The first chinese edition of Mark Elvin’s landmark study, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, was published in the spring of 2023, commemoratively timed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s issuance.footnote1 This project, a collaborative effort directed by the economic historian Li Bozhong, has been long in the making, dating back decades to the early 1980s. Information regarding Mark’s involvement in the translation process is patchy, but it has been discovered, fortuitously, that he prepared not one, but two prefaces for the planned Chinese text. The first Preface, only recently discovered, was completed in 2007. The second, considerably shorter and noticeably different in content and style, was written in 2014. The Chinese editors opted for the 2014 Preface. The hitherto unknown 2007 Preface, a substantial work of scholarship, finds its first publication here.footnote2
With an arduous translation haltingly underway and a new Chinese readership in view, it is understandable that the explanatory objectives and research design of Pattern of the Chinese Past receive clarifications throughout the Preface. Two preferred methodological procedures are discussed, and affirmed, at the outset: first, systematic, controlled comparison, for the teasing out of causal factors of likely import in the shaping of historical outcomes; and second, inclusiveness in evidence gathering, with special consideration afforded to sources that communicate the experiential textures of everyday life; hence the many self-translated Chinese poems that feature so prominently in Mark’s work, alongside his frequent citations from the ‘being there’ observations the Jesuits provided in their monumental, multi-volume Mémoires concernant les Chinois.
Can a book of historiography, even one widely recognized as a classic, still retain analytical utility and interpretational value half a century after its publication? Elvin provides an engagingly reflective meditation on that question. He situates The Pattern of the Chinese Past within the ambitious and rarely practiced subfield of ‘long-term analytical history’, the successes of which depend on the formulation of explicit questions, clearly defined terms and mutually consistent assumptions that, together, facilitate the heuristic modelling of causes and effects. The triplet of questions that directed his own research—not entirely new individually, but in their binding—are as follows. How did the Chinese empire manage to function as a single political unit over such extended periods of time? What developments led to a ‘medieval economic revolution’ that carried China to the most advanced position in the world? And why did late-imperial China experience significant quantitative growth yet fail to build upon its earlier technological lead, thereby forestalling possible progress towards industrial-scale mechanization, the transformational ‘breakthrough’ that was to propel the hitherto lagging Europeans to global economic and military-political dominance?
Reflecting on these questions anew in the 2007 Preface, Elvin judged them well-founded, and the answers given—never intended as complete—largely correct in substance. His confidence resided not so much at the level of detail, but in the explanatory reasoning and models employed. Briefly, on the question of China’s imperial perdurance, Elvin identified those factors that worked towards securing the Empire against both external threats and internal opposition. A large and highly productive economy, continuous improvements in military technology and logistics, administrative efficiencies that kept expenditures below revenues, modest taxation of the peasantry—these were the main stabilization mechanisms. Of the factors that put imperial unity at risk—to the point of cyclical dynastic toppling—two are given special prominence: the ‘leakage’ of military and economic technologies to the bordering steppe nomads; and excessive territorial expansion, which placed performance and fiscal strains on administrative control and border security. Recourse to taxation increases in turn led to deepening agrarian crises and rising peasant discontent.