Richard Drayton FRHistS (born 1964) is a Guyana-born historian and Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London.
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.
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.
[6][7] In November 2010, he spoke on "Economic lies and cuts" at a student "occupation" organised by Cambridge Defend Education[8] 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.
[11] 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.