As Wittfogel has insisted, the kernel of the hydraulic theory was anticipated by Karl Marx in a number of works that were either disguised or ignored by Lenin and Stalin. Marx attributed the peculiar political economies of India and China to what he called the “Asiatic Mode of Production.” He wrote:
There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments of Government: that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of War, or the plunder of the exterior; and, finally, the department of Public Works. In Egypt and India, Mesopotamia, Persia, etc., advantage is taken of a high level for feeding irrigation canals. This prime necessity of an economical and common use of water … necessitated, in the Orient, where civilization was too low and territorial extent too vast to call into life voluntary associations, the interference of the centralizing powers of government.
One reason this part of Marx’s scheme of world evolution fell into disrepute under Lenin and Stalin is its implication that state communism or the “dictatorship of the proletariat” may actually be nothing more than a new and more highly developed form of managerial despotism reared on an industrial rather than an agricultural base. Another reason is that Marx referred to the Asiatic societies as “stagnant” or “stationary” and saw no prospect for their further evolution through purely internal processes. This was at odds with other aspects of Marx’s theories, for he held that the contradictions within society gave rise to class struggle and that class struggle was the key to the understanding of all history. Hydraulic societies had plenty of contradictions and class struggle, but they seem to have been remarkably resistant to fundamental change.
Some critics of the hydraulic theory contend that the bureaucratic features of the ancient empires had already come into existence before the irrigation networks and flood control projects reached the stage of requiring huge numbers of laborers and centralized control. Robert McC. Adams of the University of Chicago, for example, argues that in early dynastic Mesopotamia “irrigation, on the whole, was conducted on a small-scale basis, which involved little alteration of the natural hydraulic regime and the construction of only small-scale feeder canals” and that therefore “there is nothing to suggest that the rise of dynastic authority in southern Mesopotamia was linked to the administrative requirements of a major canal system.” In rebuttal I would point out that Wittfogel’s theory is one not of the origin of the state but of the origin of the highly despotic and enduring nature of certain kinds of imperial state systems. Adams does not deny that during the maturity of the Mesopotamian empires construction and management of colossal hydraulic enterprises was a constant and salient preoccupation of highly centralized agro-managerial cadres. The dynastic history of Mesopotamia fully confirms Wittfogel’s basic contention that as the scope and complexity of the waterworks increased, so did the “interference of the centralizing power of government.”
Karl Butzer has recently rejected the applicability of Wittfogel’s theory to the hydraulic and managerial features of ancient Egypt. Like Adams, Butzer claims that the dynastic phase had already been reached before there was any large-scale investment in hydraulic construction. But he seems to go further in insisting that “competition for water was never an issue except at the local level”; that “there is no evidence for a centralized bureaucratic apparatus that might have served to administer irrigation at the national, regional, or local level”; and finally that “ecological problems were handled at the local level.”
Butzer attributes the permanently decentralized nature of the dynastic Egyptian irrigation system to the fact that the Nile flood plain is broken into a series of natural basins which fill up sequentially when the river rises and overflows the levees along its main channel. Before the construction of the Aswan dam in the 1960’s across the whole width of the main, channel and flood plain, there was no way for districts to cut off the water of districts further downstream, as there was in Mesopotamia. Artificial constructions, according to Butzer, were small-scale and consisted primarily of attempts to strengthen and enlarge the preexisting natural levees and dikes separating each basin from the river and one basin from another.
Butzer’s critique of Wittfogel’s theory is contradicted by much of the data provided by Butzer himself. It appears that he has not understood what Wittfogel is saying. For example, the mace head of the Scorpion King pictures a 3100 B.C. predynastic ruler either opening a levee or initiating construction of a canal. Butzer accepts this and other evidence as an indication that “artificial irrigation including deliberate flooding and draining by sluice gates, and water contained by longitudinal and transverse dikes, was established by the 1st Dynasty.” He also admits that the central government engaged in vast hydraulic projects beginning in the Middle Kingdom (2000 B.C.) aimed at regulating the level of the Fayum lake and at draining large portions of the Delta region, though he regards these monumental undertakings as exceptions and therefore insignificant for an understanding of dynastic political organization. Further, despite his claim that local officials could regulate and administer the distribution of water, he describes formidable technical requirements:
conversion of the natural to higher and stronger artificial levees; enlarging and dredging of natural diverging overflow channels; blocking off of natural, gathering or drainage channels by earthen dams and sluice gates; subdivision of the flood basin by dams into manageable, in part special-purpose, units; controlling water access to an retention in the basin sub-units by temporary cuts in the levees and dikes or by a network of short canals and masonry gates.
