Assessment 10 out of 10
This is a wonderful book, but not an easy read. It reflects deep and wide reading and is a long history of political & territorial structures.
Throughout Schiedel puts forward counterfactuals. Effectively what was the minimum change to result in a different outcome. He also suggests secondary counterfactuals. If the minimum change had occurred, how would actors have reacted? A post Roman world without Christianity he thinks was highly possible. What would the late Roman church have looked like without Constantine’s unexpected embrace? What if there hadn’t been a Rome at all? It was unique, so many conditions had to come together for it to succeed and, if these were unlikely, which they were, it was unlikely to be repeated.
European polycentralism is compared to Chinese persistent empires. Scheidel argues fragmentation and competition was a condition of European development, the Fall of the Roman Empire leading to experimentsm, without which the Great Escape, modernisation, would not have happened.
Imperial rule was indirect often relying on vassals, losing local control to local elites or warlords. Model Empires varied with periods of deconcentration, shortest in China, then the Middle East, then South Asia. Empires result from an interplay of an effective core and a periphery susceptible to domination.
City States Greek Poleis (more than a thousand) difficult to scale up (popular assemblies, even if oligarchic, limited the size of expansion.) Instead they expanded by alliances. If leagues survived long enough, they might become unitary states eg Switzerland and the Netherlands. Metropolitan City States settled Greek & Phoenician colonies. Late medieval Venice, Florence & Milan shifted towards unitary States turning former rivals into subordinates. Athensand Carthage created peripheral layers of control and cooperation preserving existing institutions.Symmachia a League of Polies, the Delian League, Spartan League, Ionian League, were Confederations (each with sovereignty) rather than Federations. Greek Poleis extended across Southern Italy, Sicily, Greece and Ionia to Pontus.
Federations of city states in the Low Countries and Italy were able to defeat larger powers, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. Both lacked a core from which to dominate the periphery. Madrid was established as the Spanish capital in 1561, because it was central. Before that the court circulated and Madrid was perhaps Spain’s 10th biggest city.
Political & Military Networks (PMN) emerged in the Middle East around 500 BCE covering Egypt, the Fertile Crescent & Anatolia, by 500 BCE it had expanded to include Greece, the Black Sea, Iran and the Indus Valley, but with limited incursions westwards eg Athenians towards Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War.
Then a smaller Central Mediterranean PMN appeared based on C5 BCE conflict between Syracuse and Carthage, C3 conflict between Rome & Carthage and between Rome & Syracuse, Rome kept out of conflict with more complex polities while it scaled up..By mid C3 BCE the Roman war machine was so dominant, the only creditable source of failure was internal conflict.
Rome emerged as the largest city state in Latium bordering the equally large Etruscan city states. By 264 BCE Rome had concluded 150 treaties with other polities in the Peninsular. Allied Latin city states were forbidden from forming official relations with one another. Rome scaled up military contributions without investing in extensive government structures. Roman conscription was a form of taxation, rewarded with pillage, including distribution of seized land, leading to formation of centres of Roman loyalty & promotion of continuous warfare and continuous expansion.
Rome defines War making States and States making War. Civil governance was restricted to the metropolitan core. Elsewhere civil government was through regional centres, the less well-off serving in the army were replaced in the fields by slaves taken in war, Rome becoming the greatest slave society in world history. The four sources of power were closely bundled, political, religious, economic and military in the ruling class. Temple construction was associated with military expansion. Citizenship was more widely granted by Rome than in Greece, but power was restricted to the oligarchic elite. Militarism pervaded the elite with annual elections to offices. Between 490 & 264 BCE Rome’s population increased 100 times, a central Roman core dividing Allies to North and South. For 425 years Rome was at war 90% of the time Rome kept on expanding but except for Egypt, and for their metals Dacia & Spain the provinces were a burden. Peter Heather “the ancient world order in western Eurasia [was} a dominant Mediterranean lording it over an underdeveloped northern hinterland”. After Rome never again would a dominant core face off much weaker territories.
Civil war between aristocratic rivals in ist century BCE led to short term divisions between East and West, but military mobilisation limited to the Italy always ensured who would be the eventual winner, leading to reunification of the Roman state. As the mass mobilisation at the core eroded then the Roman Empire turned into a more usual imperial structure but in the meantime it was very large for a very long time with 80% of Europe’s population and monopoly power in the Mediterranean and slow State emergence on its peripheries. No other Empire was such a long way from the Steppe margins, Roman circumstances so unusual they were unlikely to reappear.
Most of the territory where the Roman West had collapsed was held between five successor States, Ostrogoths, Franks, Visigoths and Vandals who each retained some of the infrastructure of Empire. More marginal areas, Britain, Brittany, North West Iberia and the West Maghreb fissioned into smaller scale polities.
