Peter Perdue

Peter C. Perdue is a Professor Emeritus of History. He has taught courses on East Asian history and civilization, Chinese social and economic history, the Silk Road, and historical methodology. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His first book, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500-1850 A.D. (Harvard University Press,1987), examined long-term agricultural change in one Chinese province. His second book, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2005), discusses environmental change, ethnicity, long-term economic change and military conquest in an integrated account of the Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian contention over Siberia and Central Eurasia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a coeditor of two books on empires: Imperial Formations, (SAR Press, 2007) and Shared Histories of Modernity, (Routledge, 2008), and a co-author of  Global Connections, a world history textbook forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and Asia Inside Out, three volumes on inter-Asian connections forthcoming from Harvard University Press. His current research focuses on Chinese frontiers, Chinese environmental history, and the history of tea.

He is a recipient of the 1988 Edgerton Award, the James A. Levitan Prize, and a past holder of the Ford International Career Development Chair.