About Timothy Brook

Tim Brook is a Canadian historian whose writings seek to situate China in the world and to bring the perspective of the world to our understanding of China. Among his more popular books are The Confusions of Pleasure (California 1998), Vermeer’s Hat (Bloomsbury 2008), Mr. Selden’s Map of China (Profile 2013), and Great State: China and the World (Profile 2019, HarperCollins 2020). He also served as editor-in-chief of Harvard University Press’s six-volume history of imperial China—for which he wrote The Troubled Empire (2010)—the Chinese translation of which became a bestseller in China. Recently retired from a career of teaching at the universities of Toronto, Stanford, Oxford, and British Columbia, he now devotes his working time to writing and his leisure time to music. Current projects include climate disasters in Ming China and the library of the 17th-century English legal scholar John Selden.