Elements of a state system subsequently reappeared only twice, and on a smaller scale: from the 530s to the 570s CE, when the eastern and western successor states of Northern Wei in northern China faced off with a separate regime in the south, and somewhat less ephemerally during the Southern Song period, when most of China was split between Jurchen and then Mongols in the north and the Chinese Song dynasty in the south. Other periods of temporary disunity witnessed less intensive and unstable competition, most notably the tenth century CE, when a rapid succession of northern regimes coexisted with a number of southern kingdoms for about seventy years.14
None of these configurations amounted to a stable multistate system comparable to what we find in post-Roman Europe. This basic point is worth making given the tendency in recent scholarship to conflate the existence of multiple polities in East Asia with the presence of effective political polycentrism. For example, when in the Tang period, secondary state formation among Turks and Tibetans as well as in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam created a penumbra of polities that ringed imperial China, it did so in a highly asymmetric fashion. China claimed universal rulership—or hegemonic status, in modern parlance—and others often sought recognition as constituents of this Sinocentric world order. It is telling that serious attempts at expansion were unliteral: it was the Tang who first destroyed the Eastern Turk khaganate in the Tarim basin and then the Western one between the 620s and 650s CE, or prevailed in Korea in the 660s, or dominated Vietnam. With the brief and partial exception of Charlemagne’s reign, no such hegemon ever existed in post-Roman (and pre-Napoleonic) Europe.15
Similar qualifications apply to a fashionable modern academic scenario that places “China among equals” from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries, beginning with the trifecta of the Northern Song in China and the Liao and Tangut states in the northern periphery, and continuing with the Southern Song and the Mongols in northern China. Inasmuch as this concept makes sense, it does so primarily with respect to military power and—consequently—diplomatic relations, but does not adequately describe the balance of material resources or population.
A significant degree of demographic division can only be observed in the period of the north-south split from 1127 to the 1270s. Yet even that century and a half was dominated by two powerful imperial states: each of them ruled tens of millions of people, and in so doing each of them approximated the heft of the unified Han and Tang empires. If this were to count as fragmentation or polycentrism, these very notions would be drained of meaning: if the concept of the multistate system were applied to post-Roman Europe and to post-221 BCE China alike, it could no longer serve as an analytical category.16
I call the widening chasm between post-ancient European and Chinese (as well as other Old World) trajectories of state formation the “First Great Divergence” because it prepared the ground for the much later political, economic, and scientific development and increase in human welfare associated with what is commonly referred to as the “Great Divergence”—the process of the economies of (parts of) Europe and some of its colonial spin-offs pulling away from those elsewhere in the world. My terminology adds to an increasingly crowded field. Thus, the latter “Great Divergence” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—between (northwestern) Europe or the “West” more generally and the rest of the world—has already been joined by the earlier “Little Divergence” (on occasion also and confusingly called the “First Great Divergence”) between northwestern Europe and the remainder of Europe from the early modern period onward.
To complicate matters further, Robert Ian Moore has proposed a different “First Great Divergence” that commenced in the High Middle Ages when long-term developmental paths for Europe and China were set by the reinforcement of kin-oriented local hegemony in Song China and by growing efforts to subordinate such hegemonies to larger political and ideological structures away from kinship in Latin Europe: these trends, in turn, underpinned a divergence in institution-building capacity and thus political development and state formation.17
Yet even if we were to follow this argument, Moore’s divergence would be firmly rooted in my own “First Great Divergence” as presented here: after all, it was the continuing preeminence of imperial power in China and its waning in Europe that made these particular shifts possible. Unlike the more established “Great Divergence” of the modern period, which is defined in the first instance by economic productivity, this “First Great Divergence” unfolded in the political sphere. In the end, it proved to be foundational: as I demonstrate in Part V of this book, post-Roman Europe’s decisive departure from the standard consolidation-decentralization cycle of large-scale agrarian empire formation opened up space for the more famous—and now “Second”—“Great Divergence” to occur.
