States and Power
Dedicated to the memory of my sister
Susan Margaret Lachmann Humphrey
States and Power
Richard Lachmann
polity
Copyright © Richard Lachmann 2010
The right of Richard Lachmann to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2010 by Polity Press
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Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 | Before States |
2 | The Origins of States |
3 | Nations and Citizens |
4 | States and Capitalist Development |
5 | Democracy, Civil Rights, and Social Benefits |
6 | State Breakdowns |
7 | The Future |
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
This is a book about power: the power to tax, the power to build public works and to deploy thousands or millions of workers, the power to make soldiers fight and die in wars, even the power to make children sit in rooms for years and listen to teachers. It is also about the power of citizens to demand services from their government and to replace a government they don’t like with a new one.
Power, as Max Weber wrote, is the ability to make others do what you want them to do and what they wouldn’t do otherwise. Parents can exercise such power over children, as can criminals with guns over passers-by, and cult leaders through force of personality over their disciples. Those sorts of power are worthy subjects, but they are not what I will discuss here. Instead, I will focus on how enormous organizations claimed ever stronger and more varied power over all the people in a territory and how subjects and citizens pushed back either to weaken that power or to exert collective counter-power against state rulers.
State power is a relatively recent human creation. Humans first appeared on Earth no more than 200,000 years ago. Agriculture, which made possible the first sedentary societies larger than a few hundred people, began 10,000 years ago. The first written records are 6,000 years old. The first empires appeared in the Middle East 5,500 years ago. Few states existed until 500 years ago. It is only in the twentieth century that virtually every territory on Earth (except for Antarctica) became an independent state, replacing the empires, city-states, tribes, and theocracies that once ruled most humans and the lands on which they lived.
All of you reading this book, and your parents, and probably your grandparents as well, have spent your entire lives as citizens of a state. Moreover, you also have spent your lives in a world in which everyone you could ever meet also is a citizen of a state (or a refugee from a state). If we want to think about states sociologically, that is, as creations of humans who both are shaped by and in turn remake the institutions in which we interact, we first must be able to envision a world in which states do not exist. That act of imagination is easy because until 500 years ago states did not exist in most of the world; indeed, had never existed. As we recover the historical world of tribes, city-states, empires, and theocracies we will be able to see states for what they are: a relatively recent European creation that simultaneously with capitalism has come to dominate the world.
Only when we see states as neither natural/inevitable nor static can we ask the critical questions that this book seeks to answer. Only when we realize that states have not always existed can we realistically analyze whether states will continue to dominate the field of power in the future and to consider which other institutions and forces actually might rival or supplant states.
Chapter 1 asks: what is a state and how does it differ from the political forms that existed until 500 years ago? In order to understand how unusually dynamic and powerful states became, we need to see why the other, long-enduring forms of power, from tribes to empires, had such limited influence on the ways in which their subjects lived, worked, and thought.
The second chapter begins by asking why Europe was the place where this new form of state power first developed and supplanted rival institutions of power. The process of state formation is a much studied and debated topic, and this chapter is where I will review the range of existing explanations and show the insights and limitations of each. My goal is not to hand out kudos and criticism to various scholars. Rather, I will mine these theories and the debates surrounding them to formulate the best synthetic explanation for the emergence of states that I can derive from our current store of historical understanding.
Once states gain monopolies on the means of coercion within their territories, they deepen the control they exert over their citizens’ bodies, minds, and property. Chapter 3 catalogues the range of capacities states have amassed over centuries. I am concerned in that chapter with explaining how states sought to achieve control in four domains: the appropriation of resources through taxation, the conscription of citizens into the military and the targeting of enemy nations’ citizens in wars, the creation of national identity among its citizens, and the development of national cultures. The timing and dimensions of state capacity in each domain were the combined products of officials’ ambitions and of citizens who variously resisted and collaborated with the state.
States dominated Europe and then the world at precisely the same time as capitalism supplanted all other modes of production. Chapter 4 looks at the role states have played in capitalist development. I begin by looking at the mercantilist strategies early modern European states adopted in varying forms, and then at post-colonial states’ attempts to develop their economies. I am concerned both with how state officials formulated policies and the extent to which they had to respond to demands from domestic capitalists, foreign powers, and popular forces within their own nations. I also consider why some developmental policies were effective and others less so, and finally why, in recent years, many states have moved away from efforts to shape their economies directly in favor of neoliberalism, and why some states have resisted that trend.
