ESCAPE FROM ROME
THE PRINCETON ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD
Joel Mokyr, Series Editor
A list of titles in this series appears in the back of the book.
ESCAPE FROM ROME
The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
WALTER SCHEIDEL
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON & OXFORD
Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press
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LCCN 2019943431
ISBN 978-0691172187
eISBN 9780691198835
Version 1.0
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal
Production Editorial: Natalie Baan
Jacket/Cover Design: Sandra Friesen
Production: Merli Guerra
Publicity: James Schneider and Amy Stewart
Jacket image: Marble head of the emperor Hadrian. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
for Joy
The days of empire are finished.
—UTOPIA IN JOHN CARPENTER’S
ESCAPE FROM L.A. (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1996)
CONTENTS
List of Figures and Tables xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: The Great Escape 1
PART I. THE EUROPEAN ANOMALY
1 Patterns of Empire 31
PART II. WHY ROME?
2 Core 51
3 Periphery 89
4 Counterfactuals 110
PART III. WHY ONLY ROME?
5 From Justinian to Frederick 127
6 From Genghis Khan to Napoleon 174
PART IV. THE FIRST GREAT DIVERGENCE
7 From Convergence to Divergence 219
8 Nature 259
9 Culture 307
PART V. FROM THE FIRST TO THE SECOND GREAT DIVERGENCE
10 Institutions 337
11 New Worlds 420
12 Understanding 472
Epilogue: What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us? 503
Glossary 529
Technical Note to Chapter 1 533
Notes 537
References 603
Index 647
FIGURES AND TABLES
FIGURES
I.1 Per capita GDP in the United Kingdom, China, and India, 1000–2000 CE
I.2 Distribution of global GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity in 1 CE
I.3 Distribution of global GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity in 1960
I.4 Distribution of people worldwide living on more than $200 per day in 2002
I.5 Social development scores in the most developed parts of western Eurasia, 5000 BCE–2000 CE
I.6 Social development scores in western and eastern Eurasia, 500 BCE–1500 CE
I.7 Social development scores in western and eastern Eurasia, 1500–1900 CE
I.8 The population of the single largest empire and the three largest empires in the world as a proportion of world population, 700 BCE–2000 CE
1.1 Macro-regions of state formation
1.2 The population of South Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the “Roman empire region” as a proportion of the population of East Asia, 200 BCE–2000 CE, at centennial intervals
1.3 The proportion of the population residing in the area covered by the Roman empire at its peak that was claimed by the largest polity in that area, 450 BCE–2000 CE
1.4 The proportion of the population of Europe claimed by the largest polity in that area, 250 BCE–2000 CE
1.5 The population of the area claimed by the Roman empire at its peak as a proportion of the population of Europe, 200 BCE–2000 CE
1.6 The proportion of the population of the MENA region claimed by the largest polity in that area, 700 BCE–2000 CE
1.7 The proportion of the population of South Asia claimed by the largest polity in that area, 500 BCE–2000 CE
1.8 The proportion of the population of East Asia claimed by the largest polity in that area, 250 BCE–2000 CE
1.9 Comparison between the proportion of the population of East Asia controlled by the largest polity in East Asia and the proportion of the population of China controlled by the largest polity in China, 250 BCE–2000 CE
1.10 Actual population and census population of the largest polity in China as a proportion of the total population of that region, 250 BCE–2000 CE
1.11 Proportion of the population of Europe and East Asia claimed by the largest polity in each region, 250 BCE–2000 CE
2.1 Italy in the early fourth century BCE
2.2 Political statuses in Italy in the third century BCE
2.3 Approximate military mobilization rates of the Roman citizenry, 346–31 BCE
2.4 Roman and Italian military deployments by region, 200–168 BCE
2.5 Expansion of the Roman empire to its peak size
2.6 (a) General form of the social structure of agrarian societies according to Ernest Gellner
2.6 (b) Adaptations of the Gellner model
3.1 The Middle Eastern political-military network, c. 1500–500 BCE
3.2 Political-military networks in the ancient Mediterranean during the third quarter of the first millennium BCE
3.3 Roman troop deployments by region as a share of all deployments, 200–168 BCE
3.4 Stylized typology of peripheries in the Roman-era Mediterranean
3.5 Time cost of transfers from Rome
3.6 Financial cost of transfers to Rome
3.7 The Mediterranean core of the Roman empire
4.1 The Akkadian, Neo-Assyrian, and Achaemenid empires
4.2 The Athenian empire (late fifth century BCE) and the empire of Alexander the Great (323 BCE)
5.1 The Mediterranean, c. 500 CE
5.2 The Roman empire, c. 555 CE
