Advanced search

A Self Portrait

High-spirited third-person autobiographical sketch of the making of a remarkable polymath.

Preface for Chinese Readers 2014

A personal prologue, this was Elvin’s message to a new generation of mainland readers of his classic economic and social history, The Pattern of the Chinese Past.

Unpublished Preface for Chinese Readers 2007

Drafted for Chinese readers, this unpublished preface—discovered only after Elvin’s death in 2023—is a major retrospective assessment, setting out his broader research agenda and registering his own criticisms of his work.

China’s Multiple Revolutions

Beneath the dramatic social, political and military turmoil of China’s last two centuries, Mark Elvin suggests, lay a series of existential crises amid the collapse of established pillars of authority, whose most vivid expression can be found in two largely forgotten novels of the 1920s and 1970s.

Concepts of Nature

Landscapes of Ausonius, mountain retreats of Xie Tiao, mediaeval paradise-gardens: can underlying similarities of deep structure and social function be traced in the work of classical European and Chinese writers? A panoramic cross-cultural comparison of approaches to the natural world.

The Historian as Haruspex

Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing proposes a bold new political-economic patterning of China’s rise, America’s decline. Mark Elvin examines the assumptions behind narratives of divergent West and East, and the parameters that will define a reconfigured world order.