Hugh Seton-Watson

Seton-Watson was one of the two sons of Robert William Seton-Watson, the activist and historian. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, graduating in 1938 with First Class Honours in 'Modern Greats' (Philosophy, Politics and Economics).

After working for the British Foreign Office in Belgrade and Bucharest at the start of the Second World War, Seton-Watson joined the British Special Operations Executive. Interned by the Italians after the fall of Yugoslavia to the Axis in 1941, Seton-Watson was repatriated to Britain and later posted to the British special forces in Cairo, where he remained until 1944. In January 1944, he moved to Istanbul, where he performed intelligence activities among the refugees coming from the Balkans.Stephen Dorril, MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, Touchstone, 2002 p.60

Seton-Watson wrote most of his first major work, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918–1941 in Cape Town while on his way from Italy to Britain after the fall of Yugoslavia, finishing it in Cairo during the battle of El Alamein in 1942.

In 1945 he was appointed praelector in politics at University College, Oxford. In 1951 he was appointed to the chair of Russian history at the University of London, where he remained until 1983,{{cite web |title=Hugh Seton-Watson |url=https://www.britannica.com/contributor/Hugh-Seton-Watson/2671 |website=Encyclopedia Britannica |access-date=23 March 2020 |language=en}} exercising a major influence over British and American understandings of Russia during the Cold War. He subsequently became the Professor Emeritus of Russian history.

Beginning in 1957 at Columbia University, he regularly visited institutions in the United States to lecture and conduct research.{{cite web |title=G. Hugh Seton-Watson. Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences |url=https://casbs.stanford.edu/people/g-hugh-seton-watson |website=casbs.stanford.edu |access-date=23 March 2020}} During a three-month fellowship, beginning in October 1984, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars he became ill with pulmonary problems and was admitted to Georgetown University Hospital where he died three weeks later.

After publishing The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855–1914 in 1952, Seton-Watson published his most famous work, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 in 1967. This became the standard history of late imperial Russia for a generation.{{cite journal |last1=Obolensky |first1=Dimitri |title=G.H.N.Seton-Watson.1916–1984 |journal=Proceedings of the British Academy |date=1987 |volume=LXXIII |pages=631–642 |url=https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/73p631.pdf |access-date=23 March 2020}}

Seton-Watson's Nations and States: an Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (1977) made a fundamental contribution to the study of nationalism,{{cite journal |last1=Shafer |first1=Boyd C. |title=Hugh Seton-Watson. Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. 1977. Pp. xv, 563. $25.00 |journal=The American Historical Review |date=1 October 1978 |volume=83 |issue=4 |pages=972–973 |doi=10.1086/ahr/83.4.972 |language=en |issn=0002-8762}} though later overshadowed by the success of Benedict Anderson's more theoretical Imagined Communities{{citation needed|date=March 2024}}.

The New York Times Book Review called him "the outstanding authority on the satellite countries of Eastern Europe".

Seton-Watson became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1969, received a DLitt from Oxford in 1974 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex in 1983. In the 1981 New Year Honours he was appointed CBE.

• Eastern Europe between the wars (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1945)
• Neither War Nor Peace: The Struggle for Power in the Postwar World (Frederick A. Praeger, 1960)
• The new imperialism: A background book (Bodley Head, 1961)
• Nationalism and communism: essays, 1946–1963 (Methuen, 1964)
• Nationalism old and new (Methuen, 1965)
• The Russian empire 1801–1917 (Clarendon, 1967) [https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.110576/2015.110576.The-Russian-Empire-1801-1917.pdf online]
• The 'sick heart' of modern Europe: the problem of the Danubian lands (University of Washington Press, 1975)
• The imperialist revolutionaries: trends in world Communism in the 1960s and 1970s (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1979.)
• Nations and states: an enquiry into the origins of nations and the politics of nationalism (Methuen, 1977)
• The imperialist revolutionaries (1979)
• Language and national consciousness (Oxford University Press, 1981)
• The making of a new Europe: R.W. Seton-Watson and the last years of Austria-Hungary. With Christopher Seton-Watson (Methuen, 1981){{cite journal |last1=Schroeder |first1=Paul W. |title=The Making of a New Europe: R. W. Seton-Watson and the Last Years of Austria-Hungary. Hugh Seton-Watson , Christopher Seton-Watson |journal=The Journal of Modern History |date=1 December 1981 |volume=53 |issue=4 |pages=756–758 |doi=10.1086/242406 |issn=0022-2801}}
• The decline of Imperial Russia 1855–1914 (Westview Press, 1985).
• The East European revolution (Westview Press, 1985){{cite journal |last1=Raymond |first1=Ellsworth |last2=Seton-Watson |first2=Hugh |title=Review of The East European Revolution |journal=American Slavic and East European Review |date=1952 |volume=11 |issue=2 |pages=153–154 |doi=10.2307/2491566 |jstor=2491566 |issn=1049-7544}}
• From Lenin to Khrushchev: the history of world communism (Westview Press, 1985)
• R.W. Seton-Watson and the Roumanians, 1906–20 (2 vols, Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, București, 1988)

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Category:1916 births

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Category:20th-century British historians

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