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.
Regarding China’s ‘medieval economic revolution’, Mark emphasized a crucial precondition: throughout the imperial period, the state retained sufficient military power to ward off collapse into a fully localized feudal order. China’s unique ‘manorialism without feudalism’, as he termed it, was based upon a functional and ideological compact between the landed elite and the literati officials who managed the empire. This was a ‘bureaucratic landlordism’, to use Wittfogel’s phrase—which Mark much preferred to Needham’s ‘bureaucratic feudalism’—braced by professionally trained, salaried armies, in contrast to Europe’s parcelized lord and vassal system, with military service and loyalties secured by the granting of fiefs and the serfs attached thereto. The unified Chinese state was thus able to fund and carry out vast infrastructural projects that drove the Song economic revolution, facilitating overall productivity, technological advance, population growth, urban development, expanded markets, and increasingly sophisticated currency.
As for the great puzzle of the technological stagnation that set in following the proto-modernizing Song efflorescence, Elvin draws attention to several long-term causes. The scale of China’s integrated economy and its immense growth in population left little room for further qualitative transformation. Achieved efficiencies in water transport, agriculture, market connectivity and commercialization were already near optimal by traditional standards, while the abundance of cheap labour, most notably in rural handicrafts, discouraged mercantile investments in capital-based technologies. The late-imperial Chinese economy was thus caught within a High-Level Equilibrium Trap, where modest improvements in agricultural practices—along with relentless labour intensifications—kept pace with a surging population and resource depletion, but failed to generate the surpluses and incentives necessary for any fundamental restructuring. That would only come exogenously, with the intrusive shock and example of the Europeans, the bearers of modern scientific knowledge and predacious possessors of the many potent technologies it brought forth.
If the core ideas and interpretations of Pattern can be accepted as sound, that in itself says nothing about the adequacy of its scope, the questions not asked, the topics and subjects unexamined. To address this significant concern, the book’s author—whose mind was ever attentive to the epistemological scaffolding upon which all scholarship ultimately rests—obligingly becomes the informed critic of his own work. Four specific shortcomings—sins of insufficient attention rather than outright neglect—are closely and insightfully examined: the ‘technological lock-in’ problem of China’s extensive water-control systems, efficient but too costly to upgrade; China’s ‘near miss’ on scientific advance, attributable in part to the absence of intellectual networks for shared communication; the cumulatively destructive impacts of human activity on local environments, most consequentially in resource depletion; and the manifold ways in which rising population pressures led to declining per capita productivity, increasing labour inputs, and technological stagnation. Each of these fundamental domains—technology, science, ecology, demography—would command Mark’s research attention in the decades that followed. Most importantly, the monumental Retreat of the Elephants (2004), the first extended environmental history of China, was a widely acknowledged inspiration for that emerging new field of historiography. Nearly a quarter of the 2007 Preface is given over to discussion of these lacunae and subsequent efforts at their narrowing.