Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  For a long time, variation between East and West was mere oscillation, reflecting in the first instance the moderately beneficial effect of empire on social development. Large imperial formations were associated with somewhat higher development scores, and their collapse (or plagues) with lower ones: the Roman empire helped Europe, the Tang and Song empires China. In the late Middle Ages, China was hit by the Mongols and Europe by the Black Death (figure I.6).

  FIGURE I.5   Social development scores in the most developed parts of western Eurasia, 5000 BCE–2000 CE. Source: Derived from Morris 2013b: 240–41, table 7.1.

  FIGURE I.6   Social development scores in western and eastern Eurasia, 500 BCE–1500 CE. Sources: Morris 2013b: 240–43, tables 7.1–7.2.

  Very different mechanisms were required to generate more dramatic and self-sustaining progress. In the nineteenth century, development swiftly reached an unprecedented order of magnitude that made earlier fluctuations appear insignificant and defined the inflection point for the mature hockey stick.

  The resultant divergence—from the past, and between different parts of the Old World—was so great that we no longer have to worry about the problem of (gu)es(s)timating historical GDP or other poorly documented metrics: it far exceeded any plausible margin of error. This was when the world truly did change: in David Landes’s memorable turn of phrase, “The Englishman of 1750 was closer in material things to Caesar’s legionnaires than to his own great-grandchildren.”6

  Energy capture per person accounts for most of Morris’s social development scores, from 100 percent back in 14,000 BCE—when there would have been no meaningful differences in social organization or military capacity, let alone information technology, across the globe—to around 80 percent in 1800 and between 60 and 70 percent in 1900. Thus, changes in energy capture drove the divergence shown in figure I.7. In Morris’s account, estimated per capita energy consumption rose from 38,000 kilocalories per day in 1800 to 92,000 in 1900 in northwestern Europe and on to 230,000 (in the United States) today.7

  An alternative reconstruction envisions an even more rapid increase during the nineteenth century, from 33,000 to 99,000 daily kilocalories in England, all of which was sustained by coal. The transition from organic to fossil fuel economies was crucial. The former faced an iron constraint in their dependence on plant photosynthesis that converted a steady flow of solar energy into food, feed, and firewood that sustained human and animal labor and the processing of raw materials. The latter, by contrast, could draw on much larger accumulated stocks of fuel that had been built up over geological time, first coal and later oil and gas.8

  Only in the twentieth century did war-making capacity and information technology, each of which grew by two orders of magnitude by Morris’s reckoning (thanks to nuclear weapons and computers), take over as the most important drivers of development. Both are the fruits of ever more sophisticated science and engineering that have kept deepening our break from the past.

  FIGURE I.7   Social development scores in western and eastern Eurasia, 1500–1900 CE. Sources: Morris 2013b: 241, table 7.1; 243, table 7.2.

  What has all this economic growth and social development done for us? Most fundamentally, we live much longer. Life span is positively associated with economic performance, and as global average per capita output has risen about fifteenfold between the late eighteenth century and today, global mean life expectancy at birth has more than doubled from around thirty to seventy years. And we do not just live longer but also better. Poverty is down worldwide: the share of people subsisting on the real equivalent of about two dollars a day has declined from well over nine-tenths two hundred years ago to about one-tenth now. Its closest corollary, malnourishment, haunted half of the world’s population in 1945 but affects only about one in ten people today.9

  In the Western world, the original trailblazer, mature male stature rose by five inches between the late eighteenth and the late twentieth centuries. Overall, Westerners “are taller, heavier, healthier, and longer lived than our ancestors; our bodies are sturdier, less susceptible to disease in early life and slower to wear out.” And once again, this trend has gone global.10

  The world’s literacy rate is up from one in eight adults 200 years ago to six out of every seven today. Freedom reigns: the proportion of humankind that lives in countries that count as more democratic than autocratic has exploded from maybe 1 percent in 1800 to two-thirds today—and had China’s civil war in the late 1940s ended differently, the total could now easily be closer to five-sixths. On a scale from −10 (all autocratic) to +10 (all democratic), the average global score for major polities has risen from −7 in 1800 to +4 today. All this has made us measurably happier: GDP is linked to happiness and life evaluation more generally. Overall, even as economic inequality has been sustained within societies, and divergent development opened up a wide gap between rich and poor nations that is now only slowly narrowing, modern development has improved our life experience on many fronts, and has increasingly done so on a global scale.11

  It goes without saying that we are hardly in a position to claim that the Great Escape has fully succeeded. Yet the painful truth that this same development has the potential to cause serious harm to us and our planet—through climate change, environmental degradation, weaponized pathogens, or nuclear war—merely reflects the sheer scale of this transformation: nothing like this had previously been within our reach. In both good and bad, we have far outpaced the past.12

  WHY?

  Why has the world changed so much? All this development was rooted in initial breakthroughs that took place in northwestern Europe: hence the inflection points in figures I.1 and I.7. But what made it possible for that corner of the globe to launch a process that unleashed previously unimaginable productivity and human welfare by harnessing an ever-broadening range of natural resources from coal and the vaccinia virus to silicon and uranium?

