Maria Manzon is Assistant Professor at the Education University of Hong Kong. She is an Associate Editor of the Asia Pacific Education Journal. She is also a Board Member of the Comparative Education Society of Asia and was previously Chair of the Admissions and New Societies Standing Committee of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies.

• Introduction – Origins and traditions in comparative education: challenging some assumptions 1. Embodied comparative education 2. Hechtius (1795–1798) – the beginnings of historical-philosophical-idiographic research in comparative education 3. Bereday and Hilker: origins of the ‘four steps of comparison’ model 4. The Nazi seizure of the International Education Review: a dark episode in the early professional development of comparative education 5. Revisiting comparative education in Latin America: traditions, uses, and perspectives 6. Towards a new articulation of comparative educations: cross-culturalising research imaginations 7. Comparative education histories: a postscript

This important collection re-examines origins and traditions in comparative education as a scholarly field of educational inquiry. Maria Manzon has brought together an impressive group of specialists whose papers challenge many existing assumptions about its development. Volker Lenhart, for example, draws attention to Hechtius as a forerunner of Marc-Antoine Jullien, Christel Adick reminds us of the work of Franz Hilker and its association with Bereday’s four-step model of comparison, and Erwin Epstein writes of the International Education Review’s ideological usurpation under Nazism. Robert Cowen contributes a lively paper on key actors and ‘ways of knowing', Felicitas Acosta and Guillermo Ramón Ruiz describe ways in which comparative education has developed in Latin America, and Keita Takayama articulates the ‘area studies’ tradition in comparative inquiry, with particular reference to Japan. Together, their papers provide a fresh look at comparative education and its history that will be of interest to all concerned with understanding what this important dimension of educational inquiry is about.David PhillipsEmeritus Professor of Comparative Education, University of Oxford, UK