Are you aware that all these peoples. . . exact tribute from us, not from our land or from our flocks and herds, but from our folly? For if, when by force of arms any people get the upper hand and compel the vanquished to pay them silver, this is called tribute, and it is a sign that people are not very fortunate or brave if they pay tribute to others, then is it not true that if, though no one has attacked or compelled them, but because of stupidity and self-indulgence, a certain people take that which they prize most highly, silver, and of their own volition send it over a long road and across a vast expanse of sea to those who cannot easily even set foot upon our soil, such conduct is altogether more cowardly and disgraceful?
—Dio Chrysostomus 312
Commanding and Consuming the World loi
As they allowed themselves to become enslaved to their thirst for the “wealth of the wretched and unfortunate,” its people had to free themselves of such desires.312 Yet, as is also clear from the speech, the import of luxuries itself was one of the benefits of empire.
The problem of how to combine a political discourse that was frequently hostile to and always suspicious of trade and merchants with the widespread existence of markets and commercialism constitutes one of the great conundrums in the history of agrarian empires such as Rome and China. It has produced some of the most inspiring scholarship in the field of preindustrial economic history. The year 1973 was to prove one of an exceptionally rich harvest with Moses Finley’s The Ancient Economy and Mark Elvin’s The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Both books set out from a similar question, why had Greco-Roman Antiquity and China, despite their brilliant and impressive achievements, not developed modern capitalism? Finley found an explanation in the culture of the Greeks and Romans.313 314 Elvin suggested that China had entered a so-called high-level equilibrium trap. Inspired by the comments of Adam Smith on the vast internal market of China, Elvin viewed the “Celestial Empire” as having reached a sort of preindustrial equilibrium state where traditional resources were being exploited in the most efficient way, but where further development, therefore, was also well-nigh impossible.315 In Finley’s scheme it is the cultural and political outlook of the landowning elites and the predatory activities of the state that block development, whereas in Elvin’s analysis the politically dominant culture takes a much more marginal position. In spite of intermittent hostility and moral condemnation, the Chinese imperial state effectively had to tolerate, and periodically even promote, the development of commercialism and free market trade. Benign indifference and laissez-faire, sometimes enlightened, sometimes by default, and destructive interventionism mark the two opposite explanatory poles between which modern scholarship has been torn in its debates about the political economy of agrarian empires.
Both kinds of explanation, however, seem in need of modification. Today few students of preindustrial empires would be willing to subscribe to a view of the state as capable of dominating and subjecting the economy to the point of economic retardation. Individual policies could exercise a profound influence on those affected, but their reach would normally have been limited, effects isolated. For the populace at large, the imperial government is bound to have been a fairly distant reality and a relatively light burden to bear; it simply lacked the means to establish a more powerful presence in the daily lives of most people.
A more restrained view of the role of imperial government might be thought to leave the field to free market explanations. Bin Wong, for instance, has developed Elvin’s high-level equilibrium trap into a notion of an economy dominated by Smithian dynamics.316 Transaction costs, however, seriously weaken the strength of this argument. The vast expanses covered by both the Chinese and Roman empires, slow communications and transport, the absence of a strong state to enforce law and order outside governmental centers, the control of local communities exercised by groups of entrenched gentry—all these and other such factors should caution against overestimating the level of economic integration that could be achieved. Areas of intense commercialization would have alternated with regions almost untouched by the higher levels of trade. Empire-wide, these economies were beset by irregularities, imperfections, and asymmetries. There would still have been plenty of room for optimizing economic performance, in most regions at least, even in densely populated late imperial China.317
Oppressive interventionism and relatively free markets, however, need not be treated as mutually exclusive alternatives. Both phenomena seem to have formed part of the same reality. Political coercion and commercialization co-existed and should probably be understood as intimately connected with the process of empire formation. Speaking from a position within the dominant imperial discourse, Dio Chrysostomus insisted that coercion and exchange were inextricably linked. Roman imports of foreign luxuries were derided by him as equal to the payment of a tribute. But it was travelling in the wrong direction. Tribute was something subjects and outlying barbarian peoples were supposed to remit to Rome, not the other way around. From the point of view of empire, relations with the surrounding world presented themselves in terms of submission and tribute. It is an idea that is well known from Chinese history, too, with the establishment of the Han tribute system, which attempted to regulate the sphere of interest of the Chinese Empire in a hierarchy of tributary relations.318
Only later was this system to reach its culmination during the Ming and Qing periods with the (ineffective) attempt to achieve a tight regulation of all seaborne foreign trade. In the future, trade was only to be granted as a privilege after foreigners had openly acknowledged their submission by bringing tribute to the Chinese emperor.319 No less fascinating are the simultaneous grand naval expeditions conducted in the early fifteenth century by the eunuch admiral Zheng He. They sought to bring South East Asia and countries lining the Indian Ocean within the orbit of the Chinese tributary system and returned triumphantly laden with professions of submission by foreign rulers and precious objects, rarities, curiosities, and marvels to reflect the wide reach of the emperor’s mighty sway.320 The Roman government never acted on its tributary instincts to conceive a similarly grandiose trading policy. But on a smaller scale, it did avail itself of several strategies that we also find employed, though probably in a more systematic fashion, by the Han Chinese court.321 These included attempts to control the movement of men and goods in frontier regions for taxation purposes, the manipulation of bordering tribes by granting or withholding the privilege to trade on imperial territory. In like fashion, prohibitions were issued on export of goods of strategic value such as iron, flint, wheat grain, and salt. The Roman emperor also prided himself on receiving at court the chieftains of client tribes and kingdoms that submitted tribute. In return, they were generously showered with presents and, frequently, also received the privilege of taking with them goods for their own personal use, however defined, free of export duty.322
