Isabel Crook (Chinese: 饶素梅; pinyin: Ráo Sùméi; 15 December 1915 – 20 August 2023) was a Canadian-British anthropologist, political prisoner, and professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

[2] After graduating, Brown returned to China and set out for western Sichuan with a Chinese colleague to study the Yi people (known then as Lolos) who followed a shamanic religion and lived in a caste-based society heavily reliant on slavery.

[2][4] The next year, the Chinese National Christian Council hired Brown to survey impoverished rural families in a village outside of Chongqing, which later became the basis for her publication Prosperity's Predicament.

[2] In the early 1940s, Isabel met David Crook, a British Stalinist who had spied for the NKVD in both Spain and Shanghai, and married him in 1942.

Her study of the village in Sichuan, which she, Xiji Yu [zh] and others had begun in the 1940s, was continued in the 90s and then eventually published as Prosperity's Predicament: Identity, Reform, and Resistance in Rural Wartime China in 2013.