From this developmental perspective, the death of the Roman empire had a much greater impact than its prior existence and the legacy it bequeathed to later European civilization. This may seem a bold claim, and I devote an epilogue to Monty Python’s famous question, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” The afterlife of Roman cultural traditions, from language and (Christian) religion to law and elite culture, undeniably mediated the long-term consequences of the collapse of Roman imperial power. Specific elements of this legacy may indeed have provided a vital counterweight to the traumatic fractures of intensifying international and domestic competition, allowing productive exchange of people, goods, and ideas across a thicket of political and ideological boundaries.
This raises a final question: Was the actual historical scenario in which a monopolistic empire first created a degree of shared culture but subsequently went away for good more conducive to an eventual European breakthrough than a counterfactual scenario in which no such empire had ever appeared in the first place? Engagement with this problem pushes us well beyond the confines of defensible counterfactual reasoning and toward runaway conjecture but is nevertheless worth considering: Are there reasons to believe that the complete lack of Roman foundations would have derailed our tortuous journey toward the modern world?
My book stands in a long tradition of scholarship that has invoked fragmentation and competition as an important precondition or source of European development. It differs from existing work in that for the first time, it develops a much more comprehensive line of reasoning to establish once and for all a fundamental axiom: without polycentrism, no modernity.19
Empire was an effective and successful way of organizing large numbers of people in agrarian societies. Large, composite, and diverse, comprising multiple peripheries loosely held together by an often distant center whose dependence on local elites belied grandiose claims to universal rule, traditional empires were kept afloat by their ability to concentrate resources as needed without intruding too much upon their far-flung subject populations. Empire’s adaptiveness is made strikingly clear in the fact that for more than 2,000 years, with primitive technology and under enormous logistical constraints, a very large share of our species has been controlled by just a handful of imperial powers (figure I.8).20
FIGURE 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 (in percent). Source: Scheidel in press-a.
Yet from a developmental perspective, traditional empire failed in three ways, all of which mattered greatly for the making of the modern world:
in the specific sense that the Roman empire released its grip on Europe and gave way to a very long period of polycentrism of powers both international and domestic;
in the broader sense that near-monopolistic empire failed to be reestablished in Europe; and
in the most general sense that empire, as a way of organizing people and resources, consistently failed to create conditions that enabled transformative development.
My focus is not on empire per se, a phenomenon increasingly studied from a global comparative perspective, most recently in the seventy-odd chapters of the Oxford World History of Empire that I have had the pleasure to edit jointly with Peter Bang and the late Chris Bayly. Even as I repeatedly refer to specific characteristics of traditional empires—most notably in China—in the following chapters, I use them primarily as a foil to conditions in the post-Roman European state system to help cast the latter into sharper relief. For me, it is the escape that matters: not only what it was from, but how it came about.21
The productive dynamics of a stable state system were key: fragmentation generated diversity, competition, and innovation, and stability preserved gains from what worked best, rewarding winners and punishing losers. Empire contributes to this story insofar as it prevented both: monopolistic rule stifled competition, and the waxing and waning of imperial power rendered polycentrism intermittent and curtailed its cumulative benefits. Thus, traditional empires did not need to maintain hegemonic status all or even most of the time in order to derail modernizing development: sporadic “imperiogenesis” on a large scale was enough. Only the persistent absence of empire allowed polycentrism and its corollaries to flourish.
I do not track our entire journey from fracture to fracking. This is resolutely an analysis of origins. My emphasis is on foundational features, from the Middle Ages up to what is known as the First Industrial Revolution in England around 1800. I do not progress beyond that point because the First Industrial Revolution cannot be judged on its own, but only in terms of what it led to, far beyond cotton-spinning, iron-making, and the stationary steam engine. It was the Second Industrial Revolution, a great acceleration in macro-inventions and their widespread application from the last third of the nineteenth century onward that was driven by systematic scientific study and engineering, and concurrent progress in medicine and public health, the fertility transition, and political and institutional reform that accounted for most of the Great Escape: but once the door had been opened, a path of promise had been set. To quote Landes one more time, “The Industrial Revolution has been like in effect to Eve’s tasting of the fruit of the tree of knowledge: the world has never been the same.”22
Instead of taking the narrative forward in time, my book extends in the opposite direction, in order to gauge the true depth of the underpinnings of these much later developments. I do so not only because of my own professional interest in deep roots but also and indeed primarily because I am concerned with the robustness of historical outcomes. How likely was it that Europe would shift far enough toward a viable escape route? If post-Roman polycentrism was the norm, the very existence of the Roman empire was anomalous; otherwise it would have been the other way around.23
In the end, outcomes appear to have been overdetermined: just as the “First Great Divergence” can be traced to multiple factors, so scholars have linked the “(Second) Great Divergence” to a variety of features that have only one thing in common, namely, that they are predicated upon productive competitive polycentrism—or, in other words, the fact that in Europe, Roman power had remained unique.
