Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University
Peter C. Perdue 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 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 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 the forthcoming Global Connections, and Asia Inside Out, three volumes on inter-Asian connections. His current research focuses on Chinese frontiers, Chinese environmental history, and the history of tea.