Oliver Yule-Smith is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Statecraft and National Security at King’s College London. He is a historian of the twentieth century, focusing on European and American diplomatic history, the development of national strategy and the construction of the post-1945 international order. His first book, The Problem of China in the British Foreign Office Mind: Understanding a Rising Superpower, 1922–1985 (Bloomsbury Academic, December 2025), challenged the idea that the concept of a "rising China" did not emerge until the 1980s or later, instead asserting that a small cadre of British China officials in the UK Foreign Office were continuously exploring what China’s return to great power would mean for both the UK and the wider international order as early as the 1920s". He has also recently published his second book, The Problem of China in the British Foreign Office Mind: Understanding a Rising Superpower, 1922-1985: Oliver Yule-Smith: Bloomsbury Academic - Bloomsbury.
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