Harvard sinologist whose Origins of the Cultural Revolution trilogy and Mao’s Last Revolution dissected China’s elite politics
A journalist in London through 1961 who covered Chinese developments from afar, he first reached mainland China only in 1972; he went on to study elite Chinese politics from the founding of the People's Republic through the Cultural Revolution.
A Briton born in India, he was a journalist and a Labour MP before becoming a scholar, and founded and edited The China Quarterly. The three volumes of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (1974–1997) traced the line struggles inside the top leadership from the Hundred Flowers of 1956 to 1966, showing the Cultural Revolution as the outcome of political conflicts accumulated since the failure of the Great Leap rather than a personal whim of Mao. Mao’s Last Revolution (2006, with Michael Schoenhals) is the standard narrative of 1966–1976. He was a professor at Harvard and director of its Fairbank Center.
Career timeline
- 1974–1979Labour MP for Belper
- 1984–2019Professor of government, Harvard University
The historian who made the Spanish Civil War a global narrative
Thomas began The Spanish Civil War without knowing a word of Spanish, and the book was banned by the Franco regime and smuggled into Spain as a clandestine best-seller.
Hugh Thomas was an English historian whose 1961 The Spanish Civil War made a large, readable survey of the conflict available to an international audience. Drawing on printed diplomatic sources, participant accounts and interviews, he presented the Republican struggle and its internal violence without simply adopting either Communist or anti-Communist polemic. The book became a clandestine bestseller in Francoist Spain, was repeatedly revised, and remained a foundational point of reference despite factual and interpretive criticisms. His later work ranged across Cuba, the Spanish empire and world history, while his political career moved from Labour to the Conservatives and then the Liberal Democrats.
Career timeline
- 1931–1952Born at Windsor; educated at Sherborne School and Cambridge, studying history
- 1952–1953First-class History Tripos result; president of the Cambridge Union Society
- 1954–1957Served in the British Foreign Office, including the UK delegation to the UN Disarmament Commission and the Paris embassy
- 1957Lectured at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and published his first novel, The World's Game
- 1961Published The Spanish Civil War; won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1962
- 1966–1976Professor of History at the University of Reading
- 1971–2014Published major works on Cuba, the conquest of Mexico, the Spanish empire and world history
- 1981–2017Created Baron Thomas of Swynnerton and sat in the House of Lords; died in 2017
