Words are blunt and slippery tools for carving up and dissecting the past. The history of modern China cannot be characterized in a few words, however well chosen. The much used term ‘revolution’ is sometimes less useful than ‘revival’, while the term ‘modern transformation’ signifies little more than ‘change through recent time’ and leaves us still ignorant of what ‘time’ is. At a less simplistic level, however, each of the twenty-eight authors writing in volumes 10 to 13 of this series has offered generalizations about events and trends in China within the century and a half from 1800 to 1949. Making more inclusive generalizations about less inclusive ones is no doubt the historian's chief activity, yet most of the writers in these four volumes would accept the notion that the broader a generalization is, the farther it is likely to be removed from the concrete reality of events. In this view the postulating of all-inclusive processes (such as progress or modernization) or of inevitable stages (such as feudalism, capitalism, and socialism) generally belongs to metahistory, the realm of faith. While we need not deny such terms to those who enjoy them, we can still identify them as matters of belief, beyond reason.

At a less general level, however, social science concepts help us to explain historical events. Though history is not itself a social science, its task is to narrate past happenings and to synthesize and integrate our present-day understanding of them. For this purpose, metaphor has long been a principal literary device of narrative history.