Rome facilitated territorial organisation within its Empire, allowing a laissez faire attitude to language and local laws leading to the Empire ultimately shearing along that axis. In Byzantium and Russia State and religion overlapped. In the Latin west they did not.
Conquest regimes Greek citizens were used to war augmented by mercenaries. Between 274 and 101 BCE the Seleucids & Ptolemies fought 9 wars for control of the Levant, The” Syrian Wars”. This spurred state formation and honed military capability but it was interspersed with near collapses. Both relied on approximately. 36,000 heavy infantry & cavalry, Cleruchs, military settlers, augmented by 15,000 mercenaries. Rome expanded against Macedonia during the 5th of the Syrian wars. Roman armies were cheaper based on conscription than the costs of the more developed Hellenistic forces which strategically were less effective.
Lightening Arab advance is compared to the slow Roman expansion based on internal strength. Arab conquest light imperial expansion resulted in an Empire light. Taxes went to pay local forces including descendants of the original conquerors not to the Caliph in Damascus. Stipends paid to 250/300,00 but only a small fraction were actually mobilised. The Umayyad caliphate covered 80% of the population of the Middle East and North Africa, the same proportion as the Achaemenids had ruled in less populous times and as Rome had ruled amongst Europeans. However by 900 it had split into 9 major and some smaller polities.
Post Roman Europe.
The Breakup of Frankish power led to a shift of the Holy Roman Empire to the east. Ottonian and Salian emperors eager to balance obstreperous princes transferred crown lands to the church. The balance between bishoprics, abbeys and princely domains kept an inherently weak Empire in being, as all benefitted from its continuance.
By 1000 there was nothing like a state anywhere in Latin Europe. Aristocratic and church power expanded at the expense of the peasantry. In the High Middle Ages larger territorial states appeared in Hungary, Denmark and Poland-Lithuania but Germany and northern Italy at the central core of Europe remained divided into fractured polities. This wasn’t imperial conquest but decentralised initiatives, aristocratic diaspora of castle building, knights followed by farmers and burghers. It wasn’t core and periphery expansion but replication of western European circumstances, towns, churches and noble estates, expansion of state level polities providing checks to imperial ventures that otherwise might have been launched.
The lack of a significant external threat between the defeat of the Magyars in 955 and the appearance of the Mongols in 1241 meant there was little pressure to centralise. Fiefs became hereditary, castles were built. They constituted a barrier to the Mongols who returned to Central Asia, but they had also come to the limit of grasslands that supported their large numbers of horses. Europe survived, as it was a long way from the steppes.
The First Great Divergence. Scheidel considers up to the middle of the first Millenium the similarity between Rome & Qin/ Han China but from then there was the 1st Great Divergence with a succession of Empires expanding & contracting around a similar Chinese core with a penumbra of polities, Korea, Japan & Vietnam, around it, quite different from European polycentrisim.
“Germanic” settlers, who were farmers already, wanted land and were different from steppe invaders who preferred continuation of tax systems as the source of tribute to produce grain & labour. The aim of steppe people in 4th & 5th Centuries CE China focused on capturing people not land with forcible mass transfers of Han to core areas of regime control. The critical difference Individual & group allotments to Germanic warriors led to state deformation & localism. Contrast this with the greater emphasis on taxation & centralised provision in conquest regimes of northern China where cavalry and the availability of horses were greater. The steppe provided new challengers putting a premium on scaling up military capability.
Strongly fragmented regions experienced higher urban growth in the middle ages. Membership of estates widened, faced with growing fiscal pressures to fund war. The strip of territory, the fault line of successive Carolingian partitions, the zone of self-governing city states. In France estates bargaining with rulers over taxation met more frequently in smaller provinces.
Significance of the steppes Steppe effect Egypt occupied by the Hyksos, from the Levant who may have introduced horses, chariots and the composite bow. Large empires concentrated in East and Central Asia, the Middle East and Egypt were dependent on proximity and links to the steppe. South Asia whilst quite distant from the grasslands was connected to it through river basins & shrublands now on the borders of Iran & Afghanistan. Steppe populations formed confederations to organise manpower to benefit from adjacent sedentary societies by trade, plunder, raiding & extracting tribute. Access to goods buttressed central authority enabling leaders to reward followers leading to shadow empires. They lacked the tax capability of primary empires they shadowed or mirrored the empires in relation to which they developed. Middle East regimes employed and then came to be ruled by Turkic horsemen.
