Scheidel’s book seeks to explain the growth in prosperity of Latin Europe, as compared to the rest of the world, which peaked in the twentieth century. He suggests that what allowed Latin Europe to develop was the collapse of the Roman empire. The reason for this success was the competitive fragmentation of power that the collapse generated. “By laying the foundations for persistent polycentrism and the transformative developmental dynamics it generated over the long run, this rupture was the single most important precondition for modern economic growth.” In fact, Scheidel argues that polycentrism was the single necessary factor that led the world into modernity.
Scheidel begins his massive book by detailing the key features in the initial rise of the Roman empire. He states, “The least invasive way of scaling up was to leave local structures intact and thereby reduce friction. Emphasis on taxing military labor maximized the honor of co-opted groups…. It was bound to be more honorable for young men to fight…. than for everyone to be asked to hand over a tithe or poll tax to Roman tax collectors…. Instead of disarming former enemies, Rome not only actively encouraged them to maintain their previous warlike disposition but institutionalized this quality even more solidly by routinizing it as a key obligation to a larger network of communities…. War-making was by far the most potent force of integration in a very parsimoniously structured system…. Only 19 of the 310 years between 410 and 101 BCE were free from recorded wars…. From an institutional perspective, the Roman state was so poorly integrated beyond its urban center that in the absence of war, citizenship would not have meant much for most Romans.” Rome was a fragile empire held together by constant combat, which brought booty from its periphery to its core in central Italy. Rome was also a complete outlier in its complete hegemony over the Mediterranean, both before and after its rule. “No other state would ever again rule four out of every five inhabitants of Europe. No other state would ever again control all of the Mediterranean basin as well as the entire population of its coastal regions…. Military mass mobilization—and political republicanism—on the scale practiced by the ascendent Roman state and its principal allies did not return to Europe until the early modern age…. No later state in the temperate zone of Europe would ever again enjoy the privilege of being able to scale up its resources and military capabilities without having to worry about outside interference. Never again were geopolitical conditions so favorable for the creation of naval hegemony, of the Roman mare nostrum.”
In its uniqueness and fragility, the Roman empire’s collapse was almost inevitable. “Local elites, on whose cooperation the central government critically relied, obstructed attempts to increase state revenue. Military capabilities as proxied by mobilization intensity declined. Geographical divisions deepened and became more formalized. Secondary state formation at the frontiers commenced wherever the Roman advance had finally run out of steam (or rather incentives): what had once been a highly fragmented tribal periphery steadily accumulated organizational and technological knowledge. Scaling-up progressed far enough to challenge Rome’s military supremacy but not enough to create suitable targets for counterattack, let alone sustainable conquest. The spatial, social, and ethnic peripherization of military service—a feature common to many maturing empires—not only raised the profile of frontier forces but also drew in manpower from beyond. The resultant hybridization prolonged the life of the empire but became harder to manage once key revenue flows dried up. The system was highly vulnerable to the loss of regions that functioned as net exporters of the tax revenue required to secure poorer but more exposed areas.” The split of the empire into its eastern and western halves and then further fragmentation into Byzantine, Vandal, Visigoth, Ostrogoth, and Frankish rule was drawn out, but absolute. The difference in state capacity between the Frankish kingdom and Rome is instructive. “The formation of an entrenched military class, the allocation of quasi-hereditary land to its members, and the decline of centralized revenue collection and disbursement greatly narrowed the scope for the exercise of coercive power by the ruler…. It fell to local estate owners to mobilize soldiers and present them to royal campaigns…. Growing emphasis on horses and armor reduced and devalued the contribution of the less affluent, thereby narrowing the social base for warfare—the exact opposite of what happened in the Roman Republic, when a voracious conscription system ensnared an ever-larger share of the citizenry.”
For much of the rest of his book Scheidel compares the post-Roman legacy of Europe to China’s enduring empire. He states that the Chinese empire, for most of its rule, controlled about eighty percent of the population of East Asia, about the same as Rome at its peak. However, despite brief intervals, such as the Warring States period, Chinese hegemony ebbed and flowed, but never disappeared entirely. “The central state managed to hold its own in its struggle against local interests. Its administrative capacity was sufficient to maintain adequate registration and taxation systems, which in turn enabled it to field enough forces to curb local autonomy. Instead of accommodating a hybrid elite of tax-exempt landowner-soldiers, the state retained control over revenues and military compensation. As a result, the tributary state as a means of managing people and resources did not dwindle nearly as much as it did in post-Roman Europe…. Whereas in Western Europe tax immunity and its replacement by localized rent and service obligations spread across the general population, in China everybody became subjected to homogenized claims by the central state…. State capacity differed accordingly, with noble levies, small armies, and rudimentary administrative structures on the one hand and extensive censuses, huge militaries, and ministries full of literate bureaucrats on the other. The former sustained polycentrism, the latter hegemonic empire.”