Butzer admits that these operations would frequently require the “mass input of the total able-bodied rural population of a basin unit,” but supposedly of only one unit at a time. This conclusion is clearly false since each “basin unit” had at least two neighbors—one upstream and one downstream. At high water, failure to maintain the between-basin dikes and the return drainage channels in proper condition could result in the uncontrolled flooding of the downstream basin. When the Nile flood was higher than usual, a break in an upstream levee would threaten not only the adjacent basin, but the next basin as well, since the uncontrolled pressure could easily sweep away the between-basin dikes. The need for coordinating the response of several basins was equally great when the Nile flood failed and the amount of water diverted by the upstream basins affected the amount that reached those further downstream. Butzer himself paints a stark picture of the “famines … poverty … mass burials … rotting corpses … suicide … cannibalism … anarchy … mass dislocations … civil war … mass plundering … roving bands of marauders … as well as looting of cemeteries” that resulted from a failure of the annual flood. While there were occasions when the crests were either so high or so low that no power on earth could render assistance, a government capable of putting 100,000 men to work building artificial mountains out of stone blocks in the desert surely did not refrain from attempting to moderate the effect of too much or too little water under emergency conditions.
As in so many other long-term natural and cultural processes, emergency or extreme rather than normal conditions shaped the political adaptation to the hydraulic mode of production. In China as in Egypt, when the major irrigation and flood control facilities were functioning properly, irrigation farming could flourish without any need for a highly centralized government. But when the great dams and levees on the major rivers were threatened by floods or earthquakes only a central administration could muster resources and labor power on a sufficiently grand scale. During the Han period, for example, population density was highest on the Great Plain of the Yellow River in the Shan-Si and Ho-Nan provinces. Periodically, the Yellow River overflowed its banks and flooded huge areas of the plain. In order to prevent these disasters, the central government supervised the construction of dikes and levees. This had the effect of increasing the amount of impounded water and of raising its level during flood seasons, thereby adding to the damage that the river could inflict when it broke through
its containments. In 132 B.C. the river breached the dikes, flooded sixteen districts, and sent a whole new branch across the plain. Tens of millions of peasants were affected. The break remained open for twenty-three years until Emperor Wu-ti himself visited the scene and personally supervised its repair. In A.D. II another breach occurred near the same point, but now the whole river changed its course and found a new path to the sea—a hundred miles away from its former mouth. Repair work was again delayed, this time for several decades.
These facts warrant two conclusions. First, no effort on a village, county, or even provincial level was adequate to the enormity of the undertaking; otherwise, so many years would not have elapsed between the breaking and the repair. Second, whoever possessed the means to control the river literally possessed the means to control the life span and well-being of vast numbers of people.
In my opinion, the actual record of discoveries made by archaeologists has consistently favored the hydraulic theory. When the theory was first formulated, almost nothing was known about the conditions that had given rise to the agro-managerial states and empires of the New World. Wittfogel stimulated the first attempt by archaeologists in the late 1930’s to detect the presence of irrigation during the formative phases of native states in South America. Recent work by archaeologists at Columbia University and Harvard continue to support the view that the growth of cities, states, and monumental architectures in the pre-Columbian cultures of highland and coastal Peru grew step by step with an increase in the size and complexity of their irrigation systems. Excavations carried out in Mesoamerica by William Sanders and Richard MacNeish have also tended to confirm the importance of irrigation. As I showed in an earlier chapter, hydraulic agriculture was the basic source of subsistence for Teotihuacán and for the Aztecs’ cannibal kingdom.
According to Wittfogel, the hydraulic theory has ominous implications for our own times. While he traces the origin of the agro-managerial form of despotism to specific ecological conditions, he emphasizes that once in existence it was spread by conquest far beyond its semiarid riverine homelands. He insists, for example, that the Mongols transplanted the agro-managerial form of despotism from China to Russia in the aftermath of the Mongol conquest of Central Asia and the eastern part of Europe. In czarist Russia the same system of “Oriental despotism” lingered on into the twentieth century. The Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” were not, in Wittfogel’s view, transient steps along the way toward the restoration of liberties that human beings enjoyed before the evolution of the state; rather they led to the restoration of the centralizing powers of government and an increase in czarist tyranny through the development of industrial means of exploitation and control. Turning to China, Wittfogel sees the Communist revolution there as the restoration of the ancient imperial system, the founding of one more dynasty after one more collapse and brief interlude under foreign control. Because of the continuing agrarian and hydraulic structure of modern China, this analysis seems to me much more apt in the case of China than of Russia, where an industrial mode of production now prevails.
