Geoffrey Parker (historian)

Noel Geoffrey Parker (born Nottingham, United Kingdom, 25 December 1943) is a British historian specializing in Spanish and military history of the early modern era. His best known book is Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1988. Parker is a fellow of the British Academy and holds his BA, MA, Ph.D. and Litt.D. degrees from Cambridge University where he studied under the historian Sir John Huxtable Elliott. Amongst the foreign honours he holds, he is a member of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise and was granted the Great Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic by the Spanish government. He has received honorary doctorates from the Catholic University of Brussels (Belgium) and the University of Burgos (Spain). Apart from the British Academy, he is also a fellow of the Spanish Real Academia de la Historia, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences since 2005.^[1] In 2012 he was awarded the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for History by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for his outstanding scholarship on the social, political and military history of Europe between 1500 and 1650, in particular Spain, Philip II, and the Dutch Revolt; for his contribution to military history in general; and for his research on the role of climate in world history.^[2]

Parker has taught at the University of Illinois, the University of St. Andrews and Yale University. He is currently the Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at The Ohio State University.

Parker was a consultant and main contributor on the BBC series, Armada: 12 days to save England.

Major works

Guide to the Archives of the Spanish Institutions in or concerned with the Netherlands (1556- 1706). Brussels, 1971. (Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique, numéro spécial 3).
The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659, Cambridge, 1972.
Military Revolution, 1560-1660 - A Myth?, The Journal of Modern History Vol. 48, No. 2, June 1976.
The Dutch Revolt, London, 1977.
Philip II, Boston and London, 1978.
Europe in Crisis, 1598-1648. Cornell U. Press, 1979.
(Editor) The Thirty Years' War. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
Western Geopolitical Thought in the Twentieth Century. London, 1985.
"Why the Armada failed", The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Vol. 1, No. 1, Autumn 1988.
Spain and the Netherlands, 1559-1659. Ten Studies, 2nd ed. Fontana, 1990.
(Joint editor) The Times History of the World, 3rd ed. London, 1995
The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, 2nd. Ed. Press Syndicate of U. of Cambridge, 1996.
(Joint editor) The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. Routledge, 1997.
The Grand Strategy of Philip II, 2000
(co-written with Robert Cowley) The Reader's Companion to Military History, 2001.
Felipe II: La biografía definitiva, Editorial Planeta, 2010.
Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.
Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014.