Peter C. Perdue is a Professor of History at Yale University. 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
Perdue’s 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 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. Perdue is a co-editor of two books on empires: Imperial Formations (SAR Press, 2007) and Shared Histories of Modernity: China, India and the Ottoman Empire (Routledge, 2008), and a co-author of several handbooks on world history. His current research focuses on Chinese frontiers and Chinese environmental history.
