He specialised in Southeast Asian history, and wrote on 18th- and 19th-century Malaysia, North Borneo, Philippines, and Laos, especially regarding foreign involvement in those countries.
Nicholas Tarling was born on 1 February 1931 in Iver, Buckinghamshire, England, and obtained his secondary education at St Albans School.
In 1957 he took up a teaching post at the University of Queensland in Gordon Greenwood's Department of History and Political Science.
In the 1996 Queen's Birthday Honours, Tarling was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to historical research and the arts.
Those in Asian history include Britain, the Brookes and Brunei (1971), Sulu and Sabah (1978),[11] The Burthen, The Risk and the Glory (1982), and The Fourth Anglo-Burman War (1987).