Shiroyama Tomoko
城山智子

HYI-Radcliffe Institute Joint Fellowship recipient

Tomoko Shiroyama is a professor of Asian economic history at the Graduate School of Economics, the University of Tokyo, as well as a research associate at Toyo Bunko (the Oriental Library). She earned her Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1999. As a historian of China and Asia, she has conducted extensive research on China’s global connections in terms of the commodity trade, the flow of money, and the migration of traders and laborers. She is the author of China during the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World Economy, 1929-1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008) and the co-editor of Chinese and Indian Merchants in Modern Asia: Networking Businesses and Formation of Regional Economy (Brill, 2019). While at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Shiroyama examines the formation of treaty-ports in China from the mid-19^th century as a long-term process for humans to negotiate with the hydrological environment. By combining archival research, meteorological datasets, and spatial analyses, she provides new insights into the changing natural and social landscapes in the early phase of modern globalization.