Peter Brock (historian)

Peter Brock (1920–2006) was an English-born Canadian historian who specialized in the history of pacifism and Eastern Europe.

Peter Brock was born in 1920 on Guernsey, Channel Islands. Although he came from a military family, he rejected this tradition. While studying at Exeter College, Oxford, he came under the influence of pacifist ideas, particularly those of Bart de Ligt.

During the Second World War, he declared as a conscientious objector and was briefly imprisoned. He spent the rest of the war on alternative service, including working in a hospital.

After the war, Brock worked with a Quaker relief mission to Germany and Poland, sparking his interest in Eastern Europe. After the mission ended, Brock took graduate study at Jagiellonian University, receiving a doctorate in history in 1950.

But, unlike many of us, Peter was not content to specialize in the history of just one country. He received a second doctoral degree in history from Oxford University in 1954 with a study that resulted in the publication of The Political and Social Doctrines of the Unity of Czech Brethren in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries (1957), which married his interest in pacifism to his interest in east central Europe, something he would continue with studies of examples of pacifism in the region. From Czech history he went on to studies in the history of Lusatian Sorbs, Kashubs, Ukrainians, Slovaks, and Hungarians, some of which were collected in Folk Cultures and Little Peoples: Aspects of National Awakening in East Central Europe (1992) and The Slovak National Awakening: An Essay in the Intellectual History of East Central Europe (1976). As a dedicated historian, Peter did not let the necessity of learning another language deter him from using primary sources on a topic that interested him. When I once expressed admiration for his ability to learn Hungarian, he replied with characteristic self-deprecation but without a touch of irony that he could only read Hungarian, not speak it.

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