FROM THE LATE SEVENTEENTH TO THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE FRENCH QUEST FOR HEGEMONY
By the end of the seventeenth century, France had become the leading power in Christian Europe: its state revenues exceeded that of any of its competitors, and it managed to field some 340,000 troops, compared to 580,000 for England, the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia combined. Thus, although pan-European empire was beyond the reach even of the Sun King Louis XIV, France was the only credible contender for a hegemonic position. However, its aggressive foreign policy primarily had the effect of encouraging balancing coalitions among its opponents, most notably in the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1714).56
Given England’s ascendance in the same period—it had won two wars against the Dutch and was well on its way to becoming Europe’s economic powerhouse—the most effective way to disrupt balancing against France’s ambitions would have been to remove England from these coalitions and bring it over to the French side. The only time this might conceivably have been possible was under the Catholic English monarch James II in the late seventeenth century.
Jack Goldstone has developed a counterfactual scenario to this end. A minimal rewrite prevents William of Orange from bringing about the Glorious Revolution, either in 1688 or in 1690. As a result, England continues to be ruled by James II and enters an alliance with France. This move would have reduced competition in Europe: there would not have been any Anglo-French conflicts in Europe or the New World; France would easily have contained the Netherlands and won the War of the Spanish Succession with less effort. In the end, Europe might have ended up divided along the Rhine between a French-led bloc that covered the Iberian peninsula, France, England (and the cowed Netherlands), and German-Austrian (and Russian) spheres farther east.
While it is hard even to guess whether this would have produced more peace or instead more massive wars across this divide, powerful consequences can be posited for the colonial world: Canada would have been dominated by the French, and the United States might have been stillborn. This suggests that the French Revolution might have been avoided as well, and thus also the secession of Spain’s American colonies.57
This counterfactual extrapolation has been criticized as being too optimistic: we must wonder whether England would have allowed itself to be tethered to a dominant continental power, or whether its Protestants could have been cowed into submission, especially with their peers in the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Scandinavia not far away. But what matters most for our present purposes is that even Goldstone’s sweeping counterfactual does not envision anything like unified empire in Europe, not even within the French-led bloc. The most France could hope for was some version of hegemonic primacy among allied states, forever latently under pressure from England’s (and the Netherlands’) maritime position and Protestant leanings.58
Even so, in view of England’s critical importance in jump-starting the Industrial Revolution, the mere possibility that its independent development might have been curbed ought to give us pause. In Goldstone’s scenario, political or economic modernity might very well not have arisen in more or less the same way it did in actual history. The answer to the question of whether this would merely have delayed, or geographically displaced, essential breakthroughs greatly depends on how much weight we put on the contingent nature of these processes. Only under extreme circumstances—if industrialization is deemed impossible without British coal deposits and protectionism, or “bourgeois values” could not have thrived outside the sheltered environments of real-life Holland, Britain, and North America—might Goldstone’s environment have stifled Europe’s progress.59
Yet even in that case, the most likely outcome was not enduring French hegemony and insufficient incentives for very specific forms of innovation but, before long, the completion of yet another Malthusian cycle and attendant pressures that would have upended the geopolitical order. More generally, any kind of domestic instability at the French core could have caused the periphery to fray, competitive polycentrism to be revived, and processes of disruptive social, economic, ideological, and technological innovation to resume.
If we allow actual history to proceed undisturbed and England to cement its economic and military power over the course of the eighteenth century, the dislocations of the Napoleonic period present us with the very last juncture at which the British breakthroughs and all that followed might still have been derailed. The most obvious way in which this could have been accomplished, a French invasion of Britain, was likely blocked by the considerable superiority of the British navy. An alternative route to European hegemony would have led through peaceful coexistence with Russia.60
Napoleon’s zeal in engaging opponents across Europe stirred up countervailing forces that, in the aggregate, were always too powerful to overcome. By the early nineteenth century, the European state system—forged of centuries of inconclusive warfare and self-strengthening reforms—had become too deeply entrenched, too large (thanks to Russia), and too capable of drawing on external resources (thanks to Britain) for any one party in Latin Europe to overpower and control all the others. From this perspective, the balance of power was never in France’s favor (figure 6.5).61
In fact, it is worth remembering that the most plausible counterfactual was not French victory and empire but failure well before it finally occurred. In confronting a variety of competitors. Napoleon repeatedly took great risks that could have resulted in decisive setbacks: for example, he could have been defeated by superior enemy forces in the Austerlitz campaign in the fall of 1805, or been wiped out at Krasnoi in November 1812 during the retreat from Russia. A string of highly contingent victories between 1805 and 1807 was needed to turn him into Europe’s momentary hegemon.
FIGURE 6.5 Europe in 1812 CE.
