Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  War-war struck the senate as much better than jaw-jaw. After just one summer’s rest, Rome turned on the kingdoms of Alexander’s successors in the eastern Mediterranean and by 167 BCE had smashed them. Another generation of grueling wars against guerrillas took its armies deep into Spain, North Africa, and northern Italy. Rome had become the West’s sole superpower.

  FIRST CONTACT

  By 200 BCE the East and West had more in common than at any time since the Ice Age. Each was dominated by a single great empire with tens of millions of subjects. Each had a literate, sophisticated elite schooled in Axial thought, living in great cities fed by highly productive farmers and supplied by elaborate trade networks. And in each core social development was 50 percent higher than it had been in 1000 BCE.

  This chapter has illustrated nicely the principle that people (in large groups) are all much the same. Divided by the vast expanses of central Asia and the Indian Ocean, East and West had followed separate but similar histories in virtual isolation from each other, differing chiefly in the fact that the West still narrowly kept the lead in social development that the geography of domesticable plants and animals had given it at the end of the Ice Age.

  This chapter also illustrates a second major principle, though—that while geography determines the course of social development, social development also changes the meanings of geography. The expansion of the cores was eating away at the distance between them, folding East and West into a single Eurasian story. This was to have dramatic consequences.

  As late as 326 BCE, when Alexander of Macedon led his troops into the Punjab (Figure 5.8), even the best-educated Easterners and Westerners knew almost nothing of each other’s existence. Alexander assured his men that they would soon bathe in the waters of Ocean, the great river that encircled the world (when instead of Ocean the Ganges plain unfolded before them, bristling with fortified cities, they mutinied).

  Alexander did a U-turn and headed home, but left various malcontents behind as settlers. In what is now Afghanistan one group set up a kingdom called Bactria, which by 150 BCE had conquered parts of the Ganges plain and begun a remarkable fusion of Greek and Indian culture. One Indian text claims to record a Greek-speaking Bactrian king’s conversations with a Buddhist monk, after which the king, along with plenty of his subjects, converted.

  Bactria has a remarkable claim to fame: its disintegration around 130 BCE is the earliest historical event to be mentioned in both Eastern and Western documents. An ambassador from the Chinese court who wandered into the kingdom’s wreckage just a couple of years later took wonderful stories back to his emperor, particularly about central Asia’s horses, and in 101 BCE a Chinese expedition battled its way into the region. Some historians think that the local troops that resisted it may have included Romans, prisoners of war taken in far-off Mesopotamia and traded through countless hands until they found themselves fighting China in the mountains of central Asia.

  Figure 5.8. Between East and West: the late-first-millennium-BCE tissue of trade linking East and West across the Indian Ocean, Silk Roads, and steppe highway

  Less-romantic historians think another two centuries passed before Chinese and Romans actually met. According to an official Chinese history, in 97 CE a Chinese general “dispatched his adjutant Gan Ying all the way to the coast of the Western Sea and back.” On this distant shore, wherever exactly it was, Gan visited the kingdom of Da Qin—literally, “Great Qin,” so-called because it struck the Chinese as being a grand, distant reflection of their own empire. Whether the Western Sea was the Mediterranean and Da Qin was Rome remain open questions. The least-romantic historians of all think that it was only in 166 CE, when ambassadors from Da Qin’s King Andun (surely the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) reached the Chinese capital at Luoyang, that Chinese and Romans finally stood in the same room.

  There may, though, have been more productive meetings, involving kinds of people who struck the educated gentlemen who wrote most of the surviving texts as too despicable to notice—slaves, for instance. In 2010, geneticists announced that mitochondrial DNA from the bones of a man buried at Vagnari in southern Italy in the second century CE suggested that his maternal ancestors had come from East Asia; and archaeologists added that the circumstances of his burial implied that he was an agricultural slave. What miseries carried him or his ancestors so far from home are anyone’s guess.

