Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  It is telling that “despite China’s integration into global trade networks, movement toward an industrial revolution was almost wholly absent before the twentieth century.” Elite groups to whom vital tasks had traditionally been delegated could not be expected to mobilize sufficient material and human resources for industrialization even when the Qing and later the Chinese Republic underwent generations of “national humiliation.” Effective responses to the growing pressures that arose in the nineteenth century would have required a systematic overhaul that was incompatible with existing elite entrenchment. Thus, belated state initiatives from the 1860s onward failed to harness adequate support from the private sector and were hobbled by predation by local powerholders.208

  Powerful and opportunistically uncooperative elites were a defining characteristic of the capstone state, which had reached its most mature form in hegemonic tributary empires. Absent credible, symmetric competition, “China’s rulers were not constantly benchmarking their empire.” Nor were the rulers of similar empires.209

  Beyond China

  In modern scholarship, political economy has long been assigned a central role in accounting for developmental outcomes, not least with respect to economic innovation: when we compare early modern Europe and late imperial China, “the key reasons for economic divergence were political.” As Bin Wong notes, even though it was ultimately macro-inventions that made European modern economic growth possible, they did not arise in a vacuum: rather, they needed to mesh well with capitalist institutions to transform the economy. Thus, “the Industrial Revolution fit within European economic institutions more effectively than Chinese ones,” given that the former “sought competition and growth” whereas the latter “aimed for … static efficiency.” As a result, as we just saw, the late imperial Chinese economy “lacked the range of financial markets, business organizations, and resource bases created by commercial capitalism supported by European states bent upon making themselves stronger and wealthier than their competitors.”210

  These outcomes were by no means limited to imperial China. While some features, such as the Confucian inflection of governance, were indeed specific to its elite culture, others were widely shared among mature traditional empires, most notably relatively low state capacity and emphasis on maintenance of the status quo.

  Size as such may have acted as a significant constraint on development. Internal diversity and logistical obstacles put large empires under continual strain. This alone would have helped encourage conservative policies aimed at preservation. As John Hall explains, “Pre-industrial empires are too centralized for their logistical capacity, and thus have produced capstone government based on their accurate knowledge that secondary organizations are dangerous.”211

  Such polities might simply have been “too big and too diverse to be efficient” or to develop into developmental states. Comparative review suggests that the often huge empires that formed in the “exposed zone” bordering the great Eurasian steppe were less able to sustain progressive centralization than were states in the “protected zone.” Population size rather than territory was the critical variable: unlike Chinese or Indian empires, Russia found it easier to manage its relatively modest population, which was strongly concentrated in the western and southwestern parts of its growing empire.212

  Spatially extensive integration may also have been an impediment to intensive economic development. At first blush, it would seem to have been advantageous for imperial China to enjoy a free-trade zone the size of Western Europe, whereas war and protectionism imposed heavy costs on the latter. Yet historically, initial takeoff only occurred in modestly sized countries such as the Netherlands or Britain. The latter’s export-driven expansion of its textile industry, for example, would have had a much lesser impact on a more populous country. In a polity as large as China, innovation was unlikely to be as concentrated, and thus as consequential, as in Europe.213

  Moreover, at least in the Chinese case, that kind of transformative regional concentration was itself antithetical to the preservation of imperial stability. Whereas the parties to the European state system strove to amass resources at the expense of their rivals, an overarching policy goal of China’s imperial government was to avoid stark imbalances. Systematic exploitation of peripheries was not an option.214

  In theory, other imperial regimes might have been less concerned about such issues. Consideration of their properties at the same level of resolution as for China would require a much longer survey than is feasible here. But luckily for us, broad trends offer a convenient shortcut. After the end of antiquity, the largest Old World regions that hosted traditional empires, the Middle East and South Asia, came to share a characteristic that decisively interfered with developmental politics along European lines. They increasingly succumbed to foreign conquest regimes of steppe extraction: in the Middle East from the seventh century onward, and in India from the eleventh.215

  These irruptions imposed two massive constraints. One was that iterative empire, however ephemeral it might sometimes have been, effectively prevented the formation of a stable competitive state system in which beneficial institutional adaptations could have been selected for and their cumulative gains preserved.216

  In the Middle East, fragmentation, which was most pronounced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, invariably gave way to reconsolidation under Turkic or Mongol rule. It is difficult to judge whether medieval Indian polities could have evolved toward more sustained polycentrism had they been given more time to do so. Their prospects were rather poor: indigenous regional empires of the post-Gupta period—Chalukya, Rashtrakuta, Pratihara, Pala, and Chola—although they could endure for centuries, were not particularly stable and fluctuated in size and power. In the end, of course, Islamic conquest regimes thwarted further political stabilization.217