5.3 The Umayyad caliphate, c. 750 CE, and later successor states
5.4 The Carolingian empire, c. 800 CE
5.5 Carolingian partitions, 843–888 CE
5.6 The German (“Roman”) Empire, c. 1200 CE
6.1 The Mongol empire in the late thirteenth century CE
6.2 The Holy Roman empire and the European possessions of Charles V, c. 1550 CE
6.3 The possessions of Philip II, 1590s CE
6.4 The Ottoman empire, c. 1683 CE
6.5 Europe in 1812 CE
7.1 Empires of the Old World, c. 200 CE
7.2 The Han, Tang, Northern Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing empires
8.1 Altitude profile of Europe
8.2 Altitude profile of East Asia
8.3 The Eurasian steppe
8.4 Spa
tial distribution of the core areas of empires of at least 1 million square kilometers in Afroeurasia
8.5 Probability of being part of large polities (> 1 million km2) at 100-year intervals, 500–1500 CE
8.6 Effective distance from the Eurasian steppe (by land)
8.7 Potential vegetation cover of Asia
9.1 Modern distribution of Chinese dialect groups
10.1. An ideal-typical model of the developmental dynamics of different types of state formation
10.2 Real wages of urban unskilled workers in different parts of Europe, 1500–1780 CE
10.3 Per capita GDP in different parts of Europe, 1500–1800 CE
10.4 Urbanization rates in England and Europe and the English share in the increase of the European urbanization rate, 1600–1800 CE
10.5 The share of the urban and nonagricultural rural population in different parts of Europe, 1500 and 1800 CE
10.6 Adult literacy rates in different parts of Europe, late fifteenth to eighteenth century CE
11.1 The world with Greater Afroeurasia rotated around its axis at 75°E
11.2 The world with Afroeurasia rotated around its axis at 63°E
E.1 Actual and counterfactual concentration of state power in Europe, 250 BCE–1800 CE
TABLES
1.1 Cumulative proportion of the population of different regions controlled by the largest polities in these regions
2.1 Expansion of the Roman state and alliance system in peninsular Italy, c. 500–225 BCE
3.1 Matrix of critical preconditions for military success, mid-third to mid-second century BCE
9.1 Determinants and outcomes of state formation in (Latin) Europe and China, c. 500–1000 CE
11.1 Minimum distances and differences between actual and counterfactual distances
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK has been long in the making. The “Stanford Ancient Chinese and Mediterranean Empires Comparative History Project,” which I launched in 2005 to promote the comparative study of early empires in western and eastern Eurasia, steered me toward the distant roots of modernity. In 2007–2008, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation sponsored a Mellon-Sawyer seminar on “The First Great Divergence: Europe and China, 300–800 CE” that I ran jointly with my Stanford colleagues Ian Morris and Mark Lewis. But this was only a beginning: my engagement with more recent economic and institutional history, which expanded over the years as my research interests increasingly outgrew the confines of the ancient world, encouraged me to explore the full length of the meandering path toward contemporary levels of prosperity, knowledge, and human flourishing.
After all, there is no bigger question for the historian than that of why the world has turned out the way it has done so far, transformed beyond the wildest imagination of our ancestors just a few generations ago. In offering my answer to this question, I hope to advance what I have found to be an unfailingly exhilarating debate. My book’s main title is not just a nod to my own personal transition to global comparative history but above all seeks to capture the essence of our collective progress—our escape from traditional strictures and structures that once weighed down so heavily on humankind that they proved almost impossible to overcome. Traditional forms of imperial rule had failed to make the world a better place and needed to fail altogether in order to set us free. There was no way of “getting to Denmark” without “escaping from Rome” first.
It is a joyous duty to acknowledge the support I have received along the way. Between 2007 and 2019, I spoke about various aspects of my project and received valuable feedback at Arizona State University, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Brooklyn College, Brown University, Claremont McKenna College, Columbia University, Cornell University, the Danish Academy in Rome, Dickinson College, McGill University, the Istituto Italiano per la Storia Antica, the National University of Singapore, New York University, Northwestern University, the Open Society Forum in Ulaanbaatar, Radboud University, Renmin University of China, the Santa Fe Institute, Stanford University, Texas Tech University, the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, the Universities of Cambridge, Cape Town, Copenhagen, Georgia, Leiden, Melbourne, Oxford, Texas, Tulsa, Utrecht, Warsaw and Zurich, and Yale University.
