Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  These options are often considered crucial. David Landes calls fragmentation “the strongest brake on willful, oppressive behavior,” and Eric Jones notes that even in the absence of political “voice,” exit options ensured a measure of leverage over rulers: “Latent competition between states remained a minimal guarantee that the difference between an empire and the European states system would not slide into merely that between one big despotism and a lot of little despotisms.” Formal models, meanwhile, focus on the economic consequences, showing that high mobility of capital within a state system can be expected to lower the rate of expropriation and increase economic growth.45

  From this perspective, states competed to attract and retain the most attractive constituents and were incentivized to do so by providing public goods such as order and adjudication. That in practice, historical regimes frequently failed to behave in this manner—consider repeated expulsions of Jews and measures against Protestants—does not detract from the principle: after all, the states that most consistently met these standards eventually reaped the greatest benefits.46

  Fragmentation of powers also protected property rights. Lords secured them by privatizing their assets and guarding them by force. Later, urban communes and corporate bodies were able to protect property rights through commerce-friendly local governance and their ability to resist predation by rulers.

  This security encouraged investment in immobile labor-saving capital goods such as water mills, windmills, and cranes. From the Early Middle Ages to the early modern period, the use of such installations expanded in Western Europe but not in the Middle East. In the latter region, prebendal assets were never similarly well privatized or protected, and the advent of Turkic and Mamluk conquest regimes increased the odds of arbitrary confiscation.47

  The impact of political fragmentation on trade varied. Even though one might reasonably suspect more intense polycentrism to have raised transaction costs, the opposite could also be the case. The presence of multiple autonomous polities along the same trade route did in fact harm exchange by prompting serial predation. At the same time, interroute fragmentation that enabled traders to choose among “multiple politically independent routes” lowered tariffs. In the end, whatever the costs of fragmentation in terms of lives and treasure, it reliably opened up room for choice and bargaining.48

  Medieval Foundations of Modern Development

  By 1000, Latin Europe had, in Michael Mann’s words, turned into “a multiple acephalous federation” that lacked a dominant center and was composed of complex interaction networks. None of the four principal sources of social power was unitary, and most social relationships were highly localized.49

  Political power, formally vested in rulers, had de facto largely devolved upon regional and local nobles and bodies. Military power was widely dispersed among knights in their castles. Ideological power resided with a church whose growing centralization and political appetites faced ever-stronger counterpressure from dissidents. Economic power had first been captured by rural lords and then become increasingly concentrated among commercial elites, most notably in autonomous cities and city-states.50

  Different legal traditions existed side by side: canon, urban, feudal, and manorial law, complemented by the rediscovery of Roman law. This variety showed rules to be the product of evolution rather than of an immutable order: consequently, conflicts and inconsistencies were to be resolved through debate rather than fiat. In this, the fragmented legal system reflected the fragmented power system overall. Power became constitutionalized and thereby subject to negotiation between different types of powerholders: at the very top—between emperor and pope—as well as at less exalted levels, those of nobles, bishops, cities, and guilds. Outcomes trended toward compromise: between state and church regarding investiture, between rulers and taxed regarding procedure and objectives, and between rulers and communes regarding their respective rights and obligations.

  In practice, of course, even the most solidly hegemonic imperial regimes had always had to accept limitations on the centralized exercise of power and to delegate much of it to local elites. The principal difference between this acquiescence and developments in medieval Latin Europe lay in the fact that the latter cumulatively rendered power constitutionalized, openly negotiable, and formally partible all at once. These attributes stand in stark contrast to the lack of constitutionality, ubiquity of implicit bargaining, and informal partitioning of power that was typical of conventional empires where limited infrastructural capacity rather than institutional checks acted as the principal constraint on the spasmodic exercise of despotic power.51

  As state power recoalesced in Latin Europe, it did so restrained by the peculiar institutional evolution and attendant entitlements and liberties that this acutely fractured environment had engendered and that—not for want of rulers’ trying—could not be fully undone. These powerful medieval legacies nurtured the growth of a more “organic” version of the state—as opposed to the traditional imperial “capstone” state—in close engagement with organized representatives of civil society.52

  The small-scale nature of politics that revolved around lordship and cities that had become widely dominant by the eleventh century required processes of rebuilding state capacity to be based on the same cellular units: for a while, as local collective power, concentrated in assemblies, emerged in response to reassertions of royal power, both grew in tandem.