Tributary empire was a way of controlling and distributing wealth. It aimed to expand the level, range, and diversity of resources available to the ruling class, group, or people. When singing the praises of Rome, ancient authors regularly congratulated themselves on the vast riches and abundance of goods flowing to the capital, the center of human civilization. The power to command and consume the world in all its great variety was publicly celebrated and proclaimed in grand triumphal ovations that followed military victory. Listen to Josephus describing the triumph of Vespasian and his son Titus after the fall of Jerusalem: “It is impossible adequately to describe the multitude of those marvels and their magnificence under every imaginable aspect whether in works of art or diversity of riches or rarities of nature; for almost all the objects which men who have ever been blessed with fortune have acquired one by one—the wonderful and precious productions of various nations—were gathered on this day in massed formation to demonstrate the grandeur of Rome.”323 Gone was the “Golden Age,” the era of Saturn, when nature had readily yielded its products and man had been free from toil. But empire held out the promise, to the privileged victors, of enjoying another age of plenty and prosperity.324 Tributary empire, like markets, embodied an economic strategy. It enabled the victors to pool and command a wide selection of regionally diverse specialities and riches. It was coercion leading to consumption. In the remainder of this chapter, I will sketch out three economic dimensions of the workings of agrarian empire: (1) empire as a tributary enterprise; (2) tribute extraction and commercialization; and (3) as a brief conclusion, imperial culture of consumption.
2. Empire as a Tributary Enterprise
The celebration of the wide range of rare and wonderful products made available through the acquisition of empire responded to the experience of a world characterized by small, localized communities. It was a world where most products never left their place of origin and consumption was heavily determined by what the local geology, climate, and ecology allowed to be grown or extracted. Peasant agriculture reigned supreme, and the potential for growth was narrowly circumscribed. It was the world of small, near autarkic communities known from Plato’s Republic; and, as the Greek philosopher candidly explained, if people desired to have access to more than the limited choice available to them, the community had to pursue a strategy of war and imperialism.325 Only successful conquest would bring more territories into their possession. These were a necessary requirement to obtain control over a greater variety and a larger amount of resources. In Eisenstadt’s felicitous expression, imperialism aimed at creating “free-floating resources.”326 By imposing tribute, empire forced resources out of the semiclosed cells of local economies and brought them into a wider sphere of circulation.
Extensive empires such as Rome or Han China drew some of their particular characteristics from their ability to cream off the limited production surpluses of numerous small communities and concentrate consumption of the accumulated wealth to a restricted number of privileged persons and places. The result was, for instance, to turn capital cities such as Rome, Constantinople, Chang’an, and Luoyang into preindustrial giant conurbations. With population numbers running well into six figures, they represented urbanization of an entirely different order of magnitude from what had come before or accompanied it and offered an equally wider palette of consumption opportunities.327 In Rome, all the world, almost literally, came together. She was “the great whore” of the Revelation as well as the “center of the universe” of her panegyrists, a place that received the best and the worst from everywhere. Empires like the Roman and the Han can therefore be described in economic terms as tribute-producing enterprises.
The main cost of the imperial enterprise was the army. Universal empires have a well-earned reputation for lavish expenditure. The Romans were no exception to this rule. “Bread and circuses,” temples, huge public baths, palatial complexes, and the omnipresent pomp and circumstance were major items of expenditure in the imperial budget.328 Chinese history has its own tale to tell of conspicuous imperial consumption. It is manifest in the stupendous scale of the recently uncovered mausoleum of the Qin emperor with its thousands of terracotta soldiers, the imposing and magnificent grandeur of the “Forbidden City” in Beijing, and the delicate but lost marvel of the Summer Palace, torched and looted by a Western expeditionary force during the Opium Wars. But however impressive such displays of wealth may appear, historically war was an even more expensive activity. There was nothing like military operations to drain away imperial revenue and thus threaten the creation of the desired surplus. Wudi, the conqueror among the Han emperors, was also the ruler behind one of the most extensive attempts to raise the level of taxation. The costs of his ambitious expansionist policies on the inner Asian frontier stretched existing imperial finances beyond their means: “The late Emperor. . . caused forts and serried signal stations to be built where garrisons were held ready against the nomads. When the revenue for the defence of the frontier fell short, the salt and iron monopoly was established, the liquor excise and the system of equable marketing introduced; goods were multiplied and wealth increased so as to furnish the frontier expenses.”329
This kind of expensive military activism did not go down well in all circles of the imperial elite. Echoes of criticism have been preserved in a small first century b. c.e. dialogue pretending to record a debate during the reign of Wudi’s successor concerning the merits and faults of his new revenue-raising measures. Con-fucian literati are here presented admonishing the monarch to curb his military ambitions. The emperor and his ministers should rather “cultivate benevolence and righteousness, to set an example to the people, and extend wide their virtuous conduct to gain the people’s confidence. Then will nearby folk lovingly flock to them and distant peoples joyfully submit to their authority. Therefore the master conqueror does not fight, the expert warrior needs no soldiers; the truly
Great commander requires not to set his troops in battle array____The Prince who
Practices benevolent administration should be matchless in the world; for him, what use is expenditure?”330 The imperial army was too costly an instrument, in this view, to be employed in all manner of vainglorious projects.