In this respect, the story of modernity is also a story about Rome: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was right to exclaim in 1786 that “an diesen Ort knüpft sich die ganze Geschichte der Welt an”—“the whole history of the world attaches itself to this spot.” It does indeed, if only thanks to what Edward Gibbon two years later famously called the “the decline and fall of the Roman empire; the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene, in the history of mankind.” Yet when viewed from a great distance, it was not that awful after all: quite the opposite, in fact, as it ushered in an age of open-ended experimentation. It is for that reason alone that it deserves to be thought of as “the greatest scene in the history of mankind.”24
The making of the modern world had a clearly demarcated beginning, forbiddingly remote as it may seem to us today. Europe had not always been fragmented and polycentric. It was not for nothing that its erstwhile rulers bequeathed to us the word “empire.” They owned Britain, a belated afterthought of an acquisition, for about as many years as have now passed since Charles I lost his head. The last self-styled Roman emperor, the Habsburg Francis II, did not abdicate until August 6, 1806, twenty months after Napoleon Bonaparte had crowned himself emperor of the French and only about a year after the latter had shelved his plans to invade Britain, where the first steam locomotive had recently been displayed and steady improvements to the power loom kept the patent office busy.
But that would-be master of Europe, however revolutionary in appearance, was merely the last hurrah of ancient designs. The Roman empire remained unique, and the long shadow it had cast was just that. Europe had well and truly escaped, ensuring our collective release into an unexpected future.
In the heyday of Roman power, a certain Lauricius, otherwise unknown but probably a Roman soldier, carv
ed a graffito on a rock in a desolate corner of what is now southern Jordan: “The Romans always win.” This sentiment, which curtly echoed Virgil’s famous and more eloquent vision that Jupiter had given the Romans “empire without end,” held true for a very long time, well beyond actual Roman history. Empires in general did tend to win, at least for a while, before they fell apart only to be succeeded by others: in that sense, they were indeed without end. For untold generations, they imposed tributary rule and prevented stable state systems from forming and building a different world. Our lives today are different only because in the end, “the Romans”—the empire builders—did not, as it happened, always win, even if they came close.25
Their failure to do so may well have been our biggest lucky break since an errant asteroid cleared away the dinosaurs 66 million years earlier: there was no way to “get to Denmark”—to build societies that enjoy freedom, prosperity, and general welfare—without “escaping from Rome” first.26
HOW?
How can we substantiate this argument? The search for the causes of the (modern, economic) “Great Divergence” is of immense importance for our understanding of how the world came to be the way it is, yet it has largely been abandoned by professional historians. In an informal but hardly unrepresentative sample drawn from my own bibliography, only one in five of some forty-odd scholars who have made significant contributions to this grand debate have earned an advanced degree in history. Social scientists have been at the forefront of this line of research: economists led the pack and sociologists come in second. By contrast, political scientists have hardly been involved at all.27
It is true that quite a few of these economists effectively operate as historians, either by holding academic positions in economic history or, more commonly, in terms of their primary interests. Nevertheless, the limited commitment of—for want of a better term—“professional,” that is, credentialed, historians is striking: judging from the age distribution in my sample, it cannot simply be waved off as a function of a turn away from economic or macro-history to cultural or micro-history, even if those trends may well play a role.
Then again, the glass is not only half empty but also half full: the relative lack of interest among historians has been more than offset by economists and sociologists’ eagerness to tackle a big historical problem. Their engagement accounts for much of the continuing vigor of the debate, which cannot fail to benefit from genuine transdisciplinarity.
I approach this topic in the same spirit of openness. I am, by training and employment, a historian of the ancient Roman world whose interests have increasingly branched out into wider reaches of history, from the comparative study of ancient empires, slavery, and human welfare to the applicability of Darwinian theory to the past and the long-term evolution of economic inequality. I have long been following the literature about the origins of the British/European/“Western” takeoff, and especially the controversy between proponents of long- and short-term perspectives.
As a historian primarily of the more distant past, affinity for the long run might well seem a professional hazard. Not so: my initial intuition was that ancient legacies need not have mattered nearly as much as my immediate colleagues often like to assume, an issue that I take up at the very end of this book. Over time, however, it became clear to me that the many competing and complementary explanations of this takeoff did in fact have something in common that anchored them in developments that commenced a very long time ago—developments that were not limited to positive contributions that shaped later opportunities and constraints, but also included a massive absence. Yet even that absence—of hegemonic empire, from post-Roman Europe—needed to be explored, given that it was not a constant but had been preceded by an equally massive earlier presence. These entanglements made me a “long-termist” almost against my will.
