Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  The Great Wall sent a clear signal: geography was changing meaning again. The forces that drove the dull upward march of social development in Figure 5.1—rising energy capture, more effective organization, widespread literacy, ever-deadlier armies—were transforming the world. By 200 BCE a single great empire dominated each core, its warriors and traders reaching even into the spaces between the cores. The steppes had gone from being a vast barrier between East and West to a highway linking them, and instead of separate but similar histories, the Eastern and Western cores were beginning to be intertwined. Very few goods, people, or ideas were as yet traveling the whole way from one end of Eurasia to the other, but new geographical realities were taking shape. Over the next few centuries, these would sweep away the great empires that dominated the cores in 200 BCE, throw the upward trends of social development into reverse, and end the West’s lead. The paradox of development was entering a whole new phase.

  6

  DECLINE AND FALL

  ALL FOR THE BEST

  “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” says Dr. Pangloss—again, and again, and again—in Voltaire’s eighteenth-century comic classic Candide. Despite contracting syphilis, losing an eye and an ear, and being enslaved, hanged, and caught in not one but two earthquakes, Pangloss sticks to his story.

  Pangloss, of course, was Voltaire’s little joke, poking fun at the silliness of contemporary philosophy, but history has thrown up plenty of real-life versions. The great empires that dominated the Eastern and Western cores in the first few centuries CE seem to have been especially rich in them. “When the emperor makes his imperial tour, all is resplendent,” one Chinese poet wrote. “Boundless joy reigns for ten thousand years.” In the Roman Empire the Greek orator Aristides waxed even more enthusiastic. “For the eternal duration of the empire the whole civilized world prays all together,” he declaimed. “Let all the gods grant that this empire and this city flourish forever and never cease until stones float on the sea and trees cease to put forth shoots.”

  So what would these Panglosses have made of Figure 6.1? After peaking around 1 BCE/CE, social development fell in both East and West. This was collapse on a whole new scale. Not only was it broader than ever before, affecting both ends of Eurasia, but it was also longer and deeper. Century after century it dragged on, cutting more than 10 percent off the East’s development score by 400 CE and 20 percent off the West’s by 500. How this happened, ushering in the end of the West’s fourteen-thousand-year-long lead in social development, is this chapter’s subject.

  Figure 6.1. An Old World–wide depression: the peak, decline, and fall of the ancient empires, 100 BCE–500 CE

  THE NEW WORLD ORDER

  The ancient empires had not always been full of Panglosses. It took hundreds of years of wars and millions of deaths before the paradox of violence that I mentioned in Chapter 5—the fact that war eventually brought peace and prosperity—made itself clear; and no sooner had the wars of unification ended than the Qin and Roman superstates both turned on themselves in horrific civil wars. Qin got down to this immediately; Rome, more gradually.

  Qin’s centralized, repressive institutions had been magnificent for conquering but turned out to be less good for ruling. After vanquishing his last enemies in 221 BCE the First Emperor continued conscripting all his male subjects, now setting them to building instead of fighting. Sometimes they were productive, as when they laid thousands of miles of roads and canals; sometimes less so. Sima Qian says that despite convincing himself of his own divinity and spending several fortunes on quacks who promised to make him live forever, the First Emperor—perhaps as insurance—also had 700,000 men spend thirty-six years building his tomb. (The graves of hundreds who died at the site have been excavated.)

  The (mostly unexcavated) twenty-square-mile tomb complex is China’s answer to Egypt envy. It is best known today for the Terracotta Army, six-thousand-plus life-size clay soldiers that guarded it, discovered by chance by a work team digging wells in 1974. It is one of the archaeological wonders of the world, but even more astonishing is the fact that when Sima Qian described the First Emperor’s tomb, this Terracotta Army that has astonished museum visitors around the world did not even get a mention. Sima instead saved his words for the tomb’s underground bronze palace, four hundred yards across, surrounded by replicas of the kingdom’s rivers in mercury. (Geochemical surveys in 1981 and 2003 confirmed that the soil above the tomb has massively elevated mercury levels.) All those royal concubines who had not given the First Emperor children, Sima Qian says, plus all the artisans who knew the tomb’s secrets and possibly the empire’s top hundred officials, too, were buried with the emperor in 210 BCE.

