John Elliott (historian)


Sir John Huxtable Elliott, , is a British historian, Regius Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge. He publishes under the name J.H. Elliott.

Biography

Born in Reading, Berkshire, Elliott was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was an assistant lecturer at Cambridge University from 1957 to 1962 and Lecturer in History from 1962 until 1967, and was subsequently Professor of History at King's College, London between 1968 and 1973. In 1972 he was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy. Elliott was Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey from 1973 to 1990, and was Regius Professor of Modern History, Oxford between 1990 and 1997.
He holds honorary doctorates from the Autonomous University of Madrid, the universities of Genoa, Portsmouth, Barcelona, Warwick, Brown University, Valencia, Lleida, Complutense University of Madrid, College of William & Mary, London, Charles III University of Madrid, Seville, Alcalá, and Cambridge. Elliott is a Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, of whose Founding Council he was also a member.
Elliott was knighted in the 1994 New Year Honours for services to history and was decorated with Commander of Isabella the Catholic in 1987, the Grand Cross of Alfonso the Wise in 1988, the Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic in 1996, and the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1999. An eminent Hispanist, he was given the Prince of Asturias Prize in 1996 for his contributions to the Social sciences. For his outstanding contributions to the history of Spain and the Spanish Empire in the early modern period, Elliott was awarded the Balzan Prize for History, 1500–1800, in 1999. He has been a corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Historia since 1965.
His studies of the Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish Empire helped the understanding of the problems confronting 16th- and 17th-century Spain, and the attempts of its leaders to avert its decline. He is considered, together with Raymond Carr and Angus Mackay, a major figure in developing Spanish historiography.
Elliott's principal publications are The Revolt of the Catalans ; The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 ; and The Count-Duke of Olivares. His Richelieu and Olivares won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association and, in 1992, the Prize XVIIe. In 2006, his book Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 was published by Yale University Press, winning the Francis Parkman Prize the following year. In 2012 he published his reflections on the progress of historical scholarship; History in the Making.

Works