  The second constraint was that strong military rule, which became the norm across most of these regions, did not leave enough space for the kind of institution-building and state-society bargaining that occurred in medieval and early modern Europe. If anything, sultanistic tendencies grew over time: whereas the caliphate had sought accommodation with established civilian elites, Turkic and Mongol conquest regimes kept a greater distance. India’s Muslim overlords remained (even) more detached from their subjects than earlier indigenous rulers had been. The Mughal regime in particular was principally run for the benefit of a tiny conquest elite that imposed heavy taxes on the peasantry.218

  The dominance of Mamluk armies precluded the “productively adversarial relationship between rulers and local elites” that prevailed in Latin Europe, where feudalism, communalism, and other institutionalized forces restrained the executive and generated political stability. Even as the survival of earlier imperial fiscal and administrative structures (discussed in chapter 7) funded military services, the ensuing dominance of an often ethnically, culturally, and legally detached military caste diminished the bargaining power of gentry elites during the same period when the latter’s peers became more powerful in Europe. The result was a perennial conquest society: in Patricia Crone’s pithy conclusion, “Politics … remained the domain of the barbarians.”219

  Intellectual traditions reflected and reinforced this split between an alien militarized state and civil society. Contestation of despotism under the first caliphs had given way to its acceptance as fait accompli. Political power was regarded as indivisible—something to be delegated but not shared. Moreover, the canonical premise that social order and morality could only emanate from divine revelation militated against any notions that humans might be able to devise and opportunistically adjust their own codes. Political thought was more concerned with religion than with statecraft per se.220

  Other attributes resembled those of late imperial China. Thus, although Mughal nominal tax rates were very high, it is unclear to what extent they translated to effective revenue for the central authorities, especially as collection always remained highly decentralized. The Ottoma
ns encountered growing collection problems, and the share of income that reached the center declined: only in the nineteenth century did rising competitive pressures (caused by military defeats) induce effective reform. Mughal rule, by contrast, failed altogether.221

  Compared to European polities, large Asian empires faced a disproportionate threat of internal rebellion. They traded off fiscal capacity for appeasement of local ruling groups, a compromise that left them with lower per capita revenue. Not only late imperial China but also the Ottoman and Mughal empires consequently lacked the European system of taxes and public debt that “promoted the development of institutions for financial intermediation and better-regulated supply of money for the economy at large.”222

  Likewise, Middle Eastern and South Asian merchants were just as institutionally marginalized as their Chinese counterparts. The Ottoman authorities prioritized the provisioning of the capital and the military, forcing merchants into an unequal relationship to ensure this objective, which overrode any desire to protect their own commercial constituents: “While European states focused on production and protection for local enterprises and workers, Ottoman officialdom was concerned with consumption and the adequacy of supplies of goods at the right price without regard to their place of origin.” Following the same logic, the Mughals even granted trade privileges to (European) foreigners.223

  The violent disruptions associated with building far-flung empires also dampened development. Northern China suffered from repeated invasions, even if the actual scale of demographic contractions may be impossible to ascertain. Except for the Black Death and, in Germany, the Thirty Years’ War, Europe did not experience similarly massive downturns. Huge population losses have traditionally—if hyperbolically—been ascribed to Mongol campaigning, and serial Islamic invasions caused considerable damage to northern India.224

  This mattered not least because technological knowledge could decline in the wake of demographic attrition: thus, societies in the “exposed zone” of the Old World were more susceptible to “interruptions in cumulative innovation.” In South Asia, empire-builders’ takeovers first sought plunder and then land revenue while neglecting the development of commercial resources. Moreover, the repeated relocation of political and commercial centers as a result of top-down decision-making or imperial transitions interfered with long-term cumulative growth.225

  In addition to these relatively straightforward consequences of imperial rule, more indirect influences also inhibited economic progress. In Islamic societies, unincorporated trusts (waqf) were increasingly set up to ensure funding for services that was sheltered from state interference. Compared to European self-governing corporations, these endowments were less flexible in their objectives: their purpose, once established, could not easily be altered, not even by their founders. Their main appeal lay in their ability to shield assets from confiscation by serving as sacred wealth shelters. This made sense in the context of latent predatory threats but would have mattered less in societies in which state power was more effectively contained, as it often was in Latin Europe. The retardative economic impact of Islamic trusts was thus a function of state power: whereas medieval European rulers were too weak to block corporations, the early caliphates lacked serious challengers and later sultanates were generally capable of resorting to arbitrary coercion.226

  It also made a difference that Islam had been closely tied up with early state formation whereas Christianity had emerged within a settled empire. This left rulers of early Islamic polities with less political influence in bargaining and in greater need of legitimation by a religious elite that favored restrictions detrimental to economic development, such as usury laws and, much later, bans on printing. While this accommodation dates back to the first caliphate, later conquest regimes became even more dependent on the religious establishment as they distanced themselves from civilian wealth and administrative elites. As we will see in chapter 12, this process also impeded intellectual innovation. Overall, it was a corollary of imperial rule and its relative detachment from civil society, which stood in growing contrast to European trends in state formation.227

