Sarah Stockwell is Professor of the History of Empire and Decolonization in the Department of History. She was an undergraduate at Girton College Cambridge and a postgraduate student at Linacre College Oxford, where her studies were funded by the British Academy and the ESRC. She was also awarded a University of Oxford Beit Scholarship in Imperial and Commonwealth History, a Bryce Studentship in History and a Linacre College Domus studentship. Between completing a Master of Studies at Oxford in 1988 and commencing her DPhil in History in 1989, she worked as an archive assistant at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, cataloguing the papers of William Wilberforce. She joined King's College London in 1992 as Lecturer in Imperial and Commonwealth History, completing her DPhil the following year. She worked part-time on a family-friendly flexible-working contract from 2002 before resuming full-time employment at King’s in September 2017. She was promoted to become a professor in 2015. Her second monograph was funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Her research focuses on the history of British colonialism, decolonization and development.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Much of Sarah’s research has focused on how different sectors and institutions within Britain – from business, to finance, to the Church of England, and universities - engaged with the process of decolonization. This theme is the subject of two books, as well as of various articles and chapters. In The Business of Decolonization: British Business Strategies in the Gold Coast (Oxford, 2000), Sarah analysed the experience and response of British business operating in the mercantile, mining and banking sectors to the end of British colonial rule in Ghana. She argued that British companies and business associations adopted various lobbying, labour, public relations, and intelligence-gathering strategies to deal with the challenges this transition presented. The book also explored the firms’ relations with the colonial and UK governments. The British End of the British Empire published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press built on this earlier work but shifted focus from business to a range of other institutions that had acquired roles within Britain’s imperial system: the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Bank of England, the Royal Mint and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Through this series of case studies. the book considers the impact of the end of empire on Britain, and the ways in which Britain managed its transition from colonial power to postcolonial nation. She shows how these institutions fashioned new roles at the end of empire, reconfiguring their activities for a postcolonial world and deploying their expertise to deliver technical assistance to new Commonwealth states. The book adopts a novel approach to the history of the British end of the British Empire and also illuminates the British role in overseas institution-building during decolonization. Separately, Sarah has also researched the Church of England and decolonization, exploring its experience, involvement in, and response to colonial political change in general, as well as in several specific locations. This research has been published in chapters and articles, including in the Oxford History of Anglicanism, and is the subject of further work still in progress.

A second, but related strand to Sarah’s research is the history of colonial and postcolonial development that dates back to her role as a co-editor with S.R. Ashton of volume 1 in the British Documents on the End of Empire series, Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice, 1925-45 (HMSO, 1996) as well as her first book. Recently, this interest has led to a volume co-edited with Véronique Dimier on The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) which combines her interest in business and development by considering the ways in which the age of development presented the private sector with new opportunities while also shaping business policies. Her next book Rethinking Colonialism and Development, co-edited with Joseph Hodge and Miguel Jerónimo, to be published by De Gruyter in late 2026 also arises from this ongoing interest in the history of development, as do her current principal writing projects.

Alongside these more focused research projects, Sarah has written several synoptic articles on British decolonization, edited a one-volume history of British imperialism, The British Empire. Themes and Perspectives (Blackwell, 2008), and co-edited two further books as well as an anthology of articles on colonial and imperial history: (with Robert Holland), Ambiguities of Empire. Essays in Honor of Andrew Porter (Routledge, 2009); (with L.J. Butler), The Wind of Change. Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and The Rise and Fall of Modern Empires, Volume III: Economics and Politics (Ashgate, 2013).

Sarah has successfully supervised many research students working on aspects of the history of colonialism and decolonization.

Teaching

Sarah Stockwell convenes a range of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level on Britain and Empire and on decolonization. She also teaches on other modules on modern world history. 

Expertise and public engagement

Sarah has contributed to workshops, conferences and seminars, delivered public lectures and recorded podcasts and other media interviews relating to her research. She is one of the convenors of the World and Imperial History Seminar at the IHR and of the Sandbjerg Summer School in Global History.  

Selected publications 

• Co-edited with Véronique Dimier, The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
• The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)Co-edited with L.J. Butler
• The Wind of Change. Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
• The British Empire. Themes and Perspectives (Blackwell, 2008)
• The Business of Decolonisation. British Business Strategies in the Gold Coast (Oxford University Press, 2000)