Jeremy Black (historian)

• 1. Introduction

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  Jeremy Black was born on the 30th of October 1955. He would go on to publish more history books than most scholars manage to read in a lifetime. By 2004, he was described as "the most prolific historical scholar of our age". At that point his bibliography already ran past 180 books, most of them built around 18th-century British politics and international relations. He built that record from a professorship at the University of Exeter. Today he serves as a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West. That center sits inside the Foreign Policy Research Institute, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. What kind of training produces output at that scale? Which institutions gave a young academic the platform to become such a fixture in eighteenth century scholarship? And does a historian this rooted in one century ever wander somewhere unexpected, toward figures like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot?

• 2. Colleges Before Durham

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  Queens' College, Cambridge, was where Jeremy Black began his university training, followed by two Oxford colleges, St John's and Merton. In 1980 he joined Durham University as a lecturer. Durham was also where he earned his PhD, with a doctoral thesis titled British Foreign Policy 1727-1731, completed in 1983. In 1994, Durham promoted him to a professorship. As a staff candidate, though, he was never attached to any of Durham's individual colleges, a detail that set his post apart from the collegiate system he had trained under at Cambridge and Oxford. That structural quirk sat alongside a growing set of duties far outside Durham's classrooms, duties that would put him at the center of Britain's historical archives community.

• 3. Councils And Editorial Boards

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  From 1989 to 2005, Jeremy Black served as editor of Archives, the journal published by the British Records Association. Across those same years, he also sat on the Association's own Council. He served two separate terms on the Council of the Royal Historical Society, from 1993 to 1996 and again from 1997 to 2000. From 1997 onward, he held a seat on the Council of the List and Index Society. His editorial reach extended into several specialist journals. He sat on the boards of History Today, the International History Review, the Journal of Military History, and Media History. He also served on the board of the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, since renamed the RUSI Journal. That web of editorial posts ran through the same years in which recognition from military historians was building toward a major career honor.

• 4. A Lifetime Achievement Prize

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  In 2008, the Society for Military History honored Jeremy Black with the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize, awarded for lifetime achievement. The Morison Prize recognizes standing across an entire career rather than a single publication. It marked his place among historians whose influence is measured across decades rather than one book. That career-spanning honor sits against a catalogue that reaches far past the eighteenth century he is best known for, into fortifications, naval warfare, and even the fictional world of a detective on Baker Street.

• 5. Beyond The Eighteenth Century

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  Warfare in the Western World, 1882-1975, appeared in 2001, followed a year later by The World in the Twentieth Century. Both books pushed his focus past the 18th-century subjects that dominate most of his catalogue, into more recent conflicts and the century just past. In 2022 alone, that catalogue also produced two books with no obvious link to 18th-century foreign policy or warfare. One was The Game Is Afoot: The Enduring World of Sherlock Holmes. The other was The Importance of Being Poirot. Both turn his attention toward fictional detectives rather than the real diplomats and generals who fill the rest of his bibliography. A 2006 talk he gave at Ohio State University, catalogued alongside his articles, points to a lecturing life that ran in parallel with all those book jackets, one that this bibliography alone cannot fully capture.