E. P. Thompson

Edward Palmer Thompson (3 February 1924 – 28 August 1993) was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963).

In 1966, Thompson coined the term "history from below" to describe his approach to social history, which became one of the most consequential developments within the global history discipline. History from below arose from the Communist Party Historians Group and its work to popularise historical materialism. Thompson's work is considered by some to have been among the most important contributions to social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa. In a 2011 poll by History Today magazine, he was named the second most important historian of the previous 60 years, behind only Fernand Braudel.

E. P. Thompson was born in Oxford to Methodist missionary parents: His father, Edward John Thompson (1886–1946), was a poet and admirer of the Nobel Prize–winning poet Rabindranath Tagore. His older brother was William Frank Thompson (1920–1944), a British officer in the Second World War, who was captured and shot aiding the Bulgarian anti-fascist partisans. Edward Thompson and his mother wrote There is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson (1947). This out of print memoir was re-released by Brittunculi Records & Books in 2024. Thompson would later write another book about his brother, published posthumously in 1996.

Thompson attended two private schools, The Dragon School in Oxford and Kingswood School in Bath. Like many he left school in 1941 to fight in the Second World War. He served in a tank unit in the Italian campaign, including at the fourth battle of Cassino.

Thompson entered Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1941, but left in 1942 to join the army. After the war he returned to Corpus to study History and graduated in 1946. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain while at Cambridge. In 1946, Thompson formed the Communist Party Historians Group with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr, and others. In 1952 they launched the journal Past and Present.^{[citation needed]}

Thompson's first major work of scholarship was his biography of William Morris, written while he was a member of the Communist Party. Subtitled From Romantic to Revolutionary, it was part of an effort by the Communist Party Historians' Group, inspired by Torr, to emphasise the domestic roots of Marxism in Britain at a time when the Communist Party was under attack for always following the Moscow line. It was also an attempt to take Morris back from the critics who for more than 50 years had emphasised his art and downplayed his politics.

Although Morris's political work is well to the fore, Thompson also used his literary talents to comment on aspects of Morris's work, such as his early Romantic poetry, which had previously received relatively little consideration. As Thompson noted in his preface to the second edition (1976), the first edition (1955) appears to have received relatively little attention from the literary establishment because of its then-unfashionable Marxist point of view. However, the somewhat rewritten second edition was much better received.

After Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, which revealed that the Soviet party leadership had long been aware of Stalin's crimes, Thompson (with John Saville and others) started a dissident publication inside the CP, called The Reasoner. Six months later, he and most of his comrades left the party in disgust at the Soviet invasion of Hungary.