Elections and other forms of democratic politics restrain many states, their rulers, and their capitalist allies who would like to make policy without popular interference. Chapter 5 examines the reasons for the spread of democracy in a series of waves beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing to the present, and for countervailing waves of dictatorship in the decades before and after World War II. It is important to go beyond the mere existence of elections and examine the extent to which classes and other groups in civil society are able to affect state policies through electoral and non-electoral means. I do that in chapter 5 by focusing on social benefits and exploring how mass mobilization, through electoral and other means, has affected the variations in social policies over time and among nations. I explore the reasons why the United States, a leader in social benefits before World War II, has fallen far behind other wealthy nations, and why in recent decades so many nations have embraced neoliberal revisions of social benefits to a greater or lesser extent.
The growth of state power and capacity has been challenged, blocked, and reversed in some parts of the globe. Chapter 6 looks at the consequences of revolutions, colonialism, and military defeats on states, and why in recent decades some states, mainly in Africa, have become so vulnerable to disintegration.
Recently, it has appeared that state power is weakening, being displaced by the reach of multinational corporations, the anonymous workings of global financial markets, or the dictates of international organizations including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. The seventh and concluding chapter of this book assesses the future of states. I ask whether the US’s loss of economic and geopolitical dominance is inevitable, and if China or another power will replace the US as hegemon, or if the world will, for the first time in 500 years, enter an era with no hegemon. I explore how other states would be affected by a world with no hegemon, and if competition among powers would cause a world or regional wars. Finally, I consider how states will respond to environmental disaster and resource shortage, and how citizens can influence state policies under those conditions.
As I wrote this book in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the power of the state was demonstrated anew to those of us who are citizens of the United States as well as to those affected by American policies elsewhere in the world. A president, chosen by a minority of the popular vote and only after the unprecedented intervention of the US Supreme Court, quickly convinced Congress to enact the largest tax cuts in the country’s history, which had the effect of transferring hundreds of billions of dollars to the richest citizens. On the basis of fraudulent intelligence, he was able to commit the United States to an invasion of Iraq, which, by the end of his presidency, had resulted in the deaths of almost a million Iraqis. In that same decade, the United States has stood alone among the major industrialized nations in refusing to ratify or implement the Kyoto Protocol, and has used its full diplomatic weight to stymie efforts to negotiate a successor treaty to prevent global climate change. Ultimately, that decade-long delay in reducing carbon emissions almost certainly will result in more deaths than the war in Iraq. The tax cuts and Iraq war would not have occurred if the 2000 election had gone the other way, while the Bush Administration’s rejection of Kyoto merely reinforced an existing Washington consensus, reflected in a unanimous 1997 Senate resolution in opposition to that Protocol. More recently, governments around the world have intervened to counteract the effects of the 2008 financial crisis with as yet undetermined consequences for the banking, automobile and other industries, and perhaps for the distribution of wealth and power in those societies.
The United States, as we will see, is not unique in the power it exerts over its citizens, even as its power to affect world events remains unparalleled. As I finished this book in 2009, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe had just secured another term in office through a fraudulent election and open attacks on the opposition party. No other government intervened, and the citizens of that nation, despite the highest inflation and unemployment rates in the world, have not attempted to overthrow the Mugabe regime.
Citizenship remains one of the most important determinants of someone’s life chances. Stand at the US–Mexican border, at the wall dividing Israel and the Palestinian territories, or on the beaches of the European islands in the Mediterranean to see what efforts governments make to secure their borders and the risks non-citizens take to pass through those divides. Jobs, civil rights, social benefits, physical security, and even water are kept on one side of those borders. More than 30 million humans today are refugees, fleeing from one country to another in an effort to survive.
States and their futures matter because, at the outset of the twenty-first century, they remain, by far, the most significant repositories of power and resources in the world. The vast majority of violent deaths are caused by wars between states, by states’ violence against their own subjects, and by armed attempts to seize state power.
Politics is almost entirely about states. People mobilize to influence state policies, and to gain control of states through elections or with violence. Where states are weak, as in much of Africa, citizens’ life chances and life spans are drastically reduced. Every realistic plan for economic growth, for reductions in poverty, hunger, disease, and environmental degradation, and to slow or reverse global warming depends largely on initiatives that are directed by governments alone or in concert.
At the same time as recent events demonstrate state power, the importance of citizenship, and the vulnerability of state rulers to voters at some moments and their vast autonomy in other instances, a chorus of recent commentators has claimed that states and political ideologies no longer matter and that the world is flat (i.e., without meaningful borders). Nations and their governments, in this view, must submit to the inexorable dictates of technological innovation, the global economy, and universal desires for more material goods.
