Mark Elvin

Mark Elvin interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 24th July 2012

0:05:07 Born 1938 in Cambridge but the life I remember was in San Francisco; my father sent me and my mother, who was American, to live there with my grandparents, probably in 1939; my mother was a clinical psychologist took a job in the juvenile court there; in due course this turned into the assignment from hell; she was amazingly calm about it but only talked of it to me when I was about twenty-five; just after the Americans came into the war, an enormous number of troops poured through the Golden Gate and out to the war with Japan; the number of Lolita-aged girls who were in trouble was almost unhandleable; my mother's job was to decide what was to be done with these girls, some as young as eleven, once the judicial process had had its way; my chief sadness was when her legal clerk, Marie Caldwell, suddenly disappeared to sew ships with a welding gun in a shipyard in the north of the Bay, organized by the automobile magnate, Henry Kaiser; I had no idea really what was going on in the court, and only a rough idea of the war; I was taken around an aircraft carrier, and my chief concern was for the poor rats who, I was told, ran up the mooring hawsers, met sort of inverted coolie hats, couldn't turn round, and fell off; I had no idea what these young men were going off to do; my father had disappeared; the first three months he had what he said was the worst non-combatant job in Government; he had to write letters to the widows of those who had died in the Battle of Britain for the Air Ministry; because he put in tiny human touches he was promptly taken off that job; it was discovered that he had two other abilities, one was a knowledge of America so he became very much involved in relation with America, particularly trying to prepare the public and Government for a hoped-for alliance of some sort; the Japanese did his job for him; he wrote a temporary best-seller called 'Man of America' which was later, after the war, translated into Japanese; the one part he never talked about, my sons conclude, was that the time not spent in the Ministry of Information was mostly spent being the man behind the man behind the Minister at various conferences; he had an extraordinary knowledge of the world which is why he later fitted so easily into UNESCO; he was garrulous, a brilliant raconteur, but about this we never heard

5:28:08 War is great for small boys and they don't understand at that distance what is really going on; in San Francisco I remember, much later on, when coffee was rationed there was a bitter protest; you can put that into the British context and see why it looks very odd when I look back afterwards; the impact at the personal level was that my grandfather, who the Minister of the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco, had a very friendly old Japanese gentleman, who looked after the church and was a great favourite of mine; one day he disappeared into some kind of internment; I never saw him again and nobody would tell me where he had gone, which even at that age worried me as I knew something was wrong; it wasn't explained what the Americans were doing, for security reasons, and he got engraved inside me as a memory of something that went wrong; otherwise it was a very straightforward childhood with some odd lessons in it; at kindergarten they wanted to introduce something more realistic; when I arrived, aged about four, I was presented with a can with water in it and a four-inch paintbrush, and told to paint the wooden slat fence outside in the sunshine; I set to work and carefully painted the wood with water, but by the time I got to the third slat it was drying off, so I went in and protested; I was told not to be silly, and that made me very angry; the row became so bad that my mother had to be called and she managed, diplomatically, to settle it, and I was never asked to do such a silly thing again; in retrospect this was a wonderful parable for the real world and much work, but I also began to learn that grownups could be incredibly stupid, and would not back down; at another pre-school I had a teacher, mainly an art teacher, called Miss Sunny, a name that suited her well; I drew trees, houses, children and animals, not very well, but I always did the sky as a solid blue line across the top of the paper; after a while she said, "John (I was called John then and changed my name later to my middle name) if you look at the sky doesn't it come down and fill in all the gaps"; she suggested I try but I said that I painted the sky at the top because that was where it was; she didn't lose her temper, but smiled, it was fine by her, but I could try it some time if I was interested; sometime later I did try and confessed that she was right; she remained a great favourite of mine because she was a reasonable grownup; she was helpful, didn't bully, and told me something; the chief point about life there was the contrast with Britain after the war when I came back; I actually came back slightly before the end in a meat steamer which many British children travelled in at some time or other, called the 'Rangatiki' - a New Zealand ship which travelled in the centre of the convoy for protection against the U-boats; I don't know why my father brought us back so early though he was aware that the war was going to end in our favour - it was 1944; I suffered a terrible pang of guilt for my behaviour there because I made a very beautiful little paper boat and was caught by the steward dropping it over the side of the boat; he told me that the Germans would see it and know that we had passed by; he put rubbish into a weighted container every evening and dropped it over the side where it went straight to the bottom; he told me never to do it again as I was risking people's lives; because he had described things, I saw him as a reasonable grownup, and was desperately anxious that I would not imperil us because of my paper boat

11:50:08 At that point I only knew my mother's father who was a bit overawing; on Saturdays you had to observe complete silence in the house because he was writing his sermon; I really related much better to my grandmother who was apparently distantly related to the Wrights of Ohio who had invented powered flight; Dian (my wife) as a genealogist has not yet pinned that down; I think the family is unhappy about too much poking around; my grandmother was interested in birds and vegetables, and I grew a vegetable garden under her supervision; we also looked at the birds in the garden and occasionally had humming birds; I remember watching one flying backwards and thought it extraordinary; she was a good cook; what I didn't know, and only learnt this year, was that my grandfather had been unfaithful to her during a transatlantic holiday voyage, on the way to some conference in Europe, with his church organist; I suddenly discovered a sort of cousin - Tom Stone - who wrote to me with all the details which had just recently been released to him; the older ladies in the family who did know this had kept it secret; they decided that since his father had now died they would tell his son; suddenly I discovered I was not on my own, and we have been in correspondence since then; my grandfather was a very moral and authoritarian chap and this would have smashed his career to pieces; I am quite sure in retrospect that my grandmother knew; there was a kind of subdued sadness about her which impressed me very early on and I didn't know why; she found relief in the birds and for the first time in seventy-plus years, that makes sense

