Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  By 700 BCE the Zhou court was almost irrelevant to the dukes, earls, viscounts, and marquises of the former colonies (one ancient source says there were now 148 of them). The leading “vassals” still claimed to be acting on behalf of the Zhou king, but in reality fought one another for supremacy without consulting their supposed ruler, making and breaking treaties at will. In 667 BCE Marquis Huan of Qi, temporarily dominant, even summoned his rivals to a conference where they acknowledged him as their leader (though they continued to fight him and everyone else). The next year Marquis Huan browbeat the king of Zhou into naming him ba, an “overlord” who would (theoretically) represent Zhou’s interests.

  Marquis Huan earned this standing largely by protecting weaker states from attacks by peoples they considered foreign—in the north, the Rong and Di, and in the south, groups known as Man. Yet the main (and surely unintended) consequence of these wars was rather similar to Phoenician and Greek colonization of the western Mediterranean, drawing the Rong, Di, and Man into the core and hugely expanding it in the process.

  In the seventh century BCE states along the northern edge of the core recruited Rong and Di as allies, cementing these ties by intermarriage. Many Rong and Di leaders became versed in Zhou literature and deliberately attached themselves to border states such as Qi, Jin, and Qin, which grew much larger. In the south some Man created their own large state, Chu, as they fought with Jin and Qi in the seventh century. By the 650s BCE Chu was a full member of the interstate community, attending its conferences; and, rather like the Segestans and Romans in the West who claimed to descend from Aeneas, Chu’s leaders started saying that they, like the other states in the Eastern core, had begun as a colony of Zhou. A distinct Chu material culture emerged by 600 BCE, combining core and southern elements.

  Chu became such a power that in 583 BCE the state of Jin decided to make alliances with other Man peoples to build up enemies in Chu’s rear. In 506 one of these allies, the state of Wu, was strong enough to smash Chu’s army; so strong, in fact, that in 482 the Marquis of Jin yielded his status as ba to Viscount Fuchai of Wu—who, like the kings of Chu, now claimed Zhou ancestry. By then yet another southern state, Yue, had also become a major power. Its viscounts tried to trump Wu ideologically by claiming descent from the earliest dynasty of all, the Xia; and in 473 BCE, after Viscount Fuchai of Wu hanged himself while Yue’s armies besieged his capital, Yue’s viscount took his place as ba. Despite its political breakdown, the Eastern core had expanded just as dramatically as the Western.

  TOWARD THE HIGH END

  The years 750–500 BCE were the turning point when history didn’t turn. In 750 BCE Western social development was pushing twenty-four points, just where it had been on the eve of the great collapse in 1200 BCE; by 500 BCE so, too, was the East’s. Just as happened around 1200, the climate was changing, peoples were migrating, conflict was escalating, new states were pushing into the cores, and old states were coming apart. New collapses seemed entirely possible, but both cores instead restructured themselves, developing the economic, political, and intellectual resources to manage the challenges that faced them. That is what makes Figure 5.1 so dull—and so interesting.

  We see the changes first in Assyria. The upstart who usurped the throne in 744 BCE under the name Tiglath-Pileser III at first looked much like all the other pretenders who had pulled the same stunt since the 780s, yet in less than twenty years he catapulted Assyria from a broken, low-end state to a dynamic, high-end one. Along the way he converted himself, like some mafioso going legitimate, from a gangster boss into a great (but brutal) king.

  His secret was cutting the aristocratic Sons of Heaven out of the deal. Tiglath-Pileser did this by creating a standing army, paid by and loyal to him alone, instead of having his lords provide troops. The surviving texts do not say how he did this, but somehow he dragooned prisoners of war into forming a personal army. When it won battles, Tiglath-Pileser used the loot to pay his own troops directly instead of sharing it with his lords. Supported by the army, he then broke the nobles’ power, subdividing top offices and filling many with captured eunuchs. Eunuchs had two advantages—they could not have sons to pass their positions to, and were held in such contempt by the traditional aristocracy that they were unlikely to lead rebellions. Above all, Tiglath-Pileser hugely expanded the bureaucracy to run his state, stepping over the old elite to create administrators loyal entirely to him.