PROXIMATE CAUSATION: CONQUEST REGIMES AND FISCAL SYSTEMS
For Cicero, it already counted as a truism that (tax) revenue had “always been considered the sinews of the state,” just as 2,000 years later, Charles Tilly deemed “extraction” to be essential for supporting the three key state functions of state-making, war-making, and protection. As the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter reminded us with reference to his fellow Austrian sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid, “The budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.” Whether as sinews or as bones, revenue sustained the state and its activities: “Follow the money, always follow the money”—Deep Throat’s (apocryphal) Watergate movie quote—is as good a precept for analyzing power relations as we can hope for. It also provides a key to understanding the “First Great Divergence.”18
Revenue collection has a long history. The modern fiscal state, with its centralized bureaucracy, budgeting mechanisms, and recourse to public debt, merely represents its latest stage. In the more distant past, rulers might rely on plunder or on income from their own estates. However, regularized revenue extraction—of material goods from food to money and of human labor from military conscription to corvée—from a broader base is necessary for sustaining any kind of state with more than minimal capacities. Empire, as the result of massive scaling-up of military reach and territorial consolidation, is impossible without it. Its characteristic articulation into center and peripheries all but requires resource flows between them. At the same time, the logistical challenges involved in controlling extensive possessions unfailingly turned local powerholders and distant agents into partners as well as competitors of the central authorities in extracting surplus. If those intermediaries became too autonomous, effective state power was bound to diminish as private rent crowded out public tax.19
An entire global history of empire could be written along these lines, tracking the rise and fall of revenue-collecting political organizations: rulers struggling to assert their prerogatives, local elites pushing back, and both compromising on an ever-changing modus vivendi while continuing to jockey for position. Outside pressures—war—either impelled a higher rate of extraction or precipitated state failure. Prolonged peace allowed fiscal systems to atrophy.20
Once in place, monopolistic empires might survive even if only modest revenue reached their centers: examples include the Umayyad empire, which accommodated pervasive regional retention of surplus, and the late Ming and Qing dynasties. By contrast, it would have been an incomparably greater challenge to establish an empire in the first place without being able to draw on considerable funds or draft soldiers. Actual practices varied depending on circumstances: Roman military mass mobilization, described in chapter 2, was one option; takeover of existing fiscal infrastructures, as practiced by the first caliphate, was another, as was Spain’s import of bullion from the New World.21
When it comes to accounting for the “First Great Divergence,” revenue extraction plays a key role as a predictor of rulers’ ability to maintain state power and to build larger imperial polities. As we will see, fiscal capacity precipitously declined in post-Roman Europe but was more successfully maintained or restored in other parts of the Old Worl
d that subsequently hosted large empires. In Latin Europe, this erosion of fiscal capacity was not overcome until after a stable multistate system had formed and political power within polities had come to be critically constrained by domestic compromises born in no small measure of fiscal weakness.22
Europe
STATE DEFORMATION
The Roman empire operated a complex and regionally variegated tax system that focused on revenue from land alongside poll taxes, tolls on trade, and income from mining and imperial estates. An array of more specialized taxes and occasional absorption of elite wealth supplemented these revenue streams. During its first two centuries, a period of great stability, the Roman monarchy could afford to accept what appear to have been considerable discounts on nominal tax rates in peripheral areas and to rely largely on income from the most developed provinces and concentrated mining and commercial activities.
After the shocks of the third century CE—driven by foreign and civil wars and plagues—had disturbed this comfortable equilibrium, the restorationist military regime that took power launched a determined if ultimately insufficient effort to standardize and rationalize fiscal arrangements. As eastern provinces had long carried a disproportionate part of the burden, reform particularly affected the western parts of the empire: Italy was no longer exempt from most forms of taxation; heavy fiscal demands are reported for late Roman Gaul; and the considerable importance of revenue from the Iberian peninsula and North Africa is reflected in the fatal consequences of their eventual loss to outside challengers. In addition, frontier zones such as Britain and the Rhineland had long been developed for the purpose of supporting large military garrisons.
Thus, even if reliable measurement is beyond our reach, there can be little doubt that the Latin territories of the Roman empire were subject to considerable tax liabilities. The growth of countervailing forces such as patronage relations designed to shield assets likewise points to the weight of these claims. Taxation, even if increasingly contested, was very much a feature of Roman rule in late antique Europe.23
In all of this, local self-governance had always institutionalized effective decentralization of tax collection and ensured its structural dependence on rent-taking elites. Within these constraints, the system had been successfully maintained for centuries. It was only when central power weakened in the face of foreign intervention and renewed internal conflict in the early fifth century CE that local resistance to payments mounted and enforcement declined. Increasingly extravagant tax remissions are recorded from the 410s CE onward, and the fiscal capacity of the now separately managed western half of the empire shrank accordingly. This set in motion a death spiral of diminishing central authority and its intensifying contestation by rival constituencies from both within and beyond the empire.24
This was the environment that in the third quarter of the fifth century CE came to be dominated by Germanic successor regimes that dismantled the western empire—one in which centralized fiscal arrangements were under pressure but still in place. But from then on, these institutions were allowed to whither. In the principal kingdoms, a share of land was taken over by the new rulers, for their own benefit and that of their armed followers.
Due to the shortcomings of the evidence, the procedural circumstances of this shift remain debated. According to the most plausible reconstruction, Germans were given control of land allotments: they enjoyed access to that land and to its yield in exchange for loyalty and military service. At least initially, an alternative theory holds, they received only the revenue of that land—via disbursements of tax proceeds—but not the land itself. In this scenario, the allocation of benefits was mediated by existing fiscal structures: depending on the polity, followers received one-third or half of the revenue while the rest went to the king.
