Thomas Lionel Hodgkin (3 April 1910, Headington Hill near Oxford – 25 March 1982, Tolo, Greece) was an English Marxist historian of Africa "who did more than anyone to establish the serious study of African history" in the UK.[1] His wife was the scientist Dorothy Hodgkin.
Thomas Lionel Hodgkin was born into an academic family. Named after his grandfather, the historian Thomas Hodgkin,[1] he was the son of Robert Howard Hodgkin, Provost of Queen's College, Oxford, and Dorothy Forster Smith, daughter of the historian Alfred Lionel Smith.[2] He was educated at Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford before using a demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford to travel, spending 1932-3 on John Garstang's archaeological dig at Jericho[1]. From 1934 to 1936 he was in the Palestine civil service, where he started to become critical of British imperialism. Resigning from the colonial service after the April 1936 Arab uprising, he hoped to stay in Palestine but was ordered to leave by the British administration.[2]
Returning to London, where he stayed with his father's cousin Margery Fry and joined the Communist Party, he briefly tried training as a schoolteacher before entering adult education. He met and married Dorothy Crowfoot in 1937. In 1939, declared ineligible for military service on medical grounds (he suffered from narcolepsy), Hodgkin became a Workers' Educational Association tutor in north Staffordshire. In September 1945 he became Secretary of the Oxford delegacy for extra-mural studies, and a Balliol fellow.[3] He first visited the Gold Coast in 1947, and became interested in African history as well as the contemporary problems of African nationalism. Befriending Kwame Nkrumah in 1951, he published a pamphlet for the Union of Democratic Control supporting independence for the Gold Coast.[2]
In 1952 Hodgkin left his Oxford job and travelled in Africa. After publishing Nationalism in Colonial Africa (1956), he became interested in Africa's Islamic history. He took part-time appointments at Northwestern University in Illinois and McGill University in Montreal, was joint secretary of a commission on reform of Ghana's universities, and in 1962 returned to Ghana for three years to head the new Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana. From 1965 until his 1970 retirement he was Lecturer in the Government of New States at Oxford University.[3]