This was advice that no successful empire, no matter how bent on military glory, could afford to ignore in the long term. An imperial army was to be used with caution; it was a scarce resource, not to be wasted indiscriminately. It sounds paradoxical, but even that paragon of militarism, the Roman government, generally only employed its vast military might with circumspection. Failure to recognize this general principle has misled modern commentators on a number of occasions, most notably when they erected an elaborate theory of defensive Roman imperialism in the second century b. c.e. After the victory at Pydna in 168 b. c.e., having definitively defeated the kingdom of Macedon, Rome was reluctant to annex the territory of the conquered foe. Instead, the existing political entity was dismantled and replaced by four self-governing republics. These, however, were left with an obligation to submit an annual tribute to the Roman victor, only, it is true, at half the rate of the old royal tax. But then again, Rome had no intention of garrisoning the former Macedonian territory. Policing and defence against bordering tribes were the responsibility of the newly created polities. On top of this, mines (some of them closed for a brief spell as a result of the rivalries of Roman domestic politics) and probably also the old royal estates were confiscated. This was not reluctant or defensive imperialism; it was an attempt to enjoy empire on the cheap and collect tribute with the least possible effort and expense.331
Tribute obtained through a minimum of effort remained a key principle of Roman imperialism for centuries. It may be worthwhile to dwell on the Macedonian example a little longer. It suggests that one of the secrets behind the success of the Romans was the achievement of economies of scale. The Macedonian army was almost wholly dismantled without triggering a similar increase in the number of troops on the Roman side. Gibbon already commented on the relatively small number of soldiers that the imperial state maintained to ensure control of the greater Mediterranean world.332 On occasion, though often to the accompaniment of hostile sneers from the imperial elite, emperors even preferred to buy off hostile barbarian tribes on the imperial frontiers that were eager for plunder instead of waging an unremunerative war. Such tribes could also be exploited as a cheap source of recruits for the army. In late antiquity, Roman emperors increasingly came to rely on Germanic federate troops to fight their wars and stave off invaders. This meant that the government did not have to divert valuable provincial subjects from taxpaying agricultural activities to army duty.333 Successive Chinese dynasties cultivated the art of managing loosely organised “barbarian” tribes on the imperial frontier to perfection. Confucian opinion was in general more favorably inclined toward such policies of accommodation than a Roman aristocracy cherishing the memory of its proud republican past. The relationship between the sedentarized agricultural core and the nomadic steppe frontier is a key theme in Chinese history and found its classic exposition in the work of Owen Lattimore.334 Bestowing rich gifts of grain and silk on nomadic chieftains in return for a token tribute, nominal recognition of Chinese supremacy, and peace were much less expensive than the waging of wars with no end in sight and little prospect of plunder and gain capable of financing the efforts against a mobile enemy that remained hard to control. Equally, such tribes could be usefully employed in war against other nomadic groups that threatened imperial territory.
To be sure, the potential drawbacks of such policies were far from negligible, as the western Roman emperors discovered in the fifth century c. e. Bought peace was frequently unstable. Often the power of tributary chieftains was insufficiently consolidated to guarantee a lasting arrangement. There was also a risk that access to the wealth of the imperial government did not satisfy demand but rather whetted the appetite of barbarian leaders and their warrior retinues for more. This could pose a serious threat if the initial alliance with the empire had helped strengthen the social and military organization of the tribal band. Imperial power and barbarian tribes existed in an uneasy equilibrium. Nonetheless, from the imperial perspective, the financial rewards of these policies frequently outweighed the risks. These, after all, could normally be handled. By contrast, the costs of waging war against the barbarians on the frontier dwarfed the expense of buying them off with gifts and military service. The sources rarely enable us to make precise calculations. But it is sometimes possible to form a rough impression. Chinese figures, for instance, seem to suggest that a set of punitive campaigns against one group of barbarian nomads in the decade from 107-118 c. e. cost the imperial government five to six times the entire amount spent on barbarian appeasement.335 In the long term, Chinese emperors understandably chose uneasy accommodation over costly mobilization.
