James Raven was born and grew up in Colchester and has lived in the area for most of his life. He attended the Gilberd School in Colchester before reading history at Cambridge University. His family has lived and worked in the villages around Colchester area for generations. Many of his family worked on farms in the area; his father and uncles worked for the local Co-operative Society. He is married to Karen, a barrister; they live in Fingringhoe.

He joined the Liberal Party as a teenager in 1974, and was active in the early campaigns to get Liberals back on the town council after an absence of many years. By 1990 Liberal Democrats were in control of the Council and in 1992 he stood as Liberal Democrat candidate for the old North Colchester seat, acheiving the highest swing to the Lib Dems in the Eastern Counties (and in numerical terms at least, even more then the winning tally of votes of his esteemed successor in the new seat, Bob Russell!).

James is an historian, specialising in British and colonial cultural history. Between 1985 and 1996, he was a don, successively, at two Cambridge University Colleges, lecturing at the university in history. He also spent sometime at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago. In 1996 he moved to take up a Fellowship at Mansfield College, Oxford where he became Reader and Professorial Fellow in 2000. In 2004 he took up his current post as Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex, and returned to live permanemtly in the Colchester area (although he had continued to live here part-time). He is the author of many books and publications, and is a regular contributor to national and international newspapers, periodicals, and radio and television programmes.

Locally, James Raven has been President of the English-Speaking Union, an educational charity, since 1990, in succession to Antony Buck, and he is active in several local and civic societies. Nationally, he serves as a Governor of the E-S.U. and directs a charity, The Cambridge Project for the Book Trust, established in 1990.