  The First Emperor’s megalomaniacal policies generated resistance at every level. When noblemen complained, he forcibly moved them to his capital; when intellectuals complained, he buried 460 of them alive; and when peasants complained, he cut them in half.*

  The reign of terror imploded almost the moment the First Emperor died. One day in 209 BCE, the story runs, heavy rain prevented two lowly officials from delivering conscripts to a garrison on time. The penalty for lateness was, of course, death. “As things stand, we face death whether we stay or run away,” Sima Qian reports one of them saying, “while if we were to start a revolt we would likewise face death. Since we must die in any case, would it not be better to die fighting for our country [by rebelling]?”

  As they anticipated, both rebels were soon killed, but their insurgency spread. Within months, the warring states had reconstituted themselves. By 206 BCE Qin was finished and the revolt became a terrible civil war. After another four years of slaughter only the peasant-turned-warlord Liu Bang remained standing. He proclaimed the Han dynasty, beheaded eighty thousand prisoners of war, announced universal peace, and eventually took the new name Gaodi (“High Emperor”).*

  Rome had the opposite problem from Qin. Instead of being too centralized to rule in peace, its institutions were too diffuse. Its senate of rich old men and assemblies of poor citizens had evolved to run a city-state, not an empire, and could not cope with the mountains of plunder, armies of slaves, and gaggle of superrich generals that victory created. In one policy dispute in 133 BCE the august senators smashed up the wooden benches they sat on and used the legs to club one another to death, and by the 80s BCE no one knew for sure who was actually running the empire.

  Instead of abruptly collapsing, like Qin, Rome slid in and out of civil war for fifty years. Increasingly armies were loyal to their generals rather than to the state, and the only way the senate could deal with successful generals was by sending them off to attack weaker foreigners (which only made the generals stronger) or by empowering new generals to attack the old ones (which only created new challengers). In 45 BCE Julius Caesar managed to defeat all comers, only to fall to assassins the next year; whereupon the wheel turned again, until in 30 BCE Octavian hunted Antony and Cleopatra down in Egypt, where they committed suicide. Exhausted by constant war, the Roman elite agreed that they would do whatever Octavian (who renamed himself Augustus, “the most august one”) said while pretending he was really just a private citizen. With everyone’s face saved by this odd arrangement, in 27 BCE Augustus declared that the republic had been restored and got down to ruling as an emperor.

  By 1 BCE almost the whole of the Eastern and Western cores were under the rule of single empires, but this had not been inevitable. Gaodi, the founder of the Han dynasty, had actually made an agreement to share the Eastern core with his last enemy in 203 BCE, but broke his word, killed his rival, and took everything; and in the 30s BCE it looked as if the Mediterranean would split between a Latin-speaking west, ruled by Octavian from Rome, and a Greek-speaking east, ruled by Antony and Cleopatra from Egypt. Had Gaodi been more honorable, or Antony less addled by liquor and sex, this chapter would have begun differently. In South Asia, things did go differently. Small cities and states developed in the Ganges Valley between 1000 and 600 BCE t
hen shifted toward high-end states like those in the Eastern and Western cores. In the third century BCE these were swallowed into the huge Mauryan Empire, probably the world’s biggest state in its day (though Qin would soon surpass it). But instead of going from strength to strength like Rome and China, this empire gradually broke apart over the next hundred years. By Augustus’ time South Asia was once again home to a mass of jostling little kingdoms.

  “All happy families resemble one another,” Tolstoy famously said, “but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So, too, empires. There are countless ways for empires to disintegrate—lost battles, disgruntled governors, uncontrollable grandees, desperate peasants, incompetent bureaucrats—but only one way to stay together: compromise. Han and Roman rulers showed a positive genius for this.

