King's College London

Richard Drayton, Professor of Imperial and Global History in the Department of History, has been awarded a 2021 Humboldt Prize.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany awards these prizes to internationally renowned scientists and scholars in recognition of their lifetime's research achievements.

Recipients are "academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge academic achievements in the future”, and have included Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners.

Professor Drayton - also a recipient of the Forkosch Prize of the American Historical Association and a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History.

Drayton will spend the 2021-22 academic year as part of the Berlin Global History Group. He is a Guest Scientist at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute of the Free University of Berlin as the guest of Professor Sebastian Conrad, and also a Visiting Scholar at the International Research Centre "Work and the Human Lifecycle in Global History" at Humboldt University.

In Berlin he will be pursuing his project "Europe’s Hinterlands and its ‘Blue Water’ Empires”. European expansion, he argues, should be studied as a connected Pan-European enterprise, and not, as is usual, via national empires. Drayton proposes a new focus on trans-European economic and cultural flows, and on how Europe's hinterlands participated in, and were transformed by, its 'Blue Water' empires. "

On receiving the award, Drayton said: