by Chris Harman
Rome conquers whole Mediterranean region and Europe south of Rhine. Spread of slavery and impoverishment of peasantry in Italy. Peasants support Gracchus brothers, murdered in 133 and 121. Slave revolts in Sicily (130s) and in Italy under Spartacus (70s). Civil wars. Julius Caesar takes power 45. Augustus becomes emperor 27.
AD 1 to 200
Peak of Roman Empire. Crushes revolt in Palestine AD 70. Paul of Tarsus splits new sect of ‘Christians’ away from Judaism.
Discovery of steel making in China. Extension of Han Empire into Korea, central Asia, south China, Indochina. Confucianism state ideology.
Spread of peasant agriculture and Hinduism into south India and then to Malay peninsula and Cambodia. Indian merchants finance great Buddhist monasteries, carry religion to Tibet and Ceylon.
AD 200 to 500
Chinese Han Empire disintegrates. Collapse of urban economy, fragmentation of countryside into aristocratic estates, loss of interest in ‘classic’ literature. Buddhism spreads among certain groups.
Gupta Empire unites much of India in fifth century, flowering of art and science.
Growing crises in Roman Empire. Technological and economic stagnation. Trade declines. Slavery gives way to taxes and rents from peasants bound to land. Peasant revolts in France and Spain. Increased problems in defending empire’s borders. Rise of cults of Osiris, Mithraism and Christianity.
Constantine moves capital to Greek city of Byzantium (330), makes Christianity the empire’s official religion. Persecution of pagan religions, other Christian beliefs and Jews. Rise of monasticism. Division of empire. Loss of England to empire (407). Alaric’s Goths sack Rome (410).
AD 500 and after
‘Dark Ages’ in western Europe. Population falls by half. Collapse of trade, town life and literacy.
Eastern empire survives to reach peak under Justinian in 530s–550s, with building of Saint Sophia cathedral, then declines.
Collapse of Gupta Empire in India. Decline of trade, towns, use of money and Buddhist religion. Agriculture and artisan trades carried out in virtually self-contained villages for benefit of feudal rulers. Ideological domination by Brahman priests. Full establishment of elaborate hierarchy of many castes. Decline in literature, art and science.
Continued fragmentation of China until rise of Sui Dynasty (581) and then T’ang Dynasty (618) see revival of economy and trade.
Chapter 1
Iron and empires
The second great phase in the history of civilisation began among the peasants and pastoralists who lived in the lands around the great empires, not in the states dominated by the priests and pharaohs. It depended on the efforts of people who could learn from the achievements of the urban revolution – use copper and bronze, employ the wheel, even adapt foreign scripts to write down their own languages – without being sucked dry by extortion and brainwashed by tradition.
There were societies across wide swathes of Eurasia and Africa which began to make use of the technological advances of the ‘urban revolution’. Some developed into smaller imitations of the great empires – as seems to have been the case with Solomon’s empire in Palestine, described in the Old Testament. Others were much less burdened, at first, with elaborate, expensive and stultifying superstructures. There was greater freedom for people to innovate; and also greater incentive for them to do so.
The adoption of these techniques was accompanied by concentration of the surplus in the hands of ruling classes, much as had happened in the original urban revolutions. But these were new ruling classes, from lands with lower natural fertility than those of the early civilisations. Only if they encouraged new techniques could they obtain a level of surplus comparable to that of those civilisations.
They could then take advantage of the crises of the ancient civilisations, tearing at them from the outside just as class tensions weakened them from within. ‘Aryans’ from the Caspian region fell upon the decaying Indus civilisation; people from south east Europe, speaking a related ‘Indo-European’ language, tore at Mycenaean Greece; a little-known group, the ‘Sea People’, attacked Egypt; the Hittites captured Mesopotamia; and a new Chou dynasty ousted the Shang from China.
