Peter C. Perdue (born 1949) is an American author, professor, and historian. He is a professor of Chinese history at Yale University.
Perdue has a Ph.D. degree (1981) from Harvard University in the field of History and East Asian Languages. He is the author of two widely-acclaimed books: 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), which won the 2006 Levenson Prize for Books in Chinese Studies. 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, the James A. Levitan Prize, and a past holder of the Ford International Career Development Chair. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.