Peter C. Perdue (born 1949) is an American author, professor, and historian. He is a professor of

Chinese history The earliest known written records of the history of China date from as early as 1250 BC, from the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BC), during the reign of king Wu Ding. Ancient historical texts such as the ''Book of Documents'' (early chapter ...

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

. Perdue has a Ph.D. degree (1981) from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in the field of

History History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the History of writing#Inventions of writing, invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbr ...

and

East Asian Languages The East Asian languages are a language family (alternatively ''macrofamily'' or ''superphylum'') proposed by Stanley Starosta in 2001. The proposal has since been adopted by George van Driem. Classifications Early proposals Early proposals of s ...

. His research interests lie in modern Chinese and Japanese social and economic history, history of frontiers, and world history. He has also written on grain markets in China, agricultural development, and environmental history. He is the author of two widely acclaimed books: ''Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850 A.D.'' (Council on East Asian Studies,

, 1987) and ''China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia'' (Harvard University Press, 2005), which won the 2006

Joseph Levenson Book Prize Joseph Levenson Book Prize is awarded each year in memory of Joseph R. Levenson by the Association for Asian Studies to two English-language books, one whose main focus is on China before 1900 and the other for works on post-1900 China. According to ...

. In giving the award, the Levenson committee said the work :fundamentally alters how we understand the relationship between Qing China and the people of Central Eurasia. His book concentrates on the period of time from the rise of the Manchus in the first decades of the seventeenth century to the return of the Torghuts in the last half of the eighteenth century, an event with which, he says, “the steppe ended, and a great chapter in world history closed.” This comment points to a highly commendable feature of this sweeping and meticulous study: Perdue places the Qing march into central Asia squarely in the contexts both of Chinese and of world history. He shows, for example, how the Qing response to trade with Britain on China’s south coast was shaped by the earlier but quite different Qing experience on the Eurasian frontier. On a larger world stage, Perdue compares state building in Qing China, France, and the Ottoman Empire, pointing to both similarities and dissimilarities in these efforts. The committee went on to commend Perdue for drawing on sources and scholarship from Chinese, Japanese, Manchu, German, French, and Russian, "to say nothing of English, the latter a language he also writes with clarity and grace."Levenson Book Prize Winners
Association for Asian Studies (Accessed March 15, 2015). The book established Perdue as a major figure in the

New Qing History The New Qing History () is a historiographical school that gained prominence in the United States in the mid-1990s by offering a wide-ranging revision of history of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty of China. Orthodox historians tend to emphasize the pow ...

intellectual movement. 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. He was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 2007.

Publications

''Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850 A.D.''
(Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987) * China Marches West. The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasi

(Harvard University Press, 2005) : Winner of the 2007 Joseph Levenson Book Prize: Pre-1900 Category * ''Imperial Formations'' (Co-editor with Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, 2007) * ''Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India and the Ottoman Empire'' (Co-editor with Huricihan Islamoglu, 2009).

Notes

External links

Official page at Yale
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Perdue, Peter C. 1949 births 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers American sinologists Harvard University alumni Living people Yale University faculty American male non-fiction writers