The elite group of Oxford and Cambridge professors of imperial history forms a natural unit for historiographical study. Oxford was the pioneer in the field, both with infrastructure (libraries and scholarships) as well as appointments. In 1905 the mining magnate Alfred Beit, shortly before he died, founded the Oxford professorship and a lectureship in colonial history. It was another generation before Cambridge had its first (partly) imperial chair. Thereafter there was considerable interpenetration between the two universities. Of the Oxford professors, Gallagher, Robinson, and Judith Brown came from Cambridge, while Oxford supplied Walker, Mansergh, Fieldhouse, Low, and Bayly to Cambridge. Only Gallagher held chairs in both universities. Although one could not claim that all the leading British historians of empire in the twentieth century were professors at either Oxford or Cambridge, many of them were.