My colleague Robert Lee, who has died aged 78, started a distinguished profession as an financial historian together with his Oxford DPhil thesis of 1972 on inhabitants and social change in Bavaria (1750-1850), later revealed as a ebook.
It drew on continental European historiographical strategies relating household formation to native economies and social organisation. Appointed as lecturer in financial historical past at Liverpool College later that 12 months, Robert spent the following 4 many years there, punctuated by visiting posts in Europe and the US.
Promoted to the Chaddock chair in financial and social historical past in 1989, Robert served as director of Liverpool’s Centre for Central and Japanese European Research (1991-96) and Institute for European Inhabitants Research (1986-90). He later co-directed the Centre for Port and Maritime Historical past, an initiative that expanded his analysis to the general public well being of Merseyside and different European ports.
For greater than a decade, till it was merged with the historical past division in 1997, Robert additionally headed Liverpool’s financial historical past division, which achieved nice success by admitting many college students by way of mature entry schemes.
Robert was born in Birkenhead, the one little one of Invoice Lee, a faculty trainer, and his spouse, Edie (nee Minshall). He attended Birkenhead college, then Corpus Christi Faculty, Oxford. In 1978 he met Kristina Eriksson (referred to as Kicki) when she admired his cable-knit sweater in a blues pub in Stockholm. Two years later, coming back from a World College Companies journey to Nicaragua and Costa Rica, they married in Belize Metropolis. Thereafter, Robert firmly embraced Anglo-Swedish household life, turning into an lively member, then managing trustee, of the Liverpool Worldwide Nordic Neighborhood.
Elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2008, Robert continued to analysis and publish after his retirement in 2011 and till current months, regardless of failing well being.
Within the Nineteen Seventies he labored as an officer of the World College Service, a world academic rights organisation, managing lots of of placements for Chilean college students displaced by the 1973 coup.
In his final years, Robert utilized his vitality to the magnificent Birkenhead Park, opened within the 1840s because the world’s first municipally funded inexperienced open house. As chair and later president of the Pals’ affiliation, and lively by means of the Wirral Parks Partnership, he led a marketing campaign to avoid wasting and restore the uncared for park.
His dedication to elevating the worldwide profile of the park as a method of contributing to the regeneration of Birkenhead, contributed to the bid for Unesco World Heritage Standing and in 2013 led to him being appointed MBE. His superbly produced ebook on the historical past of the park (one in every of three he had deliberate), Birkenhead Park: The Folks’s Backyard and an English Masterpiece, was revealed a month earlier than he died.
Robert is survived by Kicki, and their three daughters, Jenny, Susanna and Malena, and son, Oskar.
