by Ian Morris
Ashoka set up “officers of dhamma” in the cities and countryside, charged with implementing a battery of new laws. He sent out inspectors to check on his officers’ success and followed up with personal tours. As in Rome, what Hobbes would later call “commonwealth by acquisition” and “commonwealth by institution” apparently went together, and Ashoka learned that “legislation has been less effective, and persuasion more so.” But the bottom line, he concluded, was that “since [dhamma had been instituted], evil among men has diminished in the world. Among those who have suffered it has disappeared, and there is joy and peace in the whole world.”
Once again, what we really need is proper statistics on violent death in ancient India to set alongside these sources, and once again, none exist. Nor, in this case, is the archaeology very helpful. Few graves of any kind are known, so we cannot tell whether people went on seeing weapons as a normal part of male fashion. Fortifications spread along the Ganges Valley in the sixth century B.C., suggesting that fighting was increasing. In the Roman Empire, most cities let their walls decay once the initial wars of conquest were over, but in India fortifications remained normal throughout the life of the Mauryan Empire. Why remains an open question. Possibly the Mauryan Empire was less settled than the Roman, or possibly its brief life (created around 320 B.C., it fell apart after a coup in 185 B.C.) meant that its cities did not have time to outgrow walls that had become redundant. Without more excavations, we cannot know.
The agreements among Kautilya, Megasthenes, and Ashoka, combined with the general similarities between the rule of law in India and China, make me suspect that the Mauryan Empire, like the Han and the Roman, made its subjects safer. But while this question must for the moment remain open, there is less room for debate over the fact that all three empires made their subjects richer.
In China, texts and archaeology agree that economic life intensified as states became larger. Canals, irrigation ditches, wells, fertilizer, and oxen became common sights in the fields. Iron tools proliferated. Coinage spread from city to city, and traders shipped wheat, rice, and luxury goods to wherever they fetched the best price. Governments slashed customs duties and invested in roads and harbors. From the mighty capital of Chang’an with its half a million residents down to the humblest village, Han-era markets bustled with rich and poor, selling what they could produce cheaply and buying what they could not. Philosophers worried over whether it was right for merchants to get quite so wealthy.
Chinese archaeologists have not (yet) quantified enough data to produce a Chinese equivalent of Figure 1.4, charting rising living standards. But since 2003, excavations at the little village of Sanyangzhuang have been providing the next best thing.
One day in A.D. 11, the levees broke along the Yellow River. The rain must have been coming down in sheets for days, and floods had been reported upriver, but the farmers of Sanyangzhuang apparently kept on working the fine, fertile soil and hoping for the best. It is hard to tell, two thousand years on, what would have been the first sign of catastrophe. Perhaps it was a dull, distant roar as the dikes collapsed and billions of gallons of brown water surged through. Most likely, though, the rain pounding on their tile roofs drowned that out. Only, I suspect, when muddy water started oozing under their doors would the awful truth have dawned: this was not just a storm anymore. The unthinkable had happened. Dropping everything, the farmers ran for their lives. Their village had stood on this spot for a thousand years, but within a few hours it was gone.
Archaeology is a ghoulish profession. It has turned the tragedy of A.D. 11 into a scientific triumph, uncovering a Han village so perfectly preserved that journalists have labeled it “the Chinese Pompeii.” Meticulously separating the mud carried in by the flood from the mud that fills any normal village, excavators have exposed the imprints left by bare feet and iron-shod hooves as villagers and horses fled across the plowed fields.
Gripping stuff, but archaeologists tend to get even more excited about the humdrum remains of what the farmers left behind than about the human drama. These Han villagers lived in sturdy, mud-brick houses strikingly like those found four thousand miles to the west, in the Roman Empire. The tile roofs were very similar in both empires, as was the impressive quantity and variety of iron tools and well-made pottery.
