Richard Baxell
Richard Baxell is a British historian and the author of three books on the Spanish Civil War. Between 2015 and 2018 he was the Chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust. Having studied history as an undergraduate at Middlesex University from 1991-1994 and as a post-graduate at the Institute of Historical Research in 1996, he received his PhD from the London School of Economics in 2002 with a thesis titled The British Battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. As of 2020 he is a research fellow at the London School of Economics.
''British Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War'' (2004)
British Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War: The British Volunteers in the International Brigades, 1936–1939 was published by Routledge in 2004. The book engages with questions relating to the numbers, origins and motivations of Britons in the International Brigades, and utilises material from the Public Record Office and the Marx Memorial Library's International Brigade archives. Baxell argues that the British Battalion was not composed of poets, and its volunteers were not drawn from the unemployed and the lumpenproletariat; rather, Baxell argues, they were predominantly from the working and lower middle classes.George Esenwein, writing in European History Quarterly, questioned "Baxell's pointed efforts to shift attention away from the complex web of political and ideological circumstances that inevitably shaped the experiences of the British battalion", including their connections to the Soviet Union and Stalinism, and argued that he failed to "offer a compelling case in support of his view that the British battalion was composed mostly of independent-minded volunteers who maintained a considerable degree of autonomy from the communist command structures of the International Brigades." Esenwein concluded by noting, "Even if Baxell's own advocacy of the brigadiers' cause tends to colour his historical judgements, we have him to thank for correcting misconceptions that have unfairly tarnished the reputation of this distinguished group of committed citizens".
In the journal Saothar, published by the Irish Labour History Society, Manus O'Riordan questioned Baxell's treatment of alleged "friction between some British and Irish volunteers" but praised his demonstration of "how other writers have got it wrong in maintaining that some Irish volunteers were wantonly executed by their own side".