Peter Brock was born in 1920 on
Guernsey,
Channel Islands. Although he came from a military family, he rejected this tradition. While studying at
Exeter College, Oxford, he came under the influence of pacifist ideas, particularly those of
Bart de Ligt. During the
Second World War, he declared as a
conscientious objector and was briefly imprisoned. Brock later emigrated to Canada and settled there, working at the
University of Toronto from 1966. Brock's studies on pacifism included a trilogy of books,
Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War (1968),
Pioneers of the Peaceable Kingdom (1970), and
Twentieth-Century Pacifism (1970). The last book, appearing as the
Vietnam War protests had revived public interest in pacifism, was "a critical and popular success". By 1973, historian Robert Scharf said that "Professor Brock has become a recognised authority on pacifism in our Western civilization", while political scientist Martin Ceadel stated "[n]o ideology owes more to one academic than pacifism owes to Peter Brock. That the scope and richness of this historical tradition can now be recognized is largely the result of Brock's sympathetic and dedicated scholarship, which was begun when pacifism was an unfashionable subject." A revised edition of the third book,
Pacifism in the Twentieth Century was published in 1999 with Nigel Young. ==See also==