15:22:11 My father's father was a Lay Preacher - I had always understood, Methodist, but I think it was Congregationalist - rather rigid, but a very principled man, I think in this case, genuinely; he was a trade union leader; he said his hardest job as leader of the Clerks Union has been to organise the offices of the railway unions' personnel; the unions running the railways did not want their clerks to be unionised, and it was quite a struggle; in the end he became a member of the London County Council, and for at least one year was the President of the TUC, so there is a very deep streak which didn't die in me either, which regards unions, responsibly run, as incredibly important parts of society, and the endless, day to day, largely confidential battle against the mistreatment of people who are workers; my father's mother was tiny and called Dolly, probably about 4ft 11in; it turned out later on that she was a free thinker but had kept her mouth shut while my grandfather was alive; something of her attitude clearly got into my father and his two brothers; my grandfather died fairly young at sixty-seven, and I remember knowing that he was going to die by looking at him; he sat in a chair having Benger's food with a shawl around him; he was a very remarkable man and I must have inherited something of his attitude towards society; there was only one occasion that my grandmother lost her temper with me; it was very near the end, and she was living with my second uncle at Leigh on Sea, Essex; she didn't like even then to be thought of as a burden, and did all the washing-up after lunch and breakfast; she found me doing so and gave me a real scolding, saying that she was living in my uncle's house and there was very little that she could do to thank them for their kindness apart from washing-up and that I had got to let her do it; I suddenly had awe-stricken respect for this self-discipline, and apologised at once; this was a burst of real anger that I had never seen before; she was a character but I didn't know her very deeply, unlike my American grandmother; my two uncles were interesting people; Uncle George was the de-facto founder of the old Associated Cinematograph and Television Technicians Union, which for a time had powerful control over the manufacture, production and showing of films made in Britain; he was a man who exuded will-power in the same way as a boxer exudes strength; he went eye to eye with people like Spiro Skouras and Sam Goldman's representatives; he took on power and he very often won; he was a very determined guy with a wonderful sense of humour, but he suffered a lot from nervous strain; it was for his sense of humour that he is remembered; he always took bribes and declared what he had received - such as a fur coat - on the notice board in the main Union office in Soho Square; he then circularized his deputies around all the branches asking which of their members would have a use for the bribe; if someone wrote about a newly-widowed woman who would love a fur coat, George would look round to see that no one else was worthier, then send off the coat to her with the compliments of the Union; he was attacked by one of the Sunday papers and accused of being a card-carrying Communist; he was very left-wing but not a Communist and he sued them and won a lot of money; with it he took a very well publicised trip to Sochi on the Black Sea and had a de luxe holiday, bringing back a lot of caviar and other things for the family; it was in fact my first taste of caviar; he was making the point that he was not going to be intimidated; when I lived in Glasgow much later, I got an insight into his methods of negotiating; he would come up for a meeting and we would arrange to pick him up and give him a bed for the night; I remember picking him up around midnight and he seemed to be extraordinarily drunk; we gave him a coffee and then somehow got onto the only real disagreement we had with him; we thought that the policy of his union towards people who made small-budget films did not get a fair deal - they did not need to have a special electrician putting the plug in and out, for example; once the argument got going he sat up, the slur left his voice, and he talked lucidly like a trade unionist should, disagreeing with every word that we said; I realized that the secret of his technique was to feign drunkenness and stay absolutely stone-sober inside; I did some negotiating in Australia later in life, not at a very high level, but that was a useful model; of my other uncle, if this story is true, he got trapped in the Soviet Union when Hitler developed the second front; he went straight to the Embassy, where my grandfather did know the Ambassador, and was given the job of the second, assistant, night watchman; he was very happy with this; then there was the Embassy chess tournament; he was not a very good chess player, but not bad - I was a better player; the Soviet Union and Great Britain arranged over-the-radio chess matches with a Russian-speaking representative present to see that they followed the rules; my uncle had just recently won an Embassy chess match though an assistant night-watchman thrashing a political secretary was just not done; the Ambassador summoned my uncle, ascertained he could play chess and speak Russian; asked about his past experience of work he said he had acted as floor manager for Alexander Korda; he was immediately promoted to Assistant Secretary for Culture and given the task of looking after the refereeing and umpiring of the radio chess match, and so he did; I don't believe there is any comparable promotion in the diplomatic service; this was the man who brought the Russian ballerina, Violetta Prokhorova, better known as Violetta Elvin, back to Britain after the war; she now lives in Naples and has confirmed that it was through the direct intervention of Atlee with Stalin, at my grandfather's request, that my uncle was able to get a top ballerina out of Russia to marry him

