Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier was a British historian of Polish-Jewish background. His best-known works were The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930) and the History of Parliament series (begun 1940) he edited later in his life with John Brooke.
Background
Namier was born Ludwik Niemirowski in Wola Okrzejska in the Russian-controlled Congress Poland, now part of the Lublin Voivodeship of southeastern Poland. His family were secular-minded Polish-Jewish gentry. His father, with whom young Lewis often quarreled, idolized the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By contrast, Namier throughout his life detested it. He was educated at the University of Lviv in Austrian Galicia (now in Ukraine), the University of Lausanne, and the London School of Economics. At Lausanne, Namier heard Vilfredo Pareto lecture, and Pareto's ideas about elites would have a great influence on his thinking.
Education
Namier emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1907, studied at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1908, and became a British subject in 1913, whereupon he anglicised his name. During the First World War, he fought as a private with the 20th Royal Fusiliers in 1914–15 but was discharged owing to poor eyesight. He then held positions with the Propaganda Department (1915–17), the Department of Information (1917–18) and finally with the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office (1918–20).
Career
Following the defeat of Germany in World War One, Namier (age 31) joined the British delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. Based on his personal background, Namier maintained a firm personal interest in Russian affairs; however, he was also seen as one of the biggest enemies of the newly independent Polish state in the British political environment. During the Polish–Soviet War his relationship with the Polish delegation was highly antagonistic and his attitude towards Poland and Polish territories openly hostile. Asked to personally deliver a cable from the Foreign Office, Namier falsified the British draft of a proposed Curzon Line by detaching the city of Lwów from Poland. His own version called Curzon Line "A" was presented by Namier to the Commissar for Foreign Affairs of Bolshevik Russia, Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin (ru), a protégé of Leon Trotsky with strong pro-German leanings, imprisoned at Brixton a year earlier for anti-British activities.
Notably, the Polish delegation had no knowledge of the existence of Line "A" whatsoever since the idea of handing Lwów over to the Bolsheviks was rejected by Prime Minister Władysław Grabski at the very beginning of talks. Lwów has never been under the Moscow rule in its history. Prof. Piotr Eberhardt from the Polish Academy of Sciences speculates that Lloyd George could have been aware of Namier's secret modification. The earlier-approved compromised version of Curzon Line which was approved at the Spa Conference in Belgium was renamed by Namier as Curzon Line "B". Chicherin relayed this document to Lenin who rejected it nevertheless, assured of his victory over Poland followed by a planned annexation of its entire territory.
In one of his memoranda Namier falsified the results of a national census from Eastern Galicia originating from Austria-Hungary. He single handedly reduced the number of ethnic Poles living in the region from 2 million down to 600–700 inhabitants. Professor Anna M. Cienciala believes that Namier was not the original initiator of these mystifications, but merely an unscrupulous supplier of handy arguments for the anti-Polish lobby among the Entente members.
After leaving government service, Namier taught at Balliol (1920–21) before going into business for himself. Later Namier, who was a long-time Zionist, worked as political secretary for the Jewish Agency in Palestine (1929–31). For a time he was a close friend and associate of Chaim Weizmann, but Weizmann later severed relations with Namier when the latter converted to Anglicanism to marry his second wife.
His parents deeply aspired to enter the Polish Catholic nobility and led a fully Catholic life.
Politics
Namier is best known for his work on the Parliament of Great Britain, in particular English politics in the 1760s. His principal conclusion of that decade was that there was no risk of an authoritarian disposal of British parliamentarism. By way of its very detailed study of individuals, this course of study caused substantial revision to accounts based on a party system. Namier's best-known works were The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, England in the Age of the American Revolution and the History of Parliament series he edited later in his life with John Brooke.
Namier used prosopography or collective biography of every Member of Parliament (MP) and peer who sat in the British Parliament in the latter 18th century to reveal that local interests, not national ones, often determined how parliamentarians voted. Namier argued very strongly that, far from being tightly organised groups, both the Tories and Whigs were collections of ever-shifting and fluid small groups whose stances altered on an issue-by-issue basis. Namier felt that prosopographical methods were the best for analysing small groups like the House of Commons, but was opposed to the application of prosopography to larger groups. At the time of its publication in 1929, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III caused a historiographical revolution in understanding the 18th century.
Views
Namier became a strong advocate of Polish nationalism which, coupled with his Catholic upbringing, gave him a sense of belonging to Polish society.
Connections
His wife (whom he married in church after converting to Anglicanism) was Julia de Beausobre, Russian aristocratic origin who preferred Greek Orthodoxy. (Her suffering in Soviet prisons and concentration camps are the subject of her book.