Francis Fukuyama (1992) claims that since the fall of the Soviet Union no ideology or political movement offers a credible challenge to liberal democracy and consumerist market economies. Communism is discredited, as are fascism and fundamentalist religion. Governments that cling to religious, socialist, or authoritarian ideologies are condemning their citizens to repression and economic backwardness. Liberal democracy, in Fukuyama’s depiction, is not a program of social reform or even a basis for collective decision-making but merely a framework to allow the pursuit of profit by corporations and consumer spending by individuals. Fukuyama’s book, which provides a veneer of Hegelian analysis to American triumphalism, merely asserts the ideological consensus around liberalism and offers no historical account or causal analysis for why competing ideologies and social systems declined in some places but not others, nor for how bastions of fundamentalism and state economies will convert to liberalism.
Political actors are almost entirely absent in Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (2005). Instead, he identifies ten “flatteners” that allow and force all individuals, firms, and states to compete in a global economy. Only one, the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a political development. The other nine are technological or organizational innovations to which all must adapt if they are to avoid bankruptcy or poverty. Like Margaret Thatcher, Friedman is convinced that “There Is No Alternative” to neoliberal market economies. He asserts that, with the demise of the Soviet Bloc, states no longer are capable of shielding themselves and their citizens from competition. State policy now can be effective only at producing educated citizens and infrastructure, the inputs that will attract investment from globalized firms.
Fukuyama and Friedman reflect, as they provide intellectual pillars for, a consensus in the United States and increasingly elsewhere. In this view, politicians are helpless to control events and so are citizens. Elections and protests are virtually meaningless. These premises justify a journalistic approach to politics that largely ignores issues and presents those who seek public office as motivated by a corrupt desire to enrich themselves or by an obsession with fame. Too much writing about politics has become gossip and biography instead of historically grounded analysis.
I have written this book in part to address the widening divergence in journalistic and academic analyses of politics. This reflects an academic’s usual disgust that thinly researched and theoretically untenable works receive such wide and respectful attention merely because they reach politically convenient conclusions. The proper response is not for academics to join the game of political posturing in the guise of public intellectuals. Rather, I hope that by offering an account of what historians and social scientists know about states, I can provide the basis for a counter-analysis to the ahistorical and confused thinking that passes for profundity in many journalistic and governmental circles. Only when we are aware of and have gained intellectual command over the existing base of historical knowledge and the techniques for analyzing states can we understand the actual choices open to officials and citizens. There are alternatives. We have the theoretical bases to figure out what those are and in that way to determine when, where, and how citizens can become public actors in the making of their political world.
Acknowledgments
One of the pleasures of writing a synthetic work like this is that it allows me to recall advice, insights, and suggestions for reading from many teachers and colleagues over decades. Their assistance is reflected throughout this book in my arguments and citations, many of which build on their own innovative work. Several friends offered specific advice on this manuscript. I am pleased to acknowledge Georgi Derluguian, who read the entire manuscript, and Denis O’Hearn and Sam Cohn, who commented on chapter 4. Jonathan Skerrett and Emma Longstaff at Polity Press guided me from proposal to finished manuscript.
1
Before States
A state is a claim and the power to make that claim a reality. States, in Weber’s ([1922] 1978: 54) definition, claim a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order,” to which Mann adds the crucial qualifier, “in a territorially demarcated area, over which it claims a monopoly of binding and permanent rule-making” (1986: 37). The key words in those phrases are “legitimate” and “monopoly.”
States are mechanisms for the definition and generation of legitimacy as well as organizations that accumulate resources to enforce those claims of legitimacy. States claim the authority to define all rights, and each individual’s rights are defined in relation to the state itself. That is a claim broader and more fundamental than those contained in either Weber or Mann’s definitions. States don’t just use violence and make rules, and they don’t just aspire to monopolies in both realms. States seek to create a social reality in which each subject’s property claims and their civil rights and liberties, including their very right to life, exist only in the context of their legal status in a particular state. Successful states have the force, the organizational reach, and the ideological hegemony to enforce those claims upon all who live within its territory.