In Mesopotamia, Egypt and China the essential continuity of civilisation was unaffected and empires soon re-emerged, revitalised by new techniques. The conquest of the Indus and Mycenaean civilisations led to the complete disappearance both of urban life and of literacy. Yet external incursion was not wholly negative even in these cases. It played a contradictory role. On the one hand, the conquerors destroyed part of the old productive apparatus – for instance, the irrigation works that allowed the Indus cities to feed themselves. On the other, they brought with them new technologies, such as the oxdrawn plough which made possible the cultivation of the heavy soil of north India’s plains. There was an expansion of peasant production, and eventually a much larger surplus than previously in the region.
The most important new technique emerged around 2000 BC in the Armenian mountains – and several hundred years later in west Africa. 1 This was the smelting of iron. Its slow diffusion transformed production and warfare.
Copper and its alloy, bronze, had been in use since the early stages of the urban revolution. But their production was expensive and depended on obtaining relatively rare ores from distant locations. What is more, their cutting edges were quickly blunted. As a result, they were ideal as weapons or ornaments for the minority who controlled the wealth, but much less useful as tools with which the mass of people could work. So even the workers on the pyramids, tombs and temples often used stone tools a millennium and a half after the urban revolution, and copper and bronze implements seem to have been little used by cultivators.
Iron ore was very much more abundant than copper. Turning it into metal required more elaborate processes. But once smiths knew how to do so, they could turn out knives, axes, arrowheads, plough tips and nails for the masses. The effect on agriculture was massive. The iron axe enabled cultivators to clear the thickest woodlands, the iron-tipped plough to break up the heaviest soil. And the relative cheapness of the iron spear and iron sword weakened the hold of the military aristocracies, allowing peasant infantry to cut down knights in bronze armour.
By the seventh century BC new civilisations based on the new techniques were in the ascendant. The Assyrian Empire stretched from the Nile to eastern Mesopotamia, welding an unprecedented number and diversity of peoples into a single civilisation, with a single script for the different languages. A new civilisation began to develop in northern India, with the regrowth of trade and the building of cities after a lapse of nearly 1,000 years. A handful of kingdoms began to emerge in northern China out of the chaotic warfare of 170 rival statelets. And around the Mediterranean – in Palestine, Lebanon, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and north Africa – city states grew up free of the extreme political and ideological centralisation of the old Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires.
New productive techniques were matched by scientific advance and ideological ferment. There had been a growth in certain areas of scientific learning, especially mathematics and astronomy, in Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Egypt. But these advances were based on the persistence of priesthoods which, over two millennia, were increasingly cut off from material life, their findings embedded in complex and abstruse religious systems. Renewed advance depended on breaking with these. It came, not in the centres of the old civilisations – the Mesopotamian cities of Ashur and Babylon or the Egyptian cities of Memphis or Thebes – but in the new cities of northern India, northern China and the Mediterranean coast.
The new and reinvigorated civilisations shared certain common features as well as the use of iron. They saw a proliferation of new crafts; a growth of long-distance trade; a rise in the importance of merchants as a social class; the use of coins to make it easy even for lowly cultivators and artisans to trade with each other; the adoption (except in China) of new, more or less phonetically based, alphabets which made literacy po
ssible for much wider numbers of people; and the rise of ‘universalistic’ religions based on adherence to a dominant god, principle of life or code of conduct. Finally, all the new civilisations were, like the old, based on class divisions. There was no other way of pumping a surplus out of cultivators who were often hungry. But there were considerable differences between the civilisations. Material factors – environment, climate, the pool of already domesticated species, geographical location – affected how people made a livelihood and how the rulers took control of the surplus. These, in turn, influenced everything else that happened.
Chapter 2
Ancient India
The ‘Aryan’ invaders who destroyed the Indus civilisation in around 1500 BC were originally nomadic herders, living on milk and meat and led by warrior chieftains. They had no use for the ancient cities, which they ransacked and then abandoned. Neither did they have any use for the written word, and the script used by the old civilisation died out.
