I. R. Christie

Ian Ralph Christie (Preston, Lancashire, 11 May 1919 – Poole, Dorset, 25 November 1998) was a British historian specialising in late 18th-century Britain. He spent most of his academic career at University College, London (UCL). In 1983 he gave the Ford Lectures at Oxford, on the reasons why Britain avoided revolution, subsequently published as Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 1984).^[1]

Works

• The End of North's Ministry, 1780–82 (1958).
• Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform. The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760–1785 (1962).
• Crisis of Empire: Great Britain and the American Colonies 1754-1783 (1966).
• Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Politics, and Other Papers (1970).
• ‘The Historians' Quest for the American Revolution’, in Anne Whiteman, J. S. Bromley and P. G. M. Dickson (eds.), Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants: Essays in Eighteenth-Century History presented to Dame Lucy Sutherland (Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 181–201.
• Empire or independence, 1760-1776: a British-American dialogue on the coming of the American Revolution, co-edited with Benjamin W. Labaree, (1976).
• ‘George III and the historians: thirty years on’, History, new ser., 71 (1986), pp. 205–21.
• ‘Party in Politics in the Age of Lord North's Administration’, Parliamentary History 6 (1987), pp. 47–68.
• ‘Conservatism and stability in British society’, in Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 169–187.

Notes

1. Hegley Harte, 'Obituary: Professor Ian R. Christie', The Independent, 5 December 1998.