José Antonio Cantón Álvarez

Biography

Dr Jose Canton Alvarez is an LSE Fellow in Late Imperial Chinese History at the London School od Economics and Political Science. He is also an Assistant Professor at the Institute of History at Faculty of Philosophy and History, University of Lodz. He has been awarded a PhD in History at the University of Granada, Spain.

His research interests concern: international trade between China and South-East Asia in early-modern period (1350-1840), history of medical exchanges between China and the West from Yuan (1272-1368) to Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the history of European colonialism in early modern Asia, history of traditional Chinese medicine during Song dynasty (960-1279), the opium trade and its consumption in Asia before the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion and the Self-Strengthening Movement, among others.

Jose Canton’s thesis is an original research project presenting new findings on the role of opium trade in the European colonialism in Asia from the 16th to the early 19th centuries, and its impact on China. The thesis is based on an original, in-depth analysis of the primary sources in classical Chinese, Portuguese and English.
Most of his doctoral research dr. Cantón conducted while being a visiting researcher at Renmin University of China (RUC) for a two-year period, for which he secured funding from the Hanban’s Confucius China Study Program (Joint PhD program).

In 2023 he was awarded a Ho Peng-Yoke Research Fllowship at the Needham Research Institute, University of Cambridge. He has also conducted other post-doctoral research projects. In 2018, he was a Jing Brand Fellow at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge. In 2015, he worked as a British Inter-University China Centre (BICC) Fellow at Manchester Museum researching the Thomas Bellot Collection of Chinese bronzes. This project, concluded with a detailed report, has expanded his research interests to include the trade in ancient Chinese bronze replicas during late Ming and early Qing dynasty in China, as well as the personal histories of Englishmen in China at the time of the Opium Wars.