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Mark Elvin was born in Cambridge, England, in 1938.footnote1 At the end of 1939 he went to stay with his mother’s parents in San Francisco, where he spent the rest of the Second World War. His first memories were thus American, as was his original accent. From this point on his life may be summed up by saying that he was a stranger wherever he was. Even as a child he refused, as being British, to salute the us flag, but was happy to stand to attention, out of politeness. When he returned to England in 1945, he looked at the British through American eyes and was never quite able to persuade himself that they—the British—were not just playing social games and would stop when they got home in the evenings and hung up their jackets. He was wrong, of course.
After picking up the rudiments of an old-style classical education, and a proper English accent to serve as protection against being attacked in the playground, his home was moved to France, while he was sent to a boarding school in London. In the holidays he enjoyed the cultured French life of a junior family member of the unesco elite, and his father once declared to him that he (the father) was going to inculcate in him such an expensive taste in wine that he (Mark) would never be able to afford to get drunk. In the school terms he ate boarding-house fodder, was flogged from time to time and spent Sunday afternoons preparing his cadet uniform and boots for the military day on Monday.
As a leading school-competitive chess player, he also negotiated one-on-one with the Head Master the granting of a school tie for members of the chess team. This was reluctantly conceded, the team having lost just one match in three years, but on the condition that it was of such a design that it could not be mistaken for any of the ties of healthy physical sports like rugby football. The chess team collectively designed an elegant tie in black and silver silk that made the other ties look vulgar in comparison and generated a good deal of mildly gratifying envy.
Since most of Mark’s friends at this time were Jewish, sharing with him a taste for music, chess and talking non-stop, and a refusal to attend the school’s official Christian services, there were now four somewhat different ways of looking at the world competing in his brain. A good while later he learned enough Hebrew to steer his way through a parallel-text version of the Old Testament, and although he has forgotten most of it by now, retains an affection for the strange warm magic of this ancient language.
Between the ages of fifteen and sixteen he read very nearly all of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the time spent travelling on the London underground system to and from the school’s sports ground, and this probably crystallized his interest in history. He also wrote a long essay on the role of water when the class was challenged to write on the ‘most important factor’ in human history. The environmental historian has been long in the making.
Just after his sixteenth birthday he somehow won an open scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, while running a high fever that made the faces of his interviewers swim in front of his eyes like balloons, got drunk to celebrate, was flogged one last time as a punishment, scored the only and hence winning goal in the annual soccer match between the two school boarding houses (rugby being regarded as too dangerous for such ferocious rivals), was chaired off the field in triumph and left the next day for a private Grand Tour of Europe, especially Italy which has remained ever since a great love.
At Cambridge he presented an undergraduate research paper to the King’s College Political Society on ‘Cathars and Troubadours’, trying to explain how the same culture and period—the 12th and 13th centuries—had produced both world- and flesh-denying heretics, on the one hand, and the propagandists of romantic love on the other. It involved using Latin sources and learning a smattering of Provençal for the songs, but failed to solve the problem, which perhaps was not really such a problem at all. Reading some of the works of Max Weber and Joseph Needham then kindled his interest in two questions: why did the Chinese, who were so obviously bright and hard-working, with a well-educated elite, and alarmingly good at business, not have an industrial revolution and a modern scientific revolution of their own, in contrast to the early-modern West? To this he added a third question: why were there no apparent signs of major democratic institutions in premodern Chinese history? This set the intellectual agenda for the first two-thirds of the rest of his life.