Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  Notwithstanding the spread of an early Sanskrit ecumene into its elite circles, Southeast Asia was similarly diverse in language, writing systems, and religious beliefs, and home to powerful religious organizations. As part of the “protected zone,” it was spared foreign conquest regimes. Instead, as Lieberman notes, its polities were run by elites who were ethnically and religiously the same as their subjects and thus “often sought to politicize ethnic loyalty as an aid to governance and wartime effort,” a strategy that also played a role in modern European state formation and ultimately favored political regionalism over universal empire.46

  Across the Old World, long-term patterns of state formation were associated with specific configurations of cultural traits that can be thought to promote or inhibit imperiogenesis. After the fall of Rome, the polities of Latin Europe were long exposed to, and in turn amplified, a colorful mix of cultural “spoilers.” In China, the opposite was the case, as universal empire proved ever more resilient. Conditions in the Islamic world and South Asia fell in between, whereas Southeast Asia had more in common with Europe.

  CONCLUSION: THE FIRST GREAT DIVERGENCE AS A ROBUST AND CAUSALLY OVERDETERMINED OUTCOME

  Let us pull the various threads together. In this part of the book, my discussion has centered on a recurrent theme: that a wide variety of physical, institutional, and cultural properties were associated with and arguably conducive to empire-building on a large scale in East Asia but not in (Latin) Europe. Some of these features were constants, others more specific to the second half of the first millennium CE. In their complex interactions, they help us explain the phenomenon of the First Great Divergence (table 9.1).

  The terseness of this matrix calls for explication. “Extractive capacity” covers both fiscal performance and—complementarily or alternatively—the intensity of military mobilization, and refers to the extent to which central state authorities managed to appropriate resources for their own purposes. This capacity was lower in the sub- or post-Roman polities of Latin Europe than in the principal Chinese states that were able to count and tax their populations in ways Germanic regimes were not. During the period in question, it almost universally declined from a low base to even lower levels.

  In China, by contrast, capacities varied between phases of strong centralization with good registration coverage and respectable fiscal extraction rates and phases of retrenchment, albeit—and crucially—not normally to levels as low as those in early medieval Europe, except perhaps in the most ephemeral of interstitial polities. These shifts were oscillations, as opposed to the generally downward trend observed in most of Latin Europe.

  Geographic, ecological, and cultural factors have been discussed in some detail. While it is admittedly awkward to assign each of them a single value, my metrics are strictly relative: “plus” and “minus” simply denote conditions that were “more” or “less” conducive to large-scale state formation.

  Among outcomes, state power and stability are correlated with the pattern produced by the previous columns: decline in Latin Europe and oscillation at higher levels in China. The shift back and forth between relatively capable regional states and more or less centralized hegemonic empire in China matches the other fluctuations: these shifts occurred on a spectrum between centralized empire and regional states that sometimes teetered on the brink of more serious devolution but never quite succumbed.

  By comparison, the regional polities of Latin Europe of this period are best defined as weak. In a more charitable reading, one might think of their development in terms of a shift from stronger to weaker states: yet even the early sub-Roman regimes, or the Carolingian empire, were not as capable as the northern Chinese kingdoms of the sixth and tenth centuries. At most we might concede the possibility of a lesser shift, marked as doubtful in table 9.1.

  Two things matter most. One is the unidirectional character of European developments compared to the back and forth in China. The other is the level of state capacity and scale from and to which these shifts occurred. If we look at the notional endpoints of around 500 and 1000 CE, the dominant trends moved toward imperial restoration in China and toward inter- and intrastate fragmentation in Latin Europe.

  My matrix is designed to show, at a glance, how consistently putatively significant factors pointed in one direction in one case and in the opposite case in the other. In post-Roman Europe, multiple circumstances obstructed large-scale state formation, whereas in post–“Sixteen Kingdoms” China, they favored it. Some—geography and ecology—did so by nature, as it were, although the Sui regime actively enhanced spatial integration. Others—most notably language and belief systems—operated over the long term. Others still—extraction and mobilization capacity—were more narrowly circumscribed and contingent.

  This synopsis presents us with an analytical problem and a pragmatic insight. The problem is that the congruence of different factors makes it harder to identify the essential variables. The insight is that for present purposes, this does not matter all that much. Regardless of which variables we privilege, the finding is always the same: that prevailing circumstances favored a certain outcome in China and a different one in Europe. In this fundamental sense, these discrepant outcomes were robust, and they were robust because they were overdetermined.

  This striking degree of congruence and thus overdetermination likely owes a lot to interaction effects between anthropogenic and environmental factors. Both this mutual reinforcement and the minimal sample size (N = 2) makes grudging acceptance of overdetermination instead of a weighing of individual variables seem a justifiable rather than merely an intellectually lazy compromise.