  Gaodi won his civil war in 202 BCE only because he cut deals with other warlords, rewarding ten of them by leaving two-thirds of his “empire” as semi-independent kingdoms under their control. To prevent new civil wars, the empire needed to crush these vassal kings, but moving too quickly and scaring them might provoke the very wars the empire needed to prevent—as might moving too slowly and leaving the kings too strong. The Han emperors, however, moved at just the right speed, dismantling the kingdoms by 100 BCE with surprisingly few rebellions.

  Han emperors were not as megalomaniacal as the Qin First Emperor, although they had their moments. Jingdi, for instance, was buried in 141 BCE with his own terracotta army (six times as large as the First Emperor’s, though only one-third as tall). But with the partial exception of the great conqueror Wudi, Han emperors backed away from claiming immortality and divinity, though they did hang on to the Shang and Zhou kings’ role as intermediary between this and the supernatural worlds.

  They calibrated this carefully. Getting along with the great families required retreating from royal godliness (although the practical step of tying aristocratic wealth to the court’s own success also helped). Placating the gentleman scholars required inserting the throne into an idealized, Confucian model of a hierarchical universe (as well as another pragmatic move, making knowledge of the Confucian classics rather than aristocratic connections the route to administrative office). Maintaining royal authority in the vast countryside required something else again, combining some of the monarchy’s pre–Axial Age status as the bridge to the ancestors and gods with more down-to-earth measures such as reducing military service, relaxing the cruelest Qin laws, and making carefully timed tax cuts.

  Compromise created peace and unity, which gradually knit the Eastern core into a single entity. Its rulers called it zhongguo (the “Middle Kingdom” at the center of the world) or tianxia (“All Under Heaven,” because nothing beyond its borders mattered), and at this point it really does start making sense to think of the Eastern core as a single entity that modern Westerners, in their own mispronunciation of “Qin,” call China. Huge cultural differences remained within All Under Heaven, but the Eastern core had started becoming Chinese.

  Rome pursued similar compromises. When the civil wars ended in 30 BCE the victorious Augustus demobilized the conscripts and manned the frontier with career soldiers. Like the Han emperors, he knew that the army could threaten his regime, but whereas China’s rulers reacted by staffing their military with convicts and foreigners, in a sense pushing it outside mainstream society, Augustus and his successors decided to keep their enemies even closer than their friends. They made the army a central social institution, but one directly under their own control.

  War became the preserve of specialists, and everyone else turned toward the arts of peace. Rome, like China, absorbed its client kings and tied aristocrats’ prosperity to the empire’s. The emperors walked a tightrope, pretending to be merely first among peers when dealing with the aristocracy, commander-in-chief when dealing with the army, and godlike when dealing with parts of the empire that expected their rulers to be numinous. They substituted a god-when-I’m-dead strategy for the old god-for-a-day compromise: emperors were merely outstanding men until they died, the theory held, whereupon they were clutched to the bosoms of the divinities. Some, like the emperor Vespasian, found it ridiculous; as he collapsed, dying, he joked with his courtiers, “I think I’m becoming a god.”

  By the first century CE a fusion Greco-Roman culture was developing. Rich men could travel from the Jordan to the Rhine, stopping in similar-looking cities, eating off much the same gold plates, watching familiar Greek tragedies, and making clever allusions to Homer and Virgil, everywhere finding like-minded men who would appreciate their sophistication. The senate admitted more and more provincial worthies, local bigwigs put up inscriptions in Latin and Greek, and even farmers in the fields started thinking of themselves as Romans.

  Compromise defused resistance. It would be nice to quote an ancient text on this, but none sums it up quite like the 1979 comedy Monty Python’s Life of Brian. When Reg (played by John Cleese), chairman of the People’s Front of Judea (Official), tries to whip his none-too-zealous followers into an anti-Roman rage, he finds that they prefer talking about the benefits of the empire (especially the wine). Reg throws back at them what has surely become the most famous question ever asked about the Roman Empire: “All right then. Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, the fresh water system, and public health—what have the Romans ever done for us?” The freedom fighters think for a moment, then one tentatively raises a hand. “Brought peace?” Gasping at this stupidity, Reg answers: “Oh, peace … shut up!”

