ABSTRACT
That the Song Dynasty was a turning point not only in Chinese but in world history is an idea with a considerable pedigree. The Japanese scholar whose work most promoted the study of the Song both in Japan and later in the West, Naitō Torajirō, saw Song China as the world’s first “modern” society. 1 More recently William McNeill has argued that China in the Song became the first country in the world to demonstrate the growth-producing capacities of a (relatively) unrestricted private commercial economy. 2 One of the most widely read books on China, Mark Elvin’s Pattern of the Chinese Past, regards the Song as the peak of China’s development, both economically and technologically; and his notion of the “high-level equilibrium trap” proposes to explain why China declined or stagnated in the centuries that followed. 3 A leading economic historian of modern China, writing in 1992, finds “modern economic growth” in the Song, and never again in China until the twentieth century. 4 These are modern witnesses; but anticipatory support for such claims had been offered unwittingly centuries ago by Francis Bacon, who proposed that the three inventions most crucial to the transformation of his own European world were printing, gunpowder, and the mariner’s compass. 5 We now know, as Bacon did not, that all three were first used on a broad scale in Song China. And to these three one may add Marco Polo’s marvel, government-issued paper money; Joseph Needham’s marker of bureaucratic modernity, the written examination in school and in civil service; 6 and perhaps even Sydney Mintz’s sinister engines of cheap energy for the working class: caffeine and cane sugar as mass consumption goods. 7 Does “modernity,” then, begin with the Song?