At this stage they practised a ‘Vedic’ religion, which reflected their way of life. Its rituals centred on the sacrifice of animals, including cattle, and its mythology, conveyed in long sagas memorised by ‘Brahman’ priests, told of the exploits of warrior gods. The mythology also came to embody a doctrine which justified the bulk of the surplus going to the warrior rulers and priests on the grounds that these were ‘twice born’ groups, innately superior to other people. But the fully fledged system of classical Hinduism, with its four hereditary castes, did not crystallise until there was a change in the way people gained a livelihood and, with it, a transformation of the Vedic religion into a rather different set of practices and beliefs.
The slow spread of iron technology from about 1000 BC initiated the change in the way of life. The iron axe made it possible to begin to clear and cultivate the previously jungle-ridden Ganges region, providing the warrior rulers and their priestly helpers with a much larger surplus. These groups encouraged the spread of agriculture, but also insisted that the cultivators deliver to them a portion, perhaps a third or even half, of each village’s crop as tribute. Compliance with their demands was brought about by force, and backed the religious designation of the ordinary ‘Aryans’ as a lower caste of vaisyas (cultivators) and conquered peoples as a bottom caste of sudras (toilers). Caste arose out of a class organisation of production in the villages (although one not based on private property), and its persistence over millennia was rooted in this.
But, even as class in the countryside was giving rise to the notion of a simple division of humanity into four castes, further changes in the ways people made a livelihood were complicating the issue. The very success of the new agricultural methods in providing a growing surplus for the rulers also led to the growth of non-village-based social groups. The rulers wanted new luxury goods and better armaments, and encouraged crafts like carpentry, metal smelting, spinning, weaving and dyeing. There was a spread of trade across the subcontinent and beyond. As in the earlier urban revolutions, clusters of artisans and traders began to settle around the temples and military camps and along trade routes, until some villages had grown into towns and some towns into cities. Some of the warrior leaders were able to carve out kingdoms for themselves. By the sixth century BC, 16 major states dominated northern India; one, Magadha, 2 had swallowed up the others by 321 BC to form an empire across most of northern India east of the river Indus (bordering the Greek Empire established by Alexander the Great, which ruled the lands west of the river).
The rise of this ‘Maurya’ Indian Empire gave a further boost to urban development. It secured land trade routes to Iran and Mesopotamia in one direction and to the kingdoms of northern China in the other. Sea routes connected it to Arabia, Egypt, east Africa and southeast Asia. It was a key link in an emerging world (or at least ‘old world’) trade system. A Greek emissary believed the Magadhan capital, Pataliputra, to be the most impressive city in the known world. He estimated the Magadhan army to consist of 6,000 elephants, 80,000 cavalry and 200,000 infantry. 3 The figures are undoubtedly an exaggeration. But the fact that he believed them gives some idea of the scale and splendour of the empire.
The Maurya monarchy obtained the enormous surplus this required by ‘an unprecedented expansion of economic activity by the state’, with ‘state control of agriculture, industry and trade’, and monopolies in mining and in the salt, liquor and mineral trades. It was in a position to equip soldiers with metal weapons and to provide tools and implements for agriculture and industry. Its taxes financed a huge standing army and ‘a vast, numerous bureaucracy’, reaching right down to the village level, with groups of villages having ‘an accountant, who maintained boundaries, registered land … and kept a census of the population and a record of the livestock’, and a ‘tax collector who was concerned with each type of revenue … Providing further support for the whole structure was an elaborate system of spies’. 4
The Maurya state was not, in its early years, purely parasitic, and undertook some measures which were positive for society as a whole. It used some of the huge surplus for ‘the development of the rural economy’ – founding new settlements, encouraging sudras to settle as farmers with land granted by the state, 5 organising irrigation projects and controlling the distribution of water. It discouraged the emergence of private property in land and banned its sale in an effort to prevent local notables hogging the surplus produced in these new settlements.