States do not have to treat all of their subjects equally. For Carl Schmitt [1922] 1985, the state or “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” In other words, states have the power to define certain individuals or categories of people as outside the law, and certain periods of time as emergencies when normal laws don’t apply. The US Constitution explicitly defined slaves as property rather than citizens, a categorization reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in its 1856 Dred Scott decision which denied slaves the standing to bring suit in a Federal court even if they were brought by their owners or had escaped to a “free” state. Slaves were and remained the exception to US citizenship rights until the post-Civil War Constitutional Amendments. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled in Korematsu v. United States that citizens of Japanese descent could be interned. That latter decision justified the government’s racial distinction by drawing a temporal distinction between wartime emergency and normal times of peace. Giorgio Agambem, in State of Exception (2005), argues that the Third Reich was a regime that declared a state of exception, an emergency that lasted from its first day of power to its last, and which allowed the regime to legally define whole categories of citizens as without rights and deserving of extermination. More recently, Agambem finds that George W. Bush’s “war on terror” is a new attempt to establish a long-term state of emergency that allows the state to override “enemy combatants’” civil rights under the US Constitution and their rights as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Most states in their histories have declared that some times are exceptional and therefore some of their citizens fall outside the rules and rights the state confers in normal times.
States differ from all other political forms in that they assert and often achieve a monopoly on both violence and legitimacy within a territory. City-states, empires, tribes, and theocracies usually didn’t attempt to assert a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, nor on most other forms of legitimacy, and when they made such claims they were unable to enforce them. Those polities didn’t define exceptions or declare emergencies, in the sense that Schmitt and Agambem mean, because they lacked the capacity to assert regular and enduring rules that applied to all those who inhabited their realms. Indeed, the boundaries of those polities, as we shall see, were shifting and vague, and their powers and claims varied across time and space and in relation to their subjects.
States, thus, are unprecedented in their ambition and capacity to divide the world into territories each ruled by a single political entity. In order to appreciate the state’s unique identity and operation we first must examine the reality of power, and its distribution, in tribes, theocracies, city-states, and empires. Once we have done that, we will be better able to appreciate the originality and the audacity of the claims states have put forward and sought to enforce.
The Long Pre-History of Politics
Power, until around 10,000 years ago, was confined within kin groups. Beyond such extended families no human was able to exercise long-term control over others. Links between kin groups involved exchange of goods and of adults (mainly women) for reproduction. Groups attacked one another but were unable to parley victory in battle into permanent domination. Indeed, Michael Mann in his review of archeological and anthropological evidence (1986: 63–70) can find no instances in pre-literate societies where chiefs (headmen, big men, elders) were able to permanently take resources from others or to force others to work for them. Chiefs adjudicated disputes among followers and with neighboring tribes, but they could not compound that authority and prestige “into permanent, coercive power” over others (ibid.: 63), and certainly could not create institutionalized power that they could pass onto successors.
William Cronin (1983), in his sweeping study of the ecology created by the Indians who inhabited New England before the arrival of British colonists, describes how sachems (chiefs) negotiated with one another on behalf of their tribes to decide the boundaries of land that each village could use for farming and hunting. However, that land wasn’t property, and the sachems didn’t derive special material advantage through their role as representatives of their tribesmen. Although Cronin doesn’t reach this conclusion himself, his examination of the evidence makes clear that states did not exist, nor did anyone exercise power outside their kin groups, in New England prior to the arrival of Europeans.
Evidence for politics in non-literate societies anywhere is elusive at best. Anthropologists for the most part examine societies that already have been transformed by conquest, colonialism, and markets. Edmund Leach’s classic work of political anthropology, Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), analyzes an elaborate network of links among village polities in which the strategies of rulers in each locality affect the overall structure of social relations among units and thereby push the entire highland region through cycles of greater egalitarianism and hierarchy in which particular rulers achieve temporary dominance beyond their home territories. Leach’s analysis of struggles over land and office proceeds with virtually no mention of the fact that Burma had been under British control for 120 years and had just passed from Japanese occupation to renewed British rule to independence in the decade before Leach published his book. Leach’s blind spots don’t take away from the elegance of his structural analysis; indeed, they make it possible. However, they show the difficulty of turning to anthropology, which after all is a discipline that confines itself almost exclusively to the study of peoples who were colonized by Europeans and their descendents, for a realistic picture of prehistoric or pre-literate politics.
The Origins of Civilizations and Politics
Coalitions among kin groups were weak and shifting because it was possible for a family or even a larger lineage to exit from the tribe. Scale was kept small by the absence or limited nature of agriculture. Groups had to move from place to place to find food. Hunter-gatherers lacked the permanent habitations or economic surplus that would support rulers and the armed retainers who could control and coerce subjects.
