Our People

Prof Ashley Jackson

Fellow, Visiting Fellow

Professor of Imperial and Military History at King’s College London

Ashley Jackson is Professor of Imperial and Military History at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy. He has published widely on aspects of British imperial history, with a special interest in the Empire during times of war and with regional specialisms in the history of Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Middle East. He has also written on the popular culture of the British Empire, the Empire’s built environment, and Winston Churchill, and has contributed entries to the Dictionary of National Biography. Current major projects include Superpower Britain: The Post-War Vision and Why it Didn’t Happen (co-authored with Andrew Stewart); ‘Beyond the Battlefield: The Impact of British and American Forces on Overseas Societies’; ‘Oxford and the Second World War; and Many Worlds at War, an edited collection looking at different countries’ experiences during the Second World War.

Jackson’s published books (as of October 2019) are:

Botswana 1939-1945: An African Country at War (Oxford University Press, 1999)
War and Empire in Mauritius and the Indian Ocean (Macmillan, 2001)
The British Empire and the Second World War (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2006)
Mad Dogs and Englishmen: A Grand Tour of the British Empire at its Height, 1850-1945 (Quercus, 2009)
Distant Drums: The Role of Colonies in British Imperial Warfare (Sussex Academic Press, 2010)
Churchill (Quercus, 2011)
Illustrating Empire: A Visual History of British Imperialism with David Tomkins (Oxford University/Bodleian Library, 2011)
The British Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Buildings of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2013)
The British Empire and the First World War, edited (Routledge, 2015)
An Imperial World at War: Aspects of the British Empire’s War Experience, 1939-1945, edited with Yasmin Khan and Gajendra Singh (Routledge, 2016)
Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq (Yale University Press, 2018)
Of Islands, Ports, and Sea Lanes: The Second World War in Africa and the Indian Ocean (Helion, 2018)
Ceylon at War, 1939-1945 (Helion, 2018)

Jackson joined the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London in 2004 after eight years as Research Fellow in the Humanities and Director of the Visiting Student Programme at Mansfield College, Oxford, and a brief spell as Lecturer in Imperial and Commonwealth History at Oxford Brookes University (he was appointed to the junior deanship of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, before withdrawing in favour of the Mansfield position). He completed his British Academy-funded master’s (1993) and doctorate (1996) at New College, Oxford, where he also served as Junior Dean. As a member of King’s Defence Studies Department, Jackson teaches at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, and spent two years as an academic tutor at the Royal College of Defence Studies. He also teaches for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education.