POLLARD, SIDNEY

POLLARD, SIDNEY (1925–1998), British economic historian. Born Siegfried Pollak in Vienna, the son of a salesman, Pollard came to England in 1938 on a Kindertransport; his parents perished in the Holocaust. Through the help of charities and British relatives, Pollard was able to study at the London School of Economics and then became one of Britain's most respected economic historians, holding the post of professor of economic history at Sheffield University from 1963 to 1981. Among his many works are The Development of the British Economy, 1914–50 (1962), The Genesis of Modern Management (1962), Peaceful Conquest (1981), and Britain's Prime and Britain's Decline (1989). In 1971 Pollard was offered a chair at the University of California at Berkeley, but was barred from entering the United States because he had briefly been a member of the Communist Party in the 1940s, despite the fact that his books were emphatically pro-capitalist. From 1981 until 1990 he was professor of economic history at the University of Bielefeld in West Germany. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: ODNB online. (William D. Rubinstein (2nd ed.)