The era of pre-politics and pre-history came to an end with the development of agriculture in river valleys. Irrigation, and the larger-scale agriculture it made possible, provided the bases for the first permanent and hierarchical political structures. Mann argues that irrigation mattered because it “caged” humans within river valleys. “Their local inhabitants, unlike those in the rest of the globe, were constrained to accept civilization, social stratification, and the state. They were trapped into particular social and territorial relationships, forcing them to intensify those relationships rather than evade them. This led to opportunities to develop both collective and distributive power. Civilization, social stratification and the state resulted” (1986: 75).
But what sort of power and “state” developed in these river valleys? Cities in Mesopotamia beginning 5,000 years ago were governed by leading families and at times headed by kings who were able to force subjects to build irrigation canals and walls to protect the cities in which they lived, and to serve in “a ‘citizen army’ of all free, adult males” (Mann 1986: 101). Most spectacularly, Egyptian pharaohs headed a government that controlled trade along the Nile and with neighboring peoples, using the resources gained in trade to support masses of laborers to build the Pyramids and other monuments that are the outstanding relics of the ancient world. Egypt created an army big enough to capture and control slaves, although they were a minority of the work-forces that built the Pyramids. Slaves and other forms of forced labor were even more limited in all the other ancient empires from China to the Americas.
In sum, ancient civilizations were highly limited in their forms of power. Rulers usually were coordinators of leading families. Even autocrats who claimed divinity, as in Egypt, had limited power, and their monuments were artifacts of their capacity to coordinate and control trade far more than the fruits of conquest and coercion. Most subjects, even those who lived a few kilometers from the “capital,” carried on their lives in extended kin groups that were aware of their ostensible rulers mainly through their involvement in trade networks, when they participated in religious rituals at central temples, or when armed men came and looted their goods or took away captives. Rulers mattered to their subjects mainly for what they took, and had little impact otherwise. Most power and legitimacy remained within kin groups.1
For these reasons, Weber ([1922] 1978: 1006–69) was justified in describing patrimonialism as the main form of power in the world prior to the advent of capitalism and states. To the extent that rulers were seen as legitimate rather than just violent wielders of power whom subjects must obey or evade, it was because they called upon traditions of paternal authority and extended family links to justify their control over both kin and unrelated retainers. Households expanded to include followers as well as relatives. Just as a patriarch could duplicate and transfer his authority to sons, allowing them to rule wives and children as their father had done, so too could a chief, manor lord, pope, or monarch grant “benefices” to followers, allowing them to claim authority and income rights over underlings. In return, the patrimonial benefice-granter claimed a share of the benefice’s income and offered varying, though generally highly limited, help in pacifying the land and people ruled by the follower.
Weber equates benefice-holders with the ruler’s staff, but rulers in fact exerted only limited control over followers with benefices. The benefices which rulers offered to entice retainers into service then “made the officials…practically irremovable…The officials who had legally or factually appropriated the benefices could very effectively curtail the ruler’s governmental power, above all they could vitiate any attempt at rationalizing the administration through the introduction of a well-disciplined bureaucracy and preserve the traditionalist stereotyped separation of political powers” (Weber [1922] 1978: 1038).
Patrimonialism was a highly decentralized form of authority. Rulers’ control over their staffs was less consistent and less intrusive than that of the heads of government in the states we will examine in subsequent chapters. Less revenue flowed up from benefice-holders to patrimonial rulers than from taxpayers to states, and rulers were only able to demand limited military or administrative service from their staffs.
Rulers, thus, could extend their authority in two sorts of ways. One was to grant benefices to followers, which empowered and entrenched those officeholders as much as it did their patron. Such a strategy of extended patrimonialism could expand the nominal reach of a kingdom or church but did not deepen control over subjects. The other was to use violence to extract resources and obedience. The limits of that strategy, or of a combination of both techniques, will become apparent in the next section.
The Limits of Ancient Power: The Roman Empire
We can best understand the limits of power in the ancient world by focusing on the Roman Empire, which was the most successful political entity of the ancient world, rather than attempt a vast or schematic survey of all empires.2 By understanding how Rome formed an empire, what that empire accomplished, and why after its demise it left only a limited impression on its former dominions, we can comprehend how empires differ from and lack the transformative capacity of states. As we will see, the Roman and other ancient empires relied mainly on armed force to exert power, and so in studying the limits of Roman power we will be able to gain a sense of the limits of organized violence as a means of control.