The impulse to save on the number of soldiers was irresistible. In this area, extensive empires such as Rome and Han China enjoyed one advantage: they drew their resources from a very broad base. Even at low levels of mobilization, they were still able to field impressive numbers. The difficulties experienced by Roman emperors in waging simultaneous full-scale wars on the Germanic and Persian frontiers have often enough been mentioned as one of the weaknesses of the empire. Yet it ought to have been possible temporarily to expand the size of the army. At some twenty-five to thirty legions, the imperial army was bigger than the peace-time force retained by the republican government in the late 60s b. c.e. to guard its much less extensive territories, but smaller than the peak numbers reached during the following decades of conquest and revolutionary struggles. The imperial army, furthermore, increasingly drew its recruits from all over the empire while the brunt of the burden of fielding the vast armies of the late republic had fallen on the Italian population. Mobilization levels, therefore, were considerably lower than they had been.336 However, the pressure to expand numbers was not strong enough. The emperor was already in possession of the biggest military force by far anywhere in western Eurasia. He could forego the extreme levels of military recruitment that the Italian population had had to sustain even during the most peaceful times of the late republic without losing the ability to command, on a regular basis, a larger number of soldiers. In other words, he had come to depend on the benefits of economies of scale.
This ability to save on manpower resources and achieve economies of scale in army organization may provide an important part of the explanation for the frequent longevity of tributary empires such as Rome and the successive Chinese empires. History, of course, cannot be reduced to economics. When first established, inertia and cowardice, for instance, would also have been forces favoring the persistence of empire. On the other hand, much spoke against their lasting success. With their vast territories they almost seem to violate the limits of the possible. Low speed of transport and communication made tight control of all areas impossible. One might have expected the imperial state to splinter at any time. Yet these empires survived for surprisingly long periods, probably because they were able to maintain hegemony at relatively low costs. The Chinese experience, with its long history of reining in the army, seems to confirm the plausibility of such an interpretation.337
Tribute extracted with a minimum of effort also entailed keeping administrative costs at a low. The imperial state, and Rome rather more so than Han China, was spread very thin on the taxpaying ground of provincial societies. During the Antonine era, the Roman Empire with its population of perhaps sixty million people was partitioned into some forty provinces, each with a governor, a financial officer (sometimes two), a few assistants, and imperial slaves plus a small secretariat. “Government without bureaucracy,” the label coined by Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, is not an exaggeration. In the fourth and fifth centuries, provincial administration expanded.338 This brought the number of administrators closer to that of Han China, whose administration penetrated to the county level. In 140 c. e., the government comprised at its lowest level some 1,179 counties, each headed by a state magistrate assisted by one or two commandants and a few bureaus. On average, this miniscule administrative set-up would have been responsible for overseeing law, order, tax collection, maintenance of the census records as well as other governmental tasks for a population of some forty to fifty thousand.339 With such lean bureaucracies, the administration of both Han China and Rome had to depend on the active collaboration of groups that exercised a commanding influence in rural societies: primarily local landowning aristocrats and the wealthiest segments of the peasantry. But nothing ever comes for free. Here is a letter from the Roman province of Egypt in 288 c. e.: “The accounts have themselves proved that a number of persons wishing to swallow up the estates of the treasury have devised for themselves various titles, such as administrators, secretaries, or superintendents, by which means they secure no advantage for the treasury, but swallow up its surplus.”340 Wastage was an endemic and even an institutionalized feature of the tributary system. The imperial administration could only aspire to limit the number of recipients who benefited from its resources. But it could not evade the problem; it depended on local supporters to have its taxes collected.341
The imperial government had to accept that local gentry and aristocracy retained and acquired control of a sizeable part of the agricultural surplus in return for presiding over the process of tax collection. The rate of imperial taxation could not easily be increased. Most of the time, taxes were kept at a stable and relatively low level in both the Roman Empire and Han China.342 Both the establishment of the Han dynasty and its restoration under the later Han were followed by tax reductions.343 Augustus, in his own account of his reign, boasted that he had subsidized the treasury out of his own funds rather than, it is implied, burdened the population with further taxes.344 Emperors who attempted to increase or introduce new taxation frequently encountered tough opposition. New taxes were the product of bad husbandry on the part of the monarch: this was a tenet on which Greco-Roman and Han elites would generally have been able to agree.345 It was, in any case, one thing to issue a demand for taxes, quite another to receive payment. Tax arrears, in the Roman world, were allowed to build up for decades and the tax base suffered constant erosion as local people attempted to have their lands exempted from official tax records, either through grants of imperial privilege or by silent evasion.346 One way to interpret the drop in the number of households recorded by the two best-known Chinese census figures, dating respectively from the turn of our era and the middle of the second century c. e., would be to see them as a barometer of the difficulties experienced by the later Han in rebuilding and holding on to the tax base of the former period.347
Aristocracies and the wealthier segments of the peasant population consequently benefited from their collaboration with the imperial power. It enabled them to expand the acreage under their control. This process took different forms. In some areas, clan - and kinship-based types of land control dominated; in others, land markets were more important. It is possible that the buying and selling of land played a bigger role in the Roman world, with its clear definition of property rights promoted by imperial law. On the other hand, patronage and other social ties were far from insignificant there, just as markets in land property also played a role in Han China. Whatever the precise articulation of land tenure, the result was a gradual but steady growth of larger estates and an increase in aristocratic wealth. These developments characterize both Roman and Han history and acquire critical importance in their later phases as aristocratic holdings reached a size where they began to squeeze the imperial state out of the agricultural economy.348 Peasants who fell under the control and protection of big landowners and were thus lost to imperial tax collectors are a common concern of the later histories of both empires. But before competition over the control of the
Commanding and Consuming the World iii
Agricultural surplus intensified between imperial state and landed aristocracies, mutual benefits had accrued for a long time. This process is much more clearly visible in the Roman Empire because Greco-Roman elites chose to build with marble and fired brick rather than perishable materials. During the first two centuries c. e., the accumulation of aristocratic riches was accompanied by a spate of building activities and conspicuous consumption that forever transformed the landscape of the Mediterranean and beyond. Throughout the Roman Empire, aristocrats proudly proclaimed their wealth and strength by adorning their cities with monumental buildings and works of art. Ever since, the copious remains of this activity have commanded the attention of crowds of travellers and tourists, who continue to flock to museums and excavation sites to admire the accomplishments of a long-gone past. The imposition of a tributary empire increased consumption and the flow of resources both locally and empire-wide.
