William Roy is a social historian of modern China, in very broad terms "social" and "modern", whose work has centered on cultural, intellectual, economic and political history as well. His first two books dealt with the nineteenth-century history of a major inland Chinese trading city; The second received an impressive award from the Urban History Association, and made him engage in the debate on issues of "civil society" and "the public sphere". He also wrote books on the consciousness of the ruling elite of the Qing dynasty in the relatively prosperous eighteenth century, and on the patterns of agricultural violence in a war-torn Chinese province habitually over the course of seven centuries. Recently he wrote a general exegetical history of the Qing dynasty, entitled The Last Empire of China.