The spread of settled agriculture, the rise of trade and cities, and the emergence of powerful states brought enormous changes in people’s lives and, of necessity, in their attitudes to the world around them and to each other. The old gods had proclaimed, in spiritual terms, the merits of herding and fighting. New ones now began to arise who stressed the virtues of cultivation. There was also a changing attitude to a central resource of both the old and the new way of making a livelihood – cattle.
Previously, people had valued cattle as a source of meat. Now they were the only motive power for ploughing heavy land and had to be protected. Even if a peasant family was starving, it had to be prevented from killing the only means of cultivating the next year’s crop, and of providing the warriors and the priests with an adequate income. Out of this need emerged, after a period of religious turmoil, the seemingly irrational veneration of the cow and the ban on cattle slaughter which characterises modern Hinduism.
The development of urban life added to the religious flux. The new occupational groups of artisans and traders were very often hereditary groups, if only because the easiest way to learn complicated techniques was to study them from an early age in the family home. The knowledge of each craft or trade was embodied in customary lore which was tied in with its own rituals and presided over by its own gods. The religion of the Brahmans could only dominate the mind-set of all the craft and trade groups if it found a place for these gods and, similarly, fitted the practitioners of the new skills into the increasingly rigid and hereditary four-caste system of warriors, priests, cultivators and toilers.
A revolution in social behaviour necessitated a revolution in religious doctrine and practices. As people from different social groups tried to come to terms with the contradictions between new realities and old beliefs, they did so in different ways. Scores of sects arose in sixth-century north India, each rearranging elements of the traditional beliefs into its own particular pattern, often clashing bitterly with each other and with the established Brahman priests. Out of these emerged religions that survive to the present day.
The best known of these sects were to be the Jain followers of Mahavira and the Buddhist followers of Gautama. They had certain points in common. They opposed blood sacrifices and animal slaughter. They counterposed ahimsa (non-killing) to warfare. They rejected caste distinctions – their founders were not Brahmans. They tended to stress the need for a rational understanding of events and processes, in some cases dispensing with the old tales of godly adventures and exploits to such an extent as to border on materialism an
d atheism.
Such doctrines fitted the society which was emerging. They protected its supply of draught animals and expressed the distaste of the cultivators, artisans and merchants at the wanton destruction of war. They appealed to the resentment of economically thriving members of these social groups at being discriminated against by the increasingly trenchant caste rules of the Brahmans. They also appealed to some of the rulers (the emperor Ashoka, 264–227 BC, even converted to Buddhism, supposedly through remorse at the carnage of his greatest military victory). The repudiation of caste distinctions could aid monarchs in their struggle to stop the upper castes in each locality diverting the surplus into their own pockets. It could gain backing from the new social groups of the towns for the empire. Even the doctrine of non-violence could help an already successful conqueror maintain internal peace against possible challengers. A ‘universalist’ system of beliefs suited a ‘universal’ monarchy.
The empire did not last long, falling apart soon after Ashoka’s death. The huge army and bureaucratic apparatus put too much strain on the empire’s resources. Communications were still too primitive for any emperor to curb the power of local notables indefinitely. But this time the disintegration of the empire did not bring the collapse of civilisation. Agriculture and trade continued to expand. Roman coins circulated in south India and ships carried goods to and from the Roman world, Ethiopia, Malaya and south east Asia. Indian merchants were ‘the entrepreneurs in the trade supplying the luxury foods of the Graeco-Roman world’. 6 The artisan crafts flourished. ‘Cloth making, silk weaving and the making of arms and luxury items seems to have made progress’, and ‘perhaps in no other period had a money economy penetrated so deeply into the life of the common people in the towns and suburbs’. 7 Such economic expansion made possible the formation of another, less centralised, empire, that of the Guptas, half a millennium after the collapse of the first.