  A second such group of despised wanderers consisted of traders—for all we know, the very traders who brought an East Asian slave to Italy. Pliny the Elder, a Roman aristocrat who wrote an immense description of the world and its peculiarities (he was killed in 79 CE, too fascinated by the eruption of Vesuvius to run away from the lava), did bring himself to mention the annual departure of a merchant fleet from Egypt’s Red Sea coast for Sri Lanka, and one actual merchant document survives, a roughly contemporary Greek text called The Voyage on the Red Sea. This was a kind of traders’ handbook, describing the Indian Ocean’s ports and winds.

  Roman merchants certainly left their mark on India. Almost as soon as British and French colonists settled there in the eighteenth century, in fact, people started bringing them ancient Roman coins, but not until 1943 did the scale of contact become clear. That summer, after decades of neglecting India’s cultural heritage—at the height of World War II and with the end of the Raj in sight—the British Colonial Office decided that it was time to overhaul Indian archaeology. It promptly plucked Brigadier Mortimer Wheeler off the beach at Salerno, where an Anglo-American force had just invaded Italy, and dropped him into New Delhi to administer a million and a half square miles of territory that was almost as archaeologically rich as Egypt.

  Wheeler was a larger-than-life character. He fought in both world wars, left a trail of broken hearts across three continents, and revolutionized British archaeology with his meticulous excavations of Roman sites. All the same, eyebrows were raised at this appointment. The British Empire was clearly on its last legs, so why, Indian nationalists asked, inflict on us some pensioned-off Colonel Blimp, more at home on muddy Roman sites in Britain than in the land of the Buddha?

  Wheeler had a lot to prove, and as soon as he landed in Mumbai (known to the British as Bombay) he set off on a whirlwind archaeological tour. Arriving at Chennai (colonial Madras) as it sweltered in the heat of the impending monsoon, Wheeler found the government offices closed and decided to kill time at the local museum. “In a workshop cupboard,” he wrote in his memoirs,

  my hand closed upon the neck and long handle of a pottery vessel strangely alien to that tropical environment. As I looked upon it I remember recalling that provocative question in the Legislative Assembly at New Delhi: “What has Roman Britain got to do with India?” Here was the complete answer.

  Wheeler was holding a fragment of a Roman wine jar dug up at Arikamedu (Pondicherry), eighty miles down the coast. He took the overnight train and after a long, alcoholic breakfast at the town’s French legation, went looking for Romans.

  An inner room of the public library contained three or four museum cases. I strode hopefully forward, and, removing the dust with an excessively sweaty arm, peered into them. For the second time within the month, my eyes started in their sockets. Crowded together were fragments of a dozen more Roman amphorae [wine jars], part of a Roman lamp, a Roman intaglio [cameo brooch], a mass of Indian material—potsherds, beads, terracottas—and several fragments of a red-glazed ware no one trained in the school of classical archaeology could mistake.

  As a little bonus, when Wheeler got back to New Delhi with one of the red potsherds in his pocket he ran into two more giants of British archaeology doing war work on aerial photographs. “I casually produced an Arretine sherd,” he says, referring to the red-glazed ware from the Arikamedu museum, “and the effect was gratifying—how childishly rewarding is a comprehending audience!”

  Excavations soon showed that Mediterranean goods were reaching Arikamedu (and several other ports) by 200 BCE. They increased in quantity fo
r the next three centuries, and recent digs on Egypt’s Red Sea coast have also found dried-out coconuts, rice, and black pepper that can only have come from India. By the first century CE goods were also moving between China and India, and from both places to Southeast Asia.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that East and West had joined hands across the oceans. This was less a web of connections than a few gossamer-thin threads strung end to end. One trader might ship wine from Italy to Egypt; another might take it overland to the Red Sea; a third might move it on to Arabia; and a fourth might cross the Indian Ocean to Arikamedu. There he might sit down with a local merchant selling silks that had passed through even more hands in their journey from the Yellow River valley.

