Name A. Hopkins | ||
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Books An economic history of, British Imperialism: 1688‑2000, British Imperialism: Crisis an, The future of the imperial p, Africa's Age of Improvement | ||
Antony "Tony" Gerald Hopkins, FBA (born 21 February 1938) is a British historian, specialising the economic history of Africa, European colonialism, and globalisation. He is Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, and an Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge.
Career
Anthony Gerald Hopkins was born on 21 February 1938, the son of George Henry Hopkins and his wife, Queenie Ethel née Knight. Following schooling at St Paul's School between 1953 and 1957, he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in History at the University of London, graduating in 1960. He then completed a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (1964), with a thesis entitled "An Economic History of Lagos, 1880–1914".
After completing his doctorate, Hopkins was employed as an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Birmingham; he was subsequently a Lecturer and then a Reader there, before his appointment in 1977 as a Professor of Economic History on the University's faculty. In 1988, he moved over to the University of Geneva to be Professor of History, an appointment which lasted until 1994, when he became Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge. From 2002 to 2013 he held the Walter Prescott Webb Chair of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he won the University 'Eyes of Texas' Teaching Award, and the College of Liberal Arts Student Council Teaching Award.
He received honorary doctorates from the University of Stirling (D. Univ.) in 1996 and the University of Birmingham (D. Litt.) in 2013. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996. In 2011, former students and colleagues presented him with a book of essays, edited by Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell, entitled Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins (Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC).
Hopkins is known for his extensive work on the history of Africa, empires, and globalisation. He has been an editor of both the Journal of African History and the Economic History Review. His principal works include An Economic History of West Africa (1973), and, with Peter Cain, British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (1993), which won the Forkosch Prize awarded by the American Historical Association in 1995 and is considered to be one of the most influential interpretations of British imperial expansion advanced in the last half century. His most recent work is a study of the United States written from the perspective of imperial history, entitled American Empire: A Global History (2017).