Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  State intervention exacerbated this difference. The Chinese authorities were primarily concerned about flood control and the shipment of vital tribute such as grain at certain times of the year. The system they supported was thus designed more for drainage and tribute than for year-round exchange. Water use in England was more pluralistic and geared toward business activities, unconstrained by uniform elite interest and guidance. Even so, in this regard, nature was the decisive variable, even if its impact was mediated by state power.84

  What these demographic and environmental perspectives have in common is that they tend to be rather vague in identifying factors that led to modern economic growth. They are best seen as contributions to our understanding of general conditions that made this particular outcome more likely to occur in northwestern Europe than elsewhere—as impulses to what are commonly regarded as the early stages of the (Second) Great Divergence. (In this regard they do not differ from some of the points made in this and the previous two chapters.)

  Yet even these ostensibly nonpolitical explanations are generally predicated on specifically European modes of state formation and the configuration of social power that mediated the way in which demographic regimes and environmental features acted on economic development. Most important, none of them propose anything even remotely approaching an alternative chain of causation independent of the effects of variegated fragmentation.

  Why We Escaped

  In this book, I have identified two robust features of European history: post-Roman polycentrism between and within states, and causal linkages between this polycentrism and transformative developmental outcomes. As I argued in Part III, once Rome had fallen, Europe’s political fracturing proved impossible to overcome: its state system was highly durable and increasingly resilient. This persistence owed much to the balancing of different sources of social power within individual polities that constrained large-scale state formation. But it also had deeper roots: in Part IV, I sought to make the case that the physical environment greatly influenced the odds of successful imperiogenesis. Interstate and domestic fragmentation sustained the competitive dynamics and constraints on authority that lie at the heart of the principal and often overlapping explanations of modern economic growth, industrialization, and subsequent improvements in human welfare. Part V shows that this is true no matter which factors—institutions, overseas resources, science and technology, or values—we choose to prioritize.

  This does not mean that these outcomes were themselves a foregone conclusion. My survey merely suggests that they could not just as readily have occurred elsewhere. If European styles of polycentrism were essential and foundational to the creative destruction that spawned modernity, the (Second) Great Divergence and the Industrial Revolution(s) were unlikely to take place in Asia or Africa. And even Europe—Latin, Western, or otherwise—is far too broad a concept: we may take a step further in concluding with Robert Allen that “there was only one route to the twentieth century—and it traversed northern Britain.”85

  Given current and entirely justified sensibilities about Eurocentrism, I ought to stress that this observation does not seek to essentialize certain features as “Western European,” let alone “British.” The factors that (eventually) promoted transformative development were “Western European” or “British” only insofar as enduring productive polycentrism happened to be specific to these areas and shaped their political, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual evolution. Had comparable conditions surfaced in some other part of the world, they might very well have produced similar results. By the same token, had these conditions been absent from Europe, we would not have to worry about the origins of the modern world because it most likely would not exist in any recognizable form.86

  At the same time, the fact that these vital preconditions arose in Latin Europe rather than elsewhere was not the product of mere chance. European polycentrism was inadvertent but not accidental. Comparative analysis suggests that its endurance cannot be fully separated from the physical environment. Thus, if certain Europeans were the first to nudge humankind onto a novel trajectory away from ignorance, poverty, endemic illness, and early death, they found themselves in that position in no small measure because of where they lived. This fortuitous association must not be mistaken for geographical determinism: over the long run, geography and ecology merely rendered some outcomes more likely than others.

  I am advocating a perspective that steers clear of old-fashioned triumphalist narratives of “Western” exceptionalism and opposing denunciations of colonialist victimization. The question is not who did what to whom: precisely because competitive fragmentation proved so persistent, Europeans inflicted horrors on each other just as liberally as they meted them out to others around the globe. Humanity paid a staggering price for modernity. In the end, although this may seem perverse to those of us who would prefer to think that progress can be attained in peace and harmony, it was ceaseless struggle that ushered in the most dramatic and exhilaratingly open-ended transformation in the history of our species: the “Great Escape.” Long may it last.

  Epilogue

  What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

  TOO BIG TO SUCCEED

  Rome as Status Quo

  I HAVE OFFERED a simple answer to the question posed in the chapter heading: the Roman empire made modern development possible by going away and never coming back. This rupture ushered in enduring polycentrism both within and between states that sustained development-friendly institutional arrangements, encouraged overseas exploration and expansion, and allowed a culture of innovation and bourgeois values to take hold. As I have repeatedly sought to show, the persistence or return of quasi-monopolistic empire would have been antithetical to any and all of these trends.1

  This assessment should not be mistaken as a judgment of the Roman empire and its contribution to human welfare at the time. When the Monty Python crew answered this question in their 1979 movie Life of Brian, they homed in on Rome’s putative infrastructural achievements—“the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health”—capped by “peace.”2

  With some qualifications—medical services and mass schooling were not exactly hallmarks of Roman rule—a similar perspective has long prevailed in academic circles, and for good reason. The mature Roman empire produced the most prolonged period of almost continuous internal peace that this particular part of the world has ever experienced. Urbanization, while unevenly distributed, reached unprecedented and long unrivaled heights, and population density rose to levels that were not reattained until the High Middle Ages—or, in some parts of the Middle East and North Africa, not until a few generations ago.