Naturally, there were differences too. Careful excavation at Sanyangzhuang has recovered impressions on mud from the mulberry leaves used to feed silkworms, a resource Romans would have loved to have had. In the 70s A.D., the learned but curmudgeonly Roman geographer Pliny grumbled that fine ladies were squandering millions of sesterces on filmy Chinese silk so they could flaunt their charms in public. But on the whole, the finds at Sanyangzhuang are remarkably like those from Roman villages, or even Pompeii itself.
Our evidence from India is again less full but again points the same way. Like the Han and Romans, the Mauryans standardized weights and measures, minted coins on a huge scale, clarified commercial law, built roads, and helped villagers clear new lands. They also promoted trade guilds, which played important parts in commercial life.
India struck the Greek ambassador Megasthenes as a prosperous place, and archaeology bears him out. The subcontinent has yielded no Pompeii or Sanyangzhuang, and the biggest samples of Mauryan housing are still those excavated at Taxila and Bhita in the days of the British Raj. But despite the deplorable standards of these digs (out-of-date even in their own era), they still produced enough information to show that third-century-B.C. houses were bigger, more comfortable, and better furnished than earlier ones. Like Han and Roman houses, they had brick walls and tile roofs, with several rooms clustered around a courtyard. Most had wells, drains, kitchens with ovens, and storerooms.
The bad news (for archaeologists) is that there were no tragedies here, and the occupants had time to clear out their houses when they left. The good news, though, is that Mauryans were messy people. They left behind enough fragments of broken pottery, kitchen implements, iron tools, and even a little jewelry to show that they were much better-off than earlier Indians.
Greek and Roman visitors to India found much to astonish them (talking parrots! boa constrictors! and, of course, elephants!), but what impressed them most was the sheer scale of the trade that grew up between the Mediterranean and the subcontinent after about 200 B.C. “In no year,” Pliny wrote, “does India drain less than 550 million sesterces [enough to feed a million people for a year] out of our empire, giving back in exchange her own goods—which are sold among us for fully a hundred times what they cost!”
Pliny’s arithmetic cannot be right, because his numbers would mean that a few thousand merchants realized profits of 55 billion sesterces, which was nearly three times as much as the entire Roman Empire’s annual output. Many classicists therefore suspect that there has been a copying error and that Pliny originally wrote that the trade with India was worth 50 million sesterces, not 550 million. Recent discoveries suggest that 50 million sesterces, while still a staggering sum, may be about right. In 1980, the Austrian National Library acquired a papyrus scroll looted from a Roman site in Egypt, dating around A.D. 150. When studied, it turned out to describe the financial arrangements for a ship returning to Egypt from Muziris in India. The ivory, fine cloth, and perfume in the ship’s hold was valued (in Roman prices) at nearly 8 million sesterces—enough to feed more than fifteen thousand people for twelve months. Rome taxed these imports at 25 percent; five hundred such shipments would have covered the entire empire’s annual military budget.
We have not yet found written records at the Indian end of the chain, but in 2007 excavations began at Muziris (modern Pattanam in Kerala), and the first four seasons of digging generated more Roman wine containers than are known from any other site outside the empire. India was clearly a prosperous place.
In Rome, China, and India, then, it seems that large empires were making people safer and wealthier in the late first millennium B.C. In Parthia, there was a large but apparently rather less safe emp
ire; in Mesoamerica and the Andes, smaller states that were perhaps less safe still; and beyond this band of latitudes, roughly 20 to 35 degrees north of the equator in the Old World and 15 degrees south to 20 degrees north in the New, were tiny societies where rates of violent death probably remained in the 10–20 percent range.
What explains this pattern? Why was it only people within these lucky latitudes who started getting to Denmark, and why did some of them get so much farther along the path than others?
The Cage
Another map will help us answer this new question. Figure 2.3 shows the same ancient empires as Figure 2.2 but with some extra details added. The areas marked in gray show the agricultural heartlands where humans first invented farming, in the years between about 10,000 and 5000 B.C. The beginning of farming was one of the two or three real turning points in human history, and I described it in some detail in my book Why the West Rules—for Now; I return to it here, though, because of the coincidence between the places where farming began and the places where ancient empires appeared several thousand years later. The reason that war gave birth to Leviathan in these lucky latitudes, while life outside them remained as poor, nasty, and brutish as ever, is that farming made war productive.
