Thomas P. Barrett

Thomas is a Japan-trained historian of East Asia, who specialises in the international, diplomatic and transnational history of the region in the early modern and modern eras, with a particular focus on the Qing dynasty (1636-1912). He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, as Co-Editor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press'Japanese Sinology Series, and on the Editorial Board of De Gruyter's Transnational History in East Asia Series. Thomas was trained in the Japanese Tōyōshi 東洋史 tradition, completing his BA at Aichi University (the successor to the Shanghai-based Toā Dōbun Shoin 東亜同文書院) and his MA at the University of Tokyo. In 2016, he began his PhD at the University of Tokyo as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science DC Research Fellow under the guidance of Professors Murata Yūjirō 村田雄二郎 and Kawashima Shin 川島真. In 2019, he moved to the University of Oxford to complete his doctoral work under the supervision of Professor Henrietta Harrison. He has also studied at Nankai University in Tianjin, China, and at National Taiwan University in Taipei. Before taking up his current post in Keio, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and a Junior Research Fellow (JRF) at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. Titled ‘Foreigners and the Making of the Chinese Diplomat’, Thomas’ doctoral thesis evaluated the significance of foreigners who were employed as counsellors, secretaries, legal advisors and consuls in late Qing and early Republican China’s legations and consulates, as a means to trace how Western European diplomatic culture and practice came to be institutionalised in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dissertation was the recipient of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland's 2023 Bayly Prize. The project was funded in Japan by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and in Britain by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Parts of the project have been published in Late Imperial China, the renowned Japanese journals Shigaku Zasshi 史学雑誌 (which was the recipient of the 10th Historical Society of Japan Prize 第10回史学会賞) and Tōyō Gakuhō 東洋学報, and in an edited French volume published in October 2021 by the École française d'Extrême-Orient. Monographs are currently being prepared in English and Japanese.

• Modern Chinese History
• /History of East Asian International Relations
• /East Asian History
• /Early Modern Chinese History