This talk will explore some of the countercurrents to our dominant understanding of the era leading up to the Opium War of 1839-1842, focusing in particular on the voices of Chinese scholars who counseled pragmatism in foreign relations, the continued debates on opium policy in China, and the powerful political coalition in Great Britain that tried to terminate the war as soon as it was launched.

Stephen R. Platt is Professor of Chinese history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he focuses mainly on China's place in the 19th-century world. He holds a 2004 PhD in history from Yale University, where his dissertation won the university-wide Theron Rockwell Field Prize. He is the author of three books, the first of which was "Provincial Patriots," a history of reformers and revolutionaries in Hunan Province. His second book, "Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom," was a history of the Taiping Rebellion in global context that was chosen as a Washington Post notable book of 2012 and won the Cundill History Prize. His latest book, from which the material for his talk is taken, is a history of the long-term origins of the Opium War titled "Imperial Twilight."

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