About Mark Elvin: (John) Mark (Dutton) Elvin is a professor emeritus of Chinese history at Australian National University, specializing in the late imperial period; he is also emeritus fellow of St. Antony's College. Oxford.
Human history has no unique pattern of intelligibility.
One of the most momentous, yet all but invisible, psychological changes in human history has been the intensification of a sense of insecurity and alienation from the world around us that arose when we became no longer able easily to get food in a fe...
Perhaps the most overpowering contrast [with the West] is the virtual absence in premodern China of the idea of a transcendent creator God who is distinct from Nature in a fundamental qualitative sense. The Chinese had notions of a supreme god in var...