  Very broadly speaking, the Middle East and South and East Asia suffered from a dearth of productive polycentrism within—of bargaining processes and compromises that would have fostered innovation-sustaining institutions—and of enduring polycentrism without, which would have selected for competitiveness-enhancing adaptations. Thus, both serial imperiogenesis and key characteristics of imperial rule converged in producing long-term outcomes that were increasingly different from those we observe in Latin Europe. As I note in the Epilogue, much the same had already been true of the Roman empire itself: this was emphatically not a question of “East” versus “West,” but of different modes of state formation.228

  In term of outcomes, the association between multiple polycentrisms and modernizing development is clearly documented: historically, the latter only arose in the context of the former. In this chapter, I have gathered elements of an explanation as to why this was so. Yet institutions could only provide a framework and did not on their own generate transformative change. They may well have been necessary but were never sufficient. I now turn to two other vital ingredients: access to commercial opportunities and material resources, and the intellectual foundations and practical application of technological innovation. As we will see, state formation and the configuration of the sources of social power exerted just as much influence on these factors as on the institutional landscape.

  CHAPTER 11

  New Worlds

  CONSUMING THE WORLD

  A Globalist Perspective

  LOOKING AT THE domestic attributes of European societies and their affinities to modernizing development, and at how these compare to other parts of the world, as I did in the previous chapter, is only one way of probing the origins of the (Second) Great Divergence and the Great Escape. Europe also stood out in other respects—most notably, for its ever-widening reach. After violently inserting themselves into Asian maritime trade flows and conquering the Americas, Europeans relentlessly turned their home region into a global hub of exchange and manufacturing. The most heavily involved part of Europe, centered on the North Sea, was also the first one to experience modern economic growth and transformative change. At first sight, at least, the correlation between globalization and modernity is strong.

  European intervention gradually refashioned relationships of production, exchange, and power around the globe. This process has been most famously captured by Immanuel Wallerstein’s model of the “world-system,” with Europe at its center. From this perspective, a series of earlier “world empires” (such as Rome and China) that relied much more on tribute collection than on commercial revenue were succeeded or absorbed by a global capitalist “world-system” rooted in commercial relations and market exchange coupled with unfree labor and state centralization. Over time, the linkages created by European commerce drove economic integration as well as a growing hierarchical division of labor whereby northwestern European workers converted raw materials supplied by less developed parts of the world into manufactures. While this new core came to enjoy higher real wages, subordinate peripheral zones were reduced to contributing cheap (slave or forced) labor, food, and other plant and mineral resources.

  Within the core itself, a sequence of competing states gained and lost the lead: Portugal, which spearheaded exploration and set up early strongholds; Spain, which took over the most developed parts of the New World; the Netherlands, which benefited from the Baltic grain trade and access to New World resources that boosted its financial and shipping sectors. England, whose entrepreneurs made the most efficient use of land, developed new industries, and built up an extensive reexport trade, eventually eclipsed its rivals, in no small measure thanks to military successes. In the following, the “world-system” expanded by mobilizing resources in the Americas—no longer just bullion but lumber, sugar, tobacco, and cotton produced by slave labor—and entered
those Old World regions where existing empires or ecological conditions had checked earlier advances, above all in South Asia and Africa.1

  The initial steps in this process most closely resembled traditional tributary imperialism: the capture of the Americas allowed the Spanish crown to mine and import large quantities of silver. This windfall was used not only to prop up Habsburg ambitions in the (failed) pursuit of European hegemony (as discussed in chapter 6), it also enabled European traders to raise their profile in richer regions such as South and Southeast Asia. In the early modern period, when Europeans had little else of value to offer, American bullion bought them a place at the table. The silverization of Ming China’s monetary system contributed greatly to this development.2

  Colonial silver was used to purchase goods from the Indian Ocean basin and China, where this precious metal was rare and in high demand. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, a sizable proportion of these silver transfers, although not nearly as much as is sometimes claimed, ended up in Asia. At the time, European exchange with Asia critically depended on New World bullion that paid for imports, many of which were destined for reexport. Silver was also needed for strategic food and lumber imports from the Baltic.3

  Yet increasingly, North Atlantic trade as such gained in importance. It quickly eclipsed Mediterranean trade in volume and value terms. Access to Atlantic commerce helped shape institutions that empowered merchants in their relations with monarchs and protected property rights. This beneficial influence was reflected in stronger urban and gross domestic product (GDP) growth in countries that were exposed to Atlantic trade, although less so in France and especially Spain. It was thus primarily in states with nonabsolutist political conditions that involvement in the Atlantic economy strengthened commercial interests and investment. Whereas Italian city-states with similar political attributes lacked direct access to the Atlantic, the Netherlands and England enjoyed both advantages.4