What is medieval?

In one sense, what makes something ‘medieval’ is obvious: it is the ‘between times’, the time between the classical and the modern. The term itself means precisely that, via French from from Latin ‘medium’ (middle) and ‘aevum’ (era or period).

But that only puts the question off one level: because what makes something “classical” and what makes something “modern”?

Of the two, defining ‘classical’ is easier. The classical period of a civilisation is the period when it has its first flowering of art, literature, culture and thought; establishing forms of the same that become recurring patterns in that society or civilisation. So ancient Greece and ancient Rome constitute the classical period of Western civilisation. The period of the ruling Caliphate from 642 to the C9th constitutes the classical period of Islam. The Nara and Heian periods the classical period of Japanese history, and so forth.

What makes something “modern”? My preferred answer has been that one is in the modern era when a society experiences a continuing breadth and rate of technological and social change that is discernable to its own inhabitants. The problem with that is that one might say that of of C12th and C13th Latin Christendom: and we would not describe that as “modern”.

The other feature we use when presenting at schools to distinguish a medieval period is one of warrior rule: distinguishing a warrior from a soldier.

A soldier is paid for by taxes: his salary, weapons, equipment and training typically using standard gear in an organised unit. He is, in effect, an armed employee and his watchword is duty: fulfilling the obligations he is paid to undertake. The Roman Army had soldiers. Modern armies have soldiers.

A warrior owns his own weapons, his family probably arranged his training, he is likely to have some direct income source, owes personal service and his watchword is honour: fulfilling the service he has promised to uphold. The knight, the samurai, the Iranian azadan, the Central Eurasian iqta (or similar tax farming fief) holder is a warrior: medieval armies are dominated by warriors.

So the classical period in Islam ends, and the medieval period begins, when the Buyids take power from the Caliphs and begin to distribute iqta fiefs. The classical period of Japan ends, and the medieval period begins, when the bakufu (aka Shogunate), the military government of the warrior clans, is set up so Japan becomes increasingly dominated by samurai politics. Classical civilisation ends when the Western Roman Empire collapses and Germanic kingdoms dominated by warriors owing personal service take over. Developing into the “ultimate” period of warrior rule, knightly Europe.

Hence the modern period begins when warrior rule ends: when rulers put armies of tax-paid soldiers, not personal-service warriors, into the field. This is a process of transition rather than an “on/off” thing. For example, seriously outnumbered English armies won victories such as Crecy, Poitiers, Najera and Agincourt not simply because of the longbow, but because they had much better command-and-control than their enemies. (They had much the same arms mix at Bannockburn, but got horribly beaten because the English command-and-control on the field was crap.) English kings had “cashed out” knights service and used their funds to hire companies from their nobility and gentry on a contract basis: a sort of militant national capitalism. It meant the English King or Prince in charge could give orders he could reasonably expect to be obeyed. In the “personal service” armies of their opponents, command-and-control was much less reliable.

Nevertheless, in European history, the Battle of Fornovo in 1495 is a good marker, since both the Kingdom of France and the Italian League were fielding armies of tax-paid soldiers – recognisably modern armies even though they were still using knights/men-at-arms as heavy cavalry. Certainly, people at the time realised things were changing – hence figures such as Bayard (who famously knighted his sovereign, Francis I) and Maximilian being referred to during their lives as “the last knight”.

The medieval period in Japan ends with the abolition of the Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration of 1867. So, close to four centuries after it does in Latin Christendom, but the medieval period in Japan also starts about seven centuries later than it does in Latin Christendom (and does not occur due to any sort of social collapse).

Trying to date end of the medieval period in Islam is a bit trickier. The abolition of the privileges of the sipahis and their change into cavalry soldiers in 1828 by the Ottoman Sultan is a good marker. Particularly as it comes two year after the “disbanding” slaughter of the Janissaries (known as ‘the Auspicious Incident’: the Janissaries were hated by that time) and 10 years after the massacre of the Citadel ended mamluk power in Egypt. But it is a reasonable question to ask, for example, if Afghanistan has ever entirely got rid of warlords.

Then again, the period of warrior rule in the Scottish highlands probably did not end until the post-Culloden suppressions, including the 1746 abolition of the right of justice of clan chiefs.

So, a medieval period is a period of history between a classical era and the modern period marked by warrior rule – and different civilisations have their medieval periods at different times. While modernity is a period where armies are of tax-paid soldiers and a society experiences a continuing breadth and rate of technological and social change that is discernable to its own inhabitants. Which also does not happen to all civilisations at the same time.

Just because we are all on the same globe does not mean we all enter modernity in the same way and at the same time. After all, various remaining hunter-gatherer societies have still not made it into the Neolithic Revolution.

History happens, but, even in its more general patterns, in its particular ways in particular places.

Empires of the Silk Road (1): from Scythians to Tamerlaine

Christopher I. Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present is a history of central Eurasia that anyone interested in the wider patterns of world history should read. It is a book with the “barbarians”, the steppe nomads, at the centre. In reconfiguring Eurasian history Beckwith, almost as an afterthought, puts European imperialism in the context of Eurasian history far better than anyone else I have read—even those who were deliberately, even ostentatiously, trying to do so. He also engages in passionate critique and denunciation of modernism and postmodernism, but I have already discussed that.

Beckwith states his purpose quite clearly in his preface:

my aim has been to write a realistic, objective view of Central Eurasia ad Central Eurasians (p.xii).