At the same time, it is important to distinguish between ancient and modern empires and to be careful of taking lessons from Rome and applying them to the empires created in the past 500 years. The latter were formed by nation-states, existed in a capitalist world, and therefore had much greater capacities than their ancient counterparts. That is why works that attempt to offer a general model of empires, most notably S. N. Eisenstadt’s The Political Systems of Empires (1963), conflate radically different systems of political control, albeit ones with the same label, and as a result are unable to explain the dynamics of imperial formation and decline in the modern world. Max Weber didn’t fall into that error. He recognized that politics in the modern era of capitalism, rational action, and nation-states operated very differently from all that came before. We need to understand the Roman Empire on its own terms, and to refrain from translating its dynamics into later millennia. The Roman Empire offers lessons about political actors’ limited reach in the ancient world. We will need to analyze the empires of the past 500 years separately to understand what empires in conjunction with capitalism and modern technologies can accomplish.
Rome, like all other ancient empires, created its dominion through violence. Roman armies, like all those anywhere in the world until a few centuries ago, faced severe logistical limits in waging campaigns more than few days’ march from home. Their capacities for transporting provisions were highly limited, especially at sites not directly accessible by ships from sea. Animals, like humans, ate more in a week than they could carry. As a result, armies had to feed themselves and their animals by pillaging farms and urban storehouses as they fought. This restricted war and conquest to settled agricultural areas with surpluses capable of producing enough food to support both the farmers and the marauding troops. If an area produced too little food, then military seizures would cause the local population to starve and the area wouldn’t yield a surplus for tribute in future years. That is why the boundaries of the Roman Empire ended at the sparsely populated Germanic woodlands in the northeast and at the desert south of its African territories. Similarly, deserts surrounded the Chinese Empire. Once armies had ventured more than a few days from home, they and their animals ran out of the food they had brought along and had to plunder their way forward or back home.
Rome did not surmount the technological limitations faced by ancient empires. However, through organizational and political innovations it built and sustained a vast empire for more than half a millennium, from roughly 100 BC to 400 AD. During that era China was beset by civil wars, conflicts between rival kingdoms, and periods of severe decentralization as local elites and landlords appropriated virtually the entire surplus for themselves, leaving little to flow to the center (Scheidel 2009). The best indicator of the Empire’s capacity to funnel resources to the capital was Rome’s population, which reached a peak of one million in 100 AD, and sustained that level for more than 200 years. During those centuries Rome had more than twice the population of the largest Chinese city, even though the nominal boundaries of the Roman and Han Chinese Empires contained almost the same number of people and amount of land. Neither Chang’an nor Luoyang, the two cities that alternated as the Chinese imperial capital, topped 500,000 inhabitants until 500 AD, the first time a Chinese city was the largest in the world since 1,000 years earlier (Modelski 2003: 39–56, 219). China became the largest and most prosperous polity in the world only with the consolidation of the Tang Empire in 618 AD.
My purpose is not to rank empires, and pass out a gold medal to Rome and a silver to the Han. Rather, what is at issue is the extent to which any ancient empire could exert control over conquered peoples and extract resources from them and deliver those resources to the capital. In fact, the Roman and Chinese Empires faced the same limits and pursued similar strategies to overcome these, albeit with more success on the part of the Romans.
Julius Caesar famously wrote, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” to which he, and all other ancient generals, could have accurately added, “I looted, I left.” In search of food to survive and more booty to bring home, armies kept marching on, sometimes for years and thousands of kilometers. What distinguishes Caesar and the other Roman conquerors is what they left behind after their conquests, which was much more than any other ancient empire-builders: roads, garrisons, and a universal language and culture that bound the elites of the conquered lands to the empire politically and socially.
The army was the Romans’ key institution, as it was of all other ancient empires. The highest officials of the Roman Republic and, in later centuries, the emperors came largely from the military. The army was the institution that ensured the territories remained conquered, that tribute flowed to Rome, and that wealthy citizens of the empire were able to exploit and trade with the provinces. Because the Roman army was different from all other ancient military forces, its empire was more substantial too, but as we shall see it remained limited in crucial aspects and ultimately was destroyed. To understand the dynamic of Rome we must first analyze its military’s innovations and effect on Roman politics.
