George Shepperson Collection

George Shepperson was born in Peterborough, England in 1922. After studying history and English at Cambridge University, he was seconded as an officer to the King's African Rifles during the Second World War. Serving alongside African soldiers in Burma, he became interested in examining how war and slavery forged the African Diaspora. While stationed in East Africa, he became interested in how African communities were incorporated into the British Empire. These experiences bolstered his lifelong commitment to the study of Africa and its Diaspora.

Upon his return to the United Kingdom in 1948, Shepperson was appointed Lecturer in Imperial and American History at Edinburgh University. He was later awarded the position of William Robertson Professor of Commonwealth and American History (1963-1986). Throughout his career he focused specifically on British Central Africa (1891-1907) and Nyasaland (which became the independent state of Malawi in 1964), and on nineteenth century African-American life.

Shepperson is recognized as one of the founders of African, African Diaspora, and African American studies in Britain. He conducted pioneering studies of the relationships created among North America, Great Britain, and Africa through evangelism, war, and imperialism. Apart from training a new cohort of scholars who would become experts on these topics, he also secured the preservation of a number of important archival sources for future generations of historians.

Shepperson has held Visiting Professorships, Fellowships and Scholarships on both sides of the Atlantic and in Africa itself. Shepperson is a noted authority on Dr. David Livingstone, John Chilembwe, and Frederick Douglass. His key works include Independent African: John Chilembwe (1958), detailing an important anti-colonial uprising in Nyasaland, and David Livingstone and the Rovuma (1964), an account of Livingstone's troubled exploration of this tributary of the Zambezi River. These monographs, alongside his many contributions to edited volumes and journals, are regarded as seminal. In an edited volume entitled The Emergence of African History at British Universities: An Autobiographical Approach (1995, edited by Anthony Kirk-Greene), Shepperson provides an account of his life as an Africanist historian.