However, even this model is meant to be understood as a “provisional solution” that over time morphed into a more enduring arrangement of direct access to and control over the land. Thus, in the words of Walter Goffart, the leading proponent of this thesis, the beneficiaries eventually ended up “as full-fledged landowners enjoying the same rights over the land and its cultivators as the established owners of the countryside.” In terms of overall outcomes, this is all that matters here.25
Land grants to subordinates removed the single most important function of taxation: ensuring control over organized violence. Applying Tilly’s terminology, centralized extraction and distribution were no longer necessary to sustain state-making, war-making, and protection. Instead, the specialists in violence—Germanic warriors—who performed these elementary state functions could draw on prebendal (and gradually privatized) resources. The consequent erosion of fiscal institutions was gradual but inexorable.
The Ostrogothic regime that occupied Italy retained Roman forms of taxation but did not last long enough (from the 490s to the 530s CE) for abatement to set in. Following the East Roman reconquest from the 530s to the 560s CE, the Lombards who took over much of Italy initially may or may not have continued to collect taxes but by the seventh century are not known or no longer known to have done so. Income from domains became crucial: Lombard kings controlled much more land than the nobility, which served to shore up their standing. In North Africa, the Vandals (from the 430s CE) at first continued to tax but also settled their men on the land. As a result, by the time of the East Roman reconquest a century later, the regional tax system had already deteriorated.26
In the Iberian peninsula, the Visigoths (450s to 710s CE) made efforts to collect tax almost until the end of their period of control, but revenue was marginal. When the Arabs took over, they consequently found it hard to support their forces and settled them on the land to ensure their sustenance. This was a marked departure from standard practice: in other regions farther east, more developed fiscal systems had allowed them to maintain centrally funded military colonies.27
In Gaul, the Merovingians taxed the non-Frankish population in the sixth century but encountered growing resistance. As the tax-exempt Frankish-conquest elite and the ethnic identity associated with this immunity expanded, generalized taxation came to be considered an abuse of royal power. Over the course of the seventh century, with the possible exception of the Loire Valley, regular revenue collection disappeared from the record. The central authorities fell back on income from royal lands, tolls, and fines.28
By contrast, taxation survived not only in the eastern Roman empire but—as we shall see below—also in the formerly Roman and Sasanian territories that had fallen to the Umayyad caliphate. Fiscal retreat, even if of varying intensity and chronology, was limited to the Germanic successor states of the western Roman empire.
Numerous factors may have contributed to this outcome, but not all of them carry equal weight. Although the late Roman tax system was already under considerable duress at the time of the Germanic takeovers, it was still in place and is known to have continued to operate almost everywhere. This speaks against blaming its later demise on Roman legacy effects. Another potential reason is more abstract. The need for ongoing information flows makes fiscal systems costly to maintain: thus, the presence of an alternative means of supporting key state associates, such as land assignments, might render relaxation of collection efforts not only feasible but attractive. Even so, fiscal structures can survive even with minimal effort: the failure of the Ming and Qing to update tax records is the best-known example. But none of this can explain the wholesale collapse of land taxes among the Franks.29
Germanic regimes were cheaper in the sense that they incurred less overhead: they ran a much smaller administrative machine than the Romans had done and no longer had to support voracious capital cities with their corrupt officials and retainers. This made it more feasible for the central authorities to rely on patrimonial resources such as crown land and income from tolls (the latter much diminished by the concurrent decline in trade and money use). This, in turn, encouraged localization of taxation, which helps account for the uneven manner of its fading.
But most importantly of all, Germanic rule had changed the status of the military: elevated above the erstwhile waged employees of the Roman era, self-sufficient soldiers now formed a new elite.30
In a process best attested in the longest-lived successor state, that of the Franks, the martial habitus of the conquest elite, the land assignments it received, and the devolution of the tax system produced a peculiar configuration of power in which rulers depended on the cooperation of select followers, yet increasingly lacked the means to coerce or bribe them. Neither of the two most powerful groups, warrior-landlords and clerics, was fully subject to state control.
Unlike the Roman empire, the Germanic successor regimes did not maintain substantial standing armies. Dukes and counts were responsible for raising troops, which were spatially dispersed and gathered only as required. By at least the late sixth century, soldiers settled on their land and took proper ownership, considering it de facto hereditary and tax exempt. They turned into a class of well-armed landowners.
By the seventh century, this conversion had been completed wherever Germanic regimes survived. Among the Visigoths, military power came to be concentrated in aristocratic retinues that were complemented (and balanced) by men drawn from royal estates and slave soldiers from private holdings. Over time, emphasis shifted from royal forces to magnate levies and growing reliance on private resources.
In Lombard Italy, land had been assigned to groups of soldiers, called up by dukes. This likewise gave rise to armed retinues of nobles. Frankish aristocrats subordinated men of lower status and raised troops from among them. Conditions in England were probably similar. Thus, across the Germanic zone we witness a gradual transition from paid armies under central control to levies managed by powerful landlords and characterized by increasing stratification and dependence, as rising inequality reinforced earlier differences in status and resources.
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