Ghassan Moazzin (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Ghassan Moazzin is an assistant professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and in the Department of History. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he received both his BA (2012) and PhD (2017). Before coming to Hong Kong, he was a JSPS International Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Economics of the University of Tokyo. He has also been a visiting scholar at East China Normal University in Shanghai and the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica in Taipei. His doctoral dissertation won both the Coleman Prize of the Association of Business Historians and the Herman E. Krooss Prize of the Business History Conference. It was also a finalist for the Dissertation Prize (Category: The Long Nineteenth Century) of the World Economic History Congress 2018.

Moazzin’s research deals with the economic and business history of modern China and the global history of capitalism. He has previously worked on the history of foreign banks, international finance and economic globalization in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. His research has been published in Cross-Currents, Modern Asian Studies, Business History Review, Enterprise & Society, International Journal of Asian Studies, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, and Business History. His first monograph, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. In 2023, the book was a finalist for the Hagley Prize in Business History. In 2024, it received the Honorable Mention for the Ralph Gomory Prize and was the co-winner of the First Monograph Prize in Economic and/or Social History of the Economic History Society.

Moazzin was awarded the Faculty Research Award for Junior Tenure-track Professoriate Staff (for cumulative research activity over a three-year period) for 2024. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His current major research and book project deals with the history of the electrical and electronics industries in China from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. In addition, he is also writing a book tentatively titled A Business History of Modern China: c. 1800 to the Present, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Selected Publications

• Moazzin, Ghassan. Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• Moazzin, Ghassan, John D. Wong, and Jin-A Kang. “Modern Chinese Enterprise and the Global Economy: A Historiographical Essay.” Business History, published online June 20, 2025: 1–18.
• Moazzin, Ghassan. “Incomplete Infrastructure: State-Building and the Early History of China’s Long-Distance Telephone Network, 1900–1937.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, First View (2025): 1–27.
• Moazzin, Ghassan. “Banking on Distant Shores: A Comparison of the Development of Foreign Banks in pre-World War I China and Japan.” International Journal of Asian Studies, First View (2024): 1–19.
• Moazzin, Ghassan. “Electric Pioneers: Nationalist Lobbying, Technology Transfer, and the Origins of the Chinese Electric Lamp Industry, 1921–1937.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 213–47.