Jonathan Dermot Spence CMG (11 August 1936 – 25 December 2021) was a British-American historian, sinologist, and author specialised in Chinese history. He was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University from 1993 to 2008. His most widely read book is The Search for Modern China, a survey of the last several hundred years of Chinese history based on his popular course at Yale. A prolific author, reviewer, and essayist, 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. Another common theme is the efforts of both Westerners and Chinese "to change China", and how such efforts were frustrated.
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Jonathan D. Spence in the context of Daoguang Emperor
The Daoguang Emperor (16 September 1782 – 26 February 1850), also known by his temple name Emperor Xuanzong of Qing, personal name Minning, was the seventh emperor of the Qing dynasty, and the sixth Qing emperor to rule over China proper. His reign was marked by "external disaster and internal rebellion". These include the First Opium War and the beginning of the Taiping Rebellion which nearly brought down the dynasty. The historian Jonathan Spence characterizes the Daoguang Emperor as a "well meaning but ineffective man" who promoted officials who "presented a purist view even if they had nothing to say about the domestic and foreign problems surrounding the dynasty".
Jonathan D. Spence in the context of The Search for Modern China
The Search for Modern China is a history book by Jonathan D. Spence, published by Century Hutchinson and W. W. Norton & Company. The first edition was published in 1990, updated by the second edition in 1999, and the third edition in 2013 with new scholarship.
The first edition chronicles the history of China from the late Ming dynasty (circa 1600) to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Acclaimed for its "narrative techniques" and "wealth of illustrations", the book went on The New York Times’s best-seller list and is widely adopted as a standard text for university-level courses on Chinese history.