  Market integration, however imperfect, advanced in the absence of political boundaries, uncontrolled rent-seeking, severe tariffs, and disruptive conflicts: the Mediterranean basin, formally united for the only time in history, served as a reliable conduit for the untrammeled flow of goods, people, and information. Even bulk goods were shipped over long distances—most famously several hundred thousand tons of Egyptian and North African grain each year to feed the city of Rome—and a wide range of supplies for the military (including Indian pepper) reached the remotest frontiers. Monetization boomed on a scale not found again until the early modern period, driven both by massive mining operations that left their mark on Greenlandic ice cores and by sophisticated credit institutions.3

  At the same time, the Roman economic expansion rested on Smithian growth, driven in the first instance by integration and stable governance, specialization, and the refinement and broader application of existing technologies. This limited productivity gains. We may never be able to reconstruct trends in gross domestic product (GDP) in more than the most cursory fashion. Yet if we are prepared to interpret a variety of archaeological proxy data as a rough reflection of output or consumption trends—admittedly a big and rightly contested “if”—the overall impression we gain is o
ne of intensive economic growth that was concentrated in the last couple of centuries BCE, during the final stages of political unification and growing civil strife, followed by gradual abatement during the more stable monarchy and, depending on the region, further attenuation of development or even contraction in the final phases of imperial rule.4

  Roman rule did not yield major breakthroughs in productive technology. Most innovations of the era had originated in the Hellenistic East during the last three centuries BCE, such as water-lifting devices, water mills, and glassblowing, as well as others that could have been commercially exploited but were not, most famously a playful version of the steam engine and perhaps also the windmill. The mature Roman empire was characterized by diffusion and incremental improvement rather than ongoing and similarly influential innovation.

  Sophisticated precision instruments such as the famous Antikythera device did not spawn a machine revolution. Science and engineering—the latter applied on a grand scale in military affairs and civil engineering—largely moved on separate tracks. Glassblowing did not yield eyeglasses, and even the wheelbarrow appears to have been unknown. Moreover, in keeping with imperial traditions elsewhere, overseas exploration did not attract significant interest or resources.5

  The very notion that Rome might have had the potential to industrialize is thus hardly worth considering and best left to novelists, who have indeed on occasion tried their hand at developing such scenarios.6

  In many ways, the baseline conditions that framed economic development and overall outcomes in the Roman imperial economy resembled those in imperial China. This helps account for striking similarities in the debates concerning the economic impact of imperial rule in Rome and China, even if scholars on either side of this particular fence of academic specialization tend to remain unaware of this overlap. Thus, just as scholarly positions on Chinese development have shifted back and forth between notions of stifling despotism, corrupt laissez-faire, and selective benevolent state intervention aimed at ensuring social stability, students of the Roman economy have focused on comparable features. The main difference, if only in terms of style, lies in the fact that its “Western” connotations helped protect the Roman empire from overt charges of “Oriental” despotism: inasmuch as the latter was once invoked in discussions of the Roman case, it used to be confined to the later phases of imperial history. Meanwhile, even this position has been greatly modified in favor of greater continuities over time.7

  As a result, when it comes to economic development, Roman rule is commonly regarded favorably. A whole minischool—the Oxford Roman Economy Project—has sprung up to document and, in essence, celebrate the expansion of the Roman imperial economy. Among the very few professional economists who care about Roman history, adherents to a neoclassical perspective have moved in the same direction. What these different strands of research have in common is their emphasis on the beneficial role of market integration and other consequences of imperial unity that lowered transaction and information costs.8

  This view that empire promoted economic activity is available in two complementary flavors, one emphasizing the role of market forces unleashed by political order and stability, the other placing greater weight on the impact of state demand—for provisioning the capital and the military—in spurring economic development. A broad model of how taxation boosted interregional trade seeks to capture this latter dynamic, just as the eventual decline of the late Roman economy has been interpreted as a function of the abatement of state power.9

  These readings are reminiscent of assessments of the economic influence of the Chinese imperial state, as it created a favorable environment for market activity while intervening to secure supplies for the court and capital cities. Structural parallels also extend into the fiscal sphere. After costly upheavals at the end of the republic that required massive mobilization of resources (not dissimilar to efforts undertaken to establish new dynasties in China), for about a quarter of a millennium the Roman monarchy made do with revenues that were relatively modest in per capita terms, just as mature Chinese regimes were inclined to do.

