Spence was educated at Winchester College, an English independent school for boys, and at Clare College at the University of Cambridge. He received his B.A. in history from Cambridge in 1959. He went to Yale on a Clare-Mellon Fellowship to study the history and culture of China, receiving an M.A. and then a Ph.D. in 1965.

Widely recognized as a leading scholar of Chinese history, Spence was president of the American Historical Association for the 2004-2005 term. While his primary focus has been on medieval China, he has also written a biography of Mao Zedong and Treason by the Book, exploring an intriguing episode of 18th-century history. Spence taught a popular undergraduate class at Yale on the history of Modern China 1600-2007 (offered every other spring semester).

Spence has received eight honorary degrees in the United States as well as from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and (in 2003) from Oxford University. He was invited to become a visiting professor at Peking University and an honorary professor at Nanjing University. He was named Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, and in 2006 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.

He received the William C. DeVane Medal of the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (1752); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979); the Los Angeles Times History Prize (1982), and the Vursel Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1983). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985), named a MacArthur Fellow (1988), appointed to the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress (1988), elected a member of the American Philosophical Society (1993), and named a corresponding fellow of the British Academy (1997).

In 2010, he was appointed to deliver the annual Jefferson Lecture at the Library of Congress, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

Born in Surrey, England, Spence became an American citizen in 2000. He lives in West Haven with his wife, Annping Chin (a Senior Lecturer in History at Yale who got her PhD in Classical Chinese Philosophy at Columbia). He has two sons from a previous marriage (1962-1993) to Helen Alexander, Colin and Ian Spence, and two stepchildren, Yar Woo and Mei Chin.

Books

• The Search for Modern China
• Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi (1974)
• The Death of Woman Wang (1978)
• To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620-1960 (1980)
• The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984)
• The Question of Hu (1987)
• Chinese Roundabout: Essays on History and Culture
• The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution 1895-1980
• The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds
• God's Chinese Son (1996)
• Mao Zedong (1999)
• Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (2007) Viking, 332 pages. ISBN 978-0-670-06357-4
• Treason by the Book

Book Reviews

• "The Dream of Catholic China" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 22-24 [reviews Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: the Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724]