Share

Ifind it hard to write about my early work. I am no longer the person who wrote it. I am also wary about defending it too strongly, for fear of losing the freedom to think in new ways. It often seems wiser to let oneself move with the currents of the times, like the floating duckweed 浮萍 so beloved of the Jin-dynasty 晉代 poet Su Yan 蘇彥.footnote¹ Yet I think that The Pattern of the Chinese Past still has at least two useful general lessons for historians who try to take a comprehensive analytical view of long-term history.footnote²

The first lesson is that this task is most effectively approached in terms of explicit questions, based on clearly defined terms, and that the answers given must be consistent with each other. Otherwise, a long-term historical account risks becoming either an encyclopaedia or a collection of loosely related narratives. The backbone of The Pattern of the Chinese Past consists of three questions. How did the Chinese Empire survive as a single political unit over the long run when all other great historical empires disintegrated? What was the nature of the mediaeval economic revolution that took China for a time to the foremost position in the world economy? And why did the late-imperial Chinese economy grow so large, yet undergo no further important qualitative changes until confronted with the challenge and the example of the rising West?

When I wrote the book, assumptions about the facts underlying the first and third of these questions would have seemed to be beyond challenge, but the second to be subject to some doubt. Today, the second seems to be accepted as well-founded, but the third has been queried by a few outstanding scholars, both Chinese and Western, and of course this challenge hinges on what one sees as ‘important’ qualitative change. I still take the same view as I did before, however, and would now argue that the inability of late-imperial China to develop its own modern science remains the decisive test in this respect.

The other general lesson is that comparisons with other, partially similar, histories with which a scholar is familiar usually provide the most effective method of identifying those causes that are probably of critical importance for producing certain outcomes. The limitation imposed here by the word ‘probably’ is important. Comparisons are best seen as a way of either suggesting or strengthening certain possible explanations; or, depending on the circumstances, diminishing the plausibility of others. They are not proofs or disproofs in the scientific sense. In The Pattern of the Chinese Past, I mainly used European history for this comparative purpose. This was partly because it was the other history that I was most familiar with, and partly because any history of lesser richness would not have been so useful for contrasting with that of China. In analytical history, the commonplace saying that the ‘onlooker has the clearest view’ can sometimes acquire a meaning that is far from commonplace.

Explicit evidence, mostly from written sources, can only be illustrative in analytical long-term history, for reasons of limitations on space. Some of it must always be included, however, as it demonstrates to the reader how the author is thinking. In other words, it shows what sort of material he or she thinks should lead to what sort of conclusions. The Pattern of the Chinese Past introduced and translated Chinese historical material that was new to Western historians. Though some of it will be more familiar to Chinese readers, it still performs the function of indicating the nature of the transition from historical sources to historical analysis.

Pattern is worth reading, even a third of a century after it first appeared, if only because, by and large, it still meets these methodological criteria. Pattern, though, is now itself becoming a part of history. More than a generation has passed since it helped to trigger a revolution in the way that Western scholars looked at the long-term economic history of China, from the start of the imperial era down to the early 20th century. Put in general terms, the book demonstrated that, after an approximate parity in ancient times with the Roman Empire, the mediaeval Chinese economy was probably more advanced than any in Europe until the 17th century, and possibly even the early 18th. Although this finding was not entirely unanticipated, due to the slightly earlier work of Jacques Gernet and partial studies by others, Pattern was unprecedented in its systematic approach and some of its specific conclusions.footnote³ It opened a new domain of debate and raised questions that would not have been thought worth asking before. Above all, it sharpened the question: why did the economy of late-Ming or Qing China not advance to a clearly ‘modern’ stage before learning how to do so from the West?

Many of the book’s ideas appear to have stood the test of time. They tend to be seen today as everyday truths. Their once revolutionary nature, at least within Western Sinology, has become invisible. Others of its ideas have been questioned, but there is no overall alternative general interpretative framework in sight yet. One day there assuredly will be, but it has not happened yet. At least, I am not aware of one. With the details, the situation is different. The amount of new research that has been published since 1973 when Pattern first appeared has been prodigious. Scholarly knowledge of specific aspects of the Chinese past is much richer than it was then. It would be more difficult to write a book like this today than it was at the end of the 1960s. To insert the corrections and the additions that are needed for many subordinate points and topics would be a task beyond what I now have the time for, or the energy to attempt. It would also be relatively uninteresting. I first conceived of Pattern as a sort of rapidly erected bamboo scaffolding for what would eventually be a massive building probably built by other hands. I thought I would be lucky if such scaffolding was still upright five years later. I never guessed it would last thirty-five. Now that China’s own historical scholarship in the People’s Republic is gradually resuming its old dignity and importance after some difficult times, I cherish the thought that maybe one of the readers of this translation will be the person who discovers how to create a new structure.