In Great State, Timothy Brook does for China what Mary Beard did for Rome in SPQR, analyzes the last eight centuries of China’s relationship with the world in this magnificent history that brings together accounts from civil servants, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates, emperors, migrant workers, invaders, visionaries, and traitors—creating a multifaceted portrait of Read more
September 20th 2014 Tim is giving a lecture on blah blah at the so and so centre. So on so forth.
A work of history, biography, cartography, and literary mystery, Mr. Selden’s Map of China unlocks the secrets behind a Chinese map four centuries old, long lost in a library basement, and paints an unexpected portrait of the world just as global trade changed everything. The map arrived at Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 1659, part of Read more
Timothy Brook is a professor and writer on Chinese and world history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. A native of Toronto and graduate of the University of Toronto, Brook moved from Toronto to become principal of St. John’s College at UBC in 2004, where he was named to the Republic of China Read more
The Mongol Takeover in the 1270’s changed the course of Chinese history. The Confucian empire–a millennium and a half in the making–was suddenly thrust under foreign occupation. What China had been before its reunification as the Yuan dynasty in 1279 was no longer what it would be in the future. Four centuries later, another wave Read more
With Jérôme Bourgon and Gregory Blue In a public square in the Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin was executed before a crowd of onlookers. He was among the last to suffer the extreme capital punishment known as lingchi. Called by Western observers “death by a thousand cuts” or “death by slicing,” this penalty Read more
A Vermeer painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another canvas, fruit spills from a blue-and-white porcelain bowl. Familiar images that captivate us with their beauty–but as Timothy Brook shows us, these intimate pictures actually give us a remarkable view of an expanding world. The officer’s Read more
Studies of collaboration have changed how the history of World War II in Europe is written, but for China and Japan this aspect of wartime conduct has remained largely unacknowledged. In a bold new work, Timothy Brook breaks the silence surrounding the sensitive topic of wartime collaboration between the Chinese and their Japanese occupiers. Japan’s Read more
The Ming dynasty (l368-l644), a period of commercial expansion and cultural innovation, fashioned the relationship between the present-day state and society in China. In this unique collection of reworked and illustrated essays, one of the leading scholars of Chinese history re-examines this relationship and argues that, contrary to previous scholarship, which emphasized the heavy hand Read more
With Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi The history of opium in China, prior to the publication of this volume, was traditionally approached as a deplorable episode in the history of nineteenth-century British imperialism, when British traders exported vast quantities of opium from India to China in order to balance their payments in the China trade. The volume Read more