Over a three-decade career, my friend the historian Donald McRaild, who has died suddenly aged 60 after a short illness, held posts at the universities of Sunderland, Northumbria, Ulster and Roehampton, at the Victoria University of Wellington, and at London Metropolitan University, where he served as pro-vice-chancellor for research and innovation before his retirement in 2025. He also held honorary fellowships at Edinburgh and Ulster.
Don was, like many of the people he studied, peripatetic: in each institution he built circles of collaborators, reinvigorated history and humanities departments, and left lasting marks on all those who worked alongside him. Across his career, advancing social inclusion was the hallmark of everything he did, and everywhere he worked.
He produced groundbreaking research on Irish Catholic and Protestant immigration, which yielded books on the Irish in Britain, the Orange Order in Victorian and Edwardian England, and later the English diaspora in North America.
His other great intellectual passion was labour history, shaped by a deep admiration for the historian E P Thompson; he could quote The Making of the English Working Class (1963) like poetry. With David Martin he produced Labour in British Society, 1830–1914 (2000), and with Kyle Hughes a study of the secret agrarian Ribbon societies in 19th-century Ireland that he considered his finest work for the depth of its archival research. His last two books, on the great Irish famine and Irish pauperism in 19th-century Britain, appeared in 2023 and 2024 to deserved acclaim.
His most widely read work remains Studying History (2000), co-written with Jeremy Black, which has run to numerous editions and has become a staple of undergraduate skills courses: it showcased Don’s rare ability to explain both the theory and method of history at university level.
Born in Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria to Wendy (nee Ward) and Neil MacRaild, a pharmaceutical worker, Don went to Barrow grammar then Parkview schools before graduating with a history degree from Liverpool Polytechnic (now Liverpool John Moores) in 1989. He then did a PhD at Sheffield University (1993), with a thesis on Irish migrants in North Lancashire and Cumberland, becoming part of the “Sheffield school” of academics concentrating their studies on British immigration and ethnic history.
His thesis grew into his first book, and what followed was, as a colleague once put it, enough to make the rest of us look bad: 18 books, co-authored or edited, and nearly 50 articles and chapters.
During the early part of his career at Sunderland and Northumbria, Don was also a part-time tutor at the Open University. He was an exceptional PhD supervisor, and a master at forging research collaborations, winning grants, and mentoring colleagues at every stage of their careers. He was celebrated for his kindness, candour and convivial company.
On his retirement Don returned to his native Cumbria with his second wife, Connie (nee Haag), a journalist, whom he married in 2020.
She survives him, as do his children, Michael, Katie and Andrew, from his first marriage, to Lisa Bowler, which ended in divorce, his sister, Margaret, and his mother, Wendy.