  By now, answers to this question not only fill shelf-loads of learned books and binders—or rather electronic folders—of academic papers, entire books have been written to take stock of all those books and papers that propose answers. Scholarly opinion is divided. Some take a long-term view, searching for causes and trends that go back many centuries. Others stress the role of more recent contingencies that enabled some pioneering—or, depending on whom you ask, particularly rapacious or just plain lucky—societies to pull ahead. Some accounts privilege politics and institutions; others overseas trade and colonization; others still culture, education, and values.13

  I argue that a single condition was essential in making the initial breakthroughs possible: competitive fragmentation of power. The nursery of modernity was riven by numerous fractures, not only by those between the warring states of medieval and early modern Europe but also by others within society: between state and church, rulers and lords, cities and magnates, knights and merchants, and, most recently, Catholics and Protestants. This often violent history of conflict and compromise was long but had a clear beginning: the fall of the Roman empire that had lorded it over most of Europe, much as successive Chinese dynasties lorded it over most of East Asia. Yet in contrast to China, nothing like the Roman empire ever returned to Europe.

  The enduring absence of hegemonic empire on a subcontinental scale represented a dramatic break not only with ancient history. It also set Europe on a trajectory away from the default pattern of serial imperial state formation—from the boom and bust of hegemonic powers—we can observe elsewhere. By laying the foundations for persistent polycentrism and the transformative developmental dynamics it generated over the long run, this rupture was the single most important precondition for modern economic growth, industrialization, and global Western dominance much later on.

  I develop my argument in several stages. In the opening chapter, I establish the fact that as far as imperial state formation is concerned, Europe differed profoundly from other parts of the world that supported major complex civilizations. After the demise
of the unified Roman empire in the fifth century CE, the greatest powers in Europe never laid claim to more than about one-fifth of its total population, a far cry from the four-fifths or more that had submitted to Roman rule. Likewise, the greatest powers that subsequently existed in the geographical space once held by the Romans never controlled more than a similarly modest proportion of its later population.14

  This pattern is striking for two reasons: it reveals a sharp discontinuity between the ancient and post-ancient history of Europe, and it differs dramatically from outcomes in other parts of the world that used to be home to large traditional empires, such as East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East and North Africa region. The historically unique phenomenon of “one-off empire” in Europe is remarkable because regions that supported very large polities early on can reasonably be expected to have done the same later, and did in fact consistently do so elsewhere. In this respect, imperial state formation in South Asia and the Middle East—as well as in Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Andes region—had more in common with East Asia, the classic example of imperial persistence over time, than with Europe, which represents a genuine outlier.15

  This raises four closely interrelated questions, which I address in Parts II through V of the book. How did the Roman empire come into existence—did its rise and success depend on rare or unique conditions that were never replicated later on? Why was nothing approximating the Roman empire in terms of scale ever rebuilt in the same part of the world? Can comparison with other parts of the world help us understand the absence of very large empire from post-Roman Europe? And finally, and most importantly, did the latter open a path to (much) later developments that eventually reshaped the entire world?

  In Part II, I explain the creation of a very large empire that came to encompass the entire Mediterranean basin with reference to two principal factors. First, the Roman Republic managed to combine a culture of military mass mobilization of an intensity unknown among ancient state-level polities outside the Greek city-state culture and Warring States China with integrative capacities that enabled it to scale up military mass mobilization to levels unparalleled and arguably unattainable elsewhere in western Eurasia at the time (chapter 2). Second, in its formative phase, Rome benefited from its position at the margins of a larger civilizational zone that had expanded outward from the Fertile Crescent region for several thousand years but had been exceptionally slow in drawing the central and western Mediterranean into the growing network of sustained political and military interaction at that zone’s core (chapter 3). In addition, prolonged domestic political stability and a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances that allowed Rome to establish effective naval hegemony across the Mediterranean at a relatively early stage of its expansion further contributed to its success.

  None of the preconditions were—or in the case of the second principal factor even could be—repeated in later historical periods. Rome’s rule had greatly extended the boundaries of the original Middle Eastern political-military system all the way to the North Sea. Large-scale military mass mobilization did not return to Europe until the French Revolution. Never again—or at least not until Trafalgar or World War II—was any one power or alliance able to claim naval supremacy across the entire Mediterranean basin.

  After identifying the key factors that underpinned Rome’s unique success, I assess the degree of contingency inherent in this process by considering counterfactuals (chapter 4). I ask at which junctures Roman expansion could have been derailed by plausible, “minimal rewrites” of actual history. This exercise suggests that the window for substantially alternative outcomes was fairly narrow, concentrated in the time of Alexander the Great near the end of the fourth century BCE. From the third century BCE onward, Roman capabilities—relative to those of its macro-regional competitors—made failure increasingly unlikely. Roman state formation thus turns out to have been both highly contingent (in terms of its foundational preconditions) and highly robust (once these preconditions were in place).

