James Colin Davis (28 May 1940 – 25 July 2021) was a British historian, whose work often focused on the Utopian thinkers of the 17th-century. He has been described as a "historian of political and religious thought and a brilliant and provocative iconoclast".^[1] The book Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600-1900 was written in honour of Davis at the time of his retirement as professor.^[2]

Professor Colin Davis was born in Hesse, Yorkshire into a fisherman's family.^[3] He received his education at the University of Manchester and after a brief period at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office he moved to New Zealand to teach at the University of Waikato.^[3] He worked and studied at a number of universities in New Zealand before setting up the School of History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.^[4] Davis retired in 2004. He subsequently moved to Glasgow where he died in July 2021.^[5]

Published in 2001, Davis' comprehensive study Oliver Cromwell was described as "the best analysis we have of Cromwell's religion and its politics" by the Journal of Modern History.^[6] Davis' 1986 work Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians was particularly noted for questioning whether the radical, nonconformists known as the Ranters ever existed per se, being rather a myth created by conservatives to endorse traditional values by comparison with an unimaginably radical other.^[7] Other works by J. C. Davis include Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700 (1983),^[8] and a biography of Gerrard Winstanley co-authored with J. D. Alsop for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.^[9]