Peter Hick

Peter Hick is a historian of late imperial and modern China. His dissertation project, “Migration and Conflict in Late-Qing Siyi, 1850-1920,” addresses the social history of Guangdong Province’s “Four Counties” region, the point of origin of most Chinese migrants to North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on a range of sources including legal documents, overseas Chinese periodicals, and contracts, this project traces how mass male outmigration reconfigured regional dynamics of political and economic power, rewove the region’s social fabric, and played a key role in enmeshing China with a burgeoning Pacific world.

Peter’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the Stanford Center at Peking University, among others. In addition to Chinese history, he has a longstanding interest the history of war and revolution, as well as the history of millenarian religious and political movements. The latter was the focus of a self-designed Sources and Methods course, “A Global History of the Apocalypse: Millenarian Movements in the Modern World,” which he taught at Stanford in 2020.