Mack Smith took a break from Cambridge to serve in
World War II, where he was attached to the British
Cabinet Office from 1942 to 1946. He returned to complete his degree in 1947. After graduating from Cambridge, Mack Smith taught at
Clifton College in
Bristol for one year. In 1946, Mack Smith spent an extended period in Italy researching archival material relating to
Sicily in 1860. He later recounted that he "passed entire months without talking to anyone” during this period. As Italy was still recovering from the second world war, people were throwing out books that had enjoyed favour during the fascist period. Mack Smith bought up vast amounts from street stalls and sent them back to England, thus forming the basis of a personal library that would aid his writing. During his visit, the philosopher
Benedetto Croce took the young Mack Smith in as protégé even though they had vastly different views on Mussolini, and Croce gave him access to the library of his house in
Naples. In later years, he entertained Italian scholars at his house near Oxford and gave them books from this extensive collection. His visit to Sicily was the basis for his two-volume work “A History of Sicily” (1968), written with
Moses Finley and
Christopher Duggan. He became a fellow at Peterhouse in 1947 and worked as a tutor and lecturer at Cambridge for fifteen years. In 1954, he published his landmark first book,
Cavour and Garibaldi: a Study in Political Conflict, which traced the origins of
fascism to the shortcomings of
Italian unification. Mack Smith challenged the traditional nationalist view of the period as one of heroic and unified struggle, instead portraying it as a series of political and social conflicts marked by rivalries among elites, tensions between church and state, and foreign interference. Using extensive documentary evidence, he depicted key figures such as
Camillo Benso,
Giuseppe Garibaldi and
Victor Emmanuel II in a critical light. The book was noted for overturning long-held orthodoxies in Italian historiography, with historian
David Gilmour stating that it “upset a well-defended orthodoxy that had been entrenched for almost a century.” Historian
Jonathan Steinberg stated that the book told Italians "what they did not want to hear". The best-selling book launched Mack Smith's career and became the standard English-language text on modern Italy. In 1961, he was elected to a Senior Research Fellowship at
All Souls College, Oxford, a position he held until he retired in 1987, and was an Emeritus Fellow until his death. He became a foreign honorary member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972 and was elected to a
Fellowship of the British Academy in 1976. Mack Smith published a study of Mussolini’s foreign policy the same year, followed in 1981 by a biography of the fascist leader. He authored an anthology of texts (
The Making of Italy 1796–1870), numerous essays and articles, and wrote highly acclaimed biographies of Count Cavour and
Giuseppe Mazzini, and a history of the
Monarchy of Italy. Mack Smith acted as public orator in
San Marino in 1982 before publishing
Modern Italy: a Political History in 1997 with
Yale University Press. He was elected to the
Royal Society of Literature and served as chairman of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy from 1987. Though his work on Italian history has been criticized by Italian academics, including
Rosario Romeo and
Renzo De Felice, since their first translations were published in the 1950s, Mack Smith remains the second best-selling author on Italian history after
Indro Montanelli. Other Italian academics were outraged over Mack Smith's refusal "to regard
Italian fascism and the rise of Benito Mussolini as an aberration". Mack Smith contended that one of the causes of Italian fascism was the structural weaknesses that existed in the Italian political system, a lasting "legacy of the Risorgimento". Others note of his oeuvre that he "remained obstinately English, sceptical, observant and sometimes bitingly ironic". Smith has been considered the world's leading scholar on Italian history for the English world. He belonged to the post-World War II generation of Cambridge historians, many
based at Peterhouse, who learned to appreciate the primacy of documentary evidence. He was an Honorary Fellow of
Wolfson College, Oxford, and received Italy's highest civilian honor in 1996. == Personal life ==