pursue postgraduate studies in anthropology, a position that also included some teaching. However, World War I interrupted his progress and he spent the next four years in France, in army intelligence. In 1919 he mustered out of the army having reached the rank of captain. Hocart then began what was to be a long exile from British academia to a series of posts in the British Empire. After a year-long study of Sanskrit, Tamil, Pāli, and Sinhalese he moved to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become the Archaeological Commissioner of Ceylon, where he oversaw the excavation and preservation of monumental architecture and other archaeological sites. With experience of the ancient Mediterranean, Polynesia and Melanesia, and South Asia now under his belt Hocart began publishing widely comparative studies on many topics, including that of Kingship. In 1925 Hocart suffered a bout of severe dysentery and returned to England to recover. By the late 1920s his poor health and politics within the colonial bureaucracy made Ceylon seem a poorer and poorer choice for him. He once again attempted (and failed) to obtain a position at Cambridge before finally retiring to England in 1929 on a pension. London to Cairo Beginning in 1931 Hocart served for three years as an Honorary Lecturer in Ethnology at University College London which allowed him to give classes occasionally. He applied to Cambridge once more – this time for the chair in social anthropology – but was again unsuccessful. In 1934 he moved to Cairo where he served as the Professor of Sociology, the only academic position he held in his life. Poor health dogged him and he died in 1939 after contracting an infection in the course of research in Egypt. A career admired Hocart's professional career took place at a time when British anthropologists were moving from an emphasis on diffusion and historical reconstruction to a more 'scientific' form of functionalism. Hocart's broad training and willingness to explore a wide variety of approaches produced work that was often poorly received by colleagues who repudiated past work in order to legitimize anthropology as a hard science. Interest in his work was revived in the 1960s when authors such as Lord Raglan, Rodney Needham, and Louis Dumont returned to Hocart's work as a source of theoretical inspiration. Today he is remembered for his ethnography of the Pacific and as an author whose work presaged the advent of