From the mid 1st millenium CE steppe forces were used to restore political order. Empires & Shadow Empires developed in parallel. When China united so did the steppe. Steppe inhabitants always wanted resources from the sedentary zone, the potential grew with imperial unity. Large State formation was encouraged on either side of the ecological divide There was a huge discrepancy in populations. In the early C20 12m people compared to 500m. Men & women grew up riding and hunting, to horsemanship and mounted archery. Steppe armies enjoyed great mobility as the grasslands allowed each fighter to draw on multiple horses for riding & carrying supplies.
Within China unification came from the north which was more influenced by steppe contact. There was a persistent frontier of sedentary agriculture and steppe but whose location varied with climatic variation. Control of the shifting marginal border zone Manchuria. was critical. If held by steppe groups it facilitated southward attack. If held by China it provided horses for the military and a buffer region for garrisons.
Only in Eastern Europe was there interaction with the steppe community The size and low population of what became Russia had much in common with sparsely settled steppe empires. In the rest of Europe both elements of the steppe effect were absent and so after Rome was empire building. Critical to steppe intervention in South Asia were horses supplied through the Oxus & Afghanistan. The largest Iranian empires the Achaemenids and Sassanians were established and maintained in symbiotic relation to equestrian Medes, Parthians, Huns and Turks.
Empire builders first sought plunder then land revenue neglecting commercial development. India’s Muslim overlords remained detached from their subjects, the Mughal regime run to benefit a tiny conquest elite. Asian Empires faced a disproportionate threat of internal revolt given the size of their populations. Ottoman officials and Mughals prioritised provisioning the capital and military. teading to the grant of trading privileges by Mughals to foreigners.
China and Europe compared
European commercial development was encouraged by the need to support warfare. In China from 1400 there was a long period of peace except on the Steppe margin so artillery and navies were not developed
In China, cities had less autonomy than in Europe. Commercial and civil law codes were absent. Property rights meant legal processes were determined by status. Repeated imperial restorations were the result of a tight web of vested interests of officials and elite leading to continuity in state and society. Each time China was divided entrepreneurship flourished.
Policy could be adopted and reversed in response to volatile power struggles at the monopolistic centre, The tradition was of agrarian paternalism the State’s objective favouring free peasantry, agriculture & physiocratic (rural based) government. Monopoly decisions favouring and then forbidding sea travel led to covert trading in conjunction with local landowners, so traders depended on patronage. Merchants were subordinates unlike in Europe where they were partners of the state. Repeated relocation of capital cities led to reduced cumulative urban growth.
The Quing was a conquest regime, a change of Chinese Dynasty on average every 300 years, the end of the Dynasty marked by peasant revolts.
In Europe there was doctrinal & Intellectual persecutions but oppressors were relatively weak and there were exit options and internal divisions. In China the weight of imperial power muted conflict, intellectuals accepting imperial control leading to the potential for disruption and a lack of diversity.
Small marginal polities explored, Greeks, Phoenicians, Norse, Polynesians, Madagascar settled from what is now Indonesia. Hegemonic Empires including Rome did not. The Chinese only did so with unsuccessful attacks on Annam (Vietnam), Japan & Java under the Mongols who were “ not yet Socialised to accept the ideal of stable self-contained empire”. Their expansion into the steppe to the NW of China quite different.European competing states and cquasi-corporate bodies contrasted with imperial courts which could turn on and off any interest in maritime expansion. Industrial take off came from competitive fragmentation lead to the emergence of modernity.In China respect for the classics slowed down scientific and technological development , In England technical information was widely available, patents important in protecting & making available IP. In France engineering knowledge was the State’s. In Britain it was linked to commercial exploitation. The State contributed little to scientific and technological progress but didn’t obstruct it leading to the enhanced position of the bourgeoisie. England from late C13 prohibited the export of wool leading to development of new draperies based on the Low Country example, Coal was 2% of world energy in 1700 20% in 1850 70% provided by Britain.
Rome made modernisation possible by going away and never coming back. It provided a long period of peace and unequal conflict. It cancelled the Nabateans and traded with India in spices etc. It trended to survival with low tax revenues going to the centre and high seepage similar to China. Its aim was social stability. Any Technological breakthrough came from the Hellenistic East.
In Medieval Europe there was pervasive erosion of central authority. There were innovations chartered communes, universities , guilds and parliaments. Public debt was pioneered by the Italian city states. Byzantium granted trade concessions to Genoa and Venice followed in the C13 by their take over of trade . Byzantium is an example of what Rome might have become the Emperor controlling the church, a pattern repeated in Russia .
Divisive Church conflicts with the “German” Holy Roman Empire. Europe combined political fragmentation with cultural unity. Legacies from Rome, Latin and the Church, with a Church driven revival of antique Latin.
This is a long and detailed book and a quick conclusion isn’t easy. Like Scheidel’s other great tome, The Great Leveller, it provides a lens with which to view World History.
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