Philip Nicholas Seton Mansergh, (27 June 1910-16 January 1991) was a distinguished historian of Ireland and the British Commonwealth.
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Nicholas Mansergh was born at Grenane House, Tipperary, Ireland. He was the second son of Philip St George Mansergh (1863–1928), a railway engineer, and Ethel Marguerite Otway Louise Mansergh (1876–1963). One of his earliest memories was of trains leaving the town carrying soldiers destined for service on the Western Front in the First World War. After a short period at school in the north, Mansergh attended the Erasmus Smith (Abbey) School in his native Tipperary, which was founded in 1760. He was the youngest boy there when the school suddenly closed in 1922. After the Irish Civil War, Mansergh attended St. Columba's College, Dublin with his elder brother, then he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford to read modern history. There he came under the influence of R. B. McCallum and was later supervised by W.G.S. Adams.
After graduation, Mansergh was a tutor in the school of Modern Greats at University of Oxford and secretary to the Oxford Union Politics Research Committee. His first book, The Irish Free State: Its Government and Politics (1934), fueled his subsequent interest in the Commonwealth, one that he would pursue for the remainder of his academic career. In an interview a half century later, Mansergh noted:
The Commonwealth for my generation had something in common with the Common Market nowadays. I was interested in the Commonwealth to see if it would provide a way forward in Ireland itself. An inherent weakness in the Anglo-Irish Treaty was that the Dominion settlement was not consistent with Partition [from Northern Ireland]. I felt that Dominion status wouldn't work, which was obvious enough by 1934, but I wasn't sure whether any alternative to Dominion status would work in Ireland's case.[1]
Mansergh followed this up in 1940 with Ireland in the Age of Reform and Revolution, which critically analyzed the Marxist dialectic as it had been applied to Ireland, noting later that this led to his frequent misidentification as a Marxist historian.[1] During the Second World War, Mansergh worked in the British Ministry of Information, where after working on Anglo-Irish information services and cultural relations he was appointed head of the Empire division in 1944.
After the war, Mansergh was elected to the chair of British Commonwealth relations at Chatham House. He also began visiting India as an observer at the Asian Relations Conference. Upon his return, Mansergh gave a lecture on "The Implications of Éire's Relations with the British Commonwealth of Nations", which helped influence Commonwealth relations during the late 1940s.[1]
In 1953 Mansergh was appointed to the newly created position of Smuts Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth at Cambridge University. There he supervised several research students studying Irish history and he ran a special subject on the Anglo-Irish settlement which was taken by numerous students reading for Part II of the Historical Tripos.
In 1967 he was appointed editor-in-chief by the prime minister, Harold Wilson, of a multi-volume collection of documents from the India Office on the transfer of power to India in the 1940s. Two years later, he published one of his most important works, The Commonwealth Experience, and was elected Master of St. John's College, Cambridge. He served as Master until 1979, and continued there afterwards as a fellow, and he was also three times Visiting Professor at the Indian School of International Studies in New Dehli.
Mansergh's wife, Diana, edited two collections of his papers after her husband's death in 1991.
They had 5 children (Philip, Daphne, Martin, Nicholas and Jane). Martin is an Irish politician and historian.
A travel bursary at St. Columba's, his old school, was donated by him.
St. John's College awards an annual Mansergh Prize in his honor to the best short dissertation or essay (under 10,000 words) on history. [2]
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by None: new position |
Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History Cambridge University 1953 - 1970 |
Succeeded by Eric Thomas Stokes |
| Preceded by J. S. Boys Smith |
Master of St John's College, Cambridge 1969–1979 |
Succeeded by Francis Harry Hinsley |