  Integration that arose from negotiation between interest groups needed to be supported from below, an approach uncommon among the imperial conquest regimes that continued to rise and fall in other parts of the Old World.53

  By the end of the Middle Ages, this mode of integration had brought about increased public discussion of the political, marked by greater intensity of critiques and analysis that focused on the public good and the costs of policies. The need to obtain consent for taxation (and legislation) helped create a public sphere with more capacity for organized dissent. Assemblies, church councils, and more elaborate legal systems at once contributed to and were a manifestation of this trend. As Chris Wickham concludes, the combination of local cellular politics, rising literacy, economic growth, and a newly intrusive state (which in turn was made possible by taxation, literacy, and the economy) supported political systems “which allowed engagement.”54

  Pathways differed: political coherence could be forged by autocratic and rich kings (such as in France) or arise from well-organized internal decision-making and legal structure (as, in different ways, in Italy and England). This variation was crucial: even as medieval institutional adaptations came under pressure and frequently eroded in favor of more centralized and authoritarian forms of government, persistent interstate polycentrism preserved them better in some places than in others. This diversity was of critical importance for economic and human development over the long run. Hegemonic empire was the antithesis that never came to pass.55

  “In Almost the Furthest Limit of the World”

  The formation of political institutions in Britain illustrates the range of variation of outcomes in medieval Europe: traits that were widely shared across much of the continent, such as assembly politics and aristocratic power, were significantly mediated by regionally specific conditions that prevented state deformation on the scale observed in France, Germany, and Italy. Given that Britain was to play a leading role in triggering the “Great Escape,” its particular trajectory merits special attention—as does the question of whether this trajectory’s arc bent toward these later breakthroughs.

  In the fifth century CE, the Roman order collapsed more spectacularly in Britain than it did anywhere else in the former western provinces: Roman-style urbanism and hierarchies effectively disappeared. The resultant absence of large post-Roman kingdoms paved the ground for more cooperative forms of government.56

  Germanic infiltration contributed to a mix of small-scale conquest regimes and indigenous communities. It took England’s Anglo-Saxon warlords several cen
turies to rebuild state structures from the bottom up. In the sixth century, the region was divided among dozens of small polities. Consolidation gathered pace in the eighth and ninth centuries driven by the growth of the kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex and above all by conflict with Danish settlers.

  The rising Anglo-Saxon polities came to be organized around burhs (boroughs), fortified positions that grew into centers of royal power and nodes of extraction. Shires, which already existed in embryonic form in eighth-century Wessex, spread as that kingdom expanded. By the turn of the millennium, they had become the normal form of territorial organization: as administrative units for managing conscription and taxation, they built up communities of landowners who convened to settle disputes, witness sales, publish wills, distribute tax liabilities, and raise levies. Smaller subdivisions (the hundreds or wapentakes) hosted more frequent judicial meetings that brought locals in contact with state authority.57

  These gatherings revolved around the witan, the “wise men.” At the local level, they directed the proceedings, which could attract large numbers well beyond elite circles. Kings convened grander meetings of witan for the entire realm. These witenagemots generated diplomas, charters, and laws; settled disputes; and conducted various other kinds of business ranging from royal “elections” and coronations to senior ecclesiastical appointments, treaties, and decisions about war and peace.

  No mere councils tasked with advising rulers, they were essential to the performance of government, providing a forum for producing consent via two-way interactions. If the witan could not meet, much of the business of government was put on hold. This as well as the regularity of elite attendance demonstrates that king and notables relied on each other. The strong emphasis on decisions made by the “king and his witan” reflects the collective nature of their decision-making. This interdependence did not simply serve as a check on royal power but also enhanced royal authority by being constitutive of it: “Kingship was not so much limited as enabled by assemblies.”58

  By the tenth century, levels of attendance were already comparable to those for thirteenth-century Parliament. Legislation remained part of the witenagemot’s writ even as analogous prerogatives were dying out in France and Germany. The conciliar tradition likewise survived the Norman takeover. Initially, as the new conquest elite found itself detached from its subjects by language and culture, assemblies were reduced to gatherings of magnates who could no longer claim to represent the local commons. Before long, however, this ruling class became better integrated once it was forced to assume obligations for taxpayers: this created new connections that brought nobles and other stakeholders together, and a shared English identity gradually emerged.

  By the early thirteenth century, the previous notion that the royal assemblies were meant to represent the entire free population had been reestablished. Newly confrontational politics were the main driving force. Rulers’ ambitions to exercise power freely clashed with their need for military funding. The link between taxation and conciliar consent proved to be crucial: after 1215 taxes could not be gathered without the latter. Legislative powers were restored to Parliament at the end of the thirteenth century. Participation in assembly politics once again broadened as knights of the shire—the lowest rung of nobility—joined in, paving the way for the politicized gentry of later centuries. The growing volume of petitions and claims for redress afforded kings a larger audience and made certain the lower orders were heard.

