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Capstones and Organisms

One of the great charms of Uppsala in Sweden is that of visiting the houses of the nations within the city’s university. There are more than a dozen nations, most boasting beautiful nineteenth-century buildings, although the associations often go back to the seventeenth century. The nations are geographical – ‘Uplands nation’ and ‘Gotlands nation’ for example – and have no link to ethnicity. A similar picture could be given of the nations of the University of Paris even earlier. The point is that nationalism will not feature at the start of this chapter. Nationalism is properly understood as the claim that a people should be ruled by those with whom they share a culture: this belief is not visibly present in most of the historical record. The standard way of dealing with social conflict in the past was to hire a professional ruler from the outside, indebted to none of the contending parties. Mamluks were especially valued for their skills in the Islamic world (Crone 1980), while members of the Danish and Greek royal families played this role time and again in nineteenth and twentieth-century history, with the late Duke of Edinburgh exemplifying this very type.

A claim implicit in the last paragraph – that imperial rule is ‘normal’ – rests on a proper understanding of the nature of social evolution, one that deserves decisive highlighting. That the non-imperial European state system of the early modern world eventually generated sufficient power to put great agrarian imperial worlds under pressure – the subject of the first part of this chapter – has led to them being seen as failures. That is terribly wrong. Imperial rule is the ‘default’ condition of most of human history, and what is truly remarkable is the durable quality of the most famous premodern empires. Success in evolutionary terms requires adapting to circumstances. That is precisely what the imperial worlds accomplished, becoming sources of stability, at best bearers of civilization. But the failure to adapt in an equivalent way to circumstance in Northwest Europe nonetheless led to a breakthrough in history, a step forward that eventually changed the terms of reference under which all other societies had to function. Differently put, that step in evolutionary standards came from failure, from the insignificant and backward periphery.

The character of the evolutionary step combined, in an odd manner, the loss and the increase of control. The loss of control allowed for developments, the absolutely crucial element of which was the increasing inability of any political centre to control novel social innovations. Differently put, states had to learn to swim within the larger society made up of economic and military competition – and had to do so long before economic affairs took on an industrial character. The resulting increase in wealth translated of course into political power. But the increase in state strength was also in part the result of planned actions by states seeking to emulate the leading edge of power, both military and economic, with subtle links between the two – and needing to do so in order to survive. The complexity here is that states needed to be at one and the same time absent and present, or, if you will, weak in some places and strong in others.

The restlessness of this multipolar world had a crucial developmental consequence. Continual demands from the state for recruits and money led to societal reactions. Dynastic rule had seen social life as its own preserve, the duty of all to support the regime. Administrative integration changed all this, with rulers coming to feel the necessity of representing what had become national societies. The character of the latter changed over time, from initial reactions within the elite to the rise of genuinely popular politics. The eighteenth century saw nothing less than democratic revolutions. This was by no means a simple matter, as Alexis de Tocqueville realized very early on, in the 1830s. Did democracy guarantee individual rights for everyone? Or might it be a mechanism for protecting some against others through patterns of exclusion, a mere tyranny of the majority – at once democratic and repulsive? Differently put, popular demands might be horizontal (stressing the equality of all) or they might be collective (insisting on a hierarchy placing some above others). There was bound to be tension here; it has marked the historical record since, and it will continue to do so. The fundamental reason why this is so is simple: collective rights have most often come in the form of nationalism, whose emergence is noted and characterized in the latter part of this chapter.

Formations, East and West

Empires result from conquest. There is obvious rationality involved: the strength of premodern states rests on land and people, as the latter can be conscripted for warfare. The character of empire as a whole was hinted at in the introduction through the image of a rimless bicycle wheel. Two models help understanding. The model of an agro-literate polity suggested that an elite, variously comprised of ideological, military and political elements, sits on top of a series of laterally insulated societies, which it has neither the desire nor the capacity to organize, rationalize or integrate (Gellner 1983: 8–18). The image provided by the sinologist Owen Lattimore underscores the relative weakness, the capstone quality, of premodern empires (Lattimore 1940). Rule is best imagined in terms of three circles of integration. The smallest is that of integration by economic means. It is easy to see why this circle must be small: in the absence of modern systems of transport goods cannot be transported great distances, as a bullock might well need to eat all the grain in the wagon it pulled within a hundred miles – although the presence of the Mediterranean in the Roman imperium and the Grand Canal between the north and south in China somewhat changed this logistical limitation. A larger circle is political, that of extraction of conscripts and taxation. But the largest circle is military. It is easy to see the walls in China and Rome, albeit those of the latter are often harder to detect, as most – but not Hadrian’s Wall – have disappeared as they were built in wood. Such walls were certainly designed to keep invaders out, although they had a less defined role in keeping taxpayers within – with an intermediary position being the gateways that allowed trade to take place between the two zones.

The means by which Rome and China – the two classic empires to be considered as their physiognomy highlights the causal patterns of interest here – came to predominance were slightly different. A clue to the Roman situation can be found in Montesquieu’s 1734 Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (Montesquieu 1965). Rome grew in his view because of its ceaseless and rapacious militarism – which he loathed, preferring the more civil society of his own time. Putting aside for a moment his preference and his belief that it could establish a different form of successful society, at once softer and more advanced, there is everything to be said for his account of Roman militarism. Let us consider its form and salience, before noting its transformation in the Imperial Republic and the Monarchy established by Augustus.

Rome grew initially as but a single city state surrounded by others; it held no hegemonic position, and could have been defeated by any alliance that it would have faced. Its rise to prominence accordingly took a rather novel form (Scheidel 2019: 51–88). Alliances were made with neighbouring city states based on two principles: no interference in their internal affairs, combined with the provision of opportunities to benefit from warfare. But it is a mistake to speak of Rome – or of any other city state – as if it were some sort of unity. These entities were essentially oligarchies, lacking much control over their societies, not least as their aristocracies held office only for short periods. Taxation was minimal. Status and profit only came from turning outside. Allied city states provided conscript infantry forces, which were commanded by Rome, to the benefit of all – including the soldiers themselves, who would gain funds allowing land to be purchased. Over time, a measure of integration took place, especially in the Italian peninsula, and this was cemented by the sharing of citizenship. Conscription can matter as much as taxation in terms of extraction from society, and it was very clearly present in Rome. The upper classes themselves served for something like ten years, the citizen soldiers often for longer. Consider sheer numbers. In the early eighteenth century, French military strength rose to something like 650,000, from a population of perhaps twenty million; by contrast, in the late Imperial Republic 420,000 served, drawn from a population of something like four million – a military participation rate not matched even by the extraordinary efforts of the South in the American Civil War. It might seem as if this would have badly hurt the Roman economy, not least in the way in which it would affect the farms of the citizen soldiers. But the system survived due to the large-scale importing of slaves, a high proportion of them women. This allowed expansion both to Sicily and the Italian peninsula, to the Hellenistic world (whose capture allowed the creation of a navy), to the whole of the Mediterranean with the defeat of...