Luke Roberts is Professor of Japanese History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is a specialist in political culture in Edo period Japan, among other subjects, with a particular focus on the history of Tosa province.
He earned his PhD at Princeton University in 1991. Roberts' current research investigates the biography of Mori Yoshiki, a mid-ranking samurai official in the service of the lords of Tosa.
Publications
- Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan. University of Hawaii Press, 2012.
- Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in Eighteenth Century Tosa, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- A Petition for a Popularly Chosen Council of Government in Tosa in 1787, in The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (December, 1997), pp. 575-596.
- A Transgressive Life: The Diary of a Genroku Samurai, Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 5, no. 2 (December, 1995), pp. 25-30.
- The Petition Box in Eighteenth Century Tosa, Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 20, no. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 423-458.