Emil Reich

Emil Reich (24 March 1854 – 11 December 1910) was a Hungarian-born historian of a Jewish family who lived and worked in the United States and France before spending his final years in England.

Will Johnston has called Reich "a flowering of Hungarian improvisation" and "an unduly neglected English-language essayist". Reich's work, while lively, often fell down on detail and completeness. He loved paradox.

Early life According to Johnston, Reich was a Roman Catholic "born at Eperjes in today's Slovakia" (then part of the Austrian Empire). Other writers say he was Jewish.

The son of Louis Reich, the young Reich was educated at schools at Eperjes and at Kassa (then in Hungary, now in Slovakia) before taking a series of degrees at the universities of Prague, Budapest, and Vienna, where he graduated as a Doctor of Laws (Doctor Juris Universi). In his lectures on "Fundamental principles of evidence" and in The Failure of the Higher Criticism of the Bible (1905), Reich disputed the methodology of biblical criticism. His Hungarian Literature (1897) was very successful and went into a second edition in 1906. In his A General History of Western Nations from 5000 BC to 1900 AD (1908), Reich emphasised the geopolitical, economic, and environmental aspects of history, and indeed he was one of the first writers to use the term "geopolitical" in English.

Germany's Swelled Head was followed by the more academic Handbook of Geography, Descriptive and Mathematical and Woman through the Ages, both published in 1908.

Reich died in the winter of 1910 after a long illness and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. At the time of his death he was living in Notting Hill with his wife and one daughter.

Works Graeco-Roman Institutions, from Anti-evolutionist Points of View (1890) Foundations of Modern Europe (1904) Success Among Nations (1904) Imperialism: Its Prices; Its Vocation (1905) The Failure of the 'Higher Criticism' of the Bible (1905) A General History of Western Nations from 5000 BC to 1900 AD (1908) Woman Through the Ages (1909)