  Reg did not get it: peace changed everything, bringing prosperity to both ends of Eurasia. Population soared in both empires and their economies grew even faster. At the most fundamental level, however we count—total product, product per unit of land, or product per unit of labor—agricultural output rose. Han and Roman laws gave greater security in property to landlords and peasants alike. Farmers at all levels took new land under cultivation, extended irrigation and drainage systems, bought slaves or hired laborers, and used more manure and better tools. Egyptian records show that Roman-era farmers could harvest ten pounds of wheat for every pound sown as seed, a spectacular level for premodern agriculture. No statistics survive from China, but archaeological finds and accounts in agricultural handbooks suggest that yields were high here, too, particularly in the Yellow River basin.

  Quietly, so quietly in fact that the noblemen who wrote the surviving literature barely remark on it, farmers and artisans pushed energy capture toward a threshold. Virtually all energy previously used in the entire history of humanity had come from muscles or from biomass fuels, but people now tapped into four potentially revolutionary sources—coal, natural gas, water, and wind.

  The first two remained very marginal—a few Chinese blacksmiths used coal in iron foundries, and saltmakers in Sichuan piped natural gas through bamboo tubes and burned it to evaporate brine—but not the third and fourth. In the first century BCE Romans and Chinese both came up with waterwheels, using them to power mills to grind grain and bellows to heat up furnaces. The most impressive example known, built at Barbegal in France soon after 100 CE, linked sixteen wheels to generate thirty kilowatts of power, roughly the same as a hundred oxen (or two Model T Fords running at full speed). Most wheels were much smaller, but even an average Roman mill generated as much power as ten strong men turning wheels with their feet.

  The most important use of wind- and waterpower came not from the brand-new waterwheels, though, but from improvements to the older technologies of sailing. No one would bother producing thousands of tons of wheat, millions of gallons of wine, and billions of iron nails unless they could move them from farm or foundry to potential buyers. Bigger, better, and cheaper ships (and harbors and canals) mattered as much as plows and waterwheels. Trade and industry grew together.

  Figure 6.2 shows this neatly for the West, plotting the rising number of shipwrecks against levels of lead pollution recorded in a 2005 study of lake deposits at Penido Velho in
Spain. (I show shipwrecks because no written records survive of ancient shipping, so—unless captains inexplicably got clumsier and steered onto rocks more often as time went on—shipwrecks are the best proxy for the number of voyages; I show lead pollution, a by-product of silver processing, because lead is the easiest isotope for geochemists to study.) The curves rise together to twin peaks in the first century BCE, showing how strongly trade and industry were linked (and that ancient Rome was no golden age for the environment).

  Figure 6.2. Goods and services: the parallel increases in Mediterranean shipwrecks and in lead pollution in the Spanish lake of Penido Velho. Numbers of wrecks and amounts of lead have been normalized so they can be compared on the same vertical scale, with the amounts of each in 1 BCE being counted as 100.

  We cannot yet compare Figure 6.2 with an equivalent graph for the East because Chinese archaeologists have not collected much quantifiable data. What there is, though, suggests that trade boomed in the Eastern core after 300 BCE, but not as much as in the Western core. one recent study, for instance, concludes that the Roman Empire had roughly twice as much coinage in circulation as the Han and that the richest Romans were twice as rich as the richest Chinese.

  Geography probably had a lot to do with the difference in the growth of trade. In Rome’s empire, 90 percent of the people lived within ten miles of the Mediterranean Sea. In the second millennium BCE the Western core’s expansion into the Mediterranean Basin had brought rising development and increasing disruption in equal measure, but once Rome conquered the entire coastline in the first century BCE it put an end to the disruptions. The sea now allowed cheap water transport to link almost everyone, and development shot up.