BY WILLIAM T. ROWE

For most historians of China "social history" remains essentially
lower case--it describes not so much a methodological movement as
simply an orientation to addressing problems of society and social
change. Indeed, for many of us I suspect there remains considerable
doubt regarding what this much-heralded "social history" revolution
is all about. If by this term we mean the application of social science
quantification on the macrosocietal level, then we in the China field
have seen relatively little of it. A few pioneering works of the 1950s
and 1960s by Ho Ping-ti and Chang Chung-li come to mind, but prob-
lems of data and doubts about generalization on an empirewide scale
have worked to discourage similar efforts since that time. ¹ If on the
other hand social history means depicting the impact of large struc-
tures and structural change on the lives of ordinary individuals, then
examples are even harder to find. Within the monographic literature,
Jonathan Spence The Death of Woman Wang, that highly literary re-
construction of daily life in the seventeenth century, stands almost
alone. ² The specific models and techniques developed by partici-
pants in the social history revolution in European and American
studies have only rarely been applied to the study of China, and even
more rarely applied with ingenuity. More often than not the poorly
thought-out attempt to apply social history models has marred rather
than enriched otherwise sound empirical studies ( Fei-ling Davis' ap-
propriation of Eric J. Hobsbawm's ideas in her Primitive Revolutionaries of

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