Mark Elvin

Mark Elvin is a professor emeritus of Chinese history at Australian National University, specializing in the late imperial period.

He is famous for his high level equilibrium trap theory to explain why an industrial revolution happened in Europe but not in China, despite the fact that the state of scientific knowledge was far more advanced in China much earlier than in Europe. Essentially, Elvin proposed that pre-industrial production methods were extremely efficient in China, which obviated much of the economic pressure for scientific progress. At the same time, a philosophical shift occurred, where Taoism was gradually replaced by Confucianism as the dominant intellectual paradigm, and moral philosophy and the development of rigid social organization became more important than scientific inquiry among intellectuals.

External links

• Mark Elvin's home page at ANU
• Mark Elvin's home page at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

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Name	Elvin, Mark
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