Tiger Profile: Timothy (Tim) Brook

Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of British Columbia; Fellow, Royal Society of Canada; Corresponding Fellow, British Academy

Timothy Brook  is a historian of China whose work has focused on the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) but extends to issues that span the period from the Mongol occupation of China in the 13th century to the Japanese occupation of China in the 20th. In addition to serving as the general editor of Harvard University Press’ History of Imperial China, he has published extensively on China in the world. A co-edited volume on the inter-polity relations of Inner and East Asia, Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. His recent book, Great State: China and the World, appeared in Britain and France (the French edition under the title of Le Léopard de Kubilai Khan) in September 2019 and on this side of the Atlantic by HarperCollins in March 2020. The French edition was awarded the Grand Prix des Rendez-vous de l’Histoire in October 2020. Tim is also widely-known as the author of Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer, published in 2013 as well as Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, published in 2008.