INTRODUCTION Introduction: National Traditions of Sinology Joshua A. Fogel guest editor* York University, Toronto, Canada *Corresponding author. Email: fogel@yorku.ca (Received 16 June 2022; accepted 20 June 2022) Keywords: Sinology; national traditions; history Several years ago, Pat Ebrey, founding editor of this journal, solicited the board for ideas for special issues. I have long been interested in the historiography of different national Sinological traditions and suggested a series of essays on this topic from a host of such historiographical backgrounds. Pat agreed and enthusiastically supported the idea. I had spoken about such a topic in a vague, roundabout manner some twenty years earlier with Martin Kern (Princeton University), and so I consulted him and was extremely fortunate to be given by him a handful of names of scholars who might perform such a task for their countries of origin, mostly in Europe. I was able to gradually com- pile a list that runs now to fifteen essays. Most of the authors are senior scholars in their fields, although some are mid-career or even junior; one is written by a graduate stu- dent. It was, of course, also essential that these authors all be able to write in English. Two obvious candidates for essays, China and the United States, are purposefully missing, and their absence demands a brief explanation. China’s own scholarship on its history is both widely known and, of course, highly contentious; it would require a team of scholars to trace its many Sinological traditions, and one or even two essays would be insufficient. By the same token, American scholarship on Chinese history and culture has been analyzed in countless venues to date, at least to my way of thinking. As these essays have come together, striking convergences have emerged, especially among the European traditions, but there are individually distinctive trajectories as well. Only the East Asian nations (Vietnam, Korea, and Japan) have genuinely premodern Sinological traditions. All of these national Sinological histories have faced serious dis- ruptions, often dramatic ones, over the course of their development. World War II is, quite obviously, the most dramatic of such events, but the Russian Revolution and its impact throughout Eastern Europe especially in the postwar decades was a close second, resounding still in China and Vietnam and Marxist historiographical traditions else- where. In Europe, Czechoslovakia (and the Czech Republic, now) probably encountered the most such disruptions within Europe (1938–1945 from the Nazi invasion to the end of World War II; 1968 with Prague Spring and its crushing demise; and 1989 with the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe). Vietnam faced French colonialism, Japanese invasion, French return and renewed war, national division and war with the United States and its allies, and finally reunification (and, soon thereafter, a border war with China). © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unre- stricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Journal of Chinese History (2023), 7, 253–255 doi:10.1017/jch.2022.30