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Romulus Hillsborough
AUTHOR

Romulus Hillsborough

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Romulus Hillsborough is a leading Western authority on the samurai and the political upheaval that reshaped Japan in the nineteenth century. His fascination with the era spans more than four decades, including sixteen years living in Japan, where he conducted research and traveled around the country to get a real feeling for the cities and provinces where his samurai subjects lived and died as the revolution unfolded.

He is the author of several acclaimed books on the era, including Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai, Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan Seen Through the Eyes of the Shogun’s Last Samurai, Samurai Assassins, and Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi amid the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1863–1869). His books have been published in nine languages and have been praised for their narrative style, historical accuracy, and cultural insight.

His two forthcoming books from Helion, the revised and expanded edition of Samurai Revolution (2027) and Samurai Swordsmen (2026), constitute Volumes I and II, respectively, of the Samurai Revolution Trilogy. Hillsborough is currently writing the third volume, The Last Shogun, which will focus on the life and career of Tokugawa Yoshinobu and his role in the fall of the Tokugawa Bakufu.

The first two volumes offer contrasting perspectives on the revolution that brought an end to the age of the samurai. The new edition of Samurai Revolution incorporates material not included in the first edition, drawing on subsequent research and analysis of journals, letters, memoirs, and other primary sources to chronicle the revolution largely from the perspective of the victorious side. Samurai Swordsmen, an in-depth and complete study of “the shogun's last samurai corps,” meanwhile focuses on the defeated side from the perspective of the Shinsengumi, a police force organized in the spring of 1863 to guard the shogun, quell sedition, and restore law and order in the Imperial Capital of Kyoto during the upheaval of the 1860s. As such, these two books complement each other to present a comprehensive account of this most volatile era in Japanese history. Each volume is a self-contained work that can be read independently of the others.
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