  Moreover, the congruence that is reflected in my matrix meshes well with the robustness of the counterfactual findings in Part III, which dispel the notion that post-Roman Europe was at any time gravitating toward hegemonic empire. The trifecta of consistent patterns in historical outcomes, in plausible counterfactual outcomes, and in the basic drivers and correlates of state capacity and empire formation highlights the overall solidity of the First Great Divergence—as well as, once again, the outlier status of the Roman empire. From this perspective, what is astonishing is not that the First Great Divergence happened, but that it needed to intervene at all, that the preceding convergence had occurred in the first place.

  Table 9.1 could be expanded to include other parts of the Old World. I refrain from this exercise mainly because it would be a challenge to assign simplified values in a consistent fashion to a larger number of different cases. In the most general terms, South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa region would retain their by-now-familiar position between the extremes of China and post-Roman Europe.

  In the Middle East and North Africa, frequently high levels of state capacity persisted under a long sequence of conquest regimes that were more or less adept at erecting larger imperial structures. The Nile valley and Mesopotamia permitted some concentration of resources but did not form huge natural cores such as China’s Central Plain. The Middle East was heavily exposed to multiple steppe frontiers. Religious and political leaders found themselves locked into mutual interdependence, yet without developing the intimate accommodations of Confucianism. In South Asia, state power could be more brittle, yet without sinking to the lows of early medieval Europe. River basins formed natural cores but were (still) less subjected to inputs from the steppe. The dominant belief systems were not closely tied to the state.

  In both cases, state formation oscillated between large-scale empire and capable regional polities, but differed in specifics, between a temporary shift away from hegemonic empire in the Middle East and North Africa region as regional conquest regimes formalized the effective decentralization of fiscal structures, and the generally stronger resilience of regional states in South Asia. These broadly intermediate outcomes between China’s imperial revival and Latin Europe’s deepening polycentrism correlate well with the lack of consistent trends among key features ranging from extraction rates and cultu
ral traits to geographic and ecological conditions. Across the Old World, the scope and resilience of large-scale empire in the age of the First Great Divergence was intimately bound up with a mere handful of crucial variables.

  PART V

  From the First to the Second Great Divergence

  CHAPTER 10

  Institutions

  WHAT MADE THE SECOND GREAT DIVERGENCE POSSIBLE?

  WHY DOES it matter that Europe was so fragmented? My answer is straightforward. This polycentrism is key to explaining the (Second) Great Divergence, the Industrial Revolution(s), and thus the Great Escape. Almost all of the many competing interpretations that seek to account for these radical transformations are predicated on this one feature of European sociopolitical evolution. This is true irrespective of whether these reconstructions privilege institutions, global connectivity, or cultural characteristics—and whether or not their proponents are aware of this shared underlying premise. By all accounts, the transition to the modern world was deeply rooted in the First Great Divergence.1

  This perspective has a long pedigree. Montesquieu thought that Europe’s fragmentation “formed a genius for liberty” by favoring the “government of the laws” over despotism. He was on the right track: as we will see, smaller polities enjoyed greater capacity for more inclusive forms of rule than large empires, and interstate rivalries were a crucial driver of institutional development. Immanuel Kant likewise objected to the idea

  that all the states should be merged into one under a power which has gained the ascendancy over its neighbours and gradually become a universal monarchy. For the wider the sphere of their jurisdiction, the more laws lose in force: and soulless despotism, when it has choked the seeds of good, at last sinks into anarchy.2

  One and a half centuries later, Chairman Mao opined:

  One good thing about Europe is that all its countries are independent. Each of them does its own thing, which makes it possible for the economy of Europe to develop at a fast pace. Ever since China became an empire after the Qin dynasty, our country has been for the most part unified. One of its defects has been bureaucratism, and excessively tight control. The localities could not develop independently.

  This is in some ways even closer to the mark, even if it greatly exaggerates the reach of centralized power: as it turns out, empires’ relative lack of infrastructural capacity was an even greater retardant of modernizing growth.3

  Modern scholarship has addressed the relationship between state-building and human welfare in incomparably greater depth. The insights it has generated help us identify significant variables and connectivities. I begin with a deliberately overly simple model of two starkly different ideal types of state formation and their respective developmental corollaries (figure 10.1).

  The “polycentristic” variant provides a rough approximation of conditions in post-Roman Europe. The fall of Rome ultimately gave rise to multiple states that did not dramatically differ in terms of capabilities (smaller but more cohesive polities balanced less-well-organized larger ones), mobilization intensity (Roman-style levels of conscription did not return until the French Revolution), mode of production (most Europeans were farmers and lived far from the steppe frontier), and religion (Christianity steadily spread into the northern and eastern reaches of the continent while Islam failed to make much headway). All this ensured that interstate competition was fairly symmetric in style: with like fighting like. Not least because of this, it also remained inconclusive, as no one party ever managed to overpower all the others.

