Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  By the 1570s, the threat of a Portuguese naval blockade had receded and Ottoman traders no longer required state support. Reliance on their own resources left them high and dry when the empire underwent a generalized crisis during the early seventeenth century, Yemen was lost and the appearance of new European rivals—Dutch and English—encouraged allies to defect. Under these circumstances, a strong presence in the Indian Ocean basin turned out to be no longer feasible. As it happened, initial state support had been prompted in the first instance by European intervention. In Casale’s own words:

  Had it not been for the threat posed by the Portuguese to Muslim trade and pilgrimage routes, neither the original articulation of Ottoman claims in maritime Asia nor the subsequent dedication with which members of the Indian Ocean faction defended these claims would ever have been possible. And once this Portuguese threat was removed, the Ottomans’ grand imperial project quickly became an unsustainable venture.69

  Reactive in nature, such initiatives were easily undermined by power dynamics at the court and quite predictably eclipsed by conflict over Mesopotamia with a rival empire. Nothing in the Ottoman empire nourished structural incentives for naval exploration, mercantile aggression, and colonial development. The lack of pluralism ruled out alternative pathways; traditional concerns and constraints of imperial rule kept asserting themselves. The contrast to the European “age of exploration” could hardly have been more starkly defined.

  Outcomes in China, India, and the Middle East were consistent with key characteristics of hegemonic empire: focus on domestic resources; monopolistic decision-making that was highly susceptible to power dynamics at the very top while shielded from inputs by other constituencies; and, above all, emphasis on loosely guarding and taxing large agrarian populations. What all these polities lacked were the twin spurs of competition within a durable state system and internal fragmentation of social power that created space for constituencies that pursued gain from overseas trade and development. The resultant ideological default—“An empire cannot be conceived of as entrepreneur as can a state in a world-economy. For an empire pretends to be whole”—was merely icing on the cake.70

  Wanting to Go Out There, and Making the Most of It: Europe

  In these respects, traditional empires differed hugely from Latin Europe on the cusp of the modern age: there, increasingly stable states were locked into intensifying competition that fueled their hunger for novel resources. Political fragmentation created a market for explorers and investors, and domestic balancing mechanisms protected their autonomy.71

  Polycentrism was key. Interstate conflict did not merely foster technological innovation in areas such as ship design and weaponry that proved vital for global expansion, it also raised the stakes by amplifying both the benefits of overseas conquest and its inverse, the costs of opportunities forgone: successful ventures deprived rivals from rewards they might otherwise have reaped, and vice versa. States played a zero-sum game: their involvements overseas have been aptly described as “a competitive process driven as much by anxiety over loss as by hope of gain.”

  As if rulers’ ambition had not been enough, fear of losing out lent even greater urgency to an open-ended arms race. Persistent and often violent competition called for the formal acquisition of distant strongholds and territories to preserve access to overseas resources: simply getting somewhere first was never enough, as Portugal and Spain were soon to discover. And even though challengers such as the Netherlands and England were initially more interested in markets than in land per se, they could not escape this logic either.72

  Hemmed in by powerful competitors that readily entered and abandoned alliances, Western European states generally faced enormous costs in expanding their territories at the expense of their immediate neighbors. By reaching out to new shores, these states were able to project military force against sometimes less capable opponents and open up new fronts in the struggle against their peers. Conflict over colonial territories became an organic extension of endemic warfare within Europe itself. The urge to explore and colonize was thus deeply rooted in the routinized interstate competition that distinguished Western Europe from other parts of the Old World from the Islamic world to China. Its parties were ready to strike whenever opportunities arose.73

  Sectoral institutions within states reinforced this impetus. Multiple institutional actors—rulers, capitalists, and the Church—promoted overseas initiatives as states centralized. Autonomous merchant bodies and the organizations they supported, from guilds to stock companies and trading houses, provided human and financial capital. The religious leadership backed mission and conversion. Rulers co-opted and cooperated with these two sectors to further their own political goals. This convergence of interests resulted in what David Abernathy calls a “triple sectoral assault” of soldiers, entrepreneurs, and clergymen on the outside world.74

  As mentioned in chapter 10, mercantile city-states—the earliest beneficiaries of Europe’s fragmentation—played a critical role in laying the foundations. Amalfi, Gaeta, Pisa, Naples, and then, above all, Genoa and Venice engaged in pioneering commercial ventures. After reaching out into the eastern Mediterranean to obtain raw materials for soap and glass production, they invested heavily in sugar plantations that came to stretch from Palestine and Cyprus to Valencia and the Algarve and out into the Atlantic, and served as the template for the plantation complex of the New World. Genoa had long-standing ties with Portugal: their sailors jointly or separately probed the African west coast from the twelfth century onward. Since 1385, Portugal was ruled by a dynasty that enjoyed the support of merchants and the bourgeoisie against its conservative nobility. A productive partnership between Genoese capital and Portuguese logistics ensued.75

