Richard Drayton

Last updated

Richard Drayton

FRHS
Born1964 (age 58–59)
Guyana
Occupation(s) Historian and academic
Parent(s)Kathleen (née McCracken) and Harold Drayton
Awards Philip Leverhulme Prize
Academic background
Education Harrison College
Alma mater Harvard University
Balliol College, Oxford
Yale University
Doctoral advisor Paul Kennedy

Richard Drayton FRHistS (born 1964) is a Guyana-born historian and Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London.

Contents

Biography

Early years and education

Richard Drayton was born in Guyana in 1964, to parents Kathleen (née McCracken; 1930–2009) and Harold Drayton (1929–2018), [1] [2] and grew up in Barbados, where he migrated with his family in 1972. [3] He went to school at Harrison College in Bridgetown, 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. [4]

Academic career

From 1992, Drayton 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. 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, in 2012 at the Institute of World History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in 2013 he was Professeur Invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and in 2015 was Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Advanced Research Colloquium of the City University of New York. [5] He was a Gresham College lecturer for 2019–2020. [6]

Other activities

In November 2010, he spoke on "Economic lies and cuts" at a student "occupation" organised by Cambridge Defend Education [7] at Cambridge University, suggesting that austerity policies were unnecessary in Britain where the percentage of GDP going to servicing the National Debt when David Cameron and George Osborne came to power in May 2010 was "at the lowest level it had been since Lord Salisbury was at the Treasury" a hundred years earlier, and predicting that cuts in public spending would reduce aggregate demand and growth, and thus ultimately would increase the burden of public debt. [8]

Publications

Drayton is the author of Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World (Yale University Press, 2000), which received the Morris D. Forkosch Prize of the American Historical Association in 2001 as the best book in British and British Imperial History (1999–2001). [9] In 2002, he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History. [10]

As co-editor of the scholarly book series Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, he has commissioned and published more than 40 titles since 2006. He sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History [11] and of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences journal World History Studies. [5]

"Imperial History and the Human Future", his inaugural lecture as Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London, was published by History Workshop Journal in 2012. [12]

Drayton has also written for national publications such as The Guardian , has appeared on BBC radio and has frequently been invited by prestigious institutions to give lectures, including "Hybrid time: The Incomplete Victories of the Present Over the Past", Throckmorton Lecture at Lewis and Clark College (2007); "The Problem of the Hero in Caribbean History", 21st Elsa Goveia Lecture, University of the West Indies (2004); and "What happens when two ways of knowing meet?", the Elizabeth T. Kennan Lecture at Mount Holyoke College (2003). [13]

See also

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imperialism</span> Policy or ideology of extending a nations rule over foreign nations

Imperialism is the practice, theory or attitude of maintaining or extending power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power and soft power. Imperialism focuses on establishing or maintaining hegemony and a more or less formal empire. While related to the concepts of colonialism, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walter Rodney</span> Guyanese politician, activist and historian (1942–1980)

Walter Anthony Rodney was a Guyanese historian, political activist and academic. His notable works include How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, first published in 1972. Rodney was assassinated in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1980.

Dame Linda Jane Colley, is an expert on British, imperial and global history from 1700. She is currently Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University and a long-term fellow in history at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. She previously held chairs at Yale University and at the London School of Economics. Her work frequently approaches the past from inter-disciplinary perspectives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Kennedy</span> British historian

Paul Michael Kennedy is a British historian specialising in the history of international relations, economic power and grand strategy. He has published on the history of British foreign policy and great power struggles, emphasizing the changing economic power base that undergirds military and naval strength, noting how declining economic power leads to reduced military and diplomatic weight.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Schaffer</span> British academic

Simon J. Schaffer is a historian of science, previously a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and was editor of The British Journal for the History of Science from 2004 to 2009.

Herbert Eric Huppert is a British geophysicist. He has been Professor of Theoretical Geophysics and Foundation Director, Institute of Theoretical Geophysics, at the University of Cambridge, since 1989 and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, since 1970.

Barry Emanuel Supple, CBE, FBA, is Emeritus Professor of Economic History, University of Cambridge, and a former Director of the Leverhulme Trust. He is the father of theatre and opera director Tim Supple.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tony Wrigley</span> British historical demographer (1931–2022)

Sir Edward Anthony Wrigley was a British historical demographer. Wrigley and Peter Laslett co-founded the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in 1964.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. G. Hopkins</span> British historian (born 1938)

Antony Gerald Hopkins, is a British historian specialising in the economic history of Africa, European colonialism, and globalisation. He is Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, an Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge and a fellow of the British Academy.