In either case, Wittfogel seems to have short-circuited the kind of analysis that is needed if we are to assess the true nature of the threat to liberty in our times. I do not believe that we are endangered by despotic traditions that have acquired a life of their own and that are transferred from one mode of production to another or from one ecosystem to another. What Wittfogel’s theory suggests to me is that when certain kinds of state-level systems of production undergo intensification, despotic forms of government may arise which can neutralize human will and intelligence for thousands of years. This implies further that the effective moment for conscious choice may exist only during the transition from one mode of production to another. After a society has made its commitment to a particular technological and ecological strategy for solving the problem of declining efficiency, it may not be possible to do anything about the consequences of an unintelligent choice for a long time to come.
14
The Origin of Capitalism
The hydraulic theory not only suggests an explanation for the remarkable convergences among the social institutions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and Inca Peru; it also opens up promising avenues of inquiry relevant to the question of why capitalism and parliamentary democracy evolved in Europe before they appeared anywhere else in the world. North of the Alps, where there is no Nile or Indus or Yellow River and where winter snows and spring rains provide sufficient moisture for field crops and pastures, population remained more dispersed than in the hydraulic regions. Long after the great river valleys were packed from horizon to horizon with human settlements, northern Europe stood to the Mediterranean and the Orient as America was later to stand to Europe: a frontier still covered by virgin forests. (Yet population density was higher than in temperate-zone North America, where the absence of domesticated animals served to slow population growth even more.)
The appearance of the first states in northern Europe was not caused by the concentration of people in a circumscribed habitat. All were secondary states called into existence to cope with the military threat of the Mediterranean empires and to exploit the possibilities of trade and plunder provided by the great wealth of Greece and Rome.
Although most scholars refer to the political organization of the iron age Gauls, Franks, Teutons, and Britons as “chiefdoms,” these were societies that had obviously crossed the threshold into statehood. They should be compared with feudal states such as that of the Bunyoro rather than with redistributive chiefdoms such as those of the Trobianders and the Cherokee. By 500 B.C. the social life of the peoples of Europe had become highly stratified. Like the Vedic invaders of the Indus Valley, the Franks, Gauls, Teutons, and Britons were divided into three hereditary castes: a warrior chief aristocracy; a priesthood, the Druids, in charge of rituals, record keeping, and time reckoning; and commoners living in farm villages or dispersed pastoral homesteads that were part of a local chief’s domain. At the apex of society was a hereditary or semihereditary warrior king who was a member of a ruling house or lineage.
While the king and his warrior chiefs sought to retain the image of open-handed generosity characteristic of egalitarian “big man” redistributors, they held a monopoly over the possession of the equipment essential for maintaining law and order and for waging military campaigns. The items over which they exercised their monopoly were war chariots, horses, body armor, and iron swords. Commoners were obliged to provide ritual gifts of grain and cattle and to render labor services when summoned by the chiefs or the king. If they knew what was good for them, they were prompt and courteous in their response to requests from their headhunting overlords. Society had passed beyond the point at which the redistributors had to rely on the spontaneous generosity of their followers, though there were still uninhabited forest lands into which commoners and disaffected chiefs could flee if the “gift-giving” became too one-sided.
It certainly was not for want of suitable personalities that the northern European statelets failed to develop into monolithic despotisms. The Irish hero tales, Beowulf, the Nordic sagas, and Homer’s Iliad are filled with frustrated chieftains whom Marc Bloch has called “odd little potentates.” Hurtling themselves into battle, sacking cities amid screams and the sound of trumpets, slaughtering men and boys and carrying girls and women off in chariots hung with fresh heads, the Celtic kings and their chiefs are among the most ruthless figures in history. In Piggott’s words, they were a swaggering, belching, touchy, impossible crew—“hands twitching to the sword hilt at the imagined hint of an insult … wiping the greasy moustaches that were a mark of nobility.”
Yet the Celtic kingdoms remained small and disjointed. Commoners slipped from the protection of one chief to another. New coalitions of warriors signaled the rise of new ruling houses and the fall of old ones. Whole segments of kingdoms detached themselves from their homelands and migrated en masse from one region to anot
her—the Belgae to Britain, the Helvetii to Switzerland, the Cimbri, Teutons, and Ambroni into Gaul, the Scythians into Transylvania. The Romans consolidated these loose, mobile feudal kingdoms into imperial provinces, constructed the first large masonry buildings and the first decent roads, and established systems of coinage, regular tax collection, and law courts. Much of this was a thin veneer laid over a countryside which was still barely prepared for statehood. Outside the provincial capitals the Romanized descendants of the Franks, Gauls, Celts, and Teutons practiced small-scale subsistence agriculture in isolated villages. Trade in manufactured items and agricultural products remained rudimentary compared with the circum-Mediterranean portions of the empire. Virtually everyone remained illiterate. Hence with the collapse of Rome in the fifth century A.D. transalpine Europe did not lapse back into the “Dark Ages,” never having gotten out of them in the first place. What it lapsed back into was feudalism.
Cannibals and Kings Page 20
