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In the early fifties of the twentieth century, when I was about fifteen, still a schoolboy in London, I read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. This was first published in six volumes in 1776–89, when China was in the mid-Qing. Of works by English-speaking historians, it is generally considered the greatest. I borrowed the volumes one by one from the public library near my school, often taking them with me to read on the journey back and forth by tube or bus. It took me almost a year to finish reading them all in my spare time. The volumes chronicle the process of the Roman Empire’s decline, which lasted over a millennium.

In terms of Chinese history, that was roughly the millennium from the late Western Han to the middle of the Ming. Viewed from the periodization of Europe, Gibbon’s work begins in late Antiquity and early Christendom and ends at the close of the Middle Ages, when the last of the East Roman—that is, Byzantine—Empire fell to a Turkish army in 1453, conquered by gunpowder invented in China. This period also saw the earliest sprouts of what is usually understood to be ‘modern’ times in Western Europe. The stories that Gibbon’s book recounts are like the unfolding of a magnificent panoramic scroll of an epic history.

For every single fact he mentions, Gibbon provides supporting sources from the numerous original documents he mastered. Most of the materials were in Latin, but some were in Greek. (He did not read ancient and mediaeval documents written in other languages, which could have been helpful to him, but were not indispensable for the purposes of his argument.) The general view among his contemporaries was that to produce a book covering such a long historical time-span, Gibbon’s reading must have been extraordinarily wide. An integrated analysis of such a period written by an independent scholar was an unprecedented achievement. Today, specialists concur that Gibbon had read almost all the Latin archives available at the time. In the years before I went to university at the age of seventeen, in 1955, this book supplied my basic idea of how to write history. In a broad sense it still serves such a purpose today, especially since no reader would know how scholars reach their conclusions had Gibbon not pioneered the practice of providing supporting sources, accurately and densely collected.

The book now in front of the reader, The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation, is a rudimentary historical essay written in the early 1970s, when I was in my thirties. I was still young, and what I described was China’s historical trajectory as I imagined it, following Gibbon’s example but using more contemporary concepts. Though I verified the Chinese materials translated into English that I cited, the book relied mainly on a careful choice of studies by European, Chinese and Japanese scholars. It was not until I was older that I could read Chinese with sufficient speed to acquire new evidence for my arguments without depending on initial clues in secondary works.

Pattern of the Chinese Past begins in a much earlier period than Gibbon’s study and ends with a much later one, the final years of Qing rule, a span of some interest from a typical European perspective. The book also makes a number of predictions. Some of these are now outdated, given the many historical events that have occurred since. Of these, the most conspicuous is a comment on page 319 of the book’s first edition of 1973, where I remarked that once China enters the international market, ‘it is capable of doing this with an effectiveness that will come as a shock’. Today, that looks like common sense, yet in the not-so-distant past it was highly controversial. But its accuracy was not luck. It was a prediction based on my analysis of the true economic abilities of the Chinese people, especially their creativity, for several centuries prior to early-modern times.

As a work of historical scholarship, Pattern of the Chinese Past cannot be compared to Gibbon’s monumental study. Its intention was not to settle existing questions with definitive answers but to provoke new debates about them. Readers should approach the book in that spirit: to expand their thinking on these questions and on the discussions around them; to that end, I hope they may find it interesting. There is another difference between the two works. Gibbon wrote his in order to prove theses that he was already convinced were true: that the decline of the Roman Empire was due to the weakening of its capacity for warfare and to the spreading influence of Christianity. By contrast, when I started writing, my aim was to consider questions to which there were, as yet, no satisfactory answers.

First, why was the Chinese Empire able to maintain its unity for such a long time—unlike the Roman Empire, which eventually fell apart? After all, the Chinese Empire split early on, during the period of the Three Kingdoms, 220–280 ad, followed by an incomplete reunification, before suffering an even more serious division between the South–North Dynasties of the 5th and 6th centuries ad. After unity was restored once more under the Sui and Tang dynasties, the Empire disintegrated again in the Five-Dynasties and Ten-Kingdoms period, and then with the end of the Northern Song, it divided again, the upper half of China falling to Jurchen conquest in the early 12th century. Less than two and a half centuries later, after Mongol rule by the Yuan dynasty, China was reunified in 1368 under the Ming, a Han dynasty. Then from the mid-17th century onwards the Empire experienced both huge geographical expansion and rapid demographic growth, but this time it was under Manchu rule by the Qing dynasty, 1644–1911. Yet despite these repeated splits and divisions, the Chinese Empire as a whole maintained its unity most of the time.