Perdue has a Ph.D. (1981) from Harvard University in the field of History and East Asian Languages. He is the author of Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850 A.D.(Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987) and China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2005). He has also written on grain markets in China, agricultural development, and environmental history.
His research interests lie in modern Chinese and Japanese social and economic history, history of frontiers, and world history. He is a recipient of the 1988 Edgerton Award and the James A. Levitan Prize at MIT. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.  He is currently Professor of History at Yale University.

Visit the Photo Gallery for Photos of Peter Perdue's Lecture, Globalization and Trade in Chinese History: Tea in the Borderlands