  To be sure, the shift toward formalized fiscal bargaining negotiation and the social widening of assembly politics were part of broader European trends. Yet England stood out in a number of ways. Its size made it less difficult than in larger states to convene comprehensive councils on a regular basis. There were no entrenched regional power blocs. Counties (the erstwhile shires) rather than cities served as the primary constituent units, ensuring that the rural gentry were strongly represented in the political process. More generally, sustained involvement of local elite members in their double capacity of community leaders and royal agents forged closer ties between different social strata and the central state.

  Unlike in France, nobles did not enjoy personal exemptions from public obligations. This increased the value of corporate consent, which favored rules that provided for the sharing of benefits and burdens. Insofar as power was derived from conciliar politics rather than personal access to the ruler, the nobility had a strong incentive to be actively involved in policymaking. The lack of noble privileges that were common on the continent—from tax exemptions to claims to private warfare and high justice—prevented ruptures within the elite and fostered commonalities of interest among nobles, bishops, barons, and knights that were expressed and negotiated in the shared forum of Parliament. As magnates entered alliances with lesser landowners, England precociously became a community of taxpayers whose national assembly reflected “so close an enmeshment of central authority and local action.”

  Resting as it did on a broader base than that of the privileged estates that typically made up the assemblies of continental Europe’s territorial states, the strength of allied representatives not only compelled monarchs to share power in the key domains of taxation and legislation but also contrived to curb both royal power and aristocratic patrimonialism at the same time. This was a distinctive outcome rooted in the severity of the post-Roman collapse and the precocious rebuilding of political unity.

  By contrast, the successor states of the Roman empire in continental Europe had started out as relatively powerful kingdoms. Once central authority declined, takeover by powerful aristocracies cemented the dominance of patrimonial practices. Later, when state rulers strove to reassert and centralize power, they often drew on Roman political and legal traditions in order to reduce their dependence on compromises with their estates. In the English case, neither of these processes played out in quite the same way.59

  The timing of the onset of sustained interstate competition also mattered. In polities where it commenced on a significant scale before the fifteenth century, rulers were routinely compelled to make concessions to key constituents so as to obtain administrative and financial resources and human capital at a time when these were still in relatively short supply. England, long exposed to Danish and Norman aggressors and later engaged in a grandiose military venture in France (the Hundred Years’ War), squarely fell into that category. This exposure to military pressures promoted communal involvement in the pursuit of shared interests. Elsewhere, delays in the intensification of serious conflict allowed rulers to benefit from greater affluence and literacy, making it less challenging for them to set up administrative apparatuses and apply greater bureaucratic control.60

  Two features were thus critical: strong local government and its routinized integration into polity-wide institutions, which constrained both despotic power and aristocratic autonomy, and sustained interstate conflict. Both were direct consequences of the fading of late Roman institutions and the competitive polycentrism born of the failure of hegemonic empire. And both were particularly prominent in medieval England: the least Roman of Western Europe’s former Roman provinces, it experienced what with the benefit of hindsight turned out to be the most propitious initial conditions for future transformative development.

  But in all of this we are dealing with differences in degree, not in kind: medieval England was merely one among a family of cases that shared historically unusual characteristics. Inclusive and participatory institutions had evolved all over Latin Europe. By shaping state formation across a large area, they helped forestall the reemergence of hegemonic empire that might have absorbed England or any of its peers. Radically transformative processes in later centuries owed as much to transnational characteristics as they did to any particular outlier: outliers could only survive in a sufficiently sympathetic environment.

  TOWARD TAKEOFF

  War

  Throughout the early modern period, Europe was riven by war. The major powers were involved in warfare in
more than 90 percent of the years of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in 80 percent of the years in the eighteenth century. One survey counts 443 wars in Europe between 1500 and 1800, or one and a half per year, compared to an annual mean of 0.2 in China from 1350 to 1800. Another database of 856 conflict events in Western Europe from 1000 to 1800, mostly battles and sieges, shows a rising trend in the early modern period that peaked in the eighteenth century.61

  Why was war so common? Philip Hoffman has developed a “tournament model” of warfare in which great efforts were made to capture a prize but hostilities were not overly destructive for belligerents, especially for their leadership. Enduring polycentrism was an essential precondition, as was the persistence of martial tastes that I already mentioned.

  More importantly, Hoffman’s model seeks to explain the progressive character of European warfare: that by channeling ever more resources into warfare, this competition sustained innovation in weapons technology and public organization. For war to have that effect, it had to be common and desirable (by promising glory, territorial gain, and commercial advantage); fixed costs had to be low (military infrastructure was already in place, beginning with medieval castles and knights, which represented a huge sunk cost); variable costs had to be similar (allowing efficient smaller parties to balance larger ones that found it harder to raise revenue); conditions had to be conducive to investment in modern technologies such as firearms and in navies (which was ensured by sufficient distance from the steppe and the coastal articulation of much of Europe); and obstacles to innovation had to be low (which was all but guaranteed by the relative openness of European polities and ease of transnational diffusion).