  Subsequent developments owed much to this nexus of private and public inputs. The timing of the breakthrough of the 1490s was by no means coincidental: the previous decade had been profitable for investors in Atlantic voyages. This encouraged them to take risks: Columbus’s backers had all been involved in the exploitation of the Canary Islands. In the end, his first expedition was financed without direct royal support. Organized by a treasury official who drew on Genoese merchants in Seville, it nonetheless earned the interest of the Spanish crown, which was concerned about Portuguese advances in Africa and the possibility that the Canaries might turn out to be a dead end. Columbus’s making a show of hawking his strange project to various potential patrons skillfully played on precisely these competitive anxieties.76

  But those were merely humble beginnings. Over time, the interplay of international and domestic polycentrism gave rise to mercantilism as an alliance of capitalists and state rulers that regarded trade as a means of increasing national wealth and power in order to prevail within a competitive state system. Protected by political privileges and military intervention, a strong private sector developed chartered companies that captured oligopoly or monopoly rents.77

  Trade and warfare, private and public, were tightly enmeshed. Chartered companies spent and earned huge amounts of money on and from war and privateering. They spearheaded expansion, seeking to secure strategic points before taking over more territory and conquering new markets. In so doing, they were close allies of the states that nurtured them: the Dutch East India Company, for instance, had been established expressly to harm Spain’s and Portugal’s interests.78

  States that were relatively small or heavily coastal in nature—and more often than not, both—came to be disproportionately involved in overseas trade and colonization. For Portugal such ventures served as a means to raise its status from that of a lesser power. Spain capitalized on the military and organizational capabilities it had gained during the Reconquista. The Netherlands, locked into conflict with larger opponents, benefited from its efficient private sector institutions and a government that was controlled by urban interests, and pioneered chartered companies. England, then still a fairly thinly populated island, sought to balance threats from continental powers
by staking claims to territories overseas. France, by contrast, Latin Europe’s largest state, was more focused on terrestrial operations and less in need of colonies than its competitors: although it pursued the latter to live up to its reputation as a great power, it confined itself at first to the relatively neglected northern reaches of the Americas and, later, prioritized northwestern Africa, neither one of which delivered major economic benefits.79

  Europe’s conflictual dynamics not only provided powerful incentives for overseas expansion but also helped ensure its success. Endemic interstate warfare had given Europeans a competitive edge in the military arena. Growing investment in gunpowder technology and associated domains—“firearms, artillery, ships armed with guns, and fortifications that could resist bombardment”—paved the way for Europe’s ascent to global hegemony. Thus, if colonies and the military force that had secured them were indeed an essential precondition for later economic breakthroughs, they were a direct outgrowth of Europe’s competitive state system rather than just “happy accidents.”80

  European takeovers eventually reached a previously unimaginable scale: by 1914, between four-fifths and five-sixths of the earth’s land surface were under European control, about half as colonies. Most of the early stages of this expansion had occurred in the New World: in 1760 almost all colonial territory and three-quarters of the colonial population were located in the Americas. It was only during the following seventy years that widespread American independence movements and concurrent expansion in Asia led to the latter accounting for half of the area and almost all of the population of Europe’s colonies.81

  Early on, the Americas had been a more vulnerable target due to the lower level of development of Pre-Columbian societies and the devastating impact of the various Old World diseases that the colonizers introduced. Meanwhile, much of Asia was still protected by huge traditional empires: Ottoman, Mughal, and Qing.82

  Yet even these seemingly formidable opponents gradually fell behind. Philip Hoffman’s intriguing explanation is that the specific bundle of conditions that sustained ongoing military innovation in Europe did not apply in like manner to any of those empires. Late imperial China’s wars in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries were almost exclusively waged against steppe powers, in conflicts that were not conducive to the use of firearms or the development of a navy. Episodes of greater interest in gunpowder weaponry—at the end of the Mongol period and around the time of the Manchu takeover—did not translate to steady improvements.

  In Japan, gunpowder innovation ceased once internal conflict abated with the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate after 1600. Although late and post-Mughal India experienced incessant warfare, the high political costs of mobilization and constraints on tax collection limited sustained investment in better arms technology. The Ottoman empire relied more on cavalry (against nomads) and war galleys (in the Mediterranean) than Western European powers did, collected lower tax revenues, and encountered greater obstacles to mobilization. Only Russia gradually caught up as it imported know-how and built up the requisite infrastructure, which enabled it to join the ranks of the Great Powers.83

  In this period, Europe was unique in that all the prerequisites for sustained expansion—most notably frequent, symmetric, and financially expensive but politically less costly warfare, strong incentives to focus on gunpowder technology, and low obstacles to innovation—applied simultaneously and persistently. As a result, the price of firearms relative to food was lower in Europe than in Asia, and Europe enjoyed higher productivity growth in the military sector. These advances helped Europeans overcome resistance either by force or by recruiting allies. It certainly also helped that potential competitors—China, the Ottomans—had withdrawn from the field: yet as I have tried to show there were no compelling structural incentives for them to compete to begin with.84