The Roman Republic’s army was a citizen army. That meant Roman soldiers maintained their loyalty to Rome because they expected to return home after they completed their military service, and therefore opposed any effort by their generals to establish breakaway kingdoms in the territories they controlled. Conquering generals had to maintain their loyalty to Rome to ensure that their soldiers remained loyal to them. To be sure, the number of Roman soldiers who remained in each territory was small. Rome always depended largely on local elites to administer each locality and province. Then how did a few Romans, far from home, keep local elites and the masses of farmers and townspeople pacified? Two factors were paramount: terror and trade.
The Romans did not stint in their use of violence. Indeed, they managed to hold territories in part because their use of extreme violence created memories of terror that served to keep defeated populations subservient long after their conquest. Most spectacularly, the crucifixion of 6,000 rebellious slaves after the defeat of Spartacus in 71 BC ensured that the Roman Empire never again had to face a major slave uprising. Terrorism worked.
Trade bound Roman generals and administrators as well as local elites to the empire. Trade was facilitated by one of the great Roman innovations: its use of the army to construct roads, fortifications, and provincial capitals. As a result, the Roman Empire was far better integrated than any other ancient empire. Local elites in each province came to have an interest in maintaining their locales’ allegiance to the empire since that gave them access to investment, trade, and luxury goods produced in Rome. Similarly, ease of trade allowed Roman military commanders and administrators to profit on a continuing basis from their positions. Local elites as well as Romans got richer inside the empire than they would have outside.
Economic and political ties across the empire were further reinforced by legal and linguistic commonalities. Rome created a system of civil and property law that was the same throughout the empire.3 Roman law provided local elites a source of protection for their accumulated wealth, as well as ease in selling property or conveying it to heirs, giving them a compelling reason to maintain loyalty to the empire. Law thus joined trade and the threat of military terror to bind provincial and Roman elites together, dampening the centrifugal forces that induced civil wars, rebellions, and decentralization that verged on autonomy in other ancient empires, including those of China. Commercial and legal integration were deepened as they fostered linguistic and cultural cohesion across the empire. All elites – but only the elites – Roman and provincial, spoke and read Latin and received similar educations that focused on Latin language, rhetoric, and literature (Mann 1986: 313–17).
The only other empire that created a greater degree of cultural integration was China, with its uniform written characters (which coexisted with significant regional differences in oral language), and then with Confucianism which was the basis for the tests that selected government officials and thus of the schools in which the sons of wealthy parents prepared for the tests that selected the next generation of officials. Even though China achieved cultural integration under the Han (contemporary with the Romans), the Han and their successors were unable to maintain control over provincial officials or the landed gentry to the extent that the Romans did, largely because the Chinese imperial armies were less centralized than the Romans and China lacked a uniform legal system of property and civil law. Roman imperial cohesion, thus, was the product of multiple factors, while Chinese cultural-religious unity was undermined until the Tang dynasty by gentry autonomy, which fostered economic autarky, which, in turn, created incentives for local officials to collaborate with the gentry in withholding resources from the imperial court.
Eisenstadt (1963) argues that imperial power in all empires depended on the creation of what he labels “free-floating resources,” i.e., resources not tied to local institutions. The Roman legal system made the property of local elites and the loot of army officers into genuine private property, the ultimate free-floating resource. Confucianism made the education of wealthy Chinese into a resource that could be converted, through competitive exams, into income-producing offices anywhere in the empire. However, office was not as fungible as Roman property and China remained a collection of autonomous locales held together only lightly and episodically by dynastic regimes until the Tang created a more centralized military, governmental administration, and economy similar to what the Romans had achieved 600 years earlier.
The Roman Empire, then, was better integrated, commercially and culturally, than any of its ancient contemporaries. Yet we should not exaggerate the cohesiveness or efficiency of even this largest and most capable of ancient empires. The greatest challenge to the Roman Empire, as it was to all other ancient empires and, as we will see later in this chapter, to feudal monarchies as well, was its lack of bureaucratic or other mechanisms for directly controlling territories. The Roman Empire had few administrators and, even with universal Latin literacy among elites throughout the empire and the most advanced system of roads in the ancient world, communications between provincial administrators and the capital was slow and uneven. The army, therefore, was the main organ of administration. Each legion took responsibility for ensuring that its subject territory didn’t rebel and also that it paid tribute to Rome.
The organizational and logistical limits to Roman geopolitical cohesion were further constricted by internal contradictions in the empire’s system of conquest and control. Imperial cohesion was confined to the army and to the administrative and commercial elites, so their interrelations and dynamics were the key to the fate of the empire. Rome was undone by political conflicts among the ruling elites that manifested themselves in fiscal crises and vulnerability to internal rebellions and barbarian invasions.
