David Cannadine (born 1950) is a British historian, known for a number of books including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy and Ornamentalism; and as a commentator and broadcaster on British public life, especially the British monarchy. As of 2004 he is engaged in a biography of Andrew Mellon.

He was born in Birmingham. He read history at Clare College, Cambridge, and wrote a doctorate while at St. John's College, Oxford, supervised by Peter Mathias, spending also time at Princeton University. In 1975 he became a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and a University Lecturer.

From 1992 he was Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University. In 1998 he became director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and in 2003 Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History there.

He married the historian Linda Colley in 1982.

Works

• Lords and Landlords; the aristocracy and the towns, 1774-1967 (1980)
• Patricians, Power and Politics in nineteenth-century Towns (1982) editor
• The Pleasures of the Past (1991)
• G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (1992)
• Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (1994)
• The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1996)
• The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (1998)
• History in Our Time (1998)
• Ornamentalism: How the British saw their Empire (2001)
• In Churchill's Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (2002)