Alfons Dopsch (14 June 1868 in

Lobositz Lovosice (; german: Lobositz) is a town in Litoměřice District in the Ústí nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 8,600 inhabitants. It is an industrial town. Geography Lovosice is located about southwest of Litoměřice and s ...

, Bohemia – 1 September 1953 in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

) was an Austrian social and economic historian who specialised in the history of

medieval Europe In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...

. He studied at Institut fur Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung and was a professor at the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich h ...

, 1898-1936. Dopsch, using archaeological evidence, rejected the highly defined

periodization In historiography, periodization is the process or study of categorizing the past into discrete, quantified, and named blocks of time for the purpose of study or analysis.Adam Rabinowitz. It's about time: historical periodization and Linked Ancie ...

of other scholars in favour of an emphasis on long term continuity and gradual change. He argued that the collapse of the

Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post- Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Medite ...

in Western Europe was not as catastrophic as had previously been thought and that the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

had evolved in an orderly way as the Germans absorbed and developed

Roman culture The culture of ancient Rome existed throughout the almost 1200-year history of the civilization of Ancient Rome. The term refers to the culture of the Roman Republic, later the Roman Empire, which at its peak covered an area from present-day L ...

. These views were criticised by the Russian historian Alexander Udaltsov who argued that Dopsch over emphasised the presence of private land ownership and

social inequality Social inequality occurs when resources in a given society are distributed unevenly, typically through norms of allocation, that engender specific patterns along lines of socially defined categories of persons. It posses and creates gender c ...

among pre-feudal German clans. Some of his views have since been rejected by modern scholars but his work continues to represent an important perspective on the debate about the effects of the collapse of the empire on Western Europe.Dopsch, Alfons.
by Robert F. Forrest in Boyd, Kelly (Ed.) (1999) ''Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing''. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, p. 319.

Selected publications

* ''Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit'' (1912/13) * ''Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der europäischen Kulturentwicklung von Cäsar bis auf Karl den Großen'' (1918/20). 2nd ed., 1923-4. Abridged translation by

M. G. Beard Marian Gertrude Beard, known to friends as 'Barbula' Beard (1885-1958) was an Irish-born educator and translator, headmistress of Putney High School and Crofton Grange School. Life Beard was educated at Alexandra College, gaining a first clas ...

and Nadine Marshall as ''The Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization'', 1937. * "Die historische Stellung der Deutschen in Böhmen", in: Rudolph Lodgman, '' Deutschböhmen'', Ullstein & Co, Berlin (1919). * ''Naturalwirtschaft und Geldwirtschaft in der Weltgeschichte'' (1930) * ''Herrschaft und Bauer in der deutschen Kaiserzeit'' (1934)

References

External links

*http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Alfons+Dopsch 20th-century Austrian historians 1868 births 1953 deaths Academic staff of the University of Vienna Sudeten German people People from Lovosice Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America 19th-century Austrian historians {{Austria-historian-stub