Earl Hampton Pritchard (June 5, 1907 – May 9, 1995) was an American scholar of China and one of the founders of the Association for Asian Studies and served as its president.
After completing his doctoral dissertation, Pritchard taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, from 1934 until transferring to Washington State in 1935, where he stayed until 1937.
He was disappointed when the Fulbright Fellowship that he earned in 1948 to go to China was cancelled because of the Communist revolution led by Mao Zedong that was sweeping away the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek at the time.
He cited as his third most important achievement the publication of Anglo-Chinese Relations During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (a compacted version of his M.A.
thesis), The Crucial Years of Early Anglo-Chinese Relations 1750–1800 (based in part on his doctoral thesis, 1936), sections written for The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature (1961), the coauthoring of Volume 4 of the UNESCO History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development.