28:54:03 My father was a man I greatly respected; always very proper, cautious and responsible, for example, he and my mother never travelled on the same aeroplane until I was twenty-one so that I would never be orphaned; not seeing him but for a very brief visit during the war meant that I reached the age of seven without knowing him; my bonding was very much with my mother, an extraordinary, deep person; my father was never interested on the surface in what I did; he was working firstly at higher education as the Principal of Ruskin College in Oxford; Oxford actually asked him if he wanted Ruskin to be incorporated into the University, and after discussions with the people there, decided against it; in his day, people like Bertrand Russell and Joseph Needham would come willingly to talk, and Ruskin was full of people from the main university; he was a remarkable man but with me his relationship was summed up by my showing something I had done, and he would just say "Very Fine"; eventually I got into the habit of asking him to look at something but not to say that it was very fine; of course he just found an equivalent phrase; on the surface he was not really interested; he then went to UNESCO as the "E" when it was still a remarkable and idealistic organization, and not a way of finding jobs for people owed political debts; that meant we had to go and live in Paris; I saw a little bit more of him there but mostly I just remember his table talk, which was brilliant, but he had very little interaction with me, although he was very responsible and kind in a rather distant way; my mother was quite a different matter; she was the first woman to get a first in psychology at Cambridge which was her second degree; she had been at Stanford before that; she was one of the specially gifted children studied by Terman at Stanford throughout their lives; the project carried on until very recently; she was the scientific part of my background; although basically in therapeutic work, her great speciality being the effects after the war of localised lesions in the brain; she was for a long time, after Richie Russell with whom she worked, regarded as the most important person to refer to; she was part of the team who first put agrammatism on the screen as a real phenomenon, with tests to determine its presence; agrammatism means having a vocabulary, maybe quite a large one of several thousand words, but not being able to string them together in a reliable and consistent order; the last time I talked to her she said there were probably about four cases a year in Britain, if that, but during the war there was a great number of these people; she spent most of her time before we moved to Paris, and some of the time after we came back, on how to diagnose the specifics and try to find some kind of useful employment for such people; I gained from her an acute awareness of the importance of science in society; eventually, as a historian, I came more and more to saying that the great gap in history are people who can bring together the skills of social scientists and historians with some sense of the science; there are plenty of histories of science for scientists, but there is not enough of the meeting ground in the middle, and not enough people working in history, as I was primarily, could understand some of it; for quite a while in the late forties I was an occupant of the old Institute of Experimental Psychology as one of the first people on whom a new piece of machinery was tested, so I was very familiar with what went on in these places; I was an only child which was basically Hitler's fault; I did beg my mother to have a brother or sister but she pointed out that I would not be a brother but a junior uncle in age; our relationship was fantastic; when you have an only parent with an only child, if it works you don't have a problem; I never quarrelled with my parents because it just didn't seem appropriate; it probably helped being at a boarding school; when I got older, being with my parents in Paris for a third of the year was just like being on a fantastic holiday; my mother was interested in what I did and was good for an intelligent conversion until the last time I saw her; I tried to get back from Australia when she was dying in hospital, and missed her death by twenty-four hours, but apparently she was completely lucid until her final moment; she turned to a lady called Joyce who had helped in the house when my father was ill, and told her bluntly to look after Lionel, and Joyce did; even when my mother's body was failing her she showed gentle will power; I remember going to see her once near the end when I had come to visit from Australia and she was like a glove puppet; her head was working with a limp body; then I looked into her eyes and felt she was good for some time yet; she sometimes took two hours to dress in the morning but she would not move until she had done a good job, and she always did; she had a remarkable will power and kept being re-employed; she would retire from one hospital job and then there would be a phone call; she was still working at seventy-eight or nine when the team she was with broke up and she didn't go back; but it wasn't just the team breaking up, she decided, looking at herself very clinically, that her eye-sight wasn't good enough to drive home in the dark from Addenbrookes Hospital where she worked

39:12:22 It was at the Dragon School in Oxford that it really dawned on me that I was different; I had come back from California which was quite a bit "ahead" of Britain in some respects, and found people doing things very differently and I was extremely rebellious and utterly unpersuadable; I got beaten a lot and regarded this as just ridiculous; I carried it off and got great peer group adulation which made me behave badly again; I was very bright which was the reason they tolerated me; I think if I had been in their place I would have asked me to be removed; I only stopped misbehaving because that was exactly what the Headmaster, Joc Lynam, did; he threatened to expel me if I didn't behave; internally I did not behave, but I had no trouble in stopping my physical misbehaviour; I never believed I would lose an argument, and when I was beaten I accepted that with the masters, but if I was right I never changed; I remember the extraordinary bewilderment of Wilding, a very good classics teacher, that I remembered an argument that we had had for a year, and I came back at him and said I still didn't understand why he had beaten me, and then he gave in; I accepted that these people knew maths and classics far beyond anything I could hope to understand, and had a great deal to learn which I did very happily, but not religion; exposed to a variety of religions and none, for both my parents were agnostics; my mother later said that it was not intellectually responsible to believe in a revealed religion; that sums her up; it wasn't a great agony or triumph, just not intellectually responsible; I was fascinated at the Dragon together with my friend Francis Hope, (who later died in the Orly air crash), that one area where we would almost always win arguments was on religion and philosophical issues related to religion; I was genuinely interested and not trying to do anything demonic or satanic, but was puzzled by the fact that I was told nonsense; other masters might say something wrong or that I didn't agree with, but nonsense, no; the contrast fascinated me so I was already by the age of eleven, in some ways took as a guide Bertrand Russell's work, beginning with 'Unpopular Essays'; I suppose that meant that my sense of being an outsider, of always being at odds with the establishment - not the one I had grown up with, which was very important - and going to France where people had different values again, merely rubbed it in; to take a trivial example was drinking soup; in France you tipped the plate towards you and in Britain away from you, and I remember being baffled by this; then it seemed to me to be the way the world was, in different places people did different things, so nobody was necessarily right; I remember much later coming across a phrase of Wittgenstein’s - all could also be otherwise; this I think laid the foundation of two things, firstly an interest in China where they did do things differently and also normally when I picked up a secondary work on the subject it was bound to be at least partly wrong; later on when studying history I would look at sources first and then when I had a working idea, try it out against a secondary work; sometimes they stood up, but not always; generally one always found something new as adults were not known in my childhood for always talking good sense; it sounds very arrogant but wasn't meant to be; it was the result of being bumped in different ways by circumstance in West Coast America, post-war Britain and diplomatic France, because my father was an international civil servant moving largely among diplomats and people of a similar sort