  In Part III, I make short work of the extremely popular question of why the Roman empire fell: after all, most imperial entities in history that did not eventually morph into nation-states disintegrated at some point. Instead, I focus on a much more salient problem that has received much less attention: Why did it—or rather something like it—never return?

  Chapters 2 and 3 already highlighted the peculiarities and sometimes irreproducible context of the Roman experience. I now expand my analysis to trajectories of state formation in post-Roman Europe. I identify and discuss eight junctures between the sixth and the early nineteenth centuries at which similarly dominant imperial states might conceivably have been created: the East Roman attempt in the sixth century to regain large parts of what used to be the western half of the Roman empire; Arab expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries; the growth of Frankish power around 800; the development of the German empire from the tenth to the thirteenth century; the Mongol advance in Eastern and Central Europe in the mid-thirteenth century; Habsburg policies in the sixteenth century; Ottoman power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and French policies from Louis XIV to Napoleon, with World War II added as a brief coda.

  I argue that on all these occasions, a wide range of well-documented factors decisively militated against the reemergence of anything truly resembling hegemonic empire in Europe. No plausible minimal rewrite of history was likely to lead to that particular outcome. I conclude that post-Roman polycentrism in Europe was a perennially robust phenomenon.

  In Part IV, I address a question that arises directly from this last observation: Why did large-scale empire building in post-Roman Europe consistently fail even as it continued serially elsewhere in the world? I approach this problem by comparing trends in state formation in different parts of the Old World, with particular emphasis on Europe and East Asia. I focus on this pairing because the Chinese imperial tradition was unusually resilient by world historical standards and therefore constitutes an ideal-typical counterpoint to the abiding polycentrism of post-Roman Europe.

  This comparative perspective allows me to identify several factors that favored serial imperiogenesis in East Asia and obstructed it in Europe. At the proximate level of causation, fiscal arrangements and the characteristics of the post-Roman and post-Han conquest regimes played a major role (chapter 7). At the ultimate level, geographical and ecological conditions influenced macro-sociopolitical development (chapter 8). Among these environmental features, the degree of exposure to large steppe zones appears to have been a crucial determinant of the likelihood of imperial state formation, not merely in Europe and East Asia but also in other parts of Afroeurasia. In addition, though not necessarily fully autonomously, the nature of religious and secular belief systems as well as more general cultural properties reinforced divergent trends at the opposite end of the Eurasian land mass (chapter 9).

  In all these respects, conditions in post-Han China differed profoundly from those in post-Roman Europe and help account for persistent long-term differences in the scaling-up and centralization of political and other forms of social power. I call this post-ancient divergence in macro-social evolution—centered on the sixth century CE—the “First Great Divergence.”16

  I conclude by proposing a taxonomy of features that were conducive or antithetical to empire-building on a large scale, which suggests that Europe—and Western or Latin Europe in particular—was a priori less likely to be brought under the control of such entities than were other regions. While East Asia experienced conditions that were favorable to iterative universal empire, South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa region occupied an intermediate position. This comparative analysis reinforces my findings in chapters 2 and 3 that the rise of the Roman empire depended on highly unusual circumstances. From this perspective, Rome’s success was a greater anomaly than were later failures of imperial projects in Europe.

  In Part V, I argue that what is now commonly referred to a
s the “Great Divergence,” broadly understood as a uniquely (Northwest-)European and eventually “Western” breakthrough in economic and cognate capacities, was intimately connected with and indeed deeply rooted in the political “First Great Divergence” between Roman and post-Roman Europe (Parts II and III) and between Europe on the one hand and East Asia and intermediate regions on the other (Part IV)—a divergence between the enduring disappearance and the cyclical re-creation of hegemonic empire.

  This is the case regardless of which of the competing explanations of the modern “Great Divergence” and the Industrial Revolution(s) we accept. Leading contenders include institutional developments from feudalism, church power, and religious schism to the creation of communes, corporate bodies, and parliamentarianism; social responses to perennial warfare, and more generally the overall configuration of the main sources of social power; the contribution of New World resources and global trade, and of mercantilist colonialism and protectionism; the emergence of a culture of sustained scientific and technological innovation; and a shift of values in favor of a commercially acquisitive bourgeoisie.

  Drawing on these different types of explanations in turn (chapters 10 through 12), I show that all of them critically depend on the absence of Roman-scale empire from much of Europe throughout its post-ancient history. Recurrent empire on European soil would have interfered with the creation and flourishing of a stable state system that sustained productive competition and diversity in design and outcome. This made the fall and lasting disappearance of hegemonic empire an indispensable precondition for later European exceptionalism and thus, ultimately, for the making of the modern world we now inhabit.17

  The transition to modernity was therefore a product of trends that played out over the long term: even if it only “took off” in the nineteenth century, it had very deep roots indeed, far beyond earlier signs of modernizing development that had appeared in the previous two centuries (and which I discuss in chapter 10). When it comes to the underlying dynamics, the long road to prosperity reached back to late antiquity. Europe’s breakthrough was not a highly contingent process that might just as readily have taken place elsewhere: a protracted buildup was necessary—or at least sufficient—to make it possible, though by no means inevitable.18