Elvin, the only child of Lionel Elvin and Mona Bedortha Dutton, was born on 18 August 1938. He grew up in Cambridge, attended The Dragon School, and matriculated as an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge. He held posts at the University of Glasgow and at St. Antony's College, Oxford.

Elvin is noted 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. 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, whereby 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.

Elvin died on 6 December 2023, at the age of 85.^[1] although some sources have this at a later date^[2]

Monographs

• The Pattern of the Chinese past: A social and economic interpretation (1973)
• Changing stories in the Chinese world (1997)
• The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (2006)

Other works

• Commerce and Society in Sung China (translation of Yoshinobu Shiba)
• Chinese Cities since the Sung Dynasty (1978)

• Great Divergence

• Interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 24 July 2012 (video)
• Mark Elvin's home page at ANU
• Mark Elvin's home page at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg