有評論說，歐陽泰是當代歷史學界的魔術師。
如今，歐陽泰有許多廣為人知的標籤，漢學家、台灣史學家、
1992年，歐陽泰在Reed College畢業後，
1994年，碩士畢業後，歐陽泰去耶魯大學攻讀歷史學博士。
在自己的學術研究中，歐陽泰提出了「全球微觀史」（micro-
對於歐陽泰的著作，或許用他自己的話介紹最好：
My first book, How Taiwan Became Chinese (2007), examined how Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese colonization met and competed in the Far East and asked why it was that the Chinese prevailed over the Europeans rather than the other way around, suggesting that political will – that is to say state support for expansion – was a key variable. My second book, Lost Colony (2011), examined the Sino-Dutch War of 1661-1668, Europe’s first war with China and the only significant Sino-European conflict until the Opium War of 1839–42. It asked whether Europeans had – at this early date – any significant advantages in military and naval technology over China and concluded that they did, although not perhaps in the areas people might have expected. My third book, The Gunpowder Age (2016), looked more deeply into China’s military past, comparing it to that of Europe, and showing that China’s China’s dynamism was deeper, longer lasting, and more quickly recovered than has long been believed. My fourth book, The Last Embassy (2021), examined a little-known but richly documented Dutch embassy to the court of the Qing dynasty’s Qianlong Emperor. I’m currently working on a book about the Dutch East India Company and its interactions with and effects on Asia’s maritime realms.
前三本著作《福爾摩沙如何變成臺灣府？》（How Taiwan Became Chinese）、《決戰熱蘭遮》（Lost Colony）和《火藥時代》（The Gunpowder Age），在台灣早已翻譯出版，被稱為“歐陽泰漢學經典三書”，
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書評： You once joked that when you graduated in 2000, because you studied global history (world history), you thought you might only find a teaching position at a community college. Was this because global history was not yet popular in American universities at the time?
你曾開玩笑說，2000年畢業的時候，因為自己學習的是全球史（
歐陽泰：Yes, at that point, most historians didn’t know what global history was. My graduate course on the topic was one of the first to be offered. Things began changing quickly after around 2010. Today, global history is a major subfield within the discipline, and there are scores of books published each year in global history.
歐陽泰：是的，當時大多數歷史學家都不知道什麼是全球史。
書評： At least among Chinese readers, global history seems to have only become popular in recent years, and people seem to be getting tired of history narrated by country and history dominated by elite politics. Does the popularity of global history represent a change in ideological trends?
至少在中文閱讀內，全球史似乎是近年來才開始流行起來，
歐陽泰：For me, one of the fascinating developments of the past three decades within the discipline of history is the explosion of serious history being produced outside of the west, particularly in China. This trend started to pick up speed in the 1990s, and by the 2000s and 2010s, Chinese-language scholarship in history was expanding at a dramatic clip, with new institutes, new journals, even new universities being founded yearly, particularly in the PRC. It was a renaissance in historical scholarship. I see this as part of the general zeitgeist, which global history is also part of. To build a history for all humans – regardless of race, ethnicity, or nationality – is the great goal of global historians, and the only way to do that is to listen to each other, to incorporate other historical and historiographical traditions.
歐陽泰：對我來說，
書評： You study global history through Taiwan and the encounter between China and the West through Taiwan. Did you plan this beforehand, or was it just an accident?
你通過台灣來研究全球史，通過台灣來研究中西方的相遇。
歐陽泰：It was an accident. I was very interested in cross-cultural interactions, but I didn’t originally intend to study Taiwan per se. I started my undergraduate career studying science, thinking I would specialize in biology or neuroscience, but the summer after my first year, I worked in a lab, where I met a brilliant Chinese researcher, who told me about his experience in the Cultural Revolution. This encounter sparked an interest in the Chinese language, which I began studying. I decided to put my undergraduate degree on hold, spending half a year in Taiwan. When I returned to college, I changed my major to anthropology. During my final year in college, however, I took two history classes. I was hooked and applied to graduate school in history. At first I thought I’d write a dissertation on the history of anthropology but ultimately came to be interested in early European colonialism and, in particular, in the Dutch East India Company. When I learned that the Dutch East India Company had held a colony on Taiwan, I became fascinated by it, and ended up writing my dissertation on the topic.
這是一次意外。我對跨文化交流很感興趣，
書評： What is special about Taiwan? Why can it tell a story about global history?
台灣有什麼特殊性？為什麼它能夠來講述一個全球史的故事？
歐陽泰：This is a difficult question to answer because there are so many ways in which Taiwan is a unique and special case. It has so much to tell us about global history. Perhaps to me the most interesting thing is that it is one of the few places in the world where European and Chinese colonization coexisted and perhaps the only place where the Chinese eventually prevailed. In 1624, when the Dutch established a colony on the island, there were Chinese people there, but not many. They were fishermen, traders, and, to a small extent, hunters, but there was no significant Chinese agriculture. The Dutch encouraged Chinese farmers to cross over to Taiwan, offering land, subventions, and tax breaks. In effect, they created a Chinese colony under European rule or, as I call it in my book How Taiwan Became Chinese, “Sino-European co-colonization.” Chinese rice paddies and sugar plantations spread rapidly through Taiwan’s western plains, and the Chinese population surged from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands. It’s a fascinating history, and the fall of Dutch Taiwan to the great Zheng Chenggong is equally fascinating. (That’s the subject of another book I wrote: Lost Colony（中文翻譯為：決戰熱蘭遮.)