46:43:15 I don't know when I started playing chess seriously but it must have been by the time I was seven, because my father could always beat me even as an adult at ping-pong, but I began to beat him regularly at chess when I was seven and he refused thereafter to play with me; I played with the uncle who had been in Russia into my mid-teens, but I still beat him fairly easily until late at night; he would keep me up until about three or four in the morning when I would finally give up from exhaustion; he wasn't bad at chess, but one of the few things I thought my father was a bit weak on was when he refused to play with me; at the Dragon we had a chess team that was formed by a master, Dennison-Smith - Denny Whiff, I don't like that name as thought he was very good value; that chess team did extremely well; I would have loved to have acted as my friend, Francis Hope, was brilliant, I think the only boy there to carry off Hamlet, under Bruno's guidance; I had a minor part as one of the ambassadors and had about two lines; that was typical; I would get two or three line parts; I would have loved to have been able to act but for some reason I couldn't; I was not musical in the ordinary sense; my mother was too sensitive to music; she had had Beethoven forced on her by her father, and she hated it; I picked this up from her and was largely turned off by music until I was about twelve when I belatedly discovered it; I have an extraordinary catholic taste in music although I got nothing from the Dragon and only a little from one master at St Paul's; my mother was very unhappy about her effect on me, was well aware of it, and would nobly come to concerts with me, but I could sense her will power in trying not to let is get her; when I was a little older I went by myself; this had the effect of opening me to all kinds music all at the same time, and it was all equal in my mind; I took it on my own terms, and when I went to Cambridge I immediately joined the Cambridge Asian Music Circle under that near-genius, Laurence Picken - a man who could play seventy instruments, virtually all of them not British - and I took on Indian classical music particularly; I helped organize the concerts for Ravi Shankar and Chatur Lal, the tabla player, that Laurence put on in my first year at Cambridge, and this became another example of taking all cultures on their own terms; I don't think all music are equal, but having firstly discovered Webern then Hindustani classical music, they were just part of this process and have remained very deep inside me till now; I don't listen to a great deal of music except as a background to work when I am feeling a bit depressed - for that, nothing much stronger than Shostakovich, otherwise I have to listen to it; again, it is another example of this curious destruction of the normal process of growing up

51:46:15 At the Dragon I was in the top class for everything except the special calculus group taken by a former first wrangler which I wasn't good enough for; he was called Willy [Gerald] Meister, an old man who was very clever, and the four or five kids who could do calculus studied with him; however, I was strong in geometry; I won prizes; I would come from the bottom of A1 in maths to win prizes in deductive geometry because I have got a very strong visual sense, linked with chess, and I liked it; the other aspects I struggled at; I always wanted to know maths, and was fascinated by it, but was no good at it; I remember trying to work out what one would do if one dropped the fifth postulate of Euclid, that parallel lines never meet; this was at the age of twelve or thirteen and I was told by a firm, kind and completely correct maths master, Wilkie, that I should wait until later to look at that; it symbolizes my confusions that I found maths fascinating but impossible; I was probably 5th or 6th in classics; there were people like John Dunbabin and Luke Hodgkin who were better than I was; Francis Hope and I interchanged history and English - he tended to win more English tops, and I, history, but we alternated; French I became really good at but after I left the Dragon; I think that if I had been there at fourteen I would have swept the board, though Francis was very good at it; in maths I normally came bottom or bottom but one in a form of sixteen unless they had geometry, where I was quite capable of coming top; later on in life I found mathematical logic, bedrock proto-maths, fascinating too, and it meant that when I learnt to write computer programs I took a manual onto my boat on the Thames, spent a long weekend, came back and wrote programs that worked - it was Algol68; it was an odd feature that one little part of my brain could do maths and the other wasn't up to it

