David Steele (historian)

David Steele (1934 – 17 June 2019) was a British historian at the University of Leeds who focused on nineteenth-century British political history.^[1]

Academic career

Steele taught briefly at University College Dublin before becoming a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Leeds. He remained at Leeds for 34 years until his retirement in 1999.^[1]

Steele's 1974 work on the Irish Land Acts, Irish Land and British Politics, grew out of his doctoral thesis.^[1] Michael Bentley ranked Steele's 1999 biography of Lord Salisbury with Andrew Roberts's work as the best guides to Salisbury's life.^[2] G. R. Searle said Steele's biography "brings out [Salisbury's] progressive impulses".^[3]

Selected publications

• Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant-Right and Nationality, 1865–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). ISBN 0521204216
• Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). ISBN 0521400457
• Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography (London: University College London Press, 1999). ISBN 1857283260