Dr. Richard Drayton, PhD – University Senior Lecturer in Imperial and extra-European History since 1500
Fellow, Tutor and Director of Studies in History, Corpus Christi College
Director of Graduate Training (2005-7)
Richard Drayton was born in Guyana and grew up in Barbados, where he went to school at Harrison College. He left the Caribbean as a Barbados Scholar to Harvard University, going then to Yale, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Paul Kennedy and Frank Turner. He also spent two years as a graduate student at Balliol College, Oxford as the Commonwealth Caribbean Rhodes Scholar. In 1992 he first came to Cambridge as a Research Fellow of St Catharine’s College, moving back to Oxford in 1994 to be Darby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Lincoln College. After 1998, he was Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia, returning to Cambridge in 2001. In 2002 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for History.
Richard Drayton’s research is centered on the transnational histories of Imperialism and Anti-imperialism. He looks in particular at the political, economic, and cultural histories of British and French expansion, and at the regional experience of the Caribbean. He is especially interested in the problem, central to all empires, of what happens at the surface of contact between different economies of knowledge, nature, identity, religion, or aesthetic experience.
Teaching Interests : He teaches across the range of all three Cambridge ‘extra-European’ history papers: ‘The Expansion of Europe, c. 1500 to 1914’, ‘The West and the Third World, 1914 to the present’, and ‘The British Empire and Commonwealth since 1780’. He has also designed the Migrants option on ‘Caribbean and South Asian Migration to Britain since 1945’. He is one of the governors of the World History research seminar (formerly known as the Commonwealth and Overseas History seminar).
Areas of Research Supervision
Drayton has supervised graduate students for several years in Cambridge and at Oxford (1994-8) and the University of Virginia (1998-2001). He has directed (or shared supervision of) PhD candidates working on a variety of topics including British public opinion’s response to the East India Company and imperial expansion in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the role of the Free People of Colour in the slave societies of Trinidad and Dominica; the career of Archbishop Secker; the environmental history of the British Empire; Imperial reform in Spain and its Atlantic colonies in the eighteenth century; the British intellectual response to China; Blacks in London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the cultural history of exotic fruit in early modern England. He has been examiner for doctoral dissertations on topics including French and British natural history in the seventeenth-century Caribbean; the global history of rubber; the reception of the Description de l’Egypte, Britain and the cotton south of the United States before the Civil War, Sir Robert Schomburgk’s exploration of British Guiana, the history of the London Zoo in the nineteenth-century, and the policing of the Raj in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Articles
•’Anglo-American ‘Liberal’ Imperialism: British Guiana and the World since 9-11′, in William Roger Louis, ed., Yet more adventures with Britannia, London I. B. Tauris, 2005
•’The Strange Late Birth of the British Academy’ in M. Daunton, ed., The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain Oxford: The British Academy, 2005
•’Putting the British Back into the Empire’, Journal of British Studies 44 (January 2005): 187-193
•’How Empires Rise’, in H. Swain, ed. Big Questions in History, London: Jonathan Cape, 2005.
•’Taking Back the Head’, Introduction to George Lamming, The Pleasures Of Exile London: Pluto, 2005
•’The Collaboration of Labor: Slaves, Empires, and Globalizations in the Atlantic World, c. 1600-1850, in A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (London, 2002), pp. 98-114.
•’Science, Medicine, and the British Empire’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, volume V: Historiography, Robin Winks, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, October 1999.
•’A l’école des Français: les sciences et le deuxième empire britannique (1783-1830)’ Revue Française d’Histoire D’Outre-Mer, t. 86 (1999) n0 322-333, pp. 91-118.
•’Empire and Knowledge’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, volume II: The Eighteenth Century, P.J. Marshall, ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 231-252
Public Lectures
•American Imperialism in Comparative Perspective’, Arthur J. Throckmorton Lecture, Lewis and Clark College, February 2007
•The Problem of the Hero in Caribbean History’, 21st Elsa Goveia Lecture, University of the West Indies, March 2004
•What happens when two ways of knowing meet? The Elizabeth T. Kennan Lecture at Mount Holyoke College, March 2003
•’Global Wars and Nervous Peaces: Britain, France, and the Origins of the Modern World, 1659-1815′, Plenary Lecture to the 69th Anglo-American Conference, July 2000
•’Diasporas of Nature: Science, Imperialism, and the Environment’ City University of New York, May 2000
Administration: Dr Drayton is a member of the committees of management of the Centre for African Studies and the Centre for Latin American Studies, the Smuts, Holland Rose, and Evans funds. In 2006-7 he will be mentor for the Centre for African Studies Visiting Fellowships on Africa and the Atlantic World since 1500. He is a member of the Faculty Board and Degree Committee of the Faculty of History.
External affiliations: Dr Drayton is Senior Research Associate of the Centre for World Environmental History of the University of Sussex. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee on the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. With Megan Vaughan he edits the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series of Palgrave-Macmillan. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the American Historical Association and the Association of Caribbean Historians.
Dr. Drayton believes that it is important for historians to communicate with the wider public, and in particular to speak up where their work on the past has relevance to the present. He has appeared on BBC radio on ‘Nightwaves’ and ‘In Our Time’, has participated in public debates on Britain’s imperial past and present, and has published op/ed pieces in the Guardian (including An Ethical Blank Cheque and Africa and the wealth of the West).
From University of Cambridge web site