  FIGURE 10.1.   An ideal-typical model of the developmental dynamics of different types of state formation.

  In the long run, this environment rewarded political, military, and economic performance, which was largely a function of state capacity. In principle, this impetus might have fashioned European states into ever-more-tightly centralized and autocratic entities akin to the ancient Warring States of China. That this did not generally happen in Europe—and that individual states greatly differed in terms of how far they shifted in that direction—was due to a second, complementary kind of polycentrism, which manifested itself within individual states and societies.

  After Rome’s collapse, the four principal sources of social power became increasingly unbundled. Political power was claimed by monarchs who gradually lost their grip on material resources and thence on their subordinates. Military power devolved upon lords and knights. Ideological power resided in the Catholic Church, which fiercely guarded its long-standing autonomy even as its leadership was deeply immersed in secular governance and the management of capital and labor. Economic power was contested between feudal lords and urban merchants and entrepreneurs, with the latter slowly gaining the upper hand.

  In the heyday of these fractures, in the High Middle Ages, weak kings, powerful lords, belligerent knights, the pope and his bishops and abbots, and autonomous capitalists all controlled different levers of social power. Locked in unceasing struggle, they were compelled to cooperate and compromise to make collective action possible.

  As Europe remained sheltered from major outside threats, many of its conflicts took place within sometimes large but increasingly brittle polities. Over time, the growth of population and economic output both enabled and encouraged more sustained competition between states. These pressures provided growing incentives for the reconsolidation of domestic power. The long and tortuous process of rebuilding state capacity involved both top-down coercion and extensive bargaining to bring powerful constituencies into the fold.

  In the early modern period, rulers for the most part managed to regain control over the concentrated means of violence, co-opt economic powerholders, and incorporate the church(es) into emergent national structures. Yet the scale of Europe’s political fragmentation—the sheer number of its sovereign states—ensured considerable variety of outcomes as differences in initial conditions and subsequent opportunities and constraints sent individual states along their own specific pathways of institutional elaboration. The durability of the multipolar state system—the fact that the major states were not periodically swallowed up by larger empires—allowed incremental changes along those pathways to accumulate over time.

  Intensifying interstate competition and concurrent intrastate bargaining favored certain performance-enhancing strategies. Innovation, whether institutional or technological, helped increase and mobilize domestic resources to prevail in interstate conflict. This environment also generated powerful demand for the acquisition of external resources: where appropriation of domestic elite wealth or the conquest of neighboring polities were not viable options, overseas colonies represented an attractive alternative. Back home, meanwhile, integration had the potential to boost state capacity, most crucially in the conjoined spheres of fiscal extraction and military mobilization.

  These moves toward state-strengthening in turn raised performance expectations: the more some states embraced these strategies, the greater the pressure on others to follow suit or fall behind. This feedback mechanism rendered these developmental dynamics self-sustaining as well as self-reinforcing, promoting a circle that was vicious in its relentless violence and (eventually) virtuous in terms of economic outcomes. It also prepared the ground for transformative breakthroughs, for Schumpeterian growth through creative destruction of established orders and techniques. Britain’s peculiar mix of parliamentary bargaining, mercantilist protectionism, overseas expansion, naval power, and technological progress was merely the proverbial tip of a much bigger iceberg of European experimentation and adaptation.

  Contrast this massively simplified outline of the dynamics of productive competitiveness with a different but equally ideal-typical scenario, in which a region of subcontinental proportions is dominated by a single (“monopolistic”) super-state. Under these conditions, any remaining external competition will be asymmetric in nature, between the imperial hegemon and groups in peripheral and often ecologically marginal areas beyond the former’s logistic
al reach: the persistent conflict between China and steppe formations is a classic example; ancient Rome’s containment of Germanic tribes is another.

  Hegemonic empires were likely to prioritize maintenance. Once they controlled most people and assets in a given geomorphologically circumscribed macro-region, the potential for further gains was bound to be trivial compared to what had already been obtained. Holding on to far-flung possessions by checking elite autonomy and regionalism became the principal challenge.

  This environment generated weaker demand for state capacity and performance than a competitive state system, especially if power projection was impeded by structural asymmetries: for instance, a larger infantry army was not necessarily effective against nimble steppe opponents. These constraints favored the persistence of a traditional “capstone” state in which a ruling elite and its institutions “capped” and held together a congeries of areas and constituencies they were unable or unwilling to penetrate, mobilize, and integrate. “Keeping its various components in place, but incapable of stimulating further development,” this type of government sought to perpetuate itself by limiting centralized extraction and accommodating the prerogatives of established localized power bases.4

  The absence of strong internal polycentrism served to amplify these tendencies. In imperial China, the closest historical approximation of this scenario throughout much of its history, political and ideological power were closely allied, military power was for the most part safely contained, and economic power was relatively marginalized.