  It was a beginning, though. The Voyage on the Red Sea mentions a place called “Thin,” probably a corruption of Qin (pronounced Chin), from which the Western name China comes; and a generation later a Greek named Alexander claimed to have visited Sinae, again probably China. By about 100 BCE, thanks partly to China’s military advance to Bactria, silks and spices were moving westward and gold and silver eastward along the famous Silk Roads. Only lightweight, expensive goods—such as silk, of course—could remain profitable after being carried for six months across five thousand miles, but within a century or two no self-respecting Roman noblewoman would be caught dead without her silk shawl, and central Asian merchants had set up branch offices in all China’s major cities.

  There was much for the wealthy aristocrats who ran the Eastern and Western cores to celebrate in these first contacts, but there was much to worry about too, for some of the people on the move struck them as being even nastier than merchants. “They have squat bodies, strong limbs, and thick necks, and are so hideous and deformed that they might be two-legged beasts,” the Roman historian Ammianus wrote about these people around 390 CE. He continued:

  Their shape, while horrible, is still human, but their lives are so rough that they do not use fire or cooked food, but live on the wild roots and any kind of half-raw flesh, which they warm slightly by sticking it between their thighs and the backs of their horses.

  These people were nomads, utterly alien to landowners such as Ammianus. We have already met their ancestors, the herders of central Asia who domesticated horses around 3500 BCE and hitched them to carts around 2000 BCE, giving birth to the horse-drawn chariots that threw the Western core into chaos after 1750 BCE and reached the East five hundred years later. Climbing onto horses’ backs and riding them around sounds easier than attaching them to vehicles, but it was not until about 1000 BCE that the breeding of bigger horses, improvements in horse harnesses, and the invention of small, powerful bows that could be fired from the saddle combined to create a whole new way of life: mounted pastoral nomadism. Taking to horseback transformed geography once again, gradually turning the unbroken band of arid plains stretching from Mongolia to Hungary (both named after nomad peoples) into a “steppe highway” linking East and West.

  In some ways these steppe nomads were no different from any other relatively mobile, relatively underdeveloped peoples living along the edges of great empires, going all the way back to Jacob and his sons in the Hebrew Bible. They traded animals and skins for the products of settled society. There could be profits all around: Chinese silks and a Persian carpet adorn the lavish fifth-century-BCE tombs at Pazyryk in Siberia, while in the ninth century BCE the Assyrians imported horses and bows from the steppes and replaced their chariots with cavalry.

  But there could also be problems all around. As well as silks and carpets, the Pazyryk tombs contain piles of iron weapons and cups made from the gold-plated skulls of scalped enemies, hinting that the line between trading and fighting was fine. Particularly after 800 BCE, when colder, drier weather reduced pastureland on the steppes, herders who could move their flocks quickly across long distances and fight when they arrived had huge advantages. Entire tribes took to horseback, riding hundreds of miles between winter and summer pastures.

  Their migrations created a domino effect. In the eighth century BCE a group called the Massagetae migrated west across what is now Kazakhstan, confronting the Scythian people in their path with the same choice that prehistoric hunter-gatherers had had to make when farmers moved into their foraging lands or Sicilian villagers had had to make when Greek colonists landed on their coasts: they could stand their ground, organizing themselves to fight back and even electing kings, or they could run away. Those who yielded fled across the Volga River, presenting the Cimmerians who already lived there with the same fight-or-flight choice.

  In the 710s BCE bands of Cimmerian refugees started moving into the Western core. There were not many of them, but they could do a lot of damage. In agrarian states, many peasants have to toil in the fields to support a few soldiers. At the height of their wars, Rome and Qin had mobilized maybe one man in six, but in peacetime they mustered barely one in twenty. Among nomads, by contrast, every man (and many a woman, too) could be a warrior, born and raised with a horse and bow. This was the original example of asymmetric warfare. The great empires had money, quartermasters, and siege weapons, but the nomads had speed, terror, and the fact that their sedentary victims were often busy fighting one another.

