Colin White, who died in June 2023, will be remembered by his contemporaries at Emanuel for his outstanding academic and sporting achievements, including membership of the school’s First XV. On leaving Emanuel, he went up to Cambridge University, where, despite having gained entry as a Classicist, his first degree (1962-66) was in History (Part One) and Economics (Part Two).
He stayed on at Cambridge, working as a research student and tutor at Pembroke College until 1972. The focus of his research was Soviet planning techniques, for which he learned Russian and in pursuit of which, in 1968-69, he spent a year as an exchange student at Leningrad University.
Colin’s first full-time academic post was as a Lecturer in the Centre of Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University College of Swansea (part of the University of Wales). He remained there for eight years until, in 1978, he moved with his family to La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, where he spent the next 30 years until his retirement in 2008.
Between 1992 and 1996 he was Head of two academic departments at La Trobe – Economic History and Economics – before securing promotion to full Professor in 1996. That same year he became the founding Head of the Graduate School of Management, in which role he travelled extensively in East and South-East Asia and worked relentlessly to establish an international reputation for the institution, eventually developing links with more than 100 universities throughout the world.
Colin had a formidable intellect and was a prodigious writer. In addition to many academic articles, he was the sole author of six major books and co-author of two more. His Strategic Management (2004) was widely and enthusiastically received, with one reviewer describing it as “one of the most comprehensive discussions of strategy written to date … a must read”. It was wholly characteristic of Colin’s ferocious work ethic and apparently inexhaustible energy that in retirement he continued to research and write, eventually publishing A History of the Global Economy: The Inevitable Accident (2018) – an astonishing tour de force and a true exemplar of “big history”.
These bare bones of Colin White’s professional life conceal a man with a voracious appetite for life in all its guises. He was married to Sandra (née Browne) for more than 55 years, and together they brought up their two daughters (Julia and Charlotte Anna) and a son (Daniel). After his retirement, he and Sandra acquired a taste for international travel and sea cruises, which took them to many parts of the world. But he remained a man of many parts. He never stopped reading, he loved music and cinema, ran marathons, sang in his church choir, and in retirement he even revisited some of the Latin authors he had first met at Emanuel more than half a century earlier.
On a personal note, Colin was my oldest friend, and, despite the ‘tyranny of distance’, we remained very close until his death. I visited him twice in Australia – on the second occasion, spending two months in Melbourne with my wife and daughter, Colin having engineered for me an appointment as Visiting Fellow at La Trobe. On several other occasions, he and Sandra stayed with us in Herts and Sussex, where the days always disintegrated into evenings of riotous laughter. Indeed, I never laughed so much as I did in Colin’s company. Until the end, his sense of humour and wit never left him. My most abiding memory of him is of unrestrained and loud laughter, as we recollected some incident of the distant past or commented wryly on some aspect of the contemporary human condition. For his family and for those of us fortunate to know him as a friend, he was one of the great enhancers of life.
R.F. (Bob) Ash (OE1955-62)
Emeritus Professor, SOAS University of London