歐陽泰：這是一個很難回答的問題，
書評： "The Last Embassy" tells the story of the Dutch Mission in 1795. Different from the pedantic and rigid image of the Qing Empire that everyone is familiar with, the Qing Empire provided warm hospitality. I would like to ask, during this period, were there many diplomatic exchanges between the Qing Empire and Europe? Do they usually break up on bad terms? Why is the Dutch mission successful?
《最後的使團》講述的是1795年荷蘭使團的故事。
歐陽泰：When people consider the history of Sino-European relations, they almost always focus on the British, who had a bad relationship with the Qing. The infamous Macartney Mission of 1792-93 is one reason for this, and the way British people in his entourage wrote about his failure tended to place the blame on the Qing court. I – along with some other historians – believe the blame should fall more on the British, especially considering their rather extreme demands, such as the request forof bases on Chinese soil. At the very least, blame should be apportioned more equally. In any case, subsequently, the British had another diplomatic failure in China (the less famous but even more troubled Amherst Mission) and then, of course, there occurred the First Opium War. The British blamed the acrimony and violence on the Qing and wrote volubly and vehemently about the Qing court’s supposed failings. Unfortunately, modern historians adopted many of their perspectives, which continue to affect our understanding of Sino-Western relations.
But if we look at other diplomatic encounters between Europeans and the Qing, a different picture emerges. Russian, Portuguese, and, especially, Dutch missions are particularly instructive. My book The Last Embassy looks at the last Dutch mission to the Qing court, which took place in 1794-95, showing how the two sides interacted. There are many reasons for the relative pleasantness of the Dutch mission vis-à-vis the British, but perhaps the most important is that the Dutch and Qing weren’t competing empires, whereas the British were aggressive and expansive. The Dutch also appear to have understood and accepted Qing protocols more readily than the British.
人們回顧中歐關係的歷史，
但如果我們看看歐洲人和清朝之間的其他外交接觸，
書評： Your previous book "The Gunpowder Age" seemed to want to explain why China failed and the West won; but this book seems to be the opposite, and seems to want to explain that the Qing Empire was not so pedantic. When I was studying world history, one of our teachers used "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" as a textbook for class, because he believed that Guns, Germs, and Steel really explained why Europeans came conquer the world. I don’t know how you explain the fate of China and Europe meeting?
你之前一本書《火藥時代》似乎想說明為何中國失敗西方勝出；
歐陽泰：I have come to believe that the effectiveness of the state may explain a great deal. In the 17th century, the Qing built a very effective and well administered state. Qing rulers and their bureaucracies managed the complex conquest and administration of China, Mongolia, etc., with aplomb, developing not just powerful military strucutres, but also administrative ones. In the course of the eighteenth century, they expanded the borders of their empire to a striking extent, becoming the undisputed great power of East and Central Asia. They had no significant enemies at this time: Japan was quiescent; the Russians had been neutralized; the Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese were behaving well. So, naturally, the Qing relaxed their military preparedness: why invest in arms when one is overwhemlingly powerful? Meanwhile, European states were fighting many wars, which stimulated their military technology and readiness.
It was due to this relative lack of military stimulus, I believe, that the Qing began to fall behind the west militarily. I believe that this largely explains the Qing failure in the Opium War.
Why did the Qing have such trouble catching up? First, I think the success of Qing reforms in the mid- and late-nineteenth century has been overlooked. Historians have recently found quite a lot of success in Qing reforms. Still, by the mid-nineteenth century, the Qing state was quite an old state – 200 years old or so. I’ve come to believe that old states have greater problems developing new structures than young ones. Even more importantly, they have a much harder time getting rid of expensive and obsolete old structures. The Qing had an accretion of military and other structures from their early years that weren’t so adapted to the modern world. To be sure, they built the Jiangnan Arsenal, the Fuzhou Shipyard, etc., and these were quite effective, but they couldn’t rid themselves of many other structures, which drained their treasury. At the same time, Meiji Japan was able to start from scratch, building new cohesive military and administrative structures. Perhaps today, the USA is a bit of an old state, still powerful but not as effective as its younger rival the PRC. An effective state may be the most important factor in relative success for countries.
歐陽泰：我開始相信國家的有效性可以解釋很多事情。 17世紀，清朝建立了一個非常有效且管理良好的國家。
我認為，正是由於這種相對缺乏軍事刺激，
為什麼清朝追趕上來如此困難？首先，
書評： Shi Jingqian（史景遷） is your teacher and a historian familiar to mainland Chinese readers. His books have been published in full set in mainland China and are very popular. I wonder if you can talk about your teacher（史景遷） and his influence on you.Because in Taiwan, many comments say that your novel-like narrative was influenced by Shi Jingqian.
史景遷是您的老師，也是中國大陸讀者所熟悉的歷史學家，
歐陽泰：Jonathan Spence has been a huge influence on me, not just his writings, which inspired me before I even became his student, but also his tutelage and personal example. He had a way in his writing of bringing a world to life, and you’ll notice that he pays as much attention to description, to building a sense of place, as he does to the narrative. He also involves you directly in the experiences of his subjects, whether they are the pennyless John Hu struggling to understand why he’s been imprisoned in France or the troubled Hong Xiuquan seeking to understand his visions and purpose. Like Spence, I believe that historians should not just research the past, make sense of the past, make arguments, build models, etc., but they should also seek to bring the past alive for readers today. I’ve sought to do so in my own work. Important history can be fun to read. We historians should endeavor to make it so.
歐陽泰：喬納森‧史賓塞（Jonathan Spence）對我的影響很大，
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