A Troublesome Inheritance

by Nicholas Wade

  There is no basis in Indian political institutions for a tyrannical state, whereas in China since the Qin, the state has always assumed the right to tell its citizens what to do. Yet China, for all its precocious modernity, never developed the rule of law, the concept that the ruler should be subject to some independent body of rules. In India, Fukuyama writes, law “did not spring from political authority as it did in China; it came from a source independent of and superior to the political ruler.”

  India did not develop the formal mechanisms contrived by European states for holding the ruler accountable to the law. But from the earliest times, the religious law was a central institution that circumscribed the power of the state. The respective institutions developed by India and China had a major role in shaping their different histories up until the present day. From the Great Wall to the Three Gorges Dam, the Chinese state has never hesitated to force costly public works on its citizens, who have no way to object or resist. In India, by contrast, the government cannot propose a new airport or factory site without facing vociferous public protest.

  In China, tribalism was suppressed by direct actions of the state; in India, by religion. The most inventive way of undermining tribalism was developed in the Islamic world by the Abbasid dynasty and brought to perfection by the Ottomans. This was the institution of military slavery, in which both the military and the bureaucratic elite of the empire were made up of slaves. A matter of possible envy to any chief executive who has tried to impose his wishes on a resistant bureaucracy, the sultan could order the execution of any slave bureaucrat, from those of the lowest ranks up to the grand vizier. The slaves, at least in principle, were forbidden to have families or, if allowed to marry, their sons were prohibited from becoming soldiers or succeeding their fathers in office.

  The strong human instinct of favoring one’s family or kin was thus thwarted. The elite slave officeholders were the empire’s aristocracy for just a generation; their children had to join the general population. As for the problem of where to acquire the slaves (Islam forbids the enslavement of Muslims), the Ottomans addressed that with the devshirme, a system in which talent spotters would visit Christian provinces, notably Serbia, and require local priests to provide a register of all boys baptized in the region. The most promising were abducted from their parents, whom they would never see again. They were then converted to Islam and trained either to become senior administrators or to join the Janissaries, an elite military group.

  As bizarre and inhuman as the institution of military slavery may seem, it shows the lengths to which a state would go in order to thwart tribalism and secure a caste of administrators responsive to the ruler’s commands. The institution was invented by the Abbasids, the Islamic dynasty that held sway in the Near East from 750 to 1258 AD, but they found it impossible to rule a far-flung empire with Arab tribal organization. It was further developed by the Ayyubid Sultans of Egypt, who created an army, the Mamluks, from slaves captured from Turkic tribes and the Caucasus. In slave armies with no nobility or kinship system, people could be promoted purely on merit. This and the commanders’ exclusive loyalty to their sultan were key to the success of the Mamluk and Janissary armies.

  The Mamluks of Egypt saved the Islamic world by defeating an invading Mongol army in 1260 at the battle of ‘Ain Jalut. But the commander of the Mamluk army, Baibars, then overthrew his master and became sultan of Egypt. The Mamluks continued to be a formidable military force for several decades, defeating three more Mongol invasions. But wealthy Mamluks then found ways to defeat the prohibition on bequeathing wealth to their descendants, and the system gradually retribalized itself. “The one-generation nobility principle worked against the basic imperatives of human biology, just as the impersonal Chinese examination system did,” Fukuyama observes. “Each Mamluk sought to protect the social position of his family and descendants.”

  The Mamluk system started to decay. Ridden by factionalism and handicapped by their disdain for the new firearms now dominating battlefields, the Mamluks were defeated by the Ottomans of Turkey in 1517.

  Military slavery served the Ottomans well and for a time made possible the continual conquests on which the economy of the state depended. But when the Ottoman expansion ceased, the Sultans first allowed the Janissaries to marry and have children and then permitted their sons to enter military service. This made the devshirme unnecessary. It also destroyed the basic purpose of the system, that of preventing the emergence of a hereditary elite. The institution began to decay, and the slow disintegration of the Ottoman state proceeded.

  The fourth major civilization on the Eurasian continent, that of Europe, developed a complex set of institutions that is more easily understood in comparison with the somewhat simpler cases of China, India and the Islamic world. A distinctive feature of European states is that, having escaped from tribalism, they then developed an institution contrived by none of the other three civilizations—that of a means for society to control a strong leader.

  There emerged in Europe the concept of the rule of law, a consensus among society and the elite that the ruler was not sovereign, the law was sovereign. Second, Europe and particularly England developed ways to hold the king accountable to the law. This structure had the virtue of allowing the ruler to be strong but subject to institutional restraint.

  The Chinese state, from the days of the Qin, was an efficient, bureaucratized autocracy. Yet to this day, China has never developed the rule of law. Its emperors, and now the Chinese politburo, make the law but are not accountable to it and do not have to obey it themselves. China can always force its people to build a Great Wall or its equivalent. But its great disadvantage as a strong state is to be defenseless against a bad emperor, of whom the most recent was Mao Tse-tung.

