David Trim

David J.B. Trim is a historian, archivist, and educator whose specialties are in European military history and religious history. Currently, he is the director of Archives, Statistics, and Research at the World Headquarters of Seventh-day Adventists.

Background Trim was born in Bombay, India, in 1969 to British and Australian parents and raised largely in Sydney, Australia. Educated in Britain, he has a BA in history from Newbold College and a PhD in War Studies and History is from King's College, London, part of the University of London.

Career Trim taught for ten years at Newbold College and for two years held the Walter C. Utt Chair in History at Pacific Union College. In late 2010 he was appointed Archivist of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and in 2011 became its global Director of Research. He has held research fellowships at the Huntington Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library, and been a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Trim has been a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2003.

Scholarship Trim is the author, editor, or co-editor of eighteen volumes, including: The Chivalric Ethos and the Development of Military Professionalism (Brill, 2003), Amphibious Warfare 1000-1700: Commerce, State Formation and European Expansion (Brill, 2006), European Warfare 1350-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Harfleur to Hamburg (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Trim's scholarship is credited with making important contributions to several academic areas. His work on humanitarian intervention demonstrated that nations historically engaged in this strategy to limit or arrest human suffering; it is credited with being a significant intervention in the debate about humanitarian intervention, demonstrating that it has long-term historical roots.