Richard Drayton FRHistS (born 1964) is a Guyana-born historian and Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at Kings College London. He went to school at Harrison College in Barbados, from which he left as a Barbados Scholar to Harvard University. He was a graduate student at Balliol College, Oxford as the Commonwealth Caribbean Rhodes Scholar, and at Yale University, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Paul Kennedy. From 1992, he was a Research Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, returning to Oxford in 1994 to be Darby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Lincoln College, Oxford. After 1998, he was Associate Professor of British History at the University of Virginia. From 2001 to 2009, he was University Senior Lecturer in Imperial and extra-European History since 1500, and Director of Graduate Training of the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow, Tutor, and Director of Studies in History at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 2009, he was Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University.
Drayton is author of Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (Yale University Press, 2000), which received the Forkosch Prize of the American Historical Association in 2001 as the best book in British and British Imperial History (1999-2001).[1] In 2002 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History.[2] He is co-editor, with Megan Vaughan, of the scholarly book series Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies and sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
In 2010, he spoke on "Economic lies and cuts" at a student "occupation" at Cambridge University.[3]