54:52:10 I got a scholarship to St Paul's but I actually came 16th on the roll at Eton; I wanted to go there as my best friend was going, but I missed it by one place; actually, with all apologies to Eton, it was the best event in my life because I ended up getting superlative teaching in history and French at St Paul's, and I was also able to go every weekend to the British Museum; the best teachers were extremely good; Frank Snow, the junior of the top two history masters, was not bad; he challenged us to write a long essay in the first term and I wrote mine on water in world history; later on I have worked a great deal on this subject, particularly in China; the most important person was Philip Whitting, a Byzantinist, already and established figure in Byzantine numismatics, and on the board of several journals; he was an absolute professional and I learnt an enormous amount from him; I regarded him essentially as an oracle, but even so, one to be argued with, but with extraordinary respect; it was probably because of his Byzantinism that at the age of fifteen I read every volume of 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', mostly while travelling on the underground; that gave me a vision of history which is very unusual in these days; I can mentally automatically link the ancient world to the mediaeval world down to the modern world, without any sense of shifting gears; I wrote my first important book, 'The Pattern of the Chinese Past', on a time template derived from reading Gibbon; it was very important, and that was Whitting's doing; the other was the teacher of French, known informally as Toby Parker, a very interesting teacher who on the surface was a ferocious martinet; your pen had to be in exactly the right place in front of you on the desk; your eyes had to be on him as he talked or you were in trouble; when I knew him much better and he had relaxed a great deal I realized from what he said that he had worked this our regretfully because he had begun life as a very soft master and was pushed around by the boys; being a very bright and determined man he had worked out a bullying technique that became carefully relaxed as people became fit to be talked to as human beings; he was a brilliant language teacher and he was also on Harrap’s dictionary committee; so in the French and History teachers I had two of the most extraordinary people who, certainly from an academic level were of university level in their skills; I got a scholarship to Cambridge when I was just sixteen because of the high-pressure, fascinating teaching I got from these two people

Second Part

0:05:07 Something had gone right; I was two years ahead of Francis Hope at Eton, and after I got the scholarship in December, I left school and spent the year wandering round Europe with my mother, as she would not let me go on my own; we spent a lot of time in Italy and the rest in France; I played chess, and the great run of chess at St Paul's began with the people who were running it, and I joined them; St Paul's chess team when I came, for three and a bit years only lost one match; this was very important as by this point we wanted a chess tie for sporting respectability; we took the training of our successors with incredible seriousness which was why St Paul's became very good; your duty as a good chess player was to train the next generation which we spent our lunch hours doing; I was delegated to see the High Master to make our request with facts and figures; he disliked me because he knew I didn't believe in Christianity, but St Paul's does have a large Jewish population, and virtually all my best friends were Jewish; he didn't approve of chess because it wasn't a physical sport; I was very polite, and he was at least tolerant, and I explained to him that we had racked up a record which no team in the history of the school had managed to equal; fencing had done very well, but even fencing was behind us, and I requested very politely that we might have the right, as members of the team - about six people - to wear a special tie; he told me to come and see him in a week; when I came back he said we could have a chess club tie; suddenly the world exploded inside me but I had to concentrate to listen to the condition, which was that it must be impossible to mistake it for a sporting tie and that the design should be submitted to him for final approval; we designed a tie of black silk with thin silver diagonal stripes, in fact the school colours but not the ones used in the sporting ties; he approved it; it was generally agreed that we had the smartest tie in town; I don't know whether they still have this tie; perhaps I should tell you why he disliked me, because I would always beat him in his special class on Christianity; I had asked to be excused but he insisted I come; I tried to keep silent but he provoked me into explaining why I disagreed with him; when I went back to the school he was the only master there who would not speak to me

4:19:18 I went up to King's College, Cambridge, because my grandfather went there; he was Dutton, the man who became a Unitarian Minister when he migrated to America; I actually had Isaiah Berlin on my interviewing panel and I did it with a temperature of about 101o, full of aspirin, and he asked me questions about Spinoza; I had not read a word of his but had read a number of books about him, so I just about got by on that second hand knowledge, feeling thoroughly ashamed of myself; I read history, beginning with mediaeval and modern European history; finally I moved as a special subject to Chinese history; I was the only person to get a starred first with that particular special subject; it was on the Boxer uprising; the only teacher I regard as really memorable was Margery Chibnall, who was quite special; I only did a term with her but it was instantly recognizable as real scholarship; Walter Ullmann wasn't bad too; it was very useful to have him as a guide to reading mediaeval Latin, which I put to use again recently; Christopher Morris was a family friend, but let's leave it at that; similar comment for John Saltmarsh; these people were characters but were not the kind of historians that I had expected, but Chibnall certainly was; Postan was at Cambridge and I listened to one of his series of lectures, which were pretty good; I developed a great respect for him later, but his lecturing style was quite hard to follow; I got far more in going to lectures on non-historical subjects; that was the great thing about Cambridge that I could go off to John Wisdom’s lectures on philosophy, to lectures on anthropology, and all sorts of other things; as far as history was concerned I hardly went to any lecture at all; I got my degree in 1959; Cambridge was an enormous intellectual stimulus; I have always regarded these other subjects as being an integral part of the analysis of the human experience, which is what human history is meant to be about; although the anthropologist I learnt most from was probably Bill Skinner in the Chinese field, people like Meyer Fortes were wonderful people to talk to; I got on well with Meyer, possibly because he was a friend of my father's; Jack Goody's wife, Esther, was an old school friend of my wife, but that was later, after I graduated; there were people like Moses Finley who were fascinating on classical history, but that was not part of the syllabus; I could do a pretty good job in a few days, in getting together a basic bibliography on the mainline things, but for new starting points, Cambridge was absolutely priceless for me; I did talk to a lot of people in the sciences but at that point I had not got too deeply into it; it was completely obvious to me that if you were trying to get a grip on what ultimately at the very bottom distinguishes what we rashly call the modern era, it is fundamentally something to do with the nature of whatever modern science is in terms of modernity; I found that trying to get a grasp of this was something I got more and more interested in; it is evasive but it is not unreal, so I was always very careful because of my limited knowledge of science, to explore but not to come to conclusions; I knew Gerd Buchdahl, for instance, and was actually given the draft of his book on Newton to see if his explanations of Newton's 'Principia' were accessible to a layman; the answer is partially, and I know he was very disappointed; it was a well-done book, but it was difficult; I did Chinese as a special subject with a strange man called Victor Purcell with whom I argued a good deal; I had spent my entire summer vacation at the British Museum newspaper library at Hendon, and I had read every page of the relevant period covering the Boxer uprising in the 'North China Herald', which was probably the best single source to read; I knew that I was the first person to have read it there because I cut all the pages; true enough, it turned out that Purcell had not read it, so we had a set-too; I would quote the 'North China Herald' back at him; we settled down to an amiable relationship after I had stood up for myself because he was a bully; I was shocked that he had not read this very important primary source; the sinology came in for purely pragmatic reasons; I always approached history from that time on as essentially involving the framing of a question, and I went round looking for questions that seemed to be interesting; my first paper in public at the old King's Political Society was on Cathars and Troubadours - I knew Arthur Hibbert, but he wasn't any help with that particular subject - my question was why you should get troubadour poetry at the same time as the Albigensians in much the same society, what on earth could they have had in common? I don't think that I came up with the right answer but I posed the question quite effectively; I had read some of the sources in French and Latin, but had taken on something that was really beyond me, but the question was interesting; China came simply because of three very obvious questions deriving from Max Weber; given that China, particularly after the early publication of Needham's work, was clearly at some points technically ahead of the West - I take 1100 as perhaps a reference date - why did China not have something like an industrial revolution or scientific revolution, and whatever happened to democracy; later on I re-phrased that, but that was the primitive form in which it came; I took up Chinese immediately after I had done my final examinations in order to begin to equip myself to look at why, after Weber had set the way - he underestimated China seriously because he refused to read Jesuit works - why did China clearly not succeed in carrying on from its mid-Mediaeval pre-eminence in certain very relevant areas; that was this continuation of the habit of asking questions and why I sat down to get the tools of the trade, which took me far longer than I had imagined; I can rampage quite easily through European languages if I settle down with a dictionary, Chinese is a different proposition and I got very badly stuck for a while; it was a year and a half before I could produce anything I could put a footnote to, and even after that it remained a long hard slog; I went to Harvard and took courses that Fairbank had there for two years, and learnt academic Japanese; after that by pillaging Japanese work as an intermediate half-way house, as they are very good, I was able to at least get some movement; Cambridge was above all interesting for opening the mind but technically, in my area of history, it was a bit disappointing