Yet Austria, Prussia, and Russia’s humiliation only served to galvanize their resistance. Thus, once Napoleon’s interventions in the Iberian peninsula and Russia to isolate Britain had drained his resources, hegemony could no longer be maintained. Moreover, French casualty rates kept rising as the war progressed, in part because the deployment of larger armies generated longer battles but especially because of heavier use of artillery. In this brutal environment, numbers did matter. Even victory at Waterloo would not have changed this basic fact.62
Napoleon faced a paradox. Had he been more restrained in his objectives, it might have been possible for France to make and preserve gains over the longer run, most plausibly by establishing hegemony or even direct rule over continental Europe west of Prussia and Austria. Yet that would not have created an empire of ancient Rome’s demographic preeminence, and would have kept Britain’s position (largely) intact. In this case, modern economic growth and industrialization could have proceeded unabated. A more ambitious Napoleon—the real-life version—by contrast, was bound to undermine his successes through unsustainable overreach. Either way, the ascent of Britain—and thus of Europe, and the “West”—was not in danger.
One might add as a coda that Hitler’s efforts were undone by similar constraints, most notably the fact that thanks to the Soviet Union, the British empire, and the United States—Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy”—the Europe-centered state system had by then became far too extensive to allow any European power to erect a durable empire. At that point, however, even such an unlikely outcome would no longer have made a difference—the modern world had long arrived.
FIFTEEN CENTURIES OF FRAGMENTATION
None of the states we might suspect of having had the potential to impose imperial rule on a large part of the population of Europe ever had a realistic chance to succeed. Individual events that are sometimes held up as turning points—in 732, 1242, or 1588—were hardly genuine junctures at which the political future of Europe hung in the balance. This should not occasion surprise: after all, as I tried to show in chapter 4, Rome’s rise to power was also largely free of moments when minimal rewrites cou
ld have derailed its expansion once it had begun in earnest. Structural properties and systematic disparities between core and periphery were the principal driving forces. Much the same was true of the post-Roman period, as general conditions and broad trends proved more influential than specific events.
Different factors played a decisive role at different times. (East) Roman restoration was thwarted by geopolitical dynamics: it faced too many challengers to succeed, a situation similar to that experienced by the Habsburgs a millennium later. In both cases, aspirants lacked Rome’s organizational superiority over its competitors that would have allowed them to engage multiple enemies at once and emerge victorious. Others were held back by internal fragmentation: Frankish and German rulers were tightly constrained by aristocratic autonomy, fiscal debility, and balancing among different sources of social power. Arab and Mongol instability was rooted in their social structure and the way it had shaped their conquest regimes. Europe was protected by the early fraying of their western peripheries, as Berbers and Cordoba defected and the Golden Horde turned on the Ilkhanate.
The variety and scale of the European state system likewise acted as a powerful brake on empire-building. Coalitions of city-states were able to block much larger powers: the Italian city-states and leagues that confronted the German emperors, and the Dutch United Provinces that defected from Philip II. In other cases, it was the sheer demographic heft and geographical spread of Europe that blocked contenders such as the Ottoman empire and early modern France.
Let us return for a moment to the key variables that I introduced in Part II and that played a decisive role in the rise of the Roman empire: the relative power of core and periphery, as well as scale, intensity, and integrity. Not all of the major post-Roman powers were endowed with a reasonably coherent and cohesive core: it was missing from the German empire and poorly developed in the Carolingian and Habsburg realms. The Umayyad core of Syria and the Arabian homeland was riven by ancestral divisions, and the confederated Mongol tribes increasingly dispersed across an enormous area. Only the eastern Roman empire and, much later, France shared the requisite attributes, as did, albeit less reliably, the Ottoman empire.
The only variable that was not an issue was scale: at their peak, all the polities surveyed here were very large, with populations in the deca-million range: the eastern Roman empire, the caliphate, the Franks (though perhaps just barely), the German empire, the Mongols, Habsburgs, and Ottomans, and France.
Their scale advantage was however frequently offset by poor performance regarding the other two metrics. Military mobilization intensity was low overall—1 percent of the general population or less. While the same had been true of the mature Roman empire, what is missing from the post-Roman cases is the presence of a core in the multimillion-member range that out-mobilizes larger but less committed rival states. The Mongols, who achieved very high rates of mobilization in their core, were the only exception. It was not until the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period that a country as large as France achieved mobilization levels of several percent, but at that point its competitors were rapidly catching up—which Rome’s rivals had failed to do.
Integrity within the ruling class often varied over time. It oscillated between good and mediocre in the eastern Roman empire. It was poor in the caliphate almost from the beginning and increasingly poor among the Franks, and persistently so in the German empire. Cohesion swiftly declined among the Mongols, and to some extent also in the Ottoman empire in the first half of the seventeenth century. The Habsburgs faced defection of Dutch elites and resistance in Germany, alongside more sporadic challenges from the Spanish cortes and even their own conquistadores in the New World. The French Revolution aside, early modern France was generally in better shape, but so were its main opponents.
