Millman, Brock 1963-

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MILLMAN, Brock 1963-

PERSONAL: Born 1963. Education: Attended University of Western Ontario, London University, and McGill University.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Frank Cass, Crown House, 47 Chase Side, London N14 5BP, England.

CAREER: Historian and educator. University of British Columbia, Banff, BC, Canada, former lecturer in history; instructor at University of Windsor and Royal Military College; University of Western Ontario, currently professor of history.

WRITINGS:

The Ill-made Alliance: Anglo-Turkish Relations, 1934-1940, McGill-Queen's University Press (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1998.

Managing Domestic Dissent in First World War Britain, 1914-1918, Frank Cass (London, England), 2000.

Pessimism and British War Policy, 1916-1918, Frank Cass (London, England), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: An historian with a focus on British policy in the early Twentieth century, Brock Millman published The Ill-made Alliance: Anglo-Turkish Relations, 1934-1940 to challenge the historical consensus that Turkey was a reluctant alliance partner during World War II. According to Millman, it was Turkey that wanted closer relations with Britain, and the British who missed an opportunity through negligence and a lack of imagination, ultimately letting the alliance collapse in 1939-40, producing Turkish neutrality in World War II.

Millman's 2000 work looks back to World War I and focuses on a little-known aspect of that war. In Managing Domestic Dissent in First World War Britain, Millman uses recently uncovered documents to explore trade union unrest, the role of the courts and censorship, and the British government's contingency plans for controlling dissent, particularly violent opposition. "He has consulted a wide variety of manuscript repositories and has presented a solid piece of research to show that one of the war's chief victims was the liberty of the subject," concluded a Contemporary Review contributor. Not all were convinced. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Keith Jeffrey questioned Millman's "rather lurid picture of well-organized and increasingly revolutionary 'dissent' posing a challenge to the state." Similarly, David Woodward in the Journal of Military History wrote that the absence of concrete evidence for some of the contingency plans did pose some problems. Still, he concluded "this work deserves a careful reading from anyone interested in World War I in general and British history in particular. The research in the available sources is exceeding thorough and the writing lucid."