George Shepperson


George "Sam" Albert Shepperson was a British historian and Africanist, noted particularly for his work on Malawian and African-American history. He was William Robertson Professor of Commonwealth and American History at the University of Edinburgh from 1963 until 1986. He was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1989.

Early life and career

George "Sam" Shepperson was born in Peterborough, then part of Northamptonshire, in 1922, the son of a fitter. He was educated at the King’s School, Peterborough, and read History and English at St John's College, Cambridge. He completed his Certificate of Education after his war service. He was commissioned in the Northamptonshire Regiment in February 1943, with the service number of 264651, and was on secondment to the King's African Rifles from 1943 to 1946 as an officer in the 13th Battalion, stationed in Kenya, Tanganyika, Ceylon, India and Burma. While stationed in East Africa, he developed his interest in British imperial history and Africa.
Shepperson began work teaching Imperial and American History at the University of Edinburgh in 1948 and was appointed to the William Robertson Chair in 1963, and retired in 1986. He had been a visiting professor at Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago, Rhode Island College, what is now Makerere University and Dalhousie University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of York in 1987 and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University 1986–87. In 1990 he was named a Fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland.
Shepperson was a pathbreaking historian of the African Diaspora, the history of the African peoples and their spread across the world and was awarded the "Distinguished Africanist" award in 2007 from the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom. His research specialism was Malawian history, but he also wrote on African-American history and black British history was one of the first scholarly works on African history and was widely read by African nationalists after its publication. Shepperson provided an account of his life as an Africanist historian as a contribution to The Emergence of African History at British Universities: An Autobiographical Approach.
He was awarded the CBE in 1989 as chairman of the Scottish Committee of the Commonwealth Institute.

Selected publications