So far, the tribute-producing enterprise has been sketched as an instrument of pure exploitation. This was how it looked to Finley, for instance. Certainly, lofty notions of a “Rechtstaat” underpinning an imperial peace that enabled enterprising subjects to prosper under the free spirit of the market seem distinctly misplaced.349 The backbone of the imperial economies, in Rome as well as in Han China, was not provided by capitalist entrepreneurs; it consisted of peasants, very large numbers of them. Roman moralists and Confucian literati never tired of ramming home this message: “The fundamental way of governing the people is to make them settle on the land.”350 But the prevalence of peasant agriculture need not have made the imperial economy a zero-sum game. It is well known how throughout history the production of most peasants has not been directed toward making a profit on the market. Rather, peasants generally geared their activities to satisfying the consumption needs of their household first. It was when these needs were met that peasants stopped working, and not when further activity would have been unable to generate a profit in the market place. As a result, the peasant household often had unused labor reserves.351 In favorable circumstances, markets might induce peasants to mobilize these resources in pursuit of profit. But markets also posed risks to the peasant. Markets increased his dependence on unpredictable price fluctuations. Production primarily for the market was a dangerous strategy: it could only be complementary.352 By contrast, demands imposed on the peasant by the imperial state and aristocratic landlords were not optional. Historically, the combination of imperial tribute and aristocratic rents has been able to claim a very sizeable share of peasant production.
They forced the peasant to increase his surplus production to a considerable extent.353
The mutual alliance of empire and local elites may thus be hypothesized to have strengthened their position in relation to peasant producers and enabled them to mobilize the untapped labor reserves of society.354 This happened in very direct form when peasants were conscripted to perform corvee labor on the maintenance or construction of canals, dykes, irrigation works, roads, and other such things in the agricultural off-peak seasons. Corvee labor was an important element in the set of obligations the Han government imposed on its subjects. It was less conspicuous in the Roman Empire, at least outside the province of Egypt with its irrigation agriculture, but nevertheless far from insignificant.355 The formation of a tributary empire, in other words, did not merely serve to bring more resources into circulation and concentrate consumption, it may also have had the added effect of producing a modest increase in per capita production by forcing producers to work harder. This cannot be proven. But in the Mediterranean, the huge surge in chattel slavery sparked off by the Roman conquests may be indicative of the existence of such a process.
3. Tribute and Commercialization: The Market as Transformer
The reception of tribute, however, entailed a practical problem. Most taxpayers were grain-producing peasants. But the needs of the imperial government were far more diverse. Roman authorities partly attempted to get around this problem by regularly monopolizing access to strategic goods or stipulating their delivery as part of the tribute. The range was wide, stretching from ox hides delivered by barbarian tribes to the silver mines of Spain and the quarries of red porphyry and grey granodiorite in the Egyptian desert.356 The Han imperial court received parts of its tribute in the form of diverse local products. But such arrangements did not remove the basic problem: tribute delivered in kind would not necessarily have corresponded to the consumption needs of the government. Roman and Han power also required the assistance of market institutions to mobilize the tributary surplus to the fullest and transform it into a flexible and freely disposable resource. Market trade supplied a number of services. It enabled the state to sell products in excess of its current needs, buy those it lacked, and obtain a more convenient form of storing and saving by converting goods into cash.
