The early life of the historian Jerome Ch’en, who has died aged 99, ran in parallel with the upheavals in modern China that he went on to document. Once dynastic rule collapsed after 1911, the warlord period (1916-28) was followed by the Japanese invasion (1931-45) and the civil war.

By the end of the civil war, in 1949, the Communist party was triumphant and Jerome was studying in London. He stayed abroad, and spent the rest of his life working out, as a historian, how it was that the decades he had lived in China had led to the Communist conquest. He pioneered the study of the Republic of China (1911-49), especially of the rise of the military and later of the Communists.

This was often painful work. The events that engulfed China brought great suffering to his family and friends, and cut him off from his native country. Though they started life in a traditional society, his brilliant generation of Chinese intellectuals came of age in warfare and revolution, and were later persecuted or exiled.

Jerome’s books included Yuan Shih-k’ai (1961), about the dynastic moderniser and first president of the republic; Mao and the Chinese Revolution (1965); China and the West, and The Military-Gentry Coalition: China Under the Warlords (both 1979); State Economic Policies of the Ch’ing Government (1980); and The Highlanders of China (1992). He rewrote The Military-Gentry Coalition in Chinese. Perhaps his favourite book was his first, Poems of Solitude (1961), an anthology translated from Chinese poems, edited with Michael Bullock.

Born Chen Zhirang in Chengdu, Sichuan, in western China, Jerome came from a literature-loving family. His father, Chen Keda, passed the imperial examinations just before the system was abolished in 1905; the official career that would have followed vanished. His mother, Ma Huizhi, was married to his father in her mid-teens, after his first wife had died, leaving two sons. She had eight children; four did not survive.

Chen Keda scraped together an income to support the family until 1929, when he went bankrupt. Ma Huizhi died, the family lost its home, and Jerome was sent to a missionary school, where he learnt English. The Japanese invasion had forced the flight of China’s great northern universities to the remote southwest. In 1939 Jerome went to the distinguished but very poor Southwest United University, combining the faculty and students of several institutions.

In late 1945, after the defeat of the Japanese, he took a six-day journey by lorry to Beijing, where he taught economics at Yen-ching University. In 1946 he won a scholarship to study under Friedrich Hayek, the liberal critic of JM Keynes, at the London School of Economics. When Hayek decamped to Arkansas in 1949, Jerome moved to the School of Oriental and African Studies.

By the time he finished his thesis in 1952, the Communist party was in control in China. The last letter he received from his older brother warned him not to come home. The new order was hostile to someone trained in western liberal economics.

Jerome worked for the Chinese Service of the BBC, and played for the BBC’s bridge team. This was not a long-term career; being Chinese he was not considered suitable for promotion. He went to Leeds University, as reader in history. The years there were not unhappy. He had many friends but he was an outsider; it was made clear to him, in a kindly way, that as a Chinese person he could not expect to get a chair in Chinese history. In 1971 he was recruited as a professor by York University in Toronto, where he stayed until retiring in 1987.

For almost three decades Jerome had no contact with China or his family there. When he did go back in 1978 he learned that his fellow intellectuals had been persecuted, banished and imprisoned, or had taken their own lives, in the Cultural Revolution. As China entered the Reform era in the late 1970s, he regained some of the hope for a better China that he had embraced so passionately in his youth.

In October 1981, at the conference for the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution (the first time the revolution had been celebrated for four decades), Jerome gave a fluent, impassioned speech on “seeking truth from facts” and academic independence. He was cheered for many minutes by Chinese colleagues.

His hope faded as it became clear that the Communist party would remain in complete charge of China; there was no hope for the rule of law. He did not return to the country except for short visits, which was a source of deep sadness for him.

Jerome had a large circle of friends and colleagues, in Canada, the UK, the US, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan; I first knew him as a student and colleague. In retirement he read the official biographies of Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, still trying to understand how the Communists came to power and held on to it. He saw the war with Japan as the turning point in the history of modern China as well as of his own life: “The war was Japan’s great mistake, Mao’s most brilliant gamble and Chiang [Kai-shek]’s worst mishandling.”

Jerome outlived his siblings.

• Jerome Ch’en, historian, born 2 October 1919; died 17 June 2019