18:50:08 The Oriental Institute was a different thing altogether; I studied there for a year at my own expense; although I had got a starred first I did not get a State Scholarship; I lived on £250 and my father paid my book bills; I could still dine in King's and use their facilities; for that year I worked around the clock and I lived in a room that was cheap because it was exposed to garage fumes in Victoria Street; at the end of the year I got a State Studentship and the year following got a well-paid Fellowship at Harvard, so it was quite an interesting up and down ride; the quality of teaching at the Oriental Institute was extremely good; there were some quite remarkable people that I dealt with, all master sinologists; it was not easy; they didn't believe in metaphorical crampons, you just used your fingernails, you got up fast, and there was a heck of a view at the top; one was Pulleyblank, still alive in Canada, another Denis Twitchett, and Piet Van Der Loon, who later on became Professor at Oxford; they had very limited visions historically, but the art of extracting fairly accurate information from extremely difficult texts is what sinology is about; they could hardly have been bettered anywhere in Europe at that time, so I was again extremely lucky

21:06:02 Going back to America, it was a different world; I had been back while my grandparents were alive but one was conscious of living on the edge of something dangerous all the time; occasional encounters with the police left one with a very uncomfortable feeling; of course, my introduction to America when I came back that time was to corruption; in 1962 I came by boat, one of the last generation to do so, arrived in New York and was met by a very courteous member of the Commonwealth Foundation, but my luggage has to go through customs; the custom's man opened my main bag and saw a pamphlet in English by Mao Tse-tung; he said it was subversive and that I was not allowed to take it; I didn't know what to say but explained that I had it because I was working on this subject at Harvard; I turned round to see where the Commonwealth representative had gone, but he had vanished; I hoped that I would not end up at Ellis Island; a little later, a man with the caricature face of a baby boxer, whom I later learnt was named Jampole, appeared with the customs officer; the custom's officer asked if it was educational material to which I said, yes; he slammed the case shut, marked it with chalk, and as I was taken away from the customs lobby, the Commonwealth representative reappeared and told me that I had just cost them $50; Jampole was a fixer employed by important employers to deal with routine problems with the customs, and they knew the tariffs; I was teased about this for about six months until people got bored, it was not a prelude of things to come, but it was quite a shock; Harvard was further professional training; again, the mental horizons of Harvard's sinology at that time, the techniques were very good, the library fantastic, but again also extremely narrow; I was aware that I was far more at home with sociologists like Bill Skinner and many others, who were much more like me in finding the questions I wanted to answer, and that was a source of discomfort; I remember a little later when I was a minor established figure in the professional field, I went to a conference in New Hampshire where Bill Skinner had tried to have a multi-disciplinary approach; one of the people there was Arthur Wright, a heavyweight professor from Yale, over-rated while his wife was under-rated, and he thought that as a historian I would be an ally against the dread anthropologists and sociologists; I remember he actually walked out of a session with me saying, "The historians won that, didn't they?" I just wondered what to say, I didn't want to have bad relations but didn't believe a word of this; I remember being genuinely shocked, but that is jumping ahead in time