For Scheidel, geography was the prime reason for Europe’s and China’s unique development paths. “Europe consisted of multiple smaller core regions whereas China initially had just one—the Central Plain—and then two, with the Yangzi basin added into the mix. Increasingly interconnected, the northern basin consistently remained politically and militarily dominant…. No such “natural” core existed anywhere in Europe.” The prime reason for northern dominance in China was its relationship to the steppe. “The conspicuous scarcity of large empires in regions that were ecologically well equipped to support them but were sheltered from major grassland zones highlights the causal dimension of this association.” This unique ecological divide between “civilized” northern China and the “barbarian” steppe culture led to “the pooling of military assets for the purpose of predation, preemption, and defense; the dissemination of steppe-sourced military techniques; the infiltration and repeated takeover of exposed agricultural regions by steppe warriors, as well as responses to these intrusions. The agrarian empires that were forged in these complex interactions were often large because they were close to the steppe, rather than close to the steppe because they were large…. In East Asia, the concentration of challengers to the north favored hegemonic empire among the agriculturalists, as well as the decentering of the capital cities toward the threat zone, a feature well documented for most Chinese dynasties. In Europe, the absence of a severe one-sided threat facilitated decentralization.” For Scheidel, proximity to the steppe (and the institutional, military, and cultural adaptations that it fostered) was the definitive difference in development pathways for Latin Europe and China.
In Europe, decentralization led to repeated warfare between small states. In the early modern period, “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…. [There were] 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.” Therefore, war had to pay in Europe. “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).”
Instructively, Scheidel details Britain’s development beyond its Roman legacy. “England had escaped most thoroughly from Roman imperial traditions help[ing] it establish durable local units of government and political representation. Later, the break with papal Rome under Henry VIII made England a pioneer in creating a national church…. In addition, England largely escaped from a renewal of the Roman legal tradition…. The monarch was the head of the church, and the standing of common law, as a collection of wisdom derived from earlier arbitration, was strengthened.”
In general, Scheidel makes the case it was small European polities, acting as individual labs and incubators, interacting and fighting with one another, that generated winning capacities, which then could be copied and repeated by the others. “The state was the ultimate bundle of institutions. The more developmental its nature, the more innovative were the outcomes that followed…. Societies were made modern by institutions that rendered continuous change possible…. Diversity was conducive to the discovery of potentialities because it created natural experiments: thus, discrete but interconnected polities addressed shared challenges in different ways and learned from outcomes.” Overseas colonial expansion further projected this power struggle and the diversification of these states. “By 1914, between four-fifths and five-sixths of the earth’s land surface were under European control.”
In China, on the other hand, hegemonic empire led to stale state bureaucracy. “Confucianism was revived under the Northern Song, which greatly expanded the civil service examination system by setting up more than 400 schools for candidates, helping to establish a gentry class based on canonical education rather than inherited wealth. Firmly attached to the state, this elite supported it whether from within or outside the civil service and remained loyal regardless of which regime was in power…. Merchants were strongly motivated to join the official class via kinsmen, to ally themselves to gentry families, and to participate in government at the local level: whatever formal standing they could hope to gain would accrue from public service and proximity to traditional power brokers…. Dependence on informal or de facto property rights meant that legal processes were primarily determined by social hierarchy and status. Commercial and civil law codes were absent…. Institutional arrangements were stable, resilient, and path-dependent. The repeated success of imperial restoration after intermittent shocks shows how much the interests of rulers and various elite groups from bureaucrats and scholars to commercial and landed property owners overlapped and coalesced into “a tight web of vested interests, that, once established, proved extremely difficult to dislodge.”” This system of kin-based customary law stifled commerce, credit, and impersonal exchange. Politics trumped rule of law. Regime uncertainty hindered capital accumulation and planning for the future. “Inasmuch as state support was contingent on centralized preferences and sensitive to turnover at the very top, it could be supplied or withdrawn at will…. The potential for centralized intervention and regulation across a large territory…. contains within it, however latently, the option of discouraging innovation.” Stasis became the norm and even the goal of Chinese bureaucrats and elites.
Europe, while politically fragmented, was united by a culture of knowledge. “A fortuitous blend of pervasive political splintering and overarching cultural integration created a viable marketplace of ideas…. The European state system facilitated ideational change by preventing conservative forces from consistently coordinating resistance to and suppression of innovation…. Although political pluralism was essential in ensuring free discourse, so was the relative ease of transnational intellectual communications. In the absence of some degree of underlying cultural unity, the costs of catering to a larger market of ideas would have been higher, limiting entry and competition and protecting incumbents from disruptive innovation. This cultural unity—manifest above all in the use of Latin and Christian norms—was a legacy of the Roman empire.”
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