Year: 1980
Type: article
Abstract: Carlile Aylmer Macartney, foremost authority in the Western world on the history of the Danubian region, died on June 18, 1978, at the age of eighty-three.A committed fighter for political causes, Dr. Macartney was primarily a scholar who, in the course of his long industrious life, produced one excellent book after another.His magnum opus was written years after he had passed "the Psalmists' statutory limit of life," a phrase he himself used about Francis Joseph.His interest in the Danubian region, an area beset by problems of nationality, may have been partially attributable to his family background.He was born on January 24, 1895, into an Anglo-Irish family that had emigrated to Scotland in the fourteenth century, and then back to Ulster in the seventeenth century where they became landowners.Not unexpectedly, Macartney described his nationality as legally and politically British and "personally" Irish.He was a scholar at Winchester and in 1914 also won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, which he did not take up, volunteering for the army instead.After the years in the trenches he went to Cambridge and subsequently to Vienna as acting vice-consul, and then to Geneva for the League of Nations.In June 1936, he was elected Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a post he held until his retirement twenty-nine years later.He worked in the Research Department of the British Foreign Office during the Second World War, and from 1951 to 1957 he was Montagu Burton Professor of International Relations at Edinburgh University.His work achieved academic recognition.He was Foreign Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the British Academy, and Correspondent Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.An honorary degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred on him by Oxford University, and he became Fellow Emeritus of All Souls in 1976.He was also the founder and president of the British-Hungarian Fellowship.Macartney's first book, The Social Revolution in Austria (1926), is an erudite, carefully drawn account of the conditions in post-1918 Austria.Before taking up early Hungarian historical sources, a complex subject requiring formidable linguistic skills which Macartney soon mastered, he had written (with others) Survey of International Affairs in 1925.The Magyars in the Ninth Century (1930) is a comparative examination of Arabic and Greek sources on the thorny problem of the Magyars' migration during a critical period in their social transformation.Studies in the Earliest Hungarian Historical Sources came out in seven parts (parts 1 and 2: Budapest, 1938; part 3: Budapest, 1940; parts 4 and 5: Budapest, 1940 [actually published in 1942, but the date was falsified because Great Britain and Hungary were at war at the time]; parts 6 and 7: Oxford, 1951).The subject of the last two parts was regarded as so esoteric and impenetrable that the editor of the Oxford University Gazette had to approach the author to review his own work, and Macartney obliged.Mediaeval Hungarian Historians (1953) is a critical and analytical guide that sets forth the conclusions of his seven-part work.Macartney maintained a strong interest in modern politics.National States and National Minorities reveals an understanding of the national minorities problem that few have rivaled.He also took sides.Hungary and her Successors: The Treaty of Trianon and Its Consequences 1919-1937 (1937, reprinted in 1965) is a comprehensive study of the national question in the region.Just as R. W. Seton-Watson had spoken up for the Slavs and the Rumanians, the historical underdogs in Hungary
Source: Slavic Review
Author: László Péter
Institution: University of London
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2586563254