The Glasgow-born communist Hellenist and Byzantinist, Robert Browning (1914-1997), attended the University of Glasgow before winning a coveted Snell Exhibition to study at Balliol College, Oxford from 1935-39. Owing to his proficiency in several different languages, he acted as a linguist and interpreter for the Allies during WWII, before returning to the academic world as a lecturer at University College, London. In 1965, he became professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College until his retirement in 1981.
Browning’s scholarly activity was extensive and highly commended; he received an exceptional number of honours, such as honorary doctorates from Greek universities; the Gold Medals of the Onassis Foundation and the city of Athens; and election as Fellow of the British Academy in 1978. His particular academic interests lay primarily in Byzantine Studies and the evolution of the Greek language.
It is likely that Browning joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) during his time at Oxford. While at UCL, Browning and other staff and students began to express interest in applying socioeconomic – especially Marxist – perspectives to the later Roman Empire. Shared political interests of this kind led Browning to the Historians’ Group of the CPGB between 1946-1956. Despite the 1956 crisis of the Communist Party, Browning’s commitment did not falter. In her short memoir of Browning, Judith Herrin describes him as ‘one of the brilliant Communist historians formed in the Marxist intellectual traditions of pre- and post-war Oxford.’[1]
Averil Cameron attests to the fact that none of Browning’s students at UCL witnessed him expressing left-wing ideologies, not even in relation to historical topics which might warrant such a comparison, such as the fall of the Roman Empire.[2] However, Professor David Furley admits that Browning once tried to recruit him for a Communist Party meeting.[3]
Although Browning’s own academic work did not particularly reflect his political affiliations, his review of de Ste. Croix’s Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981), which offers a Marxist approach to the class struggles in ancient Greece, reveals his interest in applying his politics to his work on the ancient world. Browning praised de Ste. Croix’s pioneering application of Marxist theory to the ancient world, commenting that ‘the best proof of the relevance of Marxism to ancient history is that it actually explains how things happen the way they do. De Ste. Croix’s book is a splendid example of the explanatory power of a Marxist approach.’[4]
Browning also contributed to the left-wing press for many years. While as a lecturer he may have kept his politics and his academic interests separate, his writings for communist publications such as the Daily Worker, Labour Monthly, and Marxism Today tell a different story. Browning’s ‘Byzantine Feudalism’ (1975) for Marxism Today maintained that Byzantium was a feudal society, based on his Marxist classification of Byzantine society as an example of the Asiatic mode of production. Similarly, in his review of Ancient History of Western Asia, India and Crete by Bedrich Hrozny, Browning expressed regret that Hrozny did not pay enough attention to the socioeconomic structure of the ancient societies and disputed Hrozny’s definition of ‘feudal’ societies.[5] He championed Jack Lindsay’s Byzantium into Europe (1952), explaining that the section on Byzantine literature was ‘the fullest discussion of the subject ever published in English’.[6]
Browning’s politics disqualified him from a fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1953, but Birkbeck, University of London, who hosted several red giants of British scholarship, including the historian Eric Hobsbawm, the mathematician Paul Dienes, the crystallographer J.D. Bernal, the physicist J. W. Jeffrey, and another classicist in Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, did not hesitate to award him a professorial chair in 1965. He remained loyal to the Soviet Union his whole life, publishing a few articles in Russian and generally maintaining good working relations with scholars in the Eastern Bloc.[7]
This profile was written by Maeve Neaven.
[1] Herrin, Judith. ‘Robert Browning.’ Past & Present 156, 1997, p. 3.
[2] Cameron, Avril. ‘Robert Browning.’ Proceedings of the British Academy 105, 2000, p. 300.
[3] David Furley, as quoted in Cameron 2000, p. 300.
[4] Browning, Robert. ‘Review: The Class Struggle in Ancient Greece.’ Past & Present 100, 1983, p. 149. See also De Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
[5] Browning, Robert. ‘Czechoslovakian Scholar.’ The Labour Monthly 1, 1954, p. 47-8.
[6] Browning, Robert. ‘Byzantium and the West.’ The Anglo-Soviet Journal, Spring 1953, p. 35.
[7] Bourke, Joanna. ‘Reds in the Classroom’, Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (Oxford, 2022) p. 359-362.
