Victor Kiernan was a polymath. He wrote poetry. Castanets, an early book of verse by him, appeared in 1941. He translated the Urdu poems of the Punjabi writers Iqbal and Faiz. He was an authority on science fiction. He wrote on Marxist theory. He produced studies of English literature. He published books on a wide range of historical topics. Throughout his life he remained particularly fascinated by Europe’s contacts with the wider world and devoted much of his work to unmasking those relationships.

Edward Victor Gordon Kiernan — the Edward largely disappeared in later years — was born in 1913 at Ashton-on-Mersey into an active and patriotic Congregationalist family. His father, a talented linguist, worked as foreign correspondent for the Manchester Ship Canal Company. His son attended Manchester Grammar School and, after winning three scholarships, proceeded in 1931 to Trinity College, Cambridge. He first ventured into print there with Fragments on a Carpet which appeared in Trinity Magazine in the summer of 1933. He graduated the following year with a double-starred first in history and secured a four-year fellowship.

At Cambridge, during the politically tumultuous interwar years, Kiernan became increasingly absorbed in Marxism. As a result, he joined the Communist Party in 1934 — he left it in 1959 — and during his student days came into contact with two people who were to exercise a profound influence on his outlook. One of these was John Cornford, who was killed soon afterwards in the Spanish Civil War, and on whom he wrote a memoir in 1938. The other was James Klugmann, later a key figure in the British Communist Party — they lived quite close to each other in college in Whewell’s Court annexe, with A. E. Housman as a near neighbour. At this time, in pursuing his politics, Kiernan became involved with the university’s Indian students and in 1938 he decided to travel to the sub-continent “to see the political scene at first hand and with some schemes for historical study”. Among his possessions he carried a Comintern document intended for the Indian Communist Party.

This journey was a significant step in his life. India occupied him for the next eight years. He taught at a Sikh school and Aitchison College, Lahore. He also continued with his writing. Literary, political and historical pieces all appeared at this time, including in 1940 his Confessions of an English Sugarcane Eater. Soon after he arrived in India he married Shanta Gandhi, a political activist and classical dancer whom he had met in London in 1938.

Kiernan stayed in India until July 1946. By then his marriage had broken down, though he was not divorced until 1951. On his return to England he hoped for a permanent academic post that would enable him to write a Marxist account of Shakespeare. He went back to Trinity but lacked tenure there and in the suspicious climate of the Cold War his politics told against him when he applied for other positions — an experience he shared with several Marxist scholars.

Eventually, and largely due to the influence of Richard Pares, who had been impressed by his 1939 book on China, British Diplomacy in China 1880-1885, he was appointed to a lectureship at Edinburgh in 1948 and joined what he called as “a large and sparkling history department”.

His first substantial study after his return was a monograph on the 1854 Spanish Revolution. Thereafter, his pace quickened and, drawing on his omnivorous reading, he wrote innumerable review articles commenting sagely and judiciously on the writings of other scholars. But he had always wished to write a book that would last across the generations, and arguably he did so in 1969 with The Lords of Human Kind, a study of European attitudes towards the outside world in the age of imperialism. Here was a canvas where he could display his vast learning. The following year he was appointed to a personal chair.

Throughout his days in Edinburgh he continued with his political activities. He had begun an involvement with the important Communist Party Historians’ Group in 1946, which counted Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, John Saville and E. P. Thompson among its contributors. He continued with it until 1956. After the Korean War he also participated in the Britain-China Friendship Association.

His university work took up a great deal of his time. He has been recalled as both “a kindly teacher” and “an austere lecturer” and carried a heavy teaching load, committing himself to undergraduate and postgraduate work as well as extramural activities. Moreover, recognising his encyclopaedic knowledge, academic journals often invited him to act as referee. He read a good deal on this account, particularly for Past and Present, of which he was a board member between 1973 and 1983. Then in 1977, to some dismay in Edinburgh, the “lad o’pairts” decided to take early retirement in order, as he put it, “to catch up on his writing”.

America, The New Imperialism appeared in 1978. He also wrote on state and society in early modern Europe and that book was followed by European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815 to 1960 (1982). He then turned his attention to The Duel in European History (1988). Tobacco: A History appeared in 1991. The 1990s also brought the publication of his Colonial Empires and Armies 1815-1960 as well as two books on Shakespeare and Horace, Poetics and Politics (1999).

After his retirement several volumes of his collected essays appeared, perhaps most notably Poets, Politics and the People (1989), which contained his passionate essay On Treason. It is a volume which shows him working at his fullest intellectual stretch.

Much of this more recent scholarship appeared after his marriage in 1984 to Heather Massey. She, he would remark, helped to reinvigorate him intellectually. Their relationship took him from his long-held base, a flat in Nelson Street, Edinburgh, to Stow in the Scottish Borders, where he spent the rest of his life.

Manchester, one of Britain’s most cosmopolitan cities, had drawn him early on to an interest in other cultures. Cambridge too, acted as an important influence. It set him on his political path and it brought Marxism into his life. It also introduced him, through the students he met there, to India. And his time in that country, which remained closer to his heart than any other, significantly influenced how he came to view European imperialism. All these influences and interests he gleaned on his journey came to fruition in his work at Edinburgh and immediately after his retirement. He was one of Britain’s foremost historians working in the Marxist tradition.

He is survived by his wife, Heather.

Professor Victor Kiernan, historian, essayist, poet and translator, was born on September 4, 1913. He died on February 17, 2009, aged 95