Imperial Twilight was written by Stephen R. Platt, a historian and professor of Chinese history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

[1] The book itself was concerned with the Old China Trade, the Canton System, and the events leading up to the start of the First Opium War in the mid-19th century.

Platt also focuses heavily on the in-decline system of bureaucracy that dominated the Qing dynasty during the lead-up to the Opium Wars.

Platt concluded in Imperial Twilight that the Chinese, though knowledgeable and well-organized, were incapable of understanding the threat that Westernized British Empire's economic system and military posed to Imperial China; he also dedicated later chapters of the book to examining how the defeat of the Qing dynasty's forces in the First Opium War set the empire on the path to dissolution at the start of the 20th century.

Ian Morris wrote for The New York Times Book Review that Imperial Twilight was “[A] superb history… Platt has written an enthralling account of the run-up to war between Britain and China", while Julian Gewirtz of The Wall Street Journal noted that the “Masterly .