These functions were performed at a number of levels. At the top, the Roman government availed itself of contractors, individually and in groups, to exploit mines, handle some of the tax collection, organize transport, and so on. This promoted strong groups of financiers, typically with solid land possessions to back them up but also with commercial interests. Their strength culminated during the late Republic, whereas the emperors subsequently curtailed their power.357 Comparable groups are known from Han history. Here the government attempted to tap into commercial profits by monopolizing the production and sale of salt and iron, not least of the important iron farming tools. The administration of the government monopolies was left in the hands of some big businessmen, who accumulated vast riches, including large land holdings. But, as already indicated, these revenue policies were controversial. Under the later Han dynasty, the monopolies were more or less abandoned, only to be partially revived much later in Chinese history.358
The process of commercial mobilization of the surplus was, however, not solely articulated in the periodic emergence of a limited layer of wealthy state contractors. Even more important were the activities taking place at a much more basic level of agricultural society. Under the emperors, the Roman state, as suggested by the late Keith Hopkins, may have attempted to shift most of its taxes from delivery in kind to payment in cash.359 In that, it would have resembled the Han authorities. The latter compensated for a very low land tax rate by claiming a rather more substantial poll tax, which was supposed to be paid in coin. It is equally difficult to determine, in the two cases, just to what extent such a shift actually succeeded.360 The sparse evidence, which survives, suggests that the picture is an uneven one. Monetary defrayment of taxes continued to exist side-by-side delivery in kind throughout both empires. What is certain, however, is that neither the Roman nor the Han state could easily have found useful ways to consume most of its taxes in kind.361 Even when by the late third century c. e. the Roman state, struggling to increase its income, seems to have introduced an elaborate system of detailed taxation in kind, commercial commutation of obligations was intrinsic to its successful functioning.362 In Rome, furthermore, where the emperors operated a public grain dole, installments of the Egyptian grain tribute were moved into the market by private agents. Medicinal herbs, grown on the emperor’s Cretan estates and collected in excess of the court’s requirements, also found an outlet on the open market through a number of grocers.363 Commercialization of the tributary surplus is bound to have happened in one way or other.
As in the last two cases, some of this would have been channelled to commercial agents by the state itself. Peasants living near market towns would not infrequently have been able to market their own products. In other regions, marketing might have happened through the agency of large landowners who would have collected taxes and rents from their tenants and then shipped the produce to urban markets.364 This process would also have given rise to groups of commercial middlemen investing in the local collection of taxes. A set of fourth century c. e. papyri enables us to observe such persons in action. They report the activities of two brothers who specialized in tax collection. We find them speculating in the price of gold in order to convert the many small individual tax payments of peasants made with the hugely devalued silver follis into the gold coins required by the Roman state. They can also be seen borrowing money to pay the taxes of villages in advance and then afterward proceeding to collect those taxes, obviously in the hope of making a profit.365 The process of tributary extraction would have spawned a complex process of commercialization. It involved several levels of activity and different groups of middlemen.366 But it is also important to stress that this process would have been uneven and varied considerably both in intensity and in character depending on prevailing local conditions.
This brings us back to the beginning of this chapter and the relationship between tribute and trade. In spite of aristocratic prejudice toward commercial activities and hostility against “the middleman,” market trade was an integral and in some respects valued part of the tributary process. Pliny the Elder, a prominent aristocrat in the emperor’s service, included among his praise of Roman power this observation: “For now that the world has been united under the majesty of the Roman Empire, who would not think that life has benefited from the exchange of things and the partnership in blessed peace and that even all those things which were previously hidden have now been made widely available.”367 As has also become increasingly clear in recent Chinese scholarship, markets were crucial instruments to grease the wheels of the agricultural economy and mobilize the peasant production surplus of the tributary system.368 But it was in precisely that capacity they were needed. Hence the Chinese imperial authorities had little inclination to promote traders and merchants as such through the grant of monopolies and privileges in the fashion of European mercantilist policies.369
The parameters of the Chinese position can be mapped out from debates that occurred during the Han period among Confucian literati and imperial ministers concerning the various government monopolies on salt, iron, and equitable marketing.370 The view taken by the ministers was that while commercial and artisanal pursuits could be suspected of diverting energies from the agricultural sector, they were nevertheless necessary. For
The ancient founders of the commonwealth made open the ways of both fundamental [agricultural] and branch industries and facilitated equitable distribution of goods. Markets and courts were provided to harmonize various demands; there people of all classes gathered together and all goods collected, so that farmer, merchant, and worker could each obtain
What he desired____Thus without artisans, the farmers will be deprived of
The use of implements; without merchants, all prized commodities will be cut off. The former would lead to stoppage of grain production, the latter to exhaustion of wealth.
By intervening in this process the government would be able to curtail commercial profits of dubious social value and divert them to public benefit. So it was asserted: “it is clear that the iron and salt monopoly and equable marketing are really intended for the circulation of amassed wealth and the regulation of the consumption according to the urgency of the need.”371 The result would be a prosperous agricultural economy.
The hard-line Confucian view, however, rejected this position. Through these various measures, the dissenters held, the government competed with the population for profits and had raised taxes. Far from succeeding in turning people to agriculture, the state monopolies had only made this branch of economic activity less profitable. Instead, the government should forego the profits from its monopolies and reduce its level of spending. Nothing would be more efficient in promoting agriculture than such a show of imperial frugality that taught the people modest living. Good government knew that the wealth of the empire was best left with the subjects and did not get deeply involved in the pursuit of money: “merchants are for the purpose of draining stagnation and the artisans for providing tools; they should not become the principal concern of the gov-ernment.”372 In other words, the circulation of goods was important, but it was important in that it was subservient to the tributary process. Both sides of the debate were interested in expanding the frontier of agriculture, not in capturing and retaining markets.