25:50:16 I was at Harvard for two years; I could have stayed to do a PhD there, but I was aware of the time and money consumption of doing general exams in America, whereas back in Cambridge I would just have to write a thesis; I had also been offered a job at Cambridge at that point as an assistant lecturer, with very generous terms which would give me enough time to finish my thesis which I had actually begun; it was on the first democratic institution in China that actually functioned, run by Chinese - a book, because of Fairbank's hostility, was postponed from publication, and then never published, though I pillaged it for articles; what is interesting is again the role of chance; I had a great row with Fairbank about how I was rewriting my thesis for publication; he was too important to have a violent disagreement with so I just dug my heals in and blocked; I couldn't write it his way because it was wrong, so I got a contract from Weidenfeld & Nicolson to write a short history of modern China; I soon realized as I sat down to fill up my time that I needed to go back, to what I later called and people have adopted since, the Mediaeval economic revolution in China - think of Marco Polo symbolizing that time - so I wrote the book backward, having written most of the part on the more recent period; I then wrote the Mediaeval period and then had a sense of how I was going to write the first part, which was roughly when the Empire crystallized; I wrote the book with a very gentle thanks to John Fairbank for his generosity in letting me pursue another project; to my amazement it became an overnight success; it was called 'The Pattern of the Chinese Past', and it ran through all the questions that I had been raising in my last year as an undergraduate; it explained a small, but useful part of the problem that China ran into which was having a very productive high-Mediaeval technology in farming, which did not advance technically much further, but spread round a very large part of the cultivatable area, and then by supporting a much increased population meant that there was a kind of ceiling, and no easy progress, and opportunities for new large effective water systems increasingly disappearing, and the marginal return on effort clearly reaching a ceiling; this was the infamous high-level equilibrium trap; at any rate, I had established a number of things, why China stayed together over the long-run, the increasing mediaeval rate of improving technology and the centre core which enabled them to finance and equip armed forces, and an administration strong enough to keep the place together, just, and quite a number of other questions, beginning on the science one, but I had still not got very far there; thus, that book was a result of the quarrel with Fairbank which meant that I had to go sideways, if at all; the phrase, high-level equilibrium trap, and much of its substance in formulating it into a coherent form and generalizing it was the work of my old friend Radharaman Sinha, who was lecturer in agricultural technology at Glasgow where I had moved after my assistant lectureship had run out; that saddened me as my name has been largely linked with that; it should always be Sinha and Elvin or Elvin and Sinha, I have no preference, but the famous graph, which was ultimately borrowed from Ricardo, was found to fit by Sinha; what I contributed was a fairly detailed amount of research on how that technology reached a ceiling; he put it into a neat, memorable, marketable form, and, from an economist's point of view, one that could be formalized; every time I have talked about that it has stood up and I have always tried to stress that is was joint work, but Sinha has not received anything remotely like the credit he deserves for it; the reason for China hitting the high-level equilibrium trap and Europe not doing so was partly the result of the structure of farming; this is most evident in the most productive farming which is wet-field rice farming; putting it simply, what happened was that the Southern Sung and later dynasties taxed farming on the acreage of cultivatable land, this encouraged farmers to produce as much out of it as possible; if they could get a second crop, an inter-crop or a winter crop, all that is just pure gain; so the Chinese concentrated brilliantly on heavy fertilizing so that fallow soon disappeared completely; by the Southern Sung, people were already commenting on a place if it had still got fallowing; as far as people could they put productivity per acre up but they put productivity, in the end, per hour of human work, down; it is that scissor effect that is characteristic of China; to some extend it results from the fiscal system because it is much easier to collect tax in that way, and to some extent out of the fact that a system where irrigation can be refined and refined is capable, with fertilizer, productivity can go way up; I don't think that anything as acute as that happened in Europe; most of the China plain and some patches of central China are essentially former marshes which had been drained, so the amount of land that had been partly levelled already was very great and also very fertile; China got into a very severe fertilizer shortage and ultimately needed Justus von Liebig, not Chinese, to get out of that particular trap; the number of cattle fell as it was only in certain upland areas that a number of cattle could be raised economically, but scavengers like pigs and poultry went up; the returns for effort, despite extreme ingenuity, went down and down; I had heard of Geertz's book, 'Agriculture Involution', but did not read it until afterwards; the Chinese practice goes back to about the year 1000; one of the things that Chinese bureaucracy did achieve of great economic value was that officials had to move around the country, going to backward places, where they would introduce more labour intensive farming; in the end there was an agricultural base which was subject to very different rules, and had enormously reduced possibilities; fertilizer was always used to some extent in English farming but it wasn't everywhere; in China it was needed everywhere; they even became masters of the difficult technique of fertilizing a second time during the growing period, and even imported fertilizer, mostly soya bean cake from Manchuria, by sea to try to make up the deficit; it was an economy, amazing in its own way, which was in the end continually under pressure

