David Steele (1934 – 17 June 2019) was a British historian at the University of Leeds who focused on nineteenth-century British political history.'Dr David Steele' (2 July 2019), University of Leeds website. Retrieved 18 April 2021.
Academic career Steele taught briefly at University College Dublin before becoming a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Leeds. He remained at Leeds for 34 years until his retirement in 1999.
Steele's 1974 work on the Irish Land Acts, Irish Land and British Politics, grew out of his doctoral thesis. Michael Bentley ranked Steele's 1999 biography of Lord Salisbury with Andrew Roberts's work as the best guides to Salisbury's life.Michael Bentley, Lord Salisbury's World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 325. G. R. Searle said Steele's biography "brings out [Salisbury's] progressive impulses".G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 874.
Selected publications Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant-Right and Nationality, 1865–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography (London: University College London Press, 1999).
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