  A central part in the development of European institutions was played by religion. Religion, Fukuyama argues, was critical first in detribalization and second in instituting the rule of law. The essence of the tribal lineage was the descent of property through the male line. But producing a male heir under medieval conditions of short life expectancy and high infant mortality was far from a sure thing. So the tribes had various strategies for keeping wealth within the lineage. These included cousin marriage, divorce if a woman bore no heir, adoption and the levirate (marrying of widows to their husband’s brother). In addition, women were not allowed to own property.

  The church opposed all these heirship strategies, not because of anything in existing Christian doctrine but because it had a better idea: that people should leave their property to the church instead of their heirs. By the end of the 7th century, a third of the productive land in France belonged to the church. The tribes of Europe, whether Frankish, Anglo-Saxon, Slavic, Norse or Magyar, found that conversion to Christianity soon separated them from their property, robbed them of their influence and paved the way to feudalism.

  In the fragmented political conditions of medieval Europe, the church became rich and powerful but started to develop tribal or nepotistic problems of its own. Its priests became keenly interested in passing on their property and offices to their kin. Pope Gregory VII forced priests to become celibate so that their loyalty would be to the church and not to their kin.

  Gregory was also at the center of the historic confrontation between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor over investiture, the question of who had the right to appoint bishops. Gregory excommunicated Henry IV, who in turn tried to depose Gregory. But the church prevailed, forcing Henry to come to the pope’s residence at Canossa in 1077 and wait barefoot in the snow for three days to receive Gregory’s absolution.

  The church used its power to back the idea of law, first of the Justinian code, a Byzantine codification of Roman law that was rediscovered around 1070 AD, and then of canon law, the synthesis by Gratian of church laws through the centuries. Because law had the church’s authority, sanctioned by a higher power, there emerged in Europe the novel idea that the ru
ler could not rule in defiance of the law and indeed owed his position to his role in upholding the law.

  Feudal Europe was a collection of local barons installed in largely impregnable castles. Kings tended to be the first among equals and had to negotiate with others to exercise power. They were obliged to take account of the concept that the law and not the king was sovereign. They could not tax or conscript peasants because those rights belonged to the feudal lords. Nor could they seize land because of the property rights conferred by the feudal system.

  National states emerged in Europe as part of a struggle between the king, the elites and other sources of power. The kings were seldom absolute rulers. The limitation on their powers was taken furthest in England, where Parliament raised its own armies, executed Charles I and forced James II to abdicate. The English state thus constructed a system, later followed by other European countries, in which the ruler was subject to the law and in which a representative body held him accountable to it.

  “Once this package had been put together the first time,” Fukuyama writes, “it produced a state so powerful, legitimate, and favorable to economic growth that it became a model to be applied throughout the world.” 9

  Effects on Social and Individual Behavior

  From the broad sweep of Fukuyama’s analysis, a clear pattern emerges. Each of the major civilizations of Eurasia developed a characteristic set of institutions in response to its local circumstances and history. Given that institutions rest on a basis of human social behavior, and that culture feeds back into the genome, it is plausible to suppose that Chinese, Indians, Ottomans and Europeans have all adapted over the generations to their particular social conditions. Because of this evolutionary process, the four civilizations remain distinct today.

  The social institutions of the four civilizations had considerable inertia, meaning that they changed very slowly over time. Institutions that endure for many generations are strong candidates for being rooted in a genetically framed social behavior that maintains their stability. East Asian societies have a distinctive character, tending to be efficient autocracies. Singapore, for instance, endowed at independence with a cultural heritage of English political institutions, nevertheless has become a looser version of the autocratic Chinese state despite retaining the outward forms of a European one.

  A similar continuity in social behavior is evident in Africa, which has consisted largely of tribally organized societies both before and after the episode of colonial rule. European powers prepared their colonies for independence by imposing their own political institutions. But these had been developed over many centuries for the European environment. Considering the long historical process by which Europeans had rid themselves of tribalism, it is hardly surprising that African states did not become detribalized overnight. They reverted to the kind of social system to which Africans had become adapted during the previous centuries.

  In tribal systems, people very rationally look to their relatives and tribal groupings for support, not to a central government, whose usual function has been to exact taxes or military service while giving back little in return. European or American institutions cannot easily be exported to tribal societies like those of Iraq or Afghanistan because they presuppose a large measure of trust toward non-kin and are designed to operate in the public interest, not to empower the officeholder and his tribe.

  Variations in human social behavior and in the institutions that embody it have far-reaching consequences. Developmental economists long ago learned that it is not just lack of capital or resources that keeps countries poor. Billions of dollars’ worth of aid have been poured into Africa in the past half century with little impact on the standard of living. Countries like Iraq are rich in oil, but their citizens are poor. And countries with no resources, like Singapore, are rich.

