Clive Day was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from Yale College in 1892. He was Phi Beta Kappa and a member of the secret society, Skull and Bones. He did postgraduate work at the University of Berlin in 1892-93, taught German at Yale in 1894-95, worked as an instructor in history and economics at the University of California, Berkeley from 1895 to 1898, and then travelled to Berlin and Paris, where he completed his doctoral dissertation in 1898-99. He received his PhD from Yale in 1899. At Yale he served as instructor of political economics from 1899-1900, and instructor of history, 1900-02. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Economic History at Yale in 1902, and Knox Professor of Political Economy in 1922. He retired in 1936.

In 1904, Day published The Policy and Administration of the Dutch in Java. A later founder of Southeast Asian Studies, Yale historian Professor Harry J. Benda, called Day's first book "a minor classic in the literature concerning colonial Indonesia, and. . . the first book ever written on the Indies by an American scholar." It was reprinted in 1966 by Oxford University Press in Kuala Lumpur and New York, as The Dutch in Java, with an Introduction by John Bastin.

    See: Harry J. Benda (1968). Review of Clive Day, and John Bastin 'The Policy and Administration of the Dutch in Java' Journal of     Southeast Asian History, 9, pp 354-356 doi:10.1017/S0217781100004762 View article

    Clive Day; Yale University Obituary Record (pg. 10): http://mssa.library.yale.edu/obituary_record/1925_1952/1951-52.pdf