  All this was expensive, so Tiglath-Pileser regularized his finances. Instead of shaking down foreigners by showing up periodically and demanding payoffs, he insisted on regular contributions—basically, taxes. If a client king argued, Tiglath-Pileser replaced him with an Assyrian governor. In 735 BCE, for instance, King Pekah of Israel joined Damascus and other Syrian cities in a tax revolt (Figure 5.5). Tiglath-Pileser came down on them like a wolf on the fold. He destroyed Damascus in 732 BCE, installed a governor, and annexed Israel’s fertile northern valleys. Pekah’s unhappy subjects assassinated him and enthroned the pro-Assyrian King Hoshea instead.

  Figure 5.5. The first high-end empires. The broken line marks the maximum extent of the Assyrian Empire, around 660 BCE, and the solid line the maximum extent of the Persian Empire, around 490 BCE.

  All went well until Tiglath-Pileser died in 727 BCE. Hoshea, assuming that the new Assyrian system would die with him, stopped paying, but Tiglath-Pileser’s institutions proved robust enough to survive a change at the top. In 722 Assyria’s new king, Shalmaneser, devastated Israel, killed Hoshea, installed a governor, and deported tens of thousands of Israelites. Between 934 and 612 BCE Assyria in fact forcibly moved some 4.5 million people from one place to another. Deportees filled Assyria’s armies, built its cities, and worked on projects to raise the empire’s productivity—damming rivers, planting trees, tending olives, and digging canals. The labor of the dispossessed fed Nineveh and Babylon, each of which grew to a hundred thousand residents, dwarfing earlier cities and sucking in resources from all around. Social development surged upward; by 700 BCE Assyria was stronger than any previous state in history.

  Did Tiglath-Pileser change the course of history by heading off collapse in the eighth century? At one time historians unhesitatingly said yes, but nowadays most shy away from attributing so much to the will of unique great men. In this case, they are probably right. Great Tiglath-Pileser might have been, if that is the label we want to use for ruthlessness, but he was not unique. All over the Western core late-eighth-century-BCE rulers hit on centralization as the solution to their woes. In Egypt, Nubians from what is now Sudan reunited the country even before Tiglath-Pileser seized Assyria’s throne, and over the next thirty years instituted reforms he would have recognized. By the 710s BCE even little Judah’s King Hezekiah was doing the same.

  Rather than a single genius changing history, this looks like desperate men trying out every idea that came along, with the best solutions winning. It was centralize or perish; rulers who failed to get local chiefs under control were crushed by those who succeeded. Hezekiah, worried about Assyria, felt compelled to strengthen Judah; Assyria’s new king, Sennacherib, worried about Hezekiah’s strength, felt compelled to stop him. In 701 BCE Sennacherib plundered Judah and carried off its people. He spared Jerusalem, whether because (as the Hebrew Bible says) the Angel of the Lord smote the Assyrians or because (as Sennacherib’s account says) Hezekiah agreed to pay more tribute.

  Either way, Sennacherib’s victory brought him face-to-face with a harsh new reality: every war that Assyria won simply generated new enemies. When Tiglath-Pileser annexed northern Syria in the early 730s BCE, Damascus and Israel organized against him; when Shalmaneser conquered Damascus and Israel between 732 and 722 BCE, Judah became the front line; and cowing Judah in 701 BCE merely made Egypt a threat, so in the 670s Assyria overran the Nile Valley. Egypt, though, turned out to be a country too far, and by the time the Assyrians withdrew ten years later, problems were plaguing all their frontiers. Destroying Urartu, their main enemy to the north, had e
xposed them to devastating raids from the Caucasus; sacking Babylon, their main enemy to the south, only generated wars with Elam, farther southeast; and destroying Elam in the 640s BCE merely freed the Medes of the Zagros Mountains to become a threat and allowed Babylon to regain its strength.

