Professor George Peden

M.A., D.Phil., F.R.Hist.S., F.R.S.E. Emeritus Professor George Peden was educated at Grove Academy, Broughty Ferry, and, after a spell as a sub-editor on the Dundee Evening Telegraph, he studied as a mature student at the universities of Dundee and Oxford. He taught at the universities of Dundee, Leeds and Bristol before coming to Stirling in 1990. His research awards include British Academy and Leverhulme research readerships and AHRB-funded research leave, and he has been a visiting fellow at All Souls and St Catherine's colleges, Oxford. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Historical Society.  His most recent book is 'Churchill, Chamberlain and Appeasement' (Cambridge, 2022). He lives in Callander, dividing his time between research and hill-walking.

Defence and foreign policy; economic thought and policy. Books British Rearmament and the Treasury, 1932-1939 (Edinburgh, 1979);  British Economic and Social Policy: Lloyd George to Margaret Thatcher (Oxford, 1985, 1991; Japanese edition: Chiba, 1990); Keynes, the Treasury and British Economic Policy (London, 1988; Japanese edition: Tokyo, 1996); The Treasury and British Public Policy, 1906-1959 (Oxford, 2000); (ed.) Keynes and his Critics: Treasury Responses to the Keynesian Revolution 1925-1946 (Oxford, 2004); (ed. with T. M. Devine and C. H. Lee) The Transformation of Scotland: The Economy since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2005); Arms, Economics and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs (Cambridge, 2007); Churchill, Chamberlain and Appeasement (Cambridge, 2022). Articles in journals and serials ‘Sir Warren Fisher and British rearmament against Germany', English Historical Review, 94 (1979), 29-47; ‘Keynes, the Treasury and unemployment in the later nineteen-thirties', Oxford Economic Papers, 32 (1980), 1-18; ‘Sir Richard Hopkins and the "Keynesian revolution" in employment policy', Economic History Review, 36 (1983), 281-296; ‘The Treasury as the central department of government, 1919-1939', Public Administration, 61 (1983), 235-250; ‘A matter of timing: the economic background to British foreign policy, 1937-1939', History, 69 (1984), 15-28; ‘The burden of imperial defence and the continental commitment reconsidered', Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 405-423; ‘The "Treasury view" on public works and employment in the interwar period', Economic History Review, 37 (1984), 167-181; ‘The road to and from Gairloch: Lloyd George, unemployment, inflation, and the "Treasury view" in 1921', Twentieth Century British History, 4 (1993), 224-249; ‘Sir Horace Wilson and appeasement', Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 983-1014; ‘Suez and Britain's decline as a world power', Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 1073-1096; ‘Recognising and responding to relative decline: the case of post-war Britain', Diplomacy and Statecraft, 24 (2013), 59-76; (with Alan Peacock) 'Merging National Insurance contributions and Income Tax: lessons of history', Economic Affairs, 34 (2014), 2-13; 'Alan Turner Peacock 1922-2014', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 14 (2015), 495-516; Neoliberal economists and the British welfare state, 1942-1975', Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 39 (2017), 413-27. Contributions to edited volumes  ‘Keynes, the economics of rearmament and appeasement', in W. J. Mommsen and L. Kettenacker (eds), The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement (London, 1983), 142-156; ‘Perceptions britanniques de la puissance économique à la fin des années 1930', in R. Girault and R. Frank (eds), La Puissance en Europe 1938-1940 (Paris, 1984), 187-202; ‘Economic aspects of British perceptions of power on the eve of the Cold War', in J. Becker and F. Knipping (eds), Power in Europe? Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany in a Postwar World, 1945-1950 (Berlin, 1986), 237-261, and ‘Economic aspects of British perceptions of power', in E. Di Nolfo (ed.), Power in Europe? Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy and the Origins of the EEC, 1952-1957 (Berlin, 1992), 237-261; ‘Old dogs and new tricks: the British Treasury and Keynesian economics in the 1940s and 1950s', in B. Supple and M. O. Furner (eds), The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences (Cambridge, 1990), 208-238; ‘Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain and the defence of empire', in J. B. Hattendorf and M. H. Murfett (eds), The Limitations of Military Power (London, 1990), 160-172; ‘Modernisierung in den 50er Jahren - die britische Erfahrung', in A. Schildt and A. Sywottek (eds), Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau. Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er Jahre (Bonn, 1993), 47-68; ‘Economic knowledge and the state in modern Britain', in S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting (eds), The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1996), 170-187; ‘The Treasury view in the interwar period: an example of political economy?', in B. Corry (ed.), Unemployment and the Economists (Cheltenham, 1996), 69-88; ‘From cheap government to efficient government: the political economy of public expenditure, 1832-1914', in D. Winch and P. K. O'Brien (eds), The Political Economy of British Economic Experience, 1688-1914 (Oxford, 2002), 351-378; ‘The Treasury and the City', in R. Michie and P. Williamson (eds), The British Government and the City of London in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2004), 117-134; ‘The Treasury and the defence of empire', in G. Kennedy (ed.), Imperial Defence: The Old World Order 1856-1956 (Abingdon, 2008), 71-110; ‘Financing Churchill's army', in K. Neilson and G. Kennedy (eds), The British Way in Warfare: Power and the International System, 1856-1956 (Farnham, 2010), 277-299; ‘War and peace: the British Army after the victories of 1918 and 1945', in P. Dennis and J. Grey (eds), Victory or Defeat: Armies in the Aftermath of Conflict (Newport, NSW, 2010), 81-103; ‘A new Scotland? The economy', in T. M. Devine and J. Wormald (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford, 2012), 652-670; 'Chamberlain, the British Army and the "continental commitment"', in M. H. Murfett (ed.), Shaping British Foreign and Defence Policy in the Twentieth Century(Basingstoke 2014), 86-110; 'The Royal Navy and grand strategy, 1937-1941', in N. Rodger et al (eds), Strategy and the Sea (Woodbridge, 2016), 148-58; 'Liberal economists and the British welfare state: from Beveridge to the New Right', in R. Backhouse et al (eds), Liberalism and the Welfare State (New York, 2017), 39-56; The growth of Cabinet government, in The British Home Front and the First World War, ed. Hew Strachan, Cambridge University Press, Feb. 2023, pp. 63-77.