A Three-Cornered Life

W.K. Hancock (1898–1988) was once thought Australia's most distinguished historian and, indeed, also one of Britain’s. Today that is not so in either country. In Oxford, where he was a Prize Fellow of All Souls and later Chichele Professor of Economic History, people now struggle to remember him. Yet he was a historian of immense range (or ‘span’ as he would have called it). His first published work was on Ricasoli, Cavour's political fixer in Tuscany and a future prime minister of Italy (1926). In 1930 he wrote Australia, a book immensely influential in Australia itself, and then in the late 1930s the two-volume Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs (1937 and 1940), much of it based on personal observation. There were the series of Civil Histories of Britain in the Second World War which he edited and to which he contributed one of the most important volumes (with Margaret Gowing), The British War Economy (1949). In the 1960s he wrote the more or less official two-volume biography of Jan Smuts (1962 and 1968; rev. ante, lxxix [1964], 803–5 and lxxxiv [1969], 879–80), and in 1972 Discovering Monaro, a pioneering study of the impact of European land management on the Monaro, a region of southern New South Wales not far from Canberra, where Hancock finally settled. He was also a student of Italian Renaissance political thought, especially Machiavelli, and intended to write (though never did) a study of the state which he called the ‘Moloch’. There were, in addition, innumerable essays and articles, lectures and book reviews, and two volumes of semi-autobiography

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