  In these years climate change and rising social development once again combined to disrupt the Western core’s frontiers, and violence and upheaval were once more the results. The Assyrian Empire, which was still the greatest power in the West around 700 BCE, invited the Cimmerians into the core to help it fight its rivals. At first that worked well, and in 695 BCE King Midas of Phrygia in central Turkey, so rich that Greek legends said he could turn objects to gold just by touching them, committed suicide as the Cimmerians closed in on his capital.

  By eliminating buffer states such as Phrygia, though, the Assyrians exposed their heartland to nomad raids, and by 650 BCE Scythians virtually controlled northern Mesopotamia. Their “violence and neglect of law led to total chaos,” the Greek historian Herodotus wrote. “They acted like mere robbers, riding up and down the land, stealing everyone’s property.” The nomads destabilized the Assyrian Empire and helped the Medes and Babylonians sack Nineveh in 612 BCE, then immediately turned on the Medes, too. Not until about 590 BCE did the Medes figure out how to fight such wily, fast-moving foes—according to Herodotus, by getting their leaders drunk at a banquet and murdering them.

  The kings of Media, Babylon, and Persia experimented with how to handle nomads. One option was to do nothing, but then nomad raids ruined frontier provinces, cutting the tax take. Buying the nomads off was another possibility, but paying protection could get as pricey as being raided. Preemptive war was a third response, striking into the steppes and occupying the pastures nomads needed to survive, but that was even costlier and riskier. With little to defend, nomads could retreat into the treeless, waterless waste, luring the invaders to destruction when their supplies ran out.

  Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, tried preemptive war against the Massagetae in 530 BCE. Like the Medes before him, he fought with the grape: he let the Massagetan vanguard loot his camp, and when they were drunk, slaughtered them and captured their queen’s son. “Glutton as you are for blood,” Queen Tomyris wrote to Cyrus, “give me back my son and get out of my country with your forces intact … If you refuse, I swear by the sun our master to give you more blood than you can drink.” True to her word, Tomyris defeated the Persians, cut off Cyrus’ head, and stuffed it in a bag of gore.

  It was a bad start for preemptive strikes, but in 519 BCE Darius of Persia showed that they could work, defeating a confederation that Persians called the “Pointy-Hatted Scythians” and imposing tribute and a puppet king on them. Five years later he tried it again, crossing the Danube and pursuing other Scythians deep into Ukraine. But like so many asymmetric wars in our own day, it is hard to say who won. Herodotus thought it was a disaster, from which Darius was lucky to escape alive, but the Scythians never again threatened Persia, so clearly something went right.<
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  It took longer for cavalry from the steppes to become a fact of life in the East, just as it had taken chariots longer to reach China than the West, but when the nomadic domino effect did arrive it worked just as viciously. The eastward spread of nomadism had probably been behind the Rong people’s attacks on the Zhou in the eighth century BCE, and the northern people absorbed by the states of Qin and Jin in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE must often have been choosing assimilation over fighting incoming nomads. When they did so, the combined pressure of nomad incursions and Chinese states’ expansion eliminated buffer societies, just as had happened in the West.

  The state of Zhao now became the frontier. Like the Assyrians when they faced the Scythians, Zhao immediately recruited nomadic horsemen to fight its neighbors and trained its own subjects as cavalry. Zhao also developed an antinomad strategy little used in the West, the war of attrition, building walls to keep nomads out (or at least to channel where they traded and raided). This seemed to work less badly than fighting or paying protection, and in the third century BCE walls proliferated. The Qin First Emperor’s wall stretched for two thousand miles, costing (according to legend, anyway) one laborer’s life for every yard built.*

  Being the kind of man he was, the First Emperor lost no sleep over this. In fact, he so appreciated wall-building that he turned this defensive strategy into a weapon, extending his Great Wall to enclose a vast sweep of pasture where nomads had traditionally grazed. Then, in 215 BCE, he followed up with a preemptive war.