  What makes societies rich or poor is to a great extent their human capital—including the nature of the people, their levels of training, the cohesiveness of their societies, and the institutions with which they are organized. As Fukuyama notes, “Poor countries are poor not because they lack resources but because they lack effective political institutions.” 10

  The same conclusion is reached in the recent book Why Nations Fail by the economist Daron Acemog˘lu and the political scientist James Robinson. “Nations fail economically because of extractive institutions,” they write, meaning institutions that allow a corrupt elite to exclude others from participating in an economy.11 Conversely, they say, “Rich nations are rich largely because they managed to develop inclusive institutions at some point during the last 300 years.” 12

  Acemog˘lu and Robinson’s theory is discussed further in the next chapter. Of relevance for the moment is that they and Fukuyama have independently concluded that institutions are central to the success and failure of human societies. Less clear is why institutions differ from one society to another. These differences became most evident during the profound shift in the structure of human societies that culminated in the Industrial Revolution.

  There have been two major steps in the evolution of human societies, both accompanied by changes in human social behavior. The first was the transition from the hunter-gatherer existence to that of settled societies. The settled societies developed agriculture but then stagnated for hundreds of generations in what is known as the Malthusian trap: each increase in productivity was followed by a growth in population, which ate up the surplus and brought the population back to the edge of starvation. The trap could not be escaped until human social nature had undergone a second major transition. Following is the case for thinking that a deep genetic change in social behavior underlay the escape from the Malthusian trap and the transition from an agrarian to a modern society.

  7

  THE RECASTING OF HUMAN NATURE

  We need to confront the most blatant fact that has persisted across centuries of social history—vast differences in productivity among peoples and the economic and other consequences of such differences.

  —THOMAS SOWELL1

  Each of the major civilizations has developed the institutions appropriate for its circumstances and survival. But these institutions, though heavily imbued with cultural traditions, rest on a bedrock of genetically shaped human behavior. And when a civilization produces a distinctive set of institutions that endures for many generations, that is the sign of a supporting suite of variations in the genes that influence human social behavior.

  Historians sometimes speak of national character, but although many might agree that the German and Japanese characters, say, differ in ways that have deeply affected their respective histories, there is less agreement on how to define the significant elements of national character. And without some objective measure, attempts to describe national character easily slip into caricature.

  How could any objective measure be found of how human nature changes over time? Surprisingly enough, such measures exist, even though they are indirect. They come from the work of economic historians, such as Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, who have documented the role of education in Jewish history, and Gregory Clark, who has reconstructed English economic and social behavior in the 600 years that preceded the Industrial Revolution.

  Figure 7.1. Real income per person in England, 1200–2000s

  FROM CLARK, FAREWELL TO ALMS

  The change brought about by the Industrial Revolution was not a visible alteration of people’s lifestyles, such as living in houses instead of the wild, but a quantum leap in society’s productivity. After stagnating for at least the five and a half centuries that can be documented, English wages started to soar in the mid-18th century, reflecting an astonishing increase in the level of productive work.

  Productivity increases may seem like something that could excite only an economist, but it made all the difference to people’s lives. Before the Industrial Revolution, almost everyone but the nobility lived a notch or two above
starvation. This subsistence-level existence was a characteristic of agrarian economies, probably from the time that agriculture was first invented.

  The reason was not lack of inventiveness: England of 1800 possessed sailing ships, firearms, printing presses and whole suites of technologies undreamed of by hunter-gatherers. But these technologies did not translate into better living standards for the average person. The reason was a catch-22 of agrarian economies that dates back probably to the beginning of agriculture.

  The catch is called the Malthusian trap because it was described by the Reverend Thomas Malthus in 1798 in his Essay on the Principle of Population. Each time productivity improved and food became more plentiful, more infants survived to maturity and the extra mouths ate up the surplus. Within a generation, everyone was back to living just above starvation level.

  This lack of progress has been documented by the economic historian Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis. Because of the existence of copious historical information in England, a country untouched by hostile invasion since 1066 (William of Orange’s invasion in 1688 was by invitation), Clark has been able to reconstruct many economic data series such as the real day wages of English farm laborers from 1200 to 1800. Wages were almost exactly the same at the end of the period as they had been 600 years earlier. They sufficed to buy a meager diet.

  But wages were not constant throughout the period. Between 1350 and 1450 they more than doubled. The cause was not some miraculous increase in productivity—it was the Black Death, which carried off some 50% of the population of Europe. In a Malthusian-trap world, plagues are a blessing, at least for the survivors. With fewer mouths to feed, everyone ate better, and with a new scarcity of labor, workers could enjoy better wages. This era of plenty lasted a century until rising population numbers closed the jaws of the Malthusian trap once again.