I wrote up most of this book during a sabbatical year in 2017–2018 when I was a visitor at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. I am grateful to Eric Klinenberg for his kind invitation, and much indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Stanford University for the financial support that allowed me to focus on the completion of my project.
I owe thanks of gratitude to John Hall and Philip Hoffman for reviewing an earlier version of my manuscript for the publisher; to Joy Connolly and Peer Vries for their detailed comments; and to Anna Grzymala-Busse, John Haldon, Kyle Harper, Reviel Netz, Sheilagh Ogilvie, and Richard Saller for further helpful observations. Daron Acemoglu, James Bennett, Victoria Tin-bor Hui, Reviel Netz, Şevket Pamuk, James Robinson, David Stasavage, Michael Taylor, Paolo Tedesco, Peer Vries, Kaveh Yazdani, and Dingxin Zhao shared unpublished or otherwise inaccessible work with me.
In 2015, when I finally resigned myself to the fact that my argument could not readily be accommodated within a single (long) article as I had originally intended, I proposed a (short) book to Rob Tempio at Princeton University Press. I am glad that he did not blink when the final product came in at twice the agreed length. My thanks go to Rob for his customary support and light touch, to Joel Mokyr, to Jonathan Weiland for expertly preparing the maps, and to Natalie Baan, Bob Bettendorf, John Donohue, Sandra Friesen, Therese Malhame, Matt Rohal, and Stephanie Rojas for ensuring a smooth production process.
ESCAPE FROM ROME
Introduction
The Great Escape
WHAT?
WHAT WAS the Great Escape? It made it possible for me to write this book, and for you to read it—which we could not do if we were busy farming the land, or were illiterate, or had died in childhood. It transformed the human condition by making so many of us so much richer, healthier, and better educated than our ancestors used to be.1
This escape from sickness, ignorance, oppression, and want, which remains very much a work in progress in large parts of the world, was not made up of slow, gradual, and linear improvements. For the most part, it represented a radical break from the practices and life experiences of the past, a break that changed the world in the course of just a few generations.
Before the nineteenth century, a certain amount of intensive—per capita—growth in economic output had taken place over the long run, but on a scale so modest that this cumulative increase becomes almost invisible when it is set against the breakthroughs of the past two centuries. Much the same is true of growth in the stock of knowledge and our ability to fight disease. This discontinuity accounts for the fact that any graph that tracks economic performance, or human welfare in general, in those parts of the world where modern economic development took off first—in Britain and then in other parts of Europe and their various global spinoffs—is shaped like a hockey stick. This upward turn opened up a growing gap with most of the rest of the world that has only recently begun to close (figure I.1).2
FIGURE I.1 Per capita GDP in the United Kingdom, China, and India, 1000–2000 CE (in 2011 US$). Source: Maddison Project Database 2018.
Thanks to this divergence, population number ceased to be the principal determinant of aggregate regional output. Global production and consumption shifted from what had long been the most populous parts of the world—East and South Asia—and came to be heavily concentrated where this novel type of transformative development occurred: in Europe and North America, and later also in Japan (figures I.2–I.3).3
Even though many Asian countries in particular have been catching up, narrowing the extreme imbalance t
hat existed a couple of generations ago, the impact of the original divergence has been very slow to fade. Thus, most of the world’s recipients of elevated incomes continue to be found in those regions that were the first to develop, with the United States and Western Europe maintaining a forbidding lead. While inequality also contributes to this pattern by boosting the standing of the United States, South Africa, and South America, the timing of modernization remains the principal determinant of these imbalances (figure I.4).4
FIGURE I.2 Distribution of global GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity in 1 CE. Sources: http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=159 and http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=162 (© Copyright Worldmapper.org / Sasi Group [University of Sheffield] and Mark Newman [University of Michigan]).
FIGURE I.3 Distribution of global GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity in 1960. Sources: http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=159 and http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=162 (© Copyright Worldmapper.org / Sasi Group [University of Sheffield] and Mark Newman [University of Michigan]).
FIGURE I.4 Distribution of people worldwide living on more than $200 per day in 2002 (adjusted for purchasing power parity, by country). Source: http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=158 (© Copyright Worldmapper.org / Sasi Group [University of Sheffield] and Mark Newman [University of Michigan]).
Ian Morris’s social development index is perhaps the most ambitious attempt to quantify this massive transformation. It seeks to (very roughly) quantify and compare overall levels of material development by tracking four key components—energy capture, social organization, war-making capacity, and information technology—over the very long term in the most developed parts of western and eastern Eurasia. For the former, this exercise produces the same hockey stick as before (figure I.5).5
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