The book was sparked by calculations finding that the trade in luxury goods must have constituted a major part of the economy of central Eurasia with subsequent study finding that:

the appearance, waxing and waning, and disappearance of Silk Road commerce paralleled that of the native Central Eurasian empires chronologically (p.xii)

with the book evolving significantly from its original conception due to Beckwith’s developing understanding as he assembled the materials for his book.

Beckwith laments the lack of scholarly depth (or even elementary coverage) on much of Central Eurasian history. He attacks the stereotypical view of the steppe nomads as distinct from agrarians and city-dwellers and as warlike, poor and hard-to-defeat natural warriors. A view he regards as comprehensively wrong (Ppxii-xxiii). In particular, agrarianism and urbanism were both part of the steppe empires.

Trading warriors
The central economic dynamic in the interaction between steppe peoples and the agrarian peoples was trade. Trade within the steppe empires and trade with the “river valley” empires. The most salient and lucrative being the trading of nomad horses for Chinese silk. An imported horse cost between 25 and 38 bolts of raw silk (p.22). China was unable to raise enough horses for its own needs (apparently due to a lack of Selenium in its soil). The vast majority of steppe silk came from trade and taxation, not war and extortion (p.23). Beckwith’s identification of trade as being the central dynamic in interactions between nomad pastoralists and urbanised agrarians replicates Salzman’s analysis.

Beckwith identifies the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex as a link across cultures and times:

The most crucial element of the early form of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex was the socio-political ideal of the heroic lord and his comitatus, a war band and his friends sworn to defend him to the death (p.12).

A pattern that extends at least as far back as the Scythians and from the Anglo-Saxon huscarls of Britain (an archipelago off the coast of north-west Eurasia) to the Japanese samurai (inhabitants of an archipelago off the coast of north-east Eurasia). Since a leader was expected to provide his comitatus with luxurious gifts (p.26), trade was central to the warrior and leadership culture in the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex from the Norse, right across Eurasia (Pp165ff). As later developments from this original source, samurai Japan developed a vigorous mercantile culture, just as knightly Europe did.

A colleague of mine suggested that the Germanic cultures developed feudalism when the Celtic cultures did not because a German warrior was permitted to sell his loyalty. The same point applies the samurai of Japan (who adopted the model, probably while in Korea [Pp90-1, 106]). In both cultures, oath-breaking was heinous, as one would expect. A contractual culture can only work if contracts are taken seriously and the binding of leader and warriors (or of warrior to warrior) was the central “glue” of the society—blood brotherhood as the substitute for the “automatic” brotherhood of blood relations. (And chosen connections according to evolved rules have rather different implications than the automatic associations of lineage: there is, for example, much less reason to develop binding institutions outside of lineage if lineage connections trump all.)

In a similar vein, Beckwith argues that the Germanic conquests represented the “re-Central Eurasianisation” of Europe and the “feudal revolution” of Europe was the product of that (Pp109ff).

Beckwith argues that the comitatus was imported into Islam as the mamluk or ghulam system, which he denies was a slave soldier system (p.25). The suggestion of importation of the concept makes sense, particularly given the historical connections Beckwith points to. While the original cases may well have been free warriors, that they did not become slave soldier systems seems more dubious. The Janissaries clearly were, for example. Given how extensive Islamic slaving and slave-trading was, slaves provided an obvious recruitment method: particularly after initial connections to recruitment sources faded and given the lineage-based loyalty systems in the wider society.
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Beckwith argues firmly that the chariot was a Central Eurasian development, from about 2000BC, given the domesticated horse preceded the chariot there, while it appears with the chariot in the river valley civilisations from Shang China to Mesopotamia and Egypt, its ritual and prestige use flowing from its hunting and military use(Pp50ff). The C17thBC saw a wave of war-chariot peoples seizing control of Central Anatolia (the Hittites), Upper Mesopotamia (Mitanni) and Greek Aegean (the Mycenaeans). The war chariot was a light and manoeuvrable vehicle, unlike the earlier four-wheeled ox-wagons. The development of running javelin throwers to disable horses, chariots and charioteers brought the military effectiveness of chariots to an end during the Bronze Age collapse , though their prestige (and racing) uses lasted much longer (Pp56-7).

Intellectual zing
Beckwith notes that there is an outbreak of intellectual ferment in the fifth and fourth century BC in the Hellenic, Indic and Sinic worlds centred around archetypal figures such as Socrates (469-399BC), Plato (427-347BC), Aristotle (384-322BC), Guatama Buddha (c.500BC), Panini (c.C4thBC), Kautilya (c.321-296BC), Confucius (c550-480BC), Lao-tzu (c.late C5thBC), Chuang Tzu (C4thBC). While tracing many specific borrowings has been difficult, Beckwith points out that:

… there are some, and it must furthermore be considered odd if such distant areas as East Asia and the Aegean … should have started arguing not only about their actual governments but about government in general, asking questions about their existence, and talking about logic and looking into the way the human mind works. … The asking of question about the questions themselves was new, and it is difficult to find the precedents or motivation for the development in each case (Pp73-4).

Beckwith notes some common features—each culture was divided by large number of states, none dominant (what economists call competitive jurisdictions), they shared in the increase in world trade due to the rise of the nomadic empires (with the consequent growth of a commercial class and spread of ideas). Any connection was by land and went through Central Eurasia.

Beckwith notes that, in the C6th and early C5th, the entire northern steppe zone and much of the Central Asian zone was Iranian speaking. Anacharsis the Scythian visited Greece in the 47th Olympiad (591-588BC). Demosthenes was the grandson of a