Jonathan Dermot Spence (Chinese: 史景遷; pinyin: Shǐ Jǐngqiān; 11 August 1936 – 25 December 2021) was a British-American sinologist and historian who specialised in Chinese history. He was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University from 1993 to 2008. He was best known for his book The Search for Modern China (1990), a survey of the last several hundred years of Chinese history. He published over a dozen books on China. Spence's major interest was modern China, especially the Qing dynasty, and relations between China and the West. Spence frequently used biographies to examine cultural and political history.
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Early life and education
Spence was born on 11 August 1936 to Muriel (née Crailsham) and Dermot Spence in Surrey in England. His mother was a French researcher while his father worked at an art gallery and a publishing house.
Spence was educated at Winchester College until 1954. He then spent two years in the British Army and was deployed to Germany. He read history at Clare College, Cambridge, and received his B.A. in 1959. While at Cambridge, he was the editor of the campus magazine and was also the co-editor of British literary magazine Granta. After graduation, he won a Mellon Fellowship to study Chinese history and culture at Yale University, where he won the John Addison Porter Prize in 1965. He earned an M.A. in Chinese from Yale and his Ph.D. in Chinese from Yale in 1965. As part of his graduate training, he spent a year in Australia studying under Chinese scholars Fang Chao-ying and Tu Lien-che.