Arthur Marwick

Arthur John Brereton Marwick was a British social historian, who served for many years as Professor of History at the Open University. His research interests lay primarily in the history of Britain in the twentieth century, and the relationship between war and social change. He is probably best known, however, for his more theoretical book The Nature of History, and its greatly reworked and expanded version The New Nature of History (2001). In the latter work he defended an empirical and source-based approach towards the writing of history, and argued against the turn towards postmodernism. He believed firmly that history was "of central importance to society".