Tom Kemp

Tom Kemp (1921–1993) was a prominent Marxist economic historian and political theorist. He was influential in socialist and Trotskyist parties in the UK, and published several influential books on Marxist theory and economic development, in particular Theories of Imperialism which made an important contribution to assimilating globalisation into Marxist theory. Early life Kemp was born in Wandsworth, London, to a working-class family. He gained a scholarship to the grammar school Emanuel School and during his school years Kemp became involved with the Young Communist League (UK) and Communist Party of Great Britain. He was thrown out of the school Cadet Force for distributing communist literature about the Spanish Civil War. In 1939 he enrolled at the London School of Economics, breaking his studies after a year to serve in the Royal Navy as a rating in landing craft, participating on his 21st birthday in the Bruneval Raid and subsequently the Dieppe Raid. Towards the end of the war Kemp was stationed in liberated Marseille and met the Frenchwoman whom he married after the war. Kemp was a lifelong Francophile and wrote important texts on French economic history and the history of Stalinism in France. Kemp returned to his studies at LSE in 1946 and in 1950 joined the economics faculty of the University of Hull, where he taught for over 30 years.