Schumpeter in Rome? The War Machine Grinds On
Back in 1919, in an indictment of the bloody follies of the Great Powers, Joseph Schumpeter sought to identify traits that turned a society into a “war machine,” an arrangement in which war was the only means for the prevailing form of political and social organization to “find an outlet and maintain its domestic position.” In this case, even when rational reasons for war-making were lacking, “War became the normal condition.… To take the field was a matter of course, the reasons for doing so were of subordinate importance. Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.” This generated what Schumpeter regarded as an “objectless disposition on the part of the state to unlimited forcible expansion.”63
In Rome—with the minor adjustment that it often placed even greater emphasis on war-making as such rather than on actual expansion—the logic of the war machine model became particularly visible once serious external challenges had abated after 200 BCE. If warfare had been driven primarily by material profit, greater energy would have been expended on subduing the wealthy polities of the eastern Mediterranean. Our best estimates leave no doubt that Roman warfare was not profitable during the first half of the second century BCE, as income from plunder and indemnities had to be topped up by taxes and other revenues to cover the cost of ceaseless mobilization and campaigning.64
Alternatively, if domestic security had been the guiding concern, further campaigning ought to have been confined to Northern Italy but spared the Iberian peninsula, which posed no imaginable risk at all and could easily have been shielded from a weakened Carthage. In reality, vast military resources were committed to operations in underdeveloped peripheries. During the early second century BCE, on average some 114,000 men were sent to the Iberian peninsula and Northern Italy year after year to grind down local tribes and chiefdoms (figure 2.4).
This persistent pattern (which in the case of the Iberian peninsula continued into the following decades) illuminates the underlying dynamics. Unless we believe in decades of inadvertent mission creep, the aristocratic quest for glory coupled with a pragmatic desire to keep Italian mobilization structures fully operational is the most economical explanation for this outcome. And although individual anecdotes cannot bear the same weight as systematic patterns, one is nonetheless worth mentioning. When in 157 BCE, after no fewer than sixty-eight consecutive years of active warfare, Rome had temporarily run out of targets, the senate immediately resolved to launch a new campaign in the Balkans to ensure that the people would not be softened by a “lengthy peace.”65
The long-term record speaks volumes. Only 19 of the 310 years between 410 and 101 BCE were free from recorded wars, and even this modest tally might be slightly inflated by gaps in the historiographical tradition. This profile ultimately extended into the second decade of the first century CE when Rome, now ruled by monarchs, finally gave up on the idea of controlling Germany east of the Rhine. Thus, for no fewer than 425 years, Rome was engaged in war well over 90 percent of the time. The sixteen years devoid of major conflict between the end of the Tacfarinas war in North Africa in 24 CE and risings in Morocco in 40 CE followed by Claudius’s invasion of Britain in 43 CE were without precedent in known Roman history. At that point, more than half a millennium had passed since the conventional start date of the Roman Republic (and more than three-quarters of a millennium since the mythical founding date of the city itself).
FIGURE 2.4 Roman and Italian military deployments by region, 200–168 BCE. Source: Data from Afzelius 1944: 47, 78–79, 89.
This track record seems unique even by the dire standards of premodern polities operating in anarchic environments. The aptly named Warring States of early China are a good example. Over the course of 502 years, the state of Qin was involved in wars in which it was either the principal aggressor or target in “only” 186 years, or a little over one in three. Even if we pool the experiences of all major states, China registered 127 years of peace in the same period, or one in four.66
Historical societies were routinely bellicose, but not quite as much as Rome. The extent to which states acted on their natural predisposition to increase their power and security in environments of militarized anarchy was critically mediated by their institutions. In the Roman case, as I have tried to show, the structural characteristics of the core go a long way in accounting for the persistence and scale of war-making and expansion.67
Empire without End? The Final Phase of Expansion and the End of Conquest
By the second century BCE, the Roman sphere of control and influence had matured into a multilayered system composed of a rapidly growing capital city and its hinterland, which formed an inner or metropolitan core; an intermediate core of citizens in central Italy; an outer core of Italian allies in the north and south of the peninsula; and a continuously expanding periphery that was itself graduated into provinces run by Roman governors, client states, allies, and “friendly” polities.68
Notwithstanding Rome’s military superiority, annexation was often delayed because outright conquest had never been the principal goal of the war machine: moreover, it was not in the interest of the ruling families to strengthen the hand of the state as an autonomous organization by augmenting its reach and revenue. In general, the mode of domination varied depending on the characteristics of specific peripheral regions (figure 2.5).69
Following a period of conflicts precipitated by external parties or internal upheaval—against roving Germans, the Italian allies, and the Anatolian kingdom of Pontus, and for the first time even among the Roman citizenry—from the 110s to the 80s BCE, the unraveling of the old aristocratic order gave rise to warlords who, unfettered by traditional constraints on the pursuit of individual glory and preeminence, availed themselves more liberally of Rome’s military edge. Their ventures resulted in the conquest of the Levant (60s BCE), Gaul (50s BCE), Egypt (30 BCE), and, under the warlord turned first emperor (Augustus), of the Danubian basin (20s–10s BCE) and, temporarily, the western reaches of Germany (10s BCE–9 CE).70
FIGURE 2.5 Expansion of the Roman empire to its peak size.
