About the Author

Mark Elvin is professor of Chinese history at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra. Author of The Pattern of the Chinese Past and other works, he has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, and Heidelberg, and been a visiting research fellow at Harvard.

Reviews

"A classic. . . a work of quite staggering scholarship of a kind that very few historians have achieved in the post-second world war period."