Anthony Pagden is a professor of political science and history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work centers on European contact with the non-European world, as well as the history of law and of anthropology. he has published more than a dozen books, including Ideologies of Empire in Britain, France and Spain (1995), and Peoples and Empires (2001), and was editor of The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (2002). He has authored articles that have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New Republic, and numerous scholarly journals.

Pagden has previously held academic appointments at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and Johns Hopkins University. He holds a doctorate from Oxford University and a B.A. from the University of Barcelona.