A passage to China: Tawney’s global moment?

ABSTRACT This article, which was originally a contribution to the 2022 Scott Holland Symposium in Durham, explores two passages to China in the context of R.H. Tawney’s life and legacy. It contextualises Tawney’s observations during these visits in relation to his increasing concern with macro-historical questions on the global scale throughout the 1920s. Tawney was especially sceptical of a single standard of progress, and of teleological history, but he did not reject the need for progress and became an advocate for social policy in a distant land. His encounters in China allowed him to develop comparative approaches to civilisational structures, even though he remained more attached to granular empiricism than his contemporaries such as Troeltsch and Toynbee. The interest Tawney took in China offers a basis to explore his legacy as a global historian.