Ei Murakami is Associate Professor of Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University, Japan. He is also the chief of the Research Center for Modern and Contemporary China, Institute for Research in Humanities. He has been organizing the research group for studying “Reorganization of Social and Economic Institutions in Modern China” since 2012. He obtained his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 2012. His main academic interests are socio-economic history of south China during the late Qing and the early Republican period, maritime history of East and South China Sea from seventeenth century to the present and history of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. He is the author of Umi no Kindai Chūgoku: Fukkenjin no katsudō to Igisiru/Shinchō (in Japanese: Maritime History of Modern China: Local Fujian actors and British and Chinese Empires, Nagoya, 2013).