 | Professor Bruce Campbell
Professor of Medieval Economic History, Queen’s University, Belfast (S2) The economic history of late-medieval Britain and Ireland, with particular reference to human-environment interactions during the 14th century and trends in agricultural output and productivity from the 13th to 19th centuries
I was born and educated in Hertfordshire, a metropolitan county with a strong tradition of individualism and an excellent state school system. From 1967 to 1970 I studied Geography at Liverpool University, where I was powerfully influenced by the distinctive blend of historical geography and economic history taught by Professor Richard Lawton. My doctoral research - into the agrarian economy and institutions of late medieval Norfolk - was then undertaken at Cambridge, then the leading British Geography department for research into the historical geography of the pre-industrial period. There I benefited from the wise supervision of Dr Alan Baker. At that time Drs Tony Wrigley FBA, Jack Langdon, and Harold Fox were on the staff, Mark Overton and Richard Smith were fellow postgraduates, and the newly founded Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure was attracting a raft of talented young researchers. It was a stimulating if daunting time to be there and the contacts then made, as also at Darwin College, have stood me in good stead ever since. In 1973 university appointments for people with my research interests were scarce and becoming scarcer and I was therefore glad to accept the position of Lecturer in Geography here at The Queen's University of Belfast, notwithstanding that the Northern Irish 'Troubles' were then at their height. That move to Northern Ireland and Queen's has paid dividends - personally, professionally, and intellectually - and I have spent the whole of my academic career here in, successively, the departments of Geography, Economic History, History, and, now, the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology. Always I have been as much interested in teaching as in research and there are few more challenging and rewarding environments within the UK in which to teach undergraduates than Belfast. Teaching Irish economic history to my students has also taught me much and greatly enriched my agenda as an economic historian. Further, it has exposed me to some first-rate scholars and scholarship and I am proud to have been elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1997. What pleases me most about election now to the British Academy is the recognition that it gives to my chosen research field - medieval economic history - as a serious, significant, and worthwhile field of academic study. Since my initial work as a postgraduate in Cambridge, my aim has been to harness the wealth of detailed statistical information contained in England's extensive medieval archives to shed systematic light on the country's economic development when it was still comparatively poor and under-developed. Much of my work has focused on the crisis of the fourteenth century, when the population was halved within the narrow space of a generation and the trajectory of socio-economic development thereby transformed. In 2010-11 I have been invited to become a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin where I plan to write a book on human - environment interactions in Britain and Ireland across this watershed century. Meanwhile, I am enjoying collaborating with a team of fellow economic historians (led by Professor Steve Broadberry of Warwick and including Professors Mark Overton of Exeter and Jan Luiten van Zanden of Utrecht), reconstructing the national incomes of Holland and Britain from the nineteenth back to the thirteenth centuries. This, we expect, will shed fresh light on the extended process whereby the countries of north-western Europe slowly achieved the breakthrough to modern economic growth. An academic's work is never done. When not working, I enjoy looking at architecture of all periods (but especially the thirteenth century), attending live performances of classical music, and walking and swimming my two Newfoundland dogs. |
