ABSTRACT
Ronald Max Hartwell is Emeritus Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford. He was born in 1921 in Glen Innes, nearly 500 miles from Sydney in the northern tablelands of New South Wales, Australia. He began his advanced education in Armidale, NSW, at the Teachers College and at New England University College, where he earned an external degree from the University of Sydney (B.A., 1945). Following Army service he continued at Sydney (M.A., 1948) and at Oxford (D.Phil., 1955; M.A., 1956). From 1950 to 1956 he was Professor of Economic History at the New South Wales University of Technology. He then returned to Oxford, where he was Reader in Recent Social and Economic History in the University and Professorial Fellow in Nuffield College (1956-77). After a further four years at Wolfson College, Oxford, he spent most of the next decade teaching alternately at the Universities of Chicago and Virginia, with occasional forays back to Australia to teach in Sydney at the Australian Graduate School of Management. While at Oxford he served in administrative positions at Nuffield and was a curator of the Bodleian Library. As Assistant Editor and Editor of The Economic History Review (1957-68), he encouraged submissions in the newly developing quantitative style while maintaining the journal’s breadth and diversity. In keeping with his classical liberal principles, he became a member of The Mont Pelerin Society in 1972, served as its President (1992-4), and published a history of the Society in 1995. He has lived in or near Oxford since his retirement in 1991. The interview took place in Oxford in October 2000 and was conducted by M T of the University of Virginia, who writes:
I have known Max Hartwell for more than 30 years. He was my undergraduate tutor for two economic history courses at Oxford. We were later colleagues (Max in economics, I in history) at the University of Virginia. Max has the distinct honor of having been feted with two Festschriften: The Industrial Revolution and British Society, edited by Patrick
O’Brien and Roland Quinault (1993) and Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of R. M. Hartwell, edited by John A. James and myself (1994).
