The work of Mark Elvin represents perhaps the most outstanding attempt by any scholar in our times to comprehend another culture as a whole. A preeminent comparative historian, Elvin was distinguished not only by command of his field, the long-term dynamics of Chinese civilization, but by his combination of scientific and literary sensibilities, each at a very high level, and his sure grasp of conceptual, methodological and historiographical questions. Born in London in 1938, Elvin’s gift for comparativism was developed—as he describes in the ‘Self Portrait’ that follows—by a kaleidoscopic succession of cultural contrasts: boyhood in America, school in England, home in France; and his idea of a historian, by teenage immersion in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Reading European History at Cambridge, he first encountered the Chinese world through Weber’s study of its religion, then Joseph Needham’s monumental project on the deep roots of its science and civilization, with which Elvin became involved, learning classical Chinese. A spell at Harvard to study modern Chinese history—also to learn Japanese, in which much of the best twentieth-century scholarship on China was written—introduced him to the New England poet Anne Stevenson, biographer of Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop, who would be the mother of his two sons. Intellectually, though, Elvin acknowledged that it was the stimulus of co-teaching comparative courses at Glasgow University on Japanese, Russian, French, German and American economic history—compelling a systematic contrast between China and the rest—that catalysed his landmark contribution, The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation (1973).
The subtitle mattered. The aim of Pattern of the Chinese Past was not to provide a comprehensive narrative account but rather ‘to disengage the major themes of relevance for an understanding of China today’. Elvin repurposed the questions posed by Needham and Weber—why did Chinese scientific and technical advances begin to wane by the mid-14th century? Why, despite a higher overall level of economic activity than in Europe, which continued in the 17th and into the 18th century, was there no endogenous breakthrough to industrial manufacturing?—by setting them within a political and geographical, as well as a social, economic and technological matrix. Critical to the pre-modern Chinese economy was its sheer size, Elvin argued; its population, some 200 million in 1600, was twice that of all the west European countries combined. To explain this meant elucidating why China alone, of all the empires of the ancient world, had remained so resilient. Its ruling elites may have varied—Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing—and it had known periods of division and internal strife; yet down to 1911, and indeed beyond, it had always reconstituted itself again as a political unit, whereas the Roman Empire had fragmented definitively into a patchwork of rival European states.
The turning point, Elvin argued—the divergence from the European pattern—came at the hinge of the first millennium. In ad 960, the founders of the Song dynasty succeeded in reuniting most of the Empire which, after the collapse of the Tang dynasty in ad 907, had been divided for half a century between five rival dynasties and ten kingdoms. What underlay this achievement were the integrative effects produced by the advances in growth and prosperity of the 8th–12th century Chinese ‘middle ages’. The initial developmental surge was driven by the expansion of paddy farming in less-populated southern China from the 8th century, and the influx of population there from the dry-farming north. This take-off was then sustained by a dynamic growth in agricultural markets, credit systems and water-borne transport networks, which in turn supported the growth of major cities, establishing a degree of economic integration that was itself an obstacle to political fragmentation. The Song emperors reinforced the exam-based imperial-bureaucratic system begun under the Tang; the circulation of scholar-officials, themselves from land-owning families keen to expand the agricultural surplus, helped to spread innovatory farming practices from region to region. The state encouraged the development of woodblock printing, with works on mathematics, medicine and warfare, as well as illustrated treatises on husbandry and weaving ‘for the common people’, published alongside the Confucian canon. Iron-working and hydraulics had developed very early, alongside the production of silks, porcelain and paper; with China’s ‘medieval economic revolution’, as Elvin called it, scientific breakthroughs in astronomy, anatomy and chemistry were accompanied by technological advances in cartography, pharmacology, metallurgy and explosives, as well as the first water-powered textile machines, twenty feet long, with 32 mechanical spindles. By 1300, Imperial China seemed on the brink of an industrial-manufacturing revolution, four hundred years before Britain.
In The Pattern of the Chinese Past, Elvin’s explanation for why this did not take place discounted Needham’s explanation—scientific slowdown—and Weber’s: lack of the Protestant ethic. He argued that the absence of major technological innovations from the 15th century onwards could be explained by an interlocking set of socio-economic factors. Chinese agriculture was already so highly productive that there was little room for increased yields. The huge scale of the economy meant that any effective stimulus had to be equally vast. A fast-growing population cheapened labour and reduced per capita shares of the surplus, weakening demand. Resources like forests, soil and water were already more depleted than was the case in 15th-century Europe. In this context—Elvin famously called it a high-level equilibrium trap—there was no endogenous pressure to invent energy-intensive, labour-saving machinery; a rational entrepreneurial strategy would rather aim to expand and intensify the labour-intensive, energy-saving status quo. In the realm of ideas, 10th-century Neo-Confucianism had stressed the reality and meaningfulness of human life, in its battle against Buddhist nihilism and idealism—encouraging scientific investigation of the natural world. By the 16th century, literati interests had begun to take an introspective, subjectivist turn. There was no Chinese equivalent, Elvin argued, to the state-backed institutions that supported modern scientific development in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, as it broke free of clerical obscurantism: Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Lavoisier. Advanced as it was, and still world-dominant by size, the Chinese economy of the 17th and 18th centuries would be characterized by ‘quantitative growth, qualitative standstill’; compared to this sophistication, Western Europe would enjoy the advantage of backwardness.