The observation about Greco-Roman colonization that Montesquieu made long ago could equally well be extended to the Chinese case. Unlike the Europeans of the early modern period, they did not treat new or subject territories as commercial opportunities by monopolizing trade between mother country and outlying region.373 Provinces, in other words, were not managed as colonies and retained in a division of labor controlled by the metropolitan regions, such as in the European Atlantic system. From the perspective of the imperial state, it mattered more to serve the expansion of more self-sufficient forms of agriculture. That would guarantee the creation of many more new peasant households that were sufficiently prosperous to pay the imperial taxes. After an initial startup phase, newly opened territories on the agricultural frontier would normally have been able to become more or less economically independent of the more “developed” parts of the country. Imports from the old core region diminished and were gradually replaced by local products. This, for instance, is a process that has been delineated for the much better-known history of China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For some of its food grains, raw cotton, and timber, the wealthy and densely populated Yangzi delta had come to depend on imports from farther up river and from northern China. These imports were paid for by exporting cloth in return. However, as the population grew and the regions supplying primary products began to fill up, the development of this trade was arrested. Instead of further increasing specialization and regional interdependence, the peasant population in the Middle Yangzi region and northern China responded by diverting some of its labor into handicraft and protoindustrial cloth production, thus substituting the need for imports with products of their own. The Chinese imperial economy, shaped in part by long held Confu-cian ideals, developed more by reproducing itself in small identical agricultural cells than by intensifying regional specialization and exchange.374
Incidentally, that path of economic development has been one of the most intensely debated problems of Roman economic history. Rostovtzeff ascribed a key role to the phenomenon of import substitution in his classic study of the rise and fall of the imperial economy. From the late second century b. c.e., sizable exports of Italian wine, later followed by red slip ceramic tableware, had developed, particularly in the Western Mediterranean. Under the reign of the emperors, however, this flow was reversed. As the western provinces became more Romanized, they freed themselves from the need for Italian imports. Instead, local production of red slip pottery, wine, and many other goods developed in Gaul, Spain, and Africa, even to the extent of exporting these products to Rome and Italy. For Rostovtzeff and many of his later followers, this produced an economic crisis, first in Italy and then in the empire. The Roman economy had been trapped in a process of decreasing specialization of labor.375 This, however, is not a helpful way of approaching these developments. The reduction in Italian exports was more than offset by increased and more diverse agricultural and artisanal production in the provinces. While imperial Italy was far from reduced to penury, agriculture and manufacturing reached a level of intensity in the western provinces that remained unmatched for centuries after the fall of the empire.376 The Chinese comparison teaches us that what really took place was simply the reproduction and expansion of “civilized” agricultural production. Aggregate production and the disposable surplus had increased.
4. Imperial Styles of Consumption
With the formation of extensive dominion and the concentration of wealth through tributary extraction, new forms and styles of consumption in food, dress, entertainment, building, burial, public ceremony, and religious ritual developed in the worlds of Rome and Han. As the rulers of “all the world,” the emperors set the pace and tone for the imperial aristocracy and the groups of local elites across the two empires. They promoted an urban style of consumption that sought to emphasize the ability of its practitioners to command, in imperial fashion, large concentrations of wealth and a great variety of rare products from far away. The cities provided the scene for symbolic aristocratic displays of power. There, large followings and groups of spectators and service people were maintained by the expenditure of elite incomes. Bulk trade in various agricultural products expanded to provision these groups.
But aristocratic excellence was not only expressed in an ability to assemble great numbers of people. The cities also afforded members of the elite a convenient stage on which to compete and distinguish themselves through the possession of rare and expensive products. More intense socializing and frequent interaction among the aristocracy brought with it the emergence of a civilization of refinement; it was a culture of luxury consumption and connoisseurship where “the special qualities and savour of a great range of local producing units across the whole of Eurasia, stretching out into Africa. . ., were preserved and cherished for their difference,” as emphasized by Chris Bayly. As he goes on to explain,
Therefore [it] differed from modern capitalist consumption in that they
Emphasised the special products and qualities of distant realms. Whereas
Modern complexity demands the uniformity of Levis and trainers, the archaic simplicity of everyday life demanded that great men prized difference in goods, learned servants, women and animals and sought to capture their qualities. Modern ‘positional’ goods are self-referential to themselves and to the markets that create demand for them; the charismatic goods of archaic globalization were embedded in ideologies which transcended them. In one sense archaic lords and rural leaders were collectors rather than consumers. What they did, however, was more than merely to collect because the people, objects, foods, garments and styles of deportment thus assembled changed the substance of the collector.377
