I am a historian of late imperial and modern China, and my scholarship has focused on issues of economic and environmental transformation, the political economy of empire, and transregional connections in the rise of global capitalism. 

I approach the study of economic life in the human past from both the top down and the bottom up to reveal the often-unexpected interplay between grand changes in national policies, international relations, and global market and locally contextualized choices and practices by individuals, households, enterprises, and grass-roots organizations. 

This interest in connecting the dots between localized goods, people, institutions, and incidents on the one hand, and larger patterns of empire, capitalism, and environmental change on the other hand has led me from examining the world of timber merchants and forest property rights; to the transnational networks of knowledge and commerce woven around edible bird’s nests; and from there to how credit relations across ethno-cultural-national boundaries made/threatened empires. 

My research has revealed that entanglements between global, national, and local forces have generated innovative arrangements at critical junctures in history that were enormously consequential for the material, political, and environmental conditions of human life.