  In his influential book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the Yale University historian Paul Kennedy argued that in the past five hundred years, the need to fight great wars has consistently forced European states to overreach, undermining their strength so much that they collapsed. Despite leaping to a high-end model with huge revenue flows, a professional army, and a bureaucracy, and despite defeating all rivals, Assyria ended up as a poster child for such imperial overreach. By 630 BCE it was in retreat everywhere, and in 612 BCE a league of Medes and Babylonians sacked Nineveh and divided its empire.

  Assyria’s abrupt fall repeated a pattern we saw in Chapter 4, in which military upheavals enlarge a core by giving previously peripheral peoples the chance to push their way in. Media adopted many of Assyria’s institutions and policies; Babylon once again became a great power; and Egypt tried to re-create its long-lost empire in the Levant. The tussle over Assyria’s carcass also kept the expansionary dynamic going. Median centralization turned another peripheral people, the Persians of southwest Iran, into a formidable power. In 550 BCE the Persian warlord Cyrus overthrew the Medes, his path smoothed by Median factional fighting. (The Median king rather foolishly put the army he sent against Cyrus under a general whom he had previously forced to eat the flesh of his own murdered son. The general promptly defected, the army collapsed, and Cyrus took over.)

  Like Assyrian kings before them, Persia’s rulers believed they were on a mission from God. As they saw it, their family, the Achaemenids, represented the earthly interests of Ahuramazda, the god of light and truth, in his eternal struggle with darkness and evil. Other people’s gods, they convinced themselves, saw the justice of their cause, and wanted them to win. Thus, when Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BCE he claimed (apparently sincerely) to have done so to liberate Babylon’s gods from corrupt rulers who neglected them. When he followed this up by sending the Jews back to Jerusalem, whence the Babylonians had carried them into captivity in 586 BCE, the authors of the Hebrew Bible even confirmed Cyrus’ high opinion of himself. Their own god, they insisted, thought of Cyrus as “my shepherd … my anointed … whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and strip kings of their robes.”

  Cyrus led his armies to the Aegean Sea and the borders of what are now Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. His son Cambyses conquered and held Egypt, then, in a story quite as bizarre as anything in Sima Qian, his distant relative Darius seized the throne in 521 BCE. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Cambyses misinterpreted a dream as meaning that his brother Smerdis was plotting against him, and had Smerdis secretly murdered. To Cambyses’ horror, though, a priest—who happened to be named Smerdis too, and happened to look exactly like the dead Smerdis—now seized the throne, pretending to be the real Smerdis. Cambyses jumped onto his horse to rush home and reveal the fraud (and the fact that he had murdered his own brother) but accidentally stabbed himself in the thigh and died. Meanwhile, Fake Smerdis was exposed when one of his wives discovered that he had no ears (Fake Smerdis’ ears having been cut off as a punishment some time earlier). Seven noblemen then murdered Fake Smerdis and held a contest for the throne: each plotter brought his horse to a chosen place, the plan being that whoever’s horse neighed first when the sun rose would become king. Darius won (he cheated).

  Remarkably, this turned out to be as good a way to choose a king as any,* and Darius quickly proved himself to be a new Tiglath-Pileser. So effectively did he maximize revenue from his realm of perhaps 30 million subjects, Herodotus recorded, that “the Persians like to say that Darius was a shopkeeper … [who] made a profit on everything.”

  Darius followed the money, which drew him west, to where rising social development had revived the Mediterranean frontier. By 500 BCE traders acting for themselves rather than working for palaces and temples had created a vibrant economy, driving the costs of seaborne transport down so much that they could make profits by shipping bulk goods such as food as well as luxuries. Around 600 BCE people in Lydia, in western Anatolia, started stamping lumps of metal to guarantee their weight, and by Darius’ day this innovation—coinage—was in widespread use, speeding up commerce still further. Living standards rose: by 400 BCE the average Greek consumed perhaps 25–50 percent more than his or her predecessor had done three centuries earlier. Houses were bigger, diets more varied, and people lived longer.

  Darius tapped into this Mediterranean economy by hiring Phoenicians to man Persia’s first fleet, cutting a Suez canal linking the Mediterranean and Red seas, and grabbing control of Greek cities. According to Herodotus, he sent spies to scope out Italy and even considered attacking Carthage.