The priorities of internal political competition drove aggressive expansionism throughout the period of regime change. From the 60s to the 30s BCE, Pompey had campaigned in the Levant and the Caucasus, Caesar attacked Gaul and Britain, Crassus attempted an invasion of Mesopotamia, and Antony campaigned there and in western Iran. Augustus followed in their footsteps, only on an even grander scale. Not all of his conquests made sense in terms of profit or even security: the first emperor not only took over well-taxed Egypt and mineral-rich northern Spain but pushed into the Alps, Germany, the northern Balkans, and the entire length of the Danube basin, alongside abortive moves into Bohemia, Sudan, and Yemen. Whatever the official justification or strategic benefits of these operations, they were undertaken above all to cement the position of the new ruler in the long term, reflected in the employment of family members to run several of these campaigns.71
The transition from oligarchy to monarchy was accompanied by a shift from popular military mobilization to a professional standing army. (Rome never adopted the historically most common model of augmenting moderately sized permanent forces with periodic levies as required.) In a sense, the inflationary militarism of the Republican order survived this change. Augustus’s professional army appears to have been almost twice as large as it needed to be to protect the territories he controlled in 30 BCE. Large additional capabilities were maintained at great expense, possibly for political reasons, and these troops were at least initially kept busy by ongoing campaigning.72
Not entirely unlike his Republican ancestors, the first emperor had created an army in search of a war. Because of this, military service continued to weigh heavily on the Italian core: by 14 CE, one in seven male citizens aged twenty to forty was a soldier, at a time when most of them still hailed from the heartland. Militarism thus remained the defining feature of Roman citizen soc
iety well beyond the most intense phase of territorial expansion, with far-reaching consequences too complex to consider here.73
Even so, expansion did greatly slow down once the new regime had become firmly ensconced and survived its first orderly succession in 14 CE. From that point onward, a number of factors militated against further expansion on a grand scale. On its western and southern periphery, Roman power had reached natural boundaries—the Atlantic Ocean and the northern fringe of the Sahara. North of the Danube lay sparsely populated and heavily forested areas that were lacking in material resources. The only remaining state-level competitor was centered on southern Mesopotamia and Iran, at great remove from the Roman heartland and separated from the Roman Levant by what is now the ar-Rutbah district, a wide stretch of barren land wedged in between the cultivated zones of northern and southern Mesopotamia.
From an economic perspective, continuing expansion no longer made sense. With the exception of the highly developed client kingdom of Egypt, by 60 BCE the Roman state already controlled the most profitable parts of western Eurasia and North Africa. With few exceptions—notably rich mineral deposits in northern Spain, Dalmatia, and Transylvania—none of the territories that were conquered during the following 170 years added to revenue net of the military deployments required to secure them. In fact, some of these acquisitions were bound to reduce average tax yield in per capita terms.74
This is not to say that we should expect Roman decision-making to have been rational in financial terms: the fact that wars could be costly did not necessarily deter. Even so, we cannot reject explanations that question the feasibility and profitability of further conquest out of hand. The status of Britain, most of it annexed in stages from 43 CE onward, is a particularly striking case. Although the geographer Strabo may simply have toed the previous official line when he claimed a generation earlier that the island was not worth occupying because “the expense of the army would offset the tribute-money,” this did not make his observation any less correct. Much the same applies to the historian Appian’s assertion more than a century later that the Romans “took possession of the better and larger part [of the world], not caring for the remainder—indeed, the part they do hold is not of much use to them”: flattery, for sure, but not far from the truth. In peripheral regions, there were limits to the extent Roman provincial administration could develop and mobilize local resources in order to offset the costs of garrisoning.75
Under the monarchy, noneconomic factors acted as a brake on war-making more generally. Unlike the aristocratic commanders of the Republic, emperors lacked peers with whom they needed to compete for glory. They could only try to outdo their deceased predecessors, a tempting but far less pressing concern. Delegation to surrogates also carried risks: putting others—whether relatives or not—in charge of major military operations might elevate them to the status of potential rivals. Monarchy severely restricted traditional elite autonomy in waging war: in turn, members of the ruling class stood to gain less from military service (and more from lucrative administrative assignments and from jockeying for influence at the court). As army recruitment very slowly shifted away from the Italian heartland and toward the (lower-wage) periphery, the Roman core finally became more pacified, and its elite with it.76
In this environment, war became optional, unless it was triggered by rebellions (which remained very rare) or external challenges (which did not gather steam until the late second century CE). The sole remaining motivation for wars of choice was the legitimation of emperors who had come to power under questionable circumstances, most notably Claudius (who initiated the conquest of Britain), Trajan (who conquered Transylvania, seized what is now Jordan, and invaded Armenia and Mesopotamia), and Septimius Severus (who likewise invaded Mesopotamia and later campaigned in Britain).
