M. M. Postan
Sir Michael Moissey Postan FBA was a British historian. He was known informally as Munia Postan.
Biography
Postan was born to a Jewish family in Bendery, in the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire, and studied at the St Vladimir University in Kiev, leaving Russia in 1919 after the October Revolution and settling in the UK. He held positions at University College London and at the London School of Economics, before being appointed Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, from 1937. He was known as an economic historian of medieval Europe. Eric Hobsbawm notes he was one of the best lecturers at Cambridge, adding, "Though passionately anti-communist, Postan was the only man in Cambridge who knew Marx, Weber, Sombart and the rest of the great central and East Europeans, and took their work sufficiently seriously to expound and criticize it."Marriages
He married historian Eileen Power in 1937. After she died in 1940, he married Lady Cynthia Rosalie Keppel, daughter of the 9th Earl of Albemarle, with whom he had two sons. He died in Cambridge.Works
Studies in English Trade in the 15th Century with Eileen PowerThe Historical Method in Social Science An Inaugural Lecture British War Production. Carte Nativorum: A Peterborough Abbey Cartulary of the Fourteenth Century with C. N. L. BrookeDesign and Development of Weapons : Studies in Government and Industrial Organisation with D. Hay and J. D. Scott. HMSO- Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman EmpireAn Economic History of Western Europe 1945 - 1964 Fact and Relevance: Essays on Historical Method The Medieval Economy and Society: Economic History of Britain, 1100-1500 Pelican Economic History of Britain #1Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy
- ''Medieval Trade and Finance''