  By the time Darius died in 486 BCE, Western social development was a good 10 percent higher than the twenty-four points it had reached around 1200 BCE. Irrigation farming in Egypt and Mesopotamia had steadily increased yields; Babylon may have had 150,000 residents (the city was so big, says Herodotus, that when Cyrus captured it, it took days for the news to reach some neighborhoods); Persian armies were so big (again, according to Herodotus) that they drank whole rivers dry; and, as we have already seen, perhaps as many as one Athenian man in ten could write his name.

  Eastern scores were also reaching twenty-four points, and processes of state restructuring and centralization much like those the West had known since the eighth century BCE were under way. The breakdown of Zhou authority since 771 BCE had been a mixed blessing for the rulers of the former vassal states. It set them free to fight one another, which they did with a vengeance, but breakdown did not stop at that point. The dukes and viscounts who had formerly been unruly vassals, obligated to the Zhou king but exploiting the fact that he relied on them for troops, now found that their own aristocrats were every bit as unruly as they had been. One solution was to end-run the aristocrats by bringing outsiders into the state, as Tiglath-Pileser had done when he filled his army with prisoners of war. Four big states on the edges of the Zhou world (Jin, Qi, Chu, and Qin; see Figure 5.2) started doing this in the seventh century and grew strong.

  As early as 690 BCE Chu, less fettered by Zhou-era aristocratic norms than states in the Yellow River valley, created new administrative districts with governors reporting directly to the palace. Other states copied this. In the 660s BCE Marquis Xian, ruler of Jin, tried a more drastic solution, massacring the heads of his state’s leading families and appointing ministers who, he hoped, would be more obedient. Other states copied this too. In 594 Marquis Xuan of Lu found another path around his peers; by remitting the peasants’ labor dues to their local lords, he effectively gave them title to the land they worked, in return for military service and taxes paid directly to him. Other states, I hardly need add, rushed to copy this policy as well.

  Modernizing rulers created bigger armies, fought harsher wars, and capitalized on economic growth like that in the West. Peasants, more willing to work to improve land when it was their own, pushed up yields by developing better crops and investing in ox-drawn plows. Iron farm tools spread, and fifth-century-BCE blacksmiths learned to use bellows to heat iron ore to 2,800°F, at which point it melted and could be cast.* Craftsmen in Wu even manipulated iron’s carbon content to produce true steel.

  Cities boomed—Linzi in Lu probably had fifty thousand residents by 500 BCE—and as in the West, their demand encouraged private merchants to bring them food. In 625 BCE a minister in Lu abolished border checkpoints to make trade easier. Waterborne commerce flourished and Jin and the Zhou court at Luoyi introduced bronze coins, independent from their invention in the West. In another parallel with the West, economic growth raised living standards but also increased inequality. Tax rates drifted upward, from 10 percent in the early sixth century to 20 percent a hundred years later. Lords bu
ilt icehouses in their palaces; peasants slid into debt.

  When Western economic expansion took off in the sixth century BCE, kings had already reasserted their power, but in the East growth just exacerbated the rulers’ problems, since the ministers who replaced their fractious lords normally themselves came from powerful lineages. Ministers were often better placed than their masters to capture the fruits of growth, and regularly developed into rivals. In 562 BCE three ministerial lineages in Lu effectively sidelined the marquis, and in the 480s one took over the state. In Jin ministers waged a fifty-year, three-way civil war, partitioning the state in 453 BCE.

  By this time, though, rulers (and those ministers who usurped power from them) had found a solution. If aristocratic ministers were as problematic as the nobles they replaced, why not go outside the state altogether, recruiting administrators from other states? These hired hands, known as shi—usually translated “gentlemen”—lacked the political connections to become rivals. Many, in fact, came from quite humble backgrounds, which was why they were looking for employment in the first place. The proliferation of shi attests to both the centralization of power and the spread of literacy. In their thousands shi shuffled scrolls and counted beans in quiet county offices, drifting from state to state as jobs opened up.