For all these reasons, expansion slowed and eventually ceased altogether. The abatement of expansion completed a prolonged transition from violent appropriation to managed exploitation: from campaigns of plunder to rule over taxpaying provinces.77
Long-term strategies of co-optation and mobilization were the two key ingredients of the successful creation of a highly capable and aggressive imperial core. In the opening phase of expansion, from the fifth through the early third centuries BCE, competition between Rome and other polities of the Italian peninsula was largely symmetric in character and resulted in a moderate degree of centralized state formation that was largely confined to the military domain and attendant institutions of registration and taxation. The resultant arrangements of governance and cooperation created and sustained dynamics that were conducive to open-ended warfare.
During the next phase, over the following two centuries or so, Rome carefully preserved the special status of the peninsula as an intensely militarized assemblage of largely self-governing communities and allies. Even as Rome established provincial rule outside this core region, it did not for a considerable amount of time follow the “Gellnerian” model in which peripheral elites joined the Roman aristocracy to form a single ruling class. Instead, the participatory Republican institutions of the Roman citizen state helped maintain stronger ties between elites and commoners and more rigid barriers between elites in the core and periphery (figure 2.6).78
Roman-style oligarchy served both as a brake on state formation in the core, by impeding centralization and bureaucratization, and as a catalyst of extensive imperial expansion, by incentivizing the leadership to pursue aggrandizement through war. By the time the privileged position of the core began to erode in the second half of the first century BCE, most of the empire had already been gained, either formally or de facto. And even at that point, its peculiar culture of military mass mobilization faded only gradually. In later centuries, Roman rule merely preserved and rounded off the existing domain as standing armies, increasingly drawn from the provinces (and much later also from frontier populations), supplanted popular mobilization in the original core. Because Rome had eliminated most state-level competitors and faced an initially intensely fragmented and underdeveloped periphery, its empire endured even under the constraints of strong local elite autonomy and a moderately ambitious fiscal system. For centuries, the lack of serious challengers simultaneously retarded centralized state formation and ensured the longevity of the imperial system.
FIGURE 2.6 (A) General form of the social structure of agrarian societies according to Ernest Gellner.
FIGURE 2.6 (B) Adaptations of the Gellner model.
CHAPTER 3
Periphery
THE MEDITERRANEAN DIVIDE
ROMAN EXPANSION within Italy took place in an environment characterized by a small degree of variation in polity size: individual states significantly larger than early fourth-century-BCE Rome were absent. Wars were fought among city-states and leagues of city-states or other small-scale entities. This changed once Rome advanced beyond the Italian peninsula, into a world of established empires. In this chapter and in chapter 4, I address two key questions in turn: What made (what were to become) Rome’s peripheries susceptible to domination, and were there other powers that could have thwarted its seemingly unstoppable ascent?
Rome greatly benefited from its semiperipheral position relative to the older civilizations of the Middle East and the Levant. Sufficiently far removed from powerful empires that might have interrupted its development or even absorbed it early on, Rome was also sufficiently close to capital-rich areas—Greek and Punic cities to the south, and the Aegean to the east—it could tap into as it laid the foundations for an imperial formation that could eventually afford to exercise power over less affluent societies all the way to Scotland.
In terms of international political and military relations, Italy as a whole long remained relatively isolated from the political-military network that had developed in and around the Fertile Crescent. If we consider interconnectedness by means of routinized military conflict and political-diplomatic interaction among state-level societies as the defining charact
eristic of a political-military network (PMN), what may well have been the first such system worldwide arose in the middle of the second millennium BCE. At that time, New Kingdom Egypt and the empires of the Hittites, Hurrians, and Kassites in Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia coalesced into a sizable competitive state system. A thousand years later, in large part thanks to the advances of the Persian Achaemenid empire, this PMN had expanded into Iran and the Indus Valley in the east and the southern and eastern Balkans in the west (figure 3.1).1
FIGURE 3.1 The Middle Eastern political-military network, c. 1500–500 BCE.
Throughout this period and even the following three centuries, the Mediterranean west of the Balkans was not yet drawn into any meaningful degree of political-military engagement with members of this massive network. There were two main reasons for this: one early and structural and the other later and more contingent. The first state-level societies of the eastern Mediterranean to advance into the western half of that inner sea were organized as city-states, located in Lebanon (Phoenicians) and the Aegean (Greeks). The traders and settlers who set out from these city-states faithfully replicated the political model of their home regions. Far from extending the sway of eastern city-states across the Mediterranean, these movements spawned independent polities that retained economic and cultural ties with their originators without submitting to their political authority. The resultant intensification of the pan-Mediterranean prestige good and information networks was not accompanied by the creation of a single PMN.2
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