Susan Pedersen is a Canadian historian, and James P. Shenton Professor of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. Pedersen focuses on 19th and 20th century British history, women's history, settler colonialism, and the history of international institutions.

Sir Christopher Alan Bayly, FBA, FRSL was a British historian specialising in British Imperial, Indian and global history. From 1992 to 2013, he was Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge.

William Roger Louis CBE FBA, commonly known as Wm. Roger Louis or, informally, Roger Louis, is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire, a former president of the American Historical Association (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.

Peter James Marshall is a British historian known for his work on the British Empire, particularly the activities of British East India Company servants in 18th-century Bengal, and also the history of British involvement in North America during the same period. He is not to be confused with his contemporary, the other P. J. Marshall, who chronicled the history of public transport in the British Isles.

John Andrew Gallagher, known as Jack Gallagher, was an historian of the British Empire who between 1963 and 1970 held the Beit Professorship of Commonwealth History at the University of Oxford and from 1971 until his death was the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge.

David Kenneth Fieldhouse, FBA was an English historian of the British Empire. Fieldhouse was born to missionary parents in Mussoorie, northern India. He was sent to England for his education at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, from 1938 to 1943. Fieldhouse then completed naval service, before reading history at The Queen's College, Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Samworth</span> British statistician

Richard John Samworth is the Professor of Statistical Science and the Director of the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and a Teaching Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge. His main research interests are in nonparametric and high-dimensional statistics. Particular topics include shape-constrained density estimation and other nonparametric function estimation problems, nonparametric classification, clustering and regression, the bootstrap and high-dimensional variable selection problems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Grove</span> British historian (1955–2020)

Richard Hugh Grove was a British historian, environmental activist, and one of the contemporary founders of environmental history as an academic field. His prizewinning book, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860 (1995), was considered a pioneering account of colonial environmental impacts and an origin for early western ideas on environmentalism.

Marina Frolova-Walker FBA is a Russian-born British musicologist and music historian, who specialises in German Romanticism, Russian and Soviet music, and nationalism in music. She is Professor of Music History at the University of Cambridge and Director of Studies in Music at Clare College, Cambridge. In June 2019 it was announced that she would be the 36th Professor of Music at Gresham College. She has authored several books and a number of academic articles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saul Dubow</span> South African historian and academic

Saul H. Dubow, is a South African historian and academic, specialising in the history of South Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since 2016, he has been the Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He previously taught at University of Sussex and Queen Mary, University of London.

Sujit Sivasundaram is a British Sri Lankan historian and academic. He is currently professor of world history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.

References

  1. ↑ Rickey Singh, "Celebrating Life of Kathleen Drayton", Guyana Chronicle, 18 July 2009.
  2. ↑ Harry Hergash (13 March 2018), "Dr Harold Drayton (1929–2018) is dead…. but his Legacy will Live On", Guyanese Online.
  3. ↑ "Dr. Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History, Kings College in London", SWSML Essay Competition 2016.
  4. ↑ "Richard Drayton", The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
  5. 1 2 Alan Macfarlane (2022). Imperialism and Colonialism: Christopher Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton. Routledge. p. 95–96. ISBN   9781000555271.
  6. ↑ "Professor Richard Drayton". Gresham College.
  7. ↑ "Cambridge occupation issues ultimatum to University management". Varsity Online. 1 December 2010. Retrieved 10 February 2019.
  8. ↑ "Prof. Richard Drayton on 'Economic Lies & Cuts' (1/4)", Cambridge Defend Education; YouTube, 28 November 2010.
  9. ↑ Sharon K. Tune (2002), "116th Annual Meeting Awards and Honors", Perspectives on History, March 2002, American Historical Association.
  10. ↑ Philip Leverhulme Prizes 2002, p. 4, The Leverhulme Trust, www.leverhulme.ac.uk.
  11. ↑ Editorial Board, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Taylor & Francis Online.
  12. ↑ Richard Drayton, "Imperial History and the Human Future", History Workshop Journal, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 October 2012, pp. 156–172, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbr074.
  13. ↑ "Richard Drayton, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., F.R.Hist.S.", Guyana Journal.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.