Figure 2.3. Farmers and fighters: the lucky latitudes
The story begins about nine thousand years before the Persians and Greeks fought at Plataea, when the world began warming up after the last spasm of the Ice Age.2 Plants and animals, including humans, reproduced madly. At the coldest point in the Ice Age, twenty thousand years ago, there had been barely half a million people on earth; ten thousand years later, there were ten million.
Then as now, global warming affected every part of the planet but affected some parts more than others. What made the lucky latitudes lucky was that in this part of the world, climate and ecology conspired to favor the evolution of large-grained grasses and big, meaty mammals. The hunting and gathering were better here than anywhere else on earth, and of the ten million people in the world of 8000 B.C. more than half lived in the lucky latitudes.
During the ice ages, humans had spent their time in tiny bands of foragers, but even before the Ice Age had completely finished, the pickings were so good in some parts of the lucky latitudes (particularly, it seems, the Jordan Valley) that people settled in permanent villages, feeding year-round from the newly abundant food sources. As they did so, a remarkable thing happened. By cultivating and tending plants and animals, humans unconsciously exerted selective pressures that modified these food sources’ genetic structures. This process—domestication3—happened first in the lucky latitudes, because they had by far the densest concentrations of potentially domesticable plants and animals on earth.
Jared Diamond makes the point well in his classic study Guns, Germs, and Steel. The world, Diamond observes, has roughly 200,000 species of plants, but humans can only eat about 2,000 of these, and only about 200 have much genetic potential for domestication. Of the 56 plants with edible seeds weighing at least ten milligrams, 50 originally grew wild in the lucky latitudes, and just 6 in the whole of the rest of the planet. Of the fourteen species of mammals weighing over a hundred pounds that humans domesticated before twentieth-century science kicked in, nine were natives of the lucky latitudes.
No surprise, then, that domestication began in the lucky latitudes, nor that within the lucky latitudes it appeared first in southwest Asia, which had the densest concentrations of potential domesticates of all. The first signs of this process (the appearance of unnaturally large seeds and animals, which archaeologists usually call “cultivation”) show up in the Hilly Flanks between 9500 and 9000 B.C., and full-blown domestication is evident by 7500.
What we now call China had high concentrations of domesticable plants and animals too, but not as high as the Hilly Flanks. Between the Yellow and the Yangzi Rivers rice was being cultivated by 7500 B.C. and domesticated by 5500. Millet and pigs followed over the next millennium. In Pakistan, barley, wheat, sheep, and goats were cultivated and then domesticated on roughly the same schedule. Squash, peanuts, and teosinte (the ancestor of corn) were being cultivated in Mexico by 6500 and had been domesticated by 3250, and quinoa, llamas, and alpacas in Peru by 6500 and 2750 (Table 2.1, on page 88). The fit between the density of potential domesticates and the date at which domestication began is almost perfect.
Domestication was a long, drawn-out process, and with every passing year a little bit more of the wild was planted and a few more fields were weeded, hoed, plowed, watered, and fertilized. Farming had its costs—farmers typically worked more than foragers and ate more monotonous, less healthy diets—but it had one huge attraction: it produced much more food from an acre of land. As the food supply grew, humans in the lucky latitudes did what every animal does in such circumstances, turning the extra calories into more of themselves, and the lucky latitudes began looking more and more peculiar. In the rest of the world, wandering hunter-gatherers were spread thinly across the land, typically at densities of less than one person per square mile. By the first millennium B.C., however, some parts of the lucky latitudes had hundreds of farmers packed into every square mile.
The population explosion set off cascades of unintended consequences. One was that farming spread: as the best land in the original agricultural cores filled up, farmers boldly went where no peasant had gone before, seeking out fertile fields beyond the horizon. Within four thousand years prehistoric frontiersmen had vaulted from the westernmost core of domestication in the Hilly Flanks as far as the Atlantic coast of France, and from the easternmost core between the Yellow and Yangzi River valleys as far as Borneo.
