Thomas Lionel Hodgkin

Thomas Lionel Hodgkin (3 April 1910 – 25 March 1982) was an English Marxist historian of Africa "who did more than anyone to establish the serious study of African history" in the UK. His wife was the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dorothy Hodgkin.

Thomas Lionel Hodgkin was born at Mendip House, Headington Hill, near Oxford. Named after his grandfather, the historian Thomas Hodgkin, 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.

Hodgkin was an exhibitioner at Winchester and from 1928 to 1932 a classics scholar at Balliol College, Oxford where he also held a Higgs Memorial scholarship in English. He obtained a Second in Classical Moderations in 1930 and a First in Literae Humaniores or "Greats" (philosophy and ancient history) in 1932.

A senior demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford, 1932–33, enabled him to travel; he spent the years on John Garstang's archaeological dig at Jericho. From 1934 to 1936 Hodgkin was in the Palestine civil service, for some time being a personal secretary to High Commissioner Wauchope. There, Hodgkin 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.

Returning to London, where he stayed with his father's cousin Margery Fry and joined the Communist Party, Hodgkin 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.

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