Following history’s paper trail, she wrote about the failures of diplomacy and the period between the world wars. Zara S. Steiner, who wrote deeply researched books on the origins of World War I and the period between the world wars, adding new layers to the standard discussions of diplomacy and its shortcomings, died on Feb. 13 at her home in Cambridge, England.
She was 91. Her son, David, said the cause was pneumonia. Dr. Steiner was unusual not only because she was a woman in a male-dominated field but also because she was an American whose writing largely centered on Britain.
She was married to the essayist and scholar George Steiner, who spent much of his career at Cambridge University. He died 10 days before she did. Dr. Steiner dug into the letters and other papers of civil servants and interviewed prominent and not-so-prominent historical players to flesh out the picture of how momentous events were shaped.
Her books looked not just at the standard official documents, but at how unheralded staff members, public opinion and more propelled history. In a tribute on Twitter, the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of War at King’s College, London, called her “one of the leading international historians of the 20th century. ” Zara Alice Shakow was born on Nov. 6, 1928, in New York City to Joseph and Frances (Price) Shakow.
Her father ran a shop that provided gear and supplies to explorers. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1948, then went to Oxford University, taking a master’s degree in history. Studying under the historian A. J.
P. Taylor, she became interested in the First World War and its origins. Historians, in dissecting the period, had generally relied on the dispatches and telegrams between the British foreign secretary and ambassadors and ministers abroad, but Dr. Steiner found those documents of limited value.
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“In the end, the material raised more questions than it definitively answered,” she wrote in “Beyond the Foreign Office Papers: The Making of an International Historian,” an autobiographical essay published in 2017 in the International History Review. “The reader still knew very little about how the decisions recorded in these dispatches were reached. ” She went to Cornwall House in London, site of the British Foreign Office library, and asked the librarian, C. H.
Fone, if any archival material from staff officers existed. “He took me into a very dusty room and opened cabinets that had clearly not been cleaned for decades,” she wrote. “Out fell, along with bound volumes, packets of papers, tied up in pink ribbon, which dropped on to the floor as well as envelopes of pictures covered in dust. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, ‘you had better have a look.
’” “That,” she added, “was how I began as a researcher. ” It would be some years before that research resulted in her first major book, “The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898-1914,” published in 1969. First came her marriage to Mr.
“Steiner in 1955, when he was working for The Economist; a Ph.”
D. in history at Harvard (after Mr. Taylor declined to take her on as a Ph. D.
candidate); and the birth of two children. “The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy” examined the story behind the usual story of the path to World War I. “I have tried,” she wrote in the preface, “to analyze the actual work and underlying stance of those men who began as clerks, exercising influence within a narrow, often traditional bureaucratic radius, and who, by the time world war began, had won a permanent place in the conception of British foreign affairs. ” Her work on that book only made her more curious about what archival materials were out there waiting to be examined.
“By this time,” she wrote in the 2017 essay, “I knew there were collections of papers in private hands that might be worth consulting. Nothing, I felt, would be lost by contacting families except a confirmation of the stereotype of the pushy American. So I began a tour of some of the great houses of England. ” She also conducted numerous interviews of historical figures, and was sometimes brought up short by their reaction to her.
In the essay, she mentioned her first encounter with Owen O’Malley, a retired diplomat. “As I walked in,” she wrote, “he looked at me and said, ‘An American, a woman and a Jew writing about the Foreign Office. It should not be allowed. ’” But, she noted, they became friends, and he gave her access to many of his papers.
In 1977 Dr. Steiner published “Britain and the Origins of the First World War. ” “In her previous book, ‘The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898-1914,’ she displayed a complete grasp of the political machinery she discussed,” a review in The Economist said. “Here she ranges more widely and displays still deeper understanding of how people act.
This is coupled with a refreshing readiness to admit, now and again, that important questions have not yet been resolved. ” Dr. Steiner was later asked to contribute a volume to the Oxford History of Modern Europe series. “I had my doubts whether I could deal with such a large canvas,” she said in the essay.
The project, covering the years between the world wars and researched for years, grew from one book to two. The first volume, “The Lights That Failed,” appeared in 2005. “Any reader who wants to understand the interwar period should consult this book, and any serious student of the period should buy it,” Piers Brendon wrote in a review in The Independent of London. “For there is simply nothing to compare with it in terms of erudition or exposition.
” The second volume, “The Triumph of the Dark,” was published in 2011. “Those who have had enough of armchair generals will turn with relief to Zara Steiner’s ‘The Triumph of the Dark,’ which completes her two-volume history of international relations between the wars,” Jonathan Sumption wrote in The Spectator. “It is not light reading. But it is one of those masterpieces of exact scholarship, conceived on a vast scale, which will remain the standard work on the subject for many years.
” In addition to her son, Dr. Steiner is survived by a daughter, Deborah Steiner, and two grandchildren. When she took stock of her career in 2017, Dr. Steiner acknowledged that the demands of historical scholarship had changed in ways she could not fully assess.
“What I am unable to do is to begin to understand and explain how Twitter and Facebook are changing twenty-first century diplomacy and the effects of the digital revolution on the work of the diplomatic establishment,” she wrote. “Different questions will have to be asked and answered,” she continued, “without the dockets with minutes and the many other parts of the paper trail that have entranced me from that moment when that Pandora’s box (or cupboard) opened in Cornwall House.
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