polemical criticism of organized religion.

4. Bernard Lewis (1916 - 2018)

With an HPI of 62.88, Bernard Lewis is the 4th most famous British Historian. His biography has been translated into 39 different languages.

Bernard Lewis, (31 May 1916 – 19 May 2018) was a British-American historian specialized in Oriental studies. He was also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Lewis's expertise was in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West. Lewis served as a soldier in the British Army in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps during the Second World War before being seconded to the Foreign Office. After the war, he returned to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and was appointed to the new chair in Near and Middle Eastern history. In 2007, Lewis was called "the West's leading interpreter of the Middle East". Others have said Lewis's approach is essentialist and generalizing to the Muslim world, as well as his tendency to restate hypotheses that were challenged by more recent research. On a political level, Lewis's detractors say he revived the image of the cultural inferiority of Islam and of emphasizing the dangers of jihad. His advice was frequently sought by neoconservative policymakers, including the Bush administration. His active support of the Iraq War and neoconservative ideals have since come under scrutiny. Lewis was notable for his public debates with Edward Said, who said Lewis was a Zionist apologist and an Orientalist who "demeaned" Arabs, misrepresented Islam, and promoted Western imperialism, to which Lewis responded by saying Orientalism was a facet of humanism and that Said was politicizing the subject. Lewis was also known for denying the Armenian Genocide. His argument that there was no evidence of a deliberate genocide carried out against the Armenian people by the Ottoman Empire is rejected by other historians. He said that the mass killings resulted from a mutual struggle between two nationalistic movements, a view that has been criticized as "ahistorical."

5. Henry Thomas Buckle (1821 - 1862)

With an HPI of 58.05, Henry Thomas Buckle is the 5th most famous British Historian. His biography has been translated into 29 different languages.

Henry Thomas Buckle (24 November 1821 – 29 May 1862) was an English historian, the author of an unfinished History of Civilization and a strong amateur chess player. He is sometimes called "the Father of Scientific History".

6. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800 - 1859)

With an HPI of 57.42, Thomas Babington Macaulay is the 6th most famous British Historian. His biography has been translated into 43 different languages.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, (; 25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian, poet, and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as the Paymaster General between 1846 and 1848. He also played a substantial role in determining India's education policy. Macaulay's The History of England, which expressed his contention of the superiority of the Western European culture and of the inevitability of its sociopolitical progress, is a seminal example of Whig history commended for its prose style.

7. C. Northcote Parkinson (1909 - 1993)

With an HPI of 57.35, C. Northcote Parkinson is the 7th most famous British Historian. His biography has been translated into 28 different languages.

Cyril Northcote Parkinson (30 July 1909 – 9 March 1993) was a British naval historian and author of some 60 books, the most famous of which was his best-seller Parkinson's Law (1957), in which Parkinson advanced the eponymous law stating that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", an insight which led him to be regarded as an important scholar in public administration and management.

8. Peter Burke (b. 1937)

With an HPI of 57.16, Peter Burke is the 8th most famous British Historian. His biography has been translated into 21 different languages.

Ulick Peter Burke (born 16 August 1937) is a British polymath, historian and professor. He was born to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother (who later converted to Roman Catholicism). He was educated by the Jesuits and at St John's College, Oxford and was a doctoral candidate at St Antony's College, Oxford. From 1962 to 1979, he was a member of the School of European Studies at University of Sussex, before moving to the University of Cambridge, where he holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Cultural History and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Burke is celebrated as a historian not only of the early modern era, but one who emphasizes the relevance of social and cultural history to modern issues. He is married to the Brazilian historian Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke who is the author of two books (in one of which she collaborated with her husband). Burke is not only known for his work on the Modern Age but also for his research on cultural history across its entire spectrum. As a polyglot, he has managed on the one hand to incorporate information from a good part of Europe and has also achieved good diffusion of his books. They have been translated into more than thirty languages. In 1998, he was awarded the Erasmus Medal of the European Academy, and is an honorary doctorate from the Universities of Lund, Copenhagen and Bucharest.

9. Ian Kershaw (b. 1943)

With an HPI of 56.13, Ian Kershaw is the 9th most famous British Historian. His biography has been translated into 30 different languages.

Sir Ian Kershaw (born 29 April 1943) is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's foremost experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler. He was a follower of the German historian Martin Broszat, and until his retirement, he was a professor at the University of Sheffield. Kershaw has called Broszat an "inspirational mentor" who did much to shape his understanding of Nazi Germany. Kershaw served as historical adviser on numerous BBC documentaries, notably The Nazis: A Warning from History and War of the Century. He taught a module titled "Germans against Hitler".

10. Norman Davies (b. 1939)

With an HPI of 56.07, Norman Davies is the 10th most famous British Historian. His biography has been translated into 33 different languages.

Ivor Norman Richard Davies (born 8 June 1939) is a British and Polish historian, known for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland and the United Kingdom. He has a special interest in Central and Eastern Europe and is UNESCO Professor at the Jagiellonian University, professor emeritus at University College London, a visiting professor at the Collège d'Europe, and an honorary fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford. He was granted Polish citizenship in 2014.

People

Pantheon has 79 people classified as British historians born between 672 and 1969. Of these 79, 26 (32.91%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living British historians include Peter Burke, Ian Kershaw, and Norman Davies. The most famous deceased British historians include Arnold J. Toynbee, Bede, and Edward Gibbon. As of April 2024, 18 new British historians have been added to Pantheon including Francis Godwin, Stanley Morison, and Thomas Walker Arnold.