Made in a rather different context, Garth Fowden’s astute observation captures the scale of the challenge inherent in this project: “The ultimate goal of the Eurocentric historian (‘modernity’) is remote from, yet conceived of as standing in a relationship of dependence toward, the First Millennium. To depict such a relationship convincingly is a very difficult enterprise in itself.” My own approach is therefore eclectic, by necessity (even) more than by inclination.28
In trying to explain why the Roman empire rose to such preeminence, I have to wear my Roman historian’s hat. In trying to explain why it never came back, I need to survey different periods in a brutally reductive way, shunting aside infinite nuance in the search for those factors that mattered most for particular outcomes. The resultant account is both parsimonious—perhaps to a fault, as fellow historians would say—and, despite its considerable length, tightly focused on my key theme.
In chapter 1, I look at the Old World as a whole to establish how different Europe really was, and in chapters 7 through 9, I need to do the same as I seek to identify the underlying causes of that difference. In chapters 10 through 12, I address a large body of scholarship, much of it produced by social scientists whose work has driven the debate, and with whom I engage on their own terms. And at the end, I return once more to antiquity, to see which if any of its legacies can be salvaged to play a role in an explanation of the transition to modern development.
Throughout my discussion, I employ two specific approaches to build my argument: a comparative perspective, and explicit recourse to counterfactuals—“what-ifs.” Both of these are means to the same end: to improve our sense of causation, of why different societies turned out the way they did.
Historical comparison promises various benefits, only the most important of which merit mention here. Comparative description helps “clarify the specific profile of individual cases by contrasting them with others.” I pursue this goal in the opening chapter by establishing contrasting patterns of state formation.29
Comparison has an “alienating … effect”: it defamiliarizes the deceptively familiar—deceptively familiar, that is, to the expert of a particular time and place: “The chief prize is a way out of parochialism.”30 Thinking about the Roman empire without considering what happened later on in the same geographical space, or how other empires developed elsewhere, blurs our vision for what may have mattered most for the rise and fall of Rome: comparanda help explain the specific.
Comparison also helps us transcend peculiarities of evidence for a particular case or the dominant academic tradition thereon. “Analyses that are confined to single cases … cannot deal effectively with factors that are largely or completely held constant within the boundaries of the case (or are simply less visible in that structural or cultural context). This is the reason why going beyond the boundaries of a single case can put into question seemingly well-established causal accounts and generate new problems and insights.”31
A closely related benefit is the fact that “analytically comparison can help to refute pseudo-explanations and to check (or test) causal hypotheses.” Parochial familiarity will favor factors that are prominent in the source tradition and/or the research tradition of a particular subfield. How can we tell how much weight to put on taxes, or religion, or geography, if we do not consider alternative cases? Such single-case explanations need not be pseudo, but they are at the very least local and thus run the risk of failing to capture significant relationships. The post-ancient “First Great Divergence” in particular is impossible to understand without comparing configurations of circumstances in different environments.32
I am primarily interested in explaining one particular phenomenon, the path to modernity in parts of Europe, and not in offering a comprehensive survey of different societies and outcomes. This renders my comparative perspective, in Jürgen Kocka’s term, “a-symmetric”: “a form of comparison which is centrally interested in describing, explaining and interpreting one case … by contrasting it with others, while … the other cases are not brought in for their own sake, and … not fully researched but only sketched as a kind of background.”33
In the present case, I draw on the experience of China and—in less detail—other parts of Asia and North Africa in order to account for European development. This approach has a long pedigree, going back most famously to Max Weber’s attempt to understand the emergence of capitalism and modern science in the West by probing Asian societies for contrast. I also apply this technique more superficially in contrasting the rise of Rome with the failure of later European states to follow suit. In Part V, I compare the effects of imperial persistence in China (and to a lesser degree in India and the Middle East) with those of Europe’s post-Roman fragmentation.34
Chapters 7 through 9 offer a more symmetric treatment: in trying to account for the “First Great Divergence,” I give equal weight to post-ancient developments in Europe and China up to the end of the first millennium CE, which represent the most divergent outcomes within Afroeurasia in that period. This approach is known as “analytical comparison” between equivalent units. It helps us identify variables that can explain shared or contrasting outcomes—in this case, the characteristics of conquest regimes and fiscal arrangements, ideation, and ecological conditions.35
In the same context, specifically in chapter 8, I move farther toward a more ambitious goal, that of “variable-oriented” “parallel demonstration of theory”: I argue that proximity to the steppe was such a persistent precondition for empire formation that it allows us to subordinate individual outcomes to a broader normative prediction. This makes it possible to identify cases that are outliers, most notably the rise of Rome, which in turn helps us assess the relative robustness of historical processes and outcomes over time, in this case the failure of hegemonic empire to return to post-Roman Europe.36
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