Thomas Lionel Hodgkin (1910-1982) was a historian of African history. He spent time in Palestine, in a cadetship in the Palestine civil service, which made him very aware of the nature of Western and British imperialism. After he resigned, he wanted to stay to observe the aftermath of the April 1936 Arab uprising but was made to leave by the British administration. He returned to Britain in 1936 and joined the London Library and the Communist Party. He met his wife, Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin, in 1937 when she was in London to photograph insulin at the Royal Institute.
He worked for the Workers’ Educational Association in north Staffordshire and, in September 1945, he became secretary of the Oxford University delegacy for extra-mural studies which took him to the Gold Coast and Nigeria in 1947. This began his interest in African history, and he wrote for West Africa on the background to African nationalism. After leaving the delegacy in 1952, he travelled extensively in Africa. He published his book Nationalism in Colonial Africa in 1956, before turning to the subject of Islam in Africa. He worked in several universities in America and Canada, and became director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana in 1962. He became a senior research fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, and lecturer in the government of new states in 1965, where he supervised students from many countries. He published several books during his life, including Perspectives (1960), African Political Parties (1961), and Vietnam: The Revolutionary Path (1981). He also wrote an unpublished novel titled ‘Qwert’.
The archive comprises: Academic papers, including lecture notes and papers on African history; correspondence, including from his family and wife, D.M.C. Hodgkin; literary papers including unpublished novels; and personal papers.