While scale was no longer a constraint—plenty of large states entered the fray over a millennium and a half—intensity (in some meaningfully defined core) and integrity undoubtedly were. Post-Roman Europe did not produce a single example of a sizable core with high levels of mobilization intensity and political integrity that was in a position to project overwhelming power against less well-organized competitors. Furthermore, as the states of early modern Europe gradually improved their capabilities in these categories, they did so in concert with their peers. As a result, no one state enjoyed the unique advantages of ancient Rome: never again would a powerful core face off against brittle patrimonial empires and fragmented ecologies of micro-states, chiefdoms, and tribes.
European polycentrism hardened over time. Some of the early post-Roman “Great Powers” were checked by a less developed political-military network (as happened to the eastern Roman empire) or were internally weak members of a poorly integrated and competitive state system (in the case of Franks and the German empire). As states rebuilt their capabilities, the entire state system became more resilient in the process—to the detriment of Habsburg, Ottoman, and French ambitions. Challengers from outside Europe—Arabs, Mongols, and Turks—would have needed either a decisive military edge or other advantages to offset the obstacles of distance and logistics, but generally lacked such qualities. Thus, while the ongoing evolution of its competitive state system obstructed empire-building from within Europe, the absence of truly formidable external aspirants prevented conquest and unification from without. Both pathways to a return to Roman-style empire remained blocked.
The counterfactual modifications required to unblock these pathways are so extravagant that they would render the whole exercise meaningless: East Roman emperors who either co-opted or conquered Sasanian Iran; caliphs who erased old tribal loyalties and novel religious divisions at will; Germanic leaders who restored tax systems to their former imperial glory and kept their dukes and bishops on a tight leash; Mongol khans unaccountably determined to burn through their reserves of men and treasure as far away from Mongolia as possible; Habsburgs who not only inherited both England and France but held on to them for good and forged a single empire out of unwieldy complexity; French rulers who assembled a proto-European Union “plus” (with Russia and without Brexit) that was eager to submit to their command.
In a counterfactual universe far, far away from an even moderately defensible rewrite of history, any or all of this might somehow have happened. On planet Earth, by contrast, Roman-scale empire stood next to no chance of returning to Europe. But what made the barriers to this outcome so hard to scale—and so much harder than elsewhere? This is a question that calls for comparative analysis, to which we now turn.
PART IV
The First Great Divergence
CHAPTER 7
From Convergence to Divergence
UNDERSTANDING DIVERGENCE
THE “FIRST GREAT DIVERGENCE” was not merely a break between Roman and post-Roman modes of state formation in Europe. It was also a genuine divergence, as trajectories of state formation began to separate between post-Roman Europe and other parts of the Old World. As we saw in the opening chapter, it was the persistent absence of large-scale empire from the past millennium and a half of Europe’s history that made it stand out. The proportion of Europeans ruled by Rome, some 80 percent or more, was similar to the share of population claimed by the largest empires of several other macro-regions, such as those of the Achaemenids and Umayyads (~80 percent) and the Ottomans (~60 percent) in the Middle East and North Africa region; the Maurya, Delhi, and Mughal empires (~90 percent) and the Gupta and Harsha empires (~60 percent) in South Asia; and various Chinese dynasties in East Asia (~80–90 percent). The recurrent creation of such entities outside Europe prevented the emergence of stable state systems.1
This divergence places the failure of hegemonic empire in post-Roman Europe in a much broader context. Identifying specific circumstances that accounted for this outcome, as I tried to do in chapters 5 and 6, can just be a first step. Only comparison between Europe and other parts of the Old World can tell us whether these outcomes were rooted in more fundamental differences. This, in t
urn, gives us a better sense of whether European polycentrism and competitive fragmentation were highly contingent or sustained by powerful structural conditions. In this chapter and in chapters 8 and 9, I argue that the latter is true.
Ideally, we would like to observe particular features that were most pronounced in East Asia—the most “empire-friendly” part of the Old World—weakest in, or even absent from, post-Roman Europe, and of intermediate strength in other subcontinental regions, including relevant portions of the New World. In practice, the comprehensive survey that is needed to systematically define, document, and assess a wide set of criteria could easily fill an entire book. In the following, I therefore focus in the first instance on a more straightforward juxtaposition of Europe and East Asia, employing the Chinese imperial tradition as a counterpoint to medieval and European state formation.
However, this contrast appeared only after the fall of Rome, and that is what made it a divergence. Up till then, Europe and East Asia had shared convergent trends that appeared to put them on similar tracks. This, of course, makes their subsequent and rather sudden divergence all the more remarkable and worth investigating. It also helps us pinpoint the most significant variables that drove this process, and to do so at different levels of causation.2
I develop my argument in two stages. In this chapter, I cover the ancient convergence and subsequent divergence between Europe and China, and the specific historical circumstances—or proximate causes—associated with the post-ancient disjuncture. I then explore more fundamental features that acted upon these historical processes: geography and ecology (chapter 8) and cultural traits (chapter 9). I expand my comparison by introducing material from South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East whenever it is expedient, but in less detail, in order to test the broader relevance of putative key variables such as fiscal arrangements, proximity to the steppe, and cultural homogeneity.
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