[2] Elliott's interest in East Asian history began at Yale, where he earned his BA and MA, the latter as a student of Jonathan Spence and Beatrice Bartlett.
After several years of study and archival research in Taiwan, mainland China, and Japan, he earned his PhD in 1993 from the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in the history of the Qing dynasty under the guidance of Frederic Wakeman.
His The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China is a representative work of the Manchu-centered theory of Qing history.
[4] In March 2018, Elliott inaugurated Harvard's Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute in New Delhi.
[5] In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Mark Elliott OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 10+ works in 20+ publications in 3 languages and 600+ library holdings.