Eric Anderson Walker (6 September 1886 – 23 February 1976) was an English historian who served as King George V Professor of History at the University of Cape Town and Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge.
[1] He was a pioneer in writing the history of South Africa and later an important historian of the British Empire, though by the end of his life his work was seen as dated and Eurocentric.
[1] He began his education at Mill Hill School, followed by a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, from where he graduated in modern history with a first class (1908).
[3] He was also an accomplished biographer, writing the lives of Lord Henry de Villiers, the former chief justice of the Cape Colony (1925) and W.P.
[1][3] In 1930, Walker gave an influential lecture in Oxford, printed as The frontier tradition in South African history (Oxford University Press, London, 1930), in which he outlined his theory that the origins of the apartheid system in South Africa lay in conflict between blacks and whites on the frontier regions in the nineteenth century which was then imported into the interior where it was institutionalised in the constitutions of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic.
[4] Walker's theory owed much to Frederick Jackson Turner and The Oxford History of Historical Writing described him as "in some respects the George Stanley of South Africa".
[2] He was a captain in the Cape Garrison Artillery, but left due to cardiac ailments from lifting of heavy ammunition.