  The underlying rationale was the same: a de facto compromise with rent-seeking elites on whose cooperation distant centers depended. As a result, enough revenue reached the Roman central authorities to fund army, court, and capital, but little else. Much was retained at the local level, through municipal taxation, or withholding by self-taxing elites. While steep tolls on imports from the Indian Ocean region and intensive gold and silver mining subsidized the treasury, formal demands on domestic taxpayers were effectively open to negotiation.10

  It should go without saying that in Rome as well as in China, moderate tax receipts went hand in hand with high corruption incomes as officials preyed on ordinary taxpayers. The predatory dimension of the ostensibly benevolent weak state—a commonplace regarding China—is now also attracting greater attention among Roman historians, even if realistic accounts continue to struggle to break through the more upbeat neoclassical and Smithian growth narrative. In both empires, centralized authoritarianism coupled with delegational oligarchy generated growing income and wealth inequality.11

  The Roman empire thus trended toward an equilibrium comparable to that experienced under several Chinese dynasties: while periods of peace and stability generated sufficient revenue to maintain the state apparatus, the latter lacked reliable mechanisms for raising revenue in times of stress. Public debt was not an option, and higher demands were bound to be met with strong elite resistance. Aggressive state intervention, though it was sometimes attempted—compare the scope of the early Ming reforms with the efforts of late Roman juntas to streamline fiscal and administrative arrangements—unfolded within rather tightly circumscribed practical limits.12

  The general template was one of some degree of market integration and unevenly distributed (extensive as well as—modest—per capita) growth that was eventually constrained by low state capacity, pervasive elite encroachment and secular lack of innovation, human capital formation, and Schumpeterian growth. In these respects, as in many others, it is not hard to recognize in the Roman empire yet another version of the great Asian empires that have long served—and for me continue to serve—as a foil to post-Roman European exceptionalism.

  The Roman and Chinese imperial economies shared a baseline preference for laissez-faire enlivened by narrowly focused state demand and interspersed with occasional spurts of more ambitious interventionism. Both systems excluded commercial elites from political power. Fiscal strictures triggered runaway coin debasement in Rome and paper money inflation in Song and Yuan China. In terms of tributary mobilization and stimulation of exchange through state demand and a voracious military sector, Rome had more in common with Mughal India. And just like the Ottomans, the Roman authorities were heavily invested in provisioning both the capital and the army.13

  At the same time, all of these imperial entities lacked the same array of features: mercantilist protections; powerful stock companies (notwithstanding Roman antecedents, tied to tax farms); public debt and resultant credit markets; a culture of sustained technological and scientific innovation geared toward practical applications; and, perhaps most important, a strong dispersion of the different sources of social power.

  Likewise, there was no sustained productive competition of the later European type; no institutionalized bargaining with civil society; no secure niches and powerbases for commercial capital, artisanal activity, and finance; few if any viable exit options for dissenters; no enduring corporations; and little interest in developing resources external to the empire’s contiguous territory. However benevolent, restrained, or feeble the state, the specter of asset requisition never went away, and both endemic corruption and maintenance-oriented traditionalism were the norm.

  In fact, the Roman empire earns top marks for the latter: witness the charade of passing off military dictatorship as a revival of the republic, and Constantine’s desire to extend his chief-priestly powers to gov
ern Christian affairs. Even when change did occur, it did so under the cloak of continuity. In all these respects, post-Roman Europe’s polycentrism in the political, social, economic, military, and ideological domains not only opened up an enduring divide to other parts of the Old World but also represented an increasingly dramatic break from its own past.14

  Status Quo, Continued

  But what of the alternatives? Although we can only guess what counterfactual post-Roman empires in Europe might have looked like, it is tempting—and not entirely hopeless—to try. The Byzantine empire conveniently provides a real-life model. Centered on Constantinople, the Roman state, however much diminished in scale, continued for fully another millennium. In striking contrast to developments in medieval Latin Europe, it preserved its trademark military-monarchical style of governance and kept the church in check.

  If we were to envision Roman-scale empire in post-Roman Europe, some version of the Byzantine model would seem the most plausible candidate: elite adherence to classical traditions coupled with a Caesaropapist fusion of political and ideological power; cycles of waxing and waning central state power locked into perennial competition with landed elites, yet without the pervasive erosion of central authority that characterized the European Middle Ages.

  In Chinese fashion, the mature Byzantine state has been said to have “restrained” the economy, tempering market transactions with interventions meant to preserve social stability and curb the worst inequalities. Strong administrative centralization overshadowed a decentralizing economy. From the ninth through the eleventh centuries, features of a command economy were in place. The state remained dominant in economic affairs in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the price of capital rose. When the central state splintered after the Fourth Crusade of 1204, its constituent elements were drawn into an international economy under unfavorable circumstances. In the following centuries, the regime shifted to an “economy of privileges” that helped elites avoid taxes, privatized state revenue, and burdened peasants, in keeping with similar developments in aging empires elsewhere.15