Robert Bickers is a British historian specialising in modern China, British imperialism and the commercial and maritime networks that connected China with the wider world. He is Professor of History at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of the British Academy. His research examines treaty-port society, colonial institutions, migration and the experiences of Chinese and foreign communities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than treating empire only through governments and diplomacy, Bickers frequently reconstructs the lives of merchants, policemen, sailors, settlers and intermediaries who operated within its institutions.
His major books include Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai, The Scramble for China, Out of China and China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World, 1816–1980. Out of China, which traces the erosion of foreign domination and the recovery of Chinese sovereignty, was shortlisted for the 2018 Wolfson History Prize. Bickers writes nonfiction rather than historical novels, but his work provides strong background for fiction about Qing China, the Opium Wars, the treaty ports, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Western imperialism, Chinese nationalism and the upheavals that culminated in the Communist victory of 1949.
