Following on from that assumption, was the assumption that the richer you were, the more influence you had. The assumption was that the House of Lords was really more important than the House of Commons and that great aristocrats like the Russells and the Bedfords controlled in effect large numbers of MP clients.
And so I was guided by these two – although you can hardly call Trevor-Roper’s hand a ‘guiding’ one, as I saw him three times altogether in my doctoral research.Īt that point everybody, not only Trevor-Roper but also Lawrence Stone, his great adversary, was into problems of patronage much of the ideology at that point had been leached out of English history. I was interested in the 16 th and 17 th century more for literary and emotional reasons than for theoretical, historiographical reasons. Prestwich thought that Trevor-Roper would be a good supervisor for a 16 th/17 th century subject and at that stage, that’s the period I wanted to work on. And Hugh Trevor-Roper had been in Army intelligence during the war, so they knew each other in that way. John Prestwich had been a Bletchley de-coder during the war or, at least, he had received the de-coded messages and had interpreted them. I wanted to be a research historian and I was offered a subject by my tutor at Queen’s, John Prestwich and a supervisor, Hugh Trevor-Roper who later on of course became notorious amongst Africanists… Īnd that was all done through British intelligence. What were the influences were on you then?
I’d like to start with where you started, as a professional historian with a doctoral research project. Thank you very much Terry for responding to this request for an inteview. Professor Diana Jeater is the author of Law, Language & Science (Heinemann Social History of Africa series, 2007), and is currently Visiting Fellow at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.
Once again, Ranger found himself aligned with the victims of the state.Īn article based on this interview, focusing on the theory and methodology in Ranger’s work, and asking what we can learn from his career about how to produce ‘relevant’ history, will appear in HWJ 73. During this time, it became clear that the nationalist government in independent Zimbabwe had carried out systematic atrocities against the citizens of western Zimbabwe. On his retirement in 1997, he returned to Zimbabwe to bolster the postgraduate provision in the History Department at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare. It was during his time at Manchester that he worked on The Invention of Tradition: he continued to worry away at questions about the construction of identity and the invention of tradition through much of the 1990s in Oxford. From Tanzania, Ranger went on Professorships at UCLA (African History, 1969-74), Manchester (Modern History, 1974-87) and Oxford (Rhodes Professor of Race Relations (1987-97).
There was quickly talk of a ‘Dar es Salaam school’ of African nationalist history, defined by a commitment, firstly, to African agency in its historical analysis and, secondly, to the production of ‘useable’ history for the newly independent nations of Africa. There, he gathered around him a stellar coterie of researchers, including Walter Rodney, the Guyanese radical and outstanding scholar of African-American history. He went on to the University of Dar es Salaam in newly-independent Tanzania, to establish its History Department.
Consequently, in January 1963, Ranger was deported from Rhodesia. In Rhodesia, Ranger and his wife Shelagh became very active campaigners opposing the institutionalised discrimination against black Africans. In 1957, following doctoral work at Oxford on Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, Ranger went to Southern Rhodesia, to the University College of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, to teach Early Modern and Late Mediaeval British and European history. However, he has spent most of his career researching and publishing on the history of Zimbabwe (previously Southern Rhodesia and, in the 1960s and 1970s, simply called Rhodesia). Terence Ranger is best known as the co-editor, with Eric Hobsbawm, of the 1983 text, The Invention of Tradition. This is the transcript of four and a half hours of interview with Terence Ranger, across two sessions, carried out by Diana Jeater for History Workshop Journal in late 2009.