This capacity to change the substance of the consumer, however, also generated anxieties. In both empires, moral discourses developed about the proper appropriation of luxury. Change, after all, could signify either enhancement of personal qualities or moral corruption. It was crucial not to become a slave of one’s desires, as Dio Chrysostomus urged at the beginning of this chapter. Had he or other Greco-Roman moralists been known to Confucian literati, they would have garnered much sympathy. Han moralists can be found to complain in a similar vein about the craze for luxuries, the enormous riches wasted on dinners and adorning womenfolk, and the consequent drain on the empire’s wealth: “Beautiful jades and corals come from mount K’un. Pearls, rhinoceros horns and elephant tusks are produced in Kuei Lin. These places are more than ten thousand li distant from Han. Calculating the labour for farming and silk raising and the costs in material and capital, it will be found that one article of foreign
Imports costs a price one hundred times its value____As the rulers treasure the
Goods from distant lands, wealth flows outward. Therefore, a true King does not value useless things.”378
Such statements of disapproval, however, did nothing effectively to counter the new luxurious styles of consumption. Rather, they served to police the boundaries of elite society and reinforce the mystique and cultural allure of aristocratic consumption. Money that might buy the emblems of elite status, they insisted, was not enough to ensure its proper use. In both societies, the nouveau riche outsiders, such as wealthy merchants or aristocratic freedmen, who sought to establish themselves in upper-class society were stigmatized and satirized for their alleged vulgarity and lack of discernment. The Satyricon of the Roman writer Petronius is a famous example of this genre that has become a part of world literature. No amount of riches, as the novel teaches through its most colorful character Trimalchio, could prevent the newcomer from becoming the laughing stock of polite society. To avoid humiliation, one had to be immersed in established elite culture. The true aristocrat knew how to avoid the vulgar excess of the merely rich but also how not to appear mean, stingy, and common: “In ancient times, reasonable limits were set to the style of palaces and houses, chariots and liveries. Plain rafters and straw thatch were not part of the system of the ancient Emperors. The true gentleman, while checking extravagance, would disapprove of parsimoniousness because over-thriftiness tends to narrowness.”379
Mere acquisition, in other words, was far from sufficient to guarantee successful appropriation of the trappings of aristocratic culture. Elite ideology required them to be difficult to handle. Mastery was reserved for the exclusive group in command of the complex codes of literary and philosophic aristocratic civiliza-tion.380 Of course, the prevalence of prejudices like these did not stop rich outsiders and the socially ambitious from staking out whatever claim to distinction they could by emulating the style of the governing classes. But these notions did serve to assert the cultural hegemony of the latter and consolidate their ability to set the tone in the world of consumption. Imperial styles of consumption developed under the leadership of the court and the governing classes. At each end of the Eurasian landmass, they sponsored an exquisite but regionally distinct culture of delicate, refined agricultural and artisan production. Fine silks, lacquerwork, vintage wine, glass, sculpture, the list could easily go on. Roman archaeology has shown that the material culture of the empire was both more diverse and extensive than that of the periods before and after.381
But aristocratic styles of consumption did not merely increase demand for internally produced goods; they also generated an upsurge in long-distance trade.382 Merchants traveled for years to bring back the rare and refined substances and products of faraway regions for the rituals of power and religion in which the consuming upper classes put their wealth on display. In this period, trade between the Mediterranean and Arabia and India expanded enormously. Merchants brought back from the East rich cargoes of incense, ivory, precious stones, rare spices, medicinal substances, and delicate clothes. Among these were Chinese silks, which can still be seen on display in surprising quantities in the National Museum of Syria in Damascus, brought to the Roman world from India by the caravans of the desert-city of Palmyra.383 At the same time,
Chinese demand spawned trading contacts with South-East Asia and even India to obtain exotic luxuries. Around the first century c. e., the contours of a Eurasian world trade emerged with Alexandria and the Middle East on one end, India (and Indonesia) as a midway station, and China at the other end. This system would gradually develop and expand over the following centuries. The scale of activity and the number of participants were always limited.384 At the same time, the cargoes of this trade represented enormous values.385 Eventually, they would tempt the Portuguese, followed later by merchants from the northwestern parts of Europe, to break into this system to capture some of its profits by circumnavigating Africa. The early modern period produced a new conjuncture in the old pattern of world trade for which the rising demand of imperial elites in Rome and Han China had laid the foundations.
These developments provide the real background to the enigmatic entry in the Hou Hanshu that “in the ninth yanxi year [166 c. e.], during the reign of Emperor Huan, the king of Da Qin [i. e., the Roman Empire], Andun [i. e., Marcus Aurelius Antoninus?], sent envoys from beyond the frontiers through Rinan [i. e., a commandery on the central Vietnamese coast], to offer elephant tusks, rhinoceros horn, and turtle shell. This was the very first time there was [direct] communication [between the two countries] .”386 The imperial chronicler, however, did not put much faith in this information. He thought the list of gifts too inconspicuous. Certainly, it seems quite unlikely that Marcus Aurelius, if he was indeed the ruler hiding behind “Andun,” should have sent an embassy to the Han Court. One plausible hypothesis, therefore, is that a group of merchants from the Roman Empire in search of rare products managed to make their way across the trade routes of Eurasia to reach China’s center of power and consumption. Such incidents, however, were few and far between. The emerging pattern of long-distance trade did not join the Eurasian cores of civilization tightly together. This trade was organized in stages. The two world empires remained hidden to each other in a twilight realm of fable and myth.387 Han China and imperial Rome represent two separate cultural traditions. But they do seem to have had much in common and even to have shared some products at the level of luxury trade. They were comparable worlds.
World History