Another unintended consequence was that as agriculture pushed up population densities, people found more reasons to fight. This was not, however, because farming itself directly caused more war; from Helen of Troy to the War of Jenkins’s Ear,4 men have contrived to kill each other over almost anything that can be imagined, with property, prestige, and women taking the top places on the list. But cramming more bodies into the same landscapes (rather like cramming more lab rats into the same cage) simply meant there were more people to fall out with and more to fall out over.
The consequence of crowding that matters most for the story in this book, though, was what defeat began to mean for fighting farmers. Gradually, over the course of millennia, it became clear that losing a conflict in a settled, crowded agricultural landscape was a very different proposition from losing one in a fluid, fairly empty landscape of foragers.
Take, for instance, the story of ≠Gau,5 a San hunter in the Kalahari Desert. Sometime in the 1920s or ’30s, ≠Gau fell out with another hunter, Debe, over bush food. ≠Gau, a hothead, speared Debe, killing him. Debe’s angry family then attacked ≠Gau, but in the struggle that followed, ≠Gau killed again, shooting a man in the back with a poisoned arrow. Realizing he had gone too far, “≠Gau grabbed his people and left the area” (the words of another San, telling the story in the 1950s). A posse pursued ≠Gau, but after a skirmish that cost three more lives, the San storyteller said, “≠Gau and his group ran away.” Among hunters and gatherers, when the going got tough, the tough simply got going. So long as there was room to keep moving, no one could make ≠Gau pay for his crimes. (≠Gau ultimately came to a fittingly violent end, speared through the heart by a young man from his own group.)
How different the fate of farmers who lose fights. In 58 B.C., Julius Caesar tells us, a farming tribe called the Helvetii abandoned their home in what is now Switzerland and migrated into Gaul to find better land. Gaul, as they knew, was full; all the good farmland had been settled long ago. But the Helvetii did not care. They would simply take what they wanted, beginning with the lands of the Aedui tribe.
What were the Aedui to do? One option was to sit out the storm and hope for the best, but the best was not looking good. As soon as the Helvetii arrived, Caesar says, the Aedui found “their earth scorched, their children enslaved, and their towns stormed.” The fruits of doing
nothing promised to be death, ruin, and bondage.
A second option was to fight back, but given that “the Helvetii exceed the other Gauls in ferocity, because they are embroiled in almost daily battles with the Germans” (Caesar’s words again), many Aedui found that an alarming prospect. The necessary experience and organization, they felt, could not simply be plucked out of thin air. Others among the Aedui, though, were very keen on fighting. A certain Dumnorix (“highly audacious, extremely influential … and ambitious for revolution,” says Caesar; he sounds like a Gallic version of ≠Gau) had raised a private force of horsemen. He planned to use the crisis to overthrow the ineffective Aeduan aristocracy and make himself king, turning the Aedui into a regional power.
A third possibility, the one the Aedui actually chose, was to put themselves under the protection of powerful friends. This, however, was anything but straightforward. To most Aeduans, the obvious friend was Caesar, the newly appointed governor of the neighboring Roman province. Dumnorix, however, was playing a double game; far from reorganizing Aeduan society to fight off the Helvetii, he actually planned to put the Aedui under Helvetian protection. The Helvetii would then help him become king, and together the two tribes would dominate Gaul and keep Rome out.
The one option the Aedui did not have was to run away and start over, like ≠Gau and his people in the Kalahari Desert. ≠Gau’s band had relatively little to lose by decamping, but the Aedui would lose everything. Farmhouses, fields, and stored food would be forfeited; generations’ worth of ditch-digging, well-sinking, terrace-building, and brush-clearing would be wiped away. And where, in any case, would they go? They were surrounded by other farming groups—Boii, Arverni, Allobroges—and if the Aedui moved, they would find themselves in just the same position as the Helvetii, attacking another tribe to steal its land.