Based on previously inaccessible sources, the present article offers an analysis of the American historian Brooks Adams' (1848-1927) influence on the Danish historian Erik Arup (1876-1951). Arup's distinction is largely derived from his ground-breaking and controversial History of Denmark, the two volumes of which were published in his lifetime (1925-32) and the third posthumously (1955). The work was notable for its materialistic approach. 

Brooks Adams was a younger brother of the noted historian, Henry Brooks Adams, and a fourth generation member of the famous Boston dynasty founded by the second president of the United States. His work, widely read in both America and Europe at the turn of the century, emphasized the paramount importance of precious metals and changes in trade routes in explaining the development of world history. 

Arup ran into Brooks Adams' work on a study trip to the British Library in the autumn of 1904. But even prior to that encounter, Arup was apparently already preoccupied with the significance of precious metals, e.g. in explaining the fall of Rome. In his later works Arup explains economic growth largely in monetary terms. In Adams' The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895) and The New Empire (1902) Arup found a welcome stimulus to his ideas on the primacy of precious metals and commerce over nationalist sentiment and intellectual currents as explanatory factors of historical development. Adams, moreover, buttressed Arup's notion that historical synthesis in the sense of an understanding of the whole could only be achieved on the basis of a materialist conception of history. 

Arup's doctoral dissertation from 1907: Studies in English and German Trade History: an Examination of the Practice and Theory of Commissioned Trade in English and German Commercial Life 1350-1850, would have brought him a position of distinction in the European historical profession, had the work been published in one of the main European languages. Practice (commerce) precedes and forms theory (commercial law). In other works from 1904 and 1918 Arup points to the need for further research on the mission of the Arabs in world history and on delineating the pattern of Far East trade (India and China). His work on the history of Denmark prevented him, however, from pursuing further research in the field of international commerce, including a study he had begun in 1908 on the English Levant Company's significance for east-west trade development. 

From his earliest youth Arup espoused radical ideas, and his History of Denmark placed him squarely on the left wing of liberalist thought. Against that back-ground, it is surprising to note that he took a favorable view of emergent American imperialism (the Spanish-American War in 1898, the acquisition of the canal zone in Panama in 1903) and the legitimacy of the trusts. In all likelihood this reflected the influence of Brooks Adams, who was a friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and a convinced believer in the destiny of the United States as a great power. In the contemporary dispute on bimetallism, Arup, in disaccord with Adams, endorsed the gold standard stance of Republican President William McKinley (1897-1901) against the populist silverite agitation of the Democrat, William Jennings Bryan. 

Arup defended his controversial conclusions on the level of synthesis by pointing to methodological differences between himself and his opponents. He discerned a difference between an older, German school of source criticism and a younger, more modern, French school. A 1918 statement by Arup has served to support the assumption that he was influenced by Charles Seignobos' and Charles Langlois' Introduction aux études historiques (Paris, 1898). The present article shows, however, that Arup, by 1904 at the latest, had also studied Seignobos' La méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales (Paris, 1901) and that he was particularly taken up with the concept of histoire commune. 

Finally, the article portrays the young Arup in the contemporary milieu of Danish historians. 

Translated by Michael Wolfe