39:36:07 The great divergence hypothesis, put forward by Pomerantz and others in California, that China and Europe were at similar stages of development until the eighteenth century, is not true as far as farming is concerned; there were many areas where China was actually ahead; for example, the use of cast iron tools from the Han onward is far ahead of the West; those that argue this don't get involved in the reality of wet rice farming; I was initially interested in water control systems; they don't study things like the problem of keeping the soil going and fallowing alone gives the game away; they are quite wrong, and for a very interesting reason, they stopped reading German; I discovered after coming to these conclusions myself that there was a massive authority in the form of Wilhelm Wagner whose book in 1926 based on over a decade of teaching farming to Chinese in China before the First World War, and household budget surveys as well as chemical knowledge of what was involved in farming, meant that he had said it already in a book of 600 pages; nobody reads it but it is still completely relevant; you cannot read that book and believe anything about the comparability of farming in the two areas; Americans do not live on the land any more and have lost a feeling for what it is like; also, I studied technology a great deal and reconstructed the first multi-spindle water-powered spinning machine which was already in a book in China in 1314, and that was actually passed as workable by a firm of Dundee spinning engineers; it was like Arkwright many hundreds of years before the event; what is interesting is that there were links between Italy and China in silk handling; while there are significant differences there are also things that are surprisingly similar; I don't think Pomerantz, though full of ideas, has really got the knowledge about what basic farming was like; I certainly know that Japanese historians felt that the picture shown in my book was broadly realistic; the trouble comes that there were things in China that do match up to the late sixteenth century with the best that Europe could produce; the most interesting, and I have written on, going on from Needham and Robinson's work is the system of equal temper tuning of wind instruments, described in the late sixteenth century, which predates Europe by about a century; however, the system in Europe was developing by that point into something far more formidable than just individuals; China did not develop, outside some very limited fields, an interacting system which communicated, criticized, commentated, financed, and passed down the generations; there are occasional peaks where you can be misled into thinking that China really had enough to have almost had modern science; the problem for Chinese science is that I think you could say that culturally, most of the resources were there; I studied the history of probabilistic thinking in China wondering why, in a gambling-mad country, nothing like the work of Cardama, or Fermat and Pascal, Van Huygens, and so forth, had developed; I was able to show that all the mathematical tools, the concepts of permutations and combinations, were all present and used probably by the end of the Sung, but certainly a bit later, and yet they were never put together in such a coherent fashion that you have the Western system of basis probability; the first time that you get a proper analysis of the relative probabilities of a simple gambling game and the correctly correlated pay-offs, is sometime in the nineteenth century, so I can't rule out some European influence by this point; what you got was a demonstration of a semi-latent cultural capacity which was never properly realized; China did not have modern science; on the other hand, people who write it off, like Toby Hough, are completely missing the point; it is a knife-edge case which is perpetually tantalizing by occasional complete successes, but it never turned into a coherent system of socio-intellectual interaction; there is a vast gulf there; even inventions like multi-spindle spinning had died out and by the end of the Ming was merely a memory in increasingly badly executed woodcuts and garbled texts; the development of the Sung clock also showed that they had got a long way, but then had stopped; so China is perpetually teasing one - it gets so close, but doesn't build up any momentum; the case of clockwork and astronomy is something of an Imperial monopoly, though not completely, and therefore there are problems in it not spreading widely; the first time that Western history starts to move away from Chinese history is ultimately in developing the system, out of which modern science developed; I have also studied this in the history of plant science in Europe, where there was constant experimentation and debate; you do not find any of this intensity in China, and by the later seventeenth century there is no sign that it can develop into a science

54:38:19 I was in Glasgow for five years, and then Oxford for seventeen; in Oxford, though profitable in many ways, I was a single father; my first wife, a poet, Anne Stevenson, left me with two sons so I managed to do just enough research to keep me in play, but mostly I was engaged in teaching and administration, apart from doing a historical atlas of China which turned me again towards the history of environment, which has always interested me; I don't think that Pomerantz realized that China was an over-worked and exhausted land long before the West began to bite; indeed the West rescued China, above all with Justus von Liebig's chemical fertilizers; at Oxford I also got very interested in women's history and published on the cult of virtuous widows in China; I had originally a desire to study population and found out that the best sources were the substantially detailed, very numerous, mini-biographies of virtuous, chaste, widows; I worked with a research assistant, Josephine Fox, and we managed to get usable, though limited, data on perinatal infant mortality; all other researchers do not have for the main part of China the way of checking up on very early deaths; if you take a census once a year you will miss an enormous number of deaths in a primitive world; they are numerous; I have recently come across a paper made in the 1930s where monthly checks were made in the same area that we concentrated on in the Lower Yangtze, and the models c1814 that we made and this one fit exactly; all of the demography, apart from that on the Imperial family and the Manchu Banner men, is out of date and useless for lack of data; with the virtuous widows, it was recorded how many children they had produced and their ages when widowed; with 20,000 case such as we had, you can make something of that; it is very rough but it indicates that it is big; we come back to the situation where the California school has tried to be too kind to China for very good motives, but I don't think that their data is good enough

1:00:43:06 I remarried; Dian was trained at the Central School of Art in London, in both theatre design and historical costume; she also had two children that she brought up as a single mother; we met as single parents with children in their mid-teens and understood the difficulties; the link was bizarrely with my first wife because she was a good friend of Dian's parents who looked me up in Oxford; Dian complements me as she is an eye rather than a word person; for instance, I am a beginner at identifying plants, but she can identify them very quickly; I have written a children's trilogy, 'Dreamguard' under the name John Dutton; they are a mixture of realism and fantasy, books about children for adults too


Footnote by Professor Elvin:

“When talking about the great pharmacological botanist Li Shizhen in the last section but one, I give the date of his magnum opus as 1695; it was in fact 1595.”