Rome’s military was transformed by its imperial success. As the empire grew in size, ever more legions were needed to maintain Roman rule. At the same time, the potential supply of citizen-soldiers shrank. Slaves brought to the Italian heartland and agricultural products imported from the provinces undercut peasant farmers. Roman smallholders were driven into bankruptcy and then could no longer afford, nor were they obligated, to serve in the military. Many flocked to Rome to live off the dole; others entered the military but as mercenaries rather than citizen-soldiers. Mercenary forces, as we will see in later eras as well, allow rulers far more autonomy than when they have to depend on citizen-soldiers. As long as the Senate and then the emperors could come up with enough cash, mercenaries – whether or not they were citizens – could be kept fighting and loyal to the empire without the political concessions that citizen-soldiers demanded.
Fiscal crises undermined and eventually destroyed the Roman Republic and later weakened the empire. Rome’s budget grew, as it had to field ever more legions to control its expanding territories. The only surviving budget figures, from Emperor Augustus’s reign at the beginning of the first century, show 70 percent of spending went to the military and an additional 15 percent for the “dole,” the food subsidies and entertainments needed to keep the growing number of landless and unemployed plebeians in Rome loyal to their rulers (Mann 1986: 273). That left little to pay imperial officials or for public works. As the military pressures on the empire became worse, even more of the budget went to the armed forces. When a government has little money to pay officials, they support themselves through corruption, weakening central control. The main solution to fiscal crises was to make the legions self-financing by allowing generals to keep war booty and provincial tribute in return for paying and supplying mercenaries. When money runs short and troops don’t get paid regularly, they support themselves through shakedowns, and, when times become even more desperate, looting. As the Senate lost control of military payrolls, they also lost control of the armies themselves and of their generals, resulting in the series of coups that marked the imperial centuries.
The Roman imperial government had no way to solve its fiscal crisis. To increase revenues would have required a larger and more honest bureaucracy, and the ongoing fiscal crisis ensured that the money needed for such reforms would never be found. Even if the money had been there, provincial governors, generals, and their mercenaries had become so closely tied to local elites that they no longer had a motive to divert local resources (which the Romans and local elites shared) to the center. The empire’s common language and culture, which once bound local elites to the center, now facilitated the melding of Romans and locals at the provincial level, and eventually within each town and small region.
Local elites’ ability to withdraw resources from the imperial administration further reduced the Romans’ weak influence on their empire’s overall economy and limited the amount of trading profits as well as tribute that flowed to the capital for Romans’ consumption and for military ventures. Trade, as far as we can measure it with the few records that have survived, stopped growing in the second century. Slaves – which were both a major source of saleable capital for generals and a crucial source of labor for public and private construction, and to operate the great plantations that increasingly supplied food to the capital – began to decline in number at the same time. The real, but limited, stimulus which imperial trade gave to both Italy and the provinces was reversed as the flow of tribute and slaves declined.
As Rome became starved of resources, emperors, generals, and Senators turned on one another and the masses became restive whenever the dole was reduced. The weakened empire, then, was easily shattered and overrun by barbarians in the fourth century.
The fall of the Roman Empire revealed the limits of its, or indeed of any ancient empire’s, capacity to transform social, economic, or political relations in its conquered territories. Class relations and the ways in which farmers and tradespeople carried out their work changed little in the centuries of Roman domination. Technological innovation under the Romans was slight. The list of inventions under the various Chinese Empires is longer, as Joseph Needham documents in his magnificent multi-volume, Science and Civilization in China (1954–2004), but still progress was slow in China and there are many centuries in which there were virtually no advances in farming, engineering, or science in either empire (Goldstone 2008: 136–44). Most of the inventions in both the Roman and Chinese Empires affected mainly urban elites. Little changed in how farmers farmed, builders built, physicians doctored, or most people thought about themselves and their physical and moral worlds during the long centuries and millennia of Roman and Chinese imperial rule.
Nor did techniques of power change much in those empires and, as a result, central control remained shallow. Empires were built on violence, meted out by mercenaries or citizen-soldiers. The former were limited by an empire’s ability to raise funds, which was meager at best, and always in danger of declining. Citizenship was limited in number, and empires created flows of slaves and booty that undermined the economic independence of citizens, reducing that supply of soldiers. All empires relied on local elites, whether warlords, landlords, or priests. The relationship between local elites and the imperium was one of tribute and nominal allegiance won through military violence with the added benefits for local elites of protection from external and popular threats and the enticement of trade.