  Europe’s advantages were reinforced by sectoral fragmentation. Privateering was rampant in early modern European military affairs: contractors and mercenaries played major roles. Private engagement extended to overseas ventures. It made sense because states could not reliably monitor distant operations, a constraint that was acceptable to rulers who had long been used to contracting for services and delegating authority to autonomous constituents. Moreover, windfalls such as those accruing from the conquest of the Americas would have held less appeal in large empires that offered ample opportunities for domestic rent-taking than it did for small polities.85

  None of this would have been possible had the Roman empire, or something like it, survived or returned. Abernathy captures this fundamental precondition well in his observation that “ironically, the invasions which destroyed western Eurasia’s greatest empire laid the foundation for new rounds of empire building centuries later”—but this time overseas.86

  COUNTERFACTUALS

  Did geography also have a hand in this? In chapter 8, I argued that the physical environment significantly influenced the spatial scale of state formation. It is therefore reasonable to ask whether it might also have contributed to observed regional variation in overseas commitments.

  I approach this question from two directions. First, when we look at European efforts from the late Middle Ages onward to establish more direct connections to South and East Asia—efforts that led to the takeover of the New World—we might conclude that the empires of the Middle East and South and East Asia simply did not need to launch comparable ventures not (only) because their incentive structure had been shaped by an alternative set of priorities but (also) because they were, in a very basic sense, already where the Europeans wanted to go: close to the (ecologically determined) sources of certain “exotic” goods from spices and perfumes to silk and ivory.87

  Alternatively, we may choose to emphasize more fundamental geographical idiosyncrasies. The distribution of continents and oceans made it easier for the inhabitants of coastal Western Europe to accomplish certain goals than for those of East or South Asia: to circumnavigate Africa and, above all, to cross the seas to reach the New World. The Atlantic is not nearly as wide as the Pacific, which separates China from the Americas, and South Asia is extremely remote from the western hemisphere. More specifically, the relative ease and predictability of monsoon sailing left Asian societies poorly prepared for ambitious maritime expeditions. Did plate tectonics ensure that Europe succeeded simply by luck of the draw?88

  Not quite. I hope to show that neither one of these interpretations can explain the observed outcomes. In so doing, I once again need to resort to counterfactual reasoning in order to assess the weight of geographical factors relative to the institutional ones I have already discussed at some length.

  Shortcuts

  Early exploration was indeed driven by the desire to access goods that were not produced in Europe and could be sold at profit there (such as the aforementioned exotica), or existed but were scarce and in high demand (most notably bullion). In a particularly crude counterfactual, one might relocate all these resources in great abundance to Europe itself or to neighboring regions such as North Africa or the Levant. Needless to say, this would flagrantly violate the “minimal-rewrite” rule: many of the plant products in question flourish only in tropical latitudes, and the rocks that contain gold and silver ore formed several billion years ago.

  This far-fetched scenario allows us to imagine a lack of interest in overseas exploration, likely coupled with fierce conflict over which party would control the sources of these goods. This competition might well have intensified antecedent political fragmentation, especially given that physical proximity would have made it harder for any one power to monopolize access and to leverage this preeminence into a hegemonic political position.

  A far less extreme counterfactual deserves more serious consideration: a scenario in which it was fairly easy for Europeans to access exotic resources even if they were physically remote, by relying on existing trade networks and by tweaking them to minimize intermediation costs. In this environment, the Ottoman empir
e would not block access to the Indian Ocean; Western European importers would not have to contend with rival Mediterranean networks such as Venice’s; and access to these resources would not be obstructed by conflict among warring parties within Western Europe seeking that access.

  This world, remote as it is from conditions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, did in fact exist at one point in time. The mature Roman empire imported vast quantities of luxury goods from East Africa, southern Arabia, South Asia, and China, and did so to a large extent—though by no means wholly—by sea. Imperial unity had removed the problem of competition among interested parties. All imports were routed through a single conduit, that of the empire’s border posts and internal toll stations. Private or state-directed trade swiftly distributed them throughout its entire domain.

  The empire’s reach ensured that no external challengers interfered with this process. The central authorities controlled all access points to the Mediterranean, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Egyptian ports that linked to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Iranian polities that held Mesopotamia could levy tolls on overland trade from farther east—and the prosperity of the Syrian oasis city of Palmyra attests to the value of these flows—but could be circumvented by maritime exchange, as they indeed were on a massive scale.89

  When Rome formally incorporated Egypt into its empire in 30 BCE, the region had already been an increasingly dependent client state for about a century and a half. The completion of its takeover permitted Rome to extend its influence toward the Indian Ocean. A Roman naval assault on Aden resulted in the city’s sack and destabilized the Sabean kingdom, which had long ruled western Yemen and controlled access to the Red Sea. Trade was diverted to rival ports, and the Sabean regime was soon replaced by that of the Himyarites, whose rulers, styled friends of Rome, made sure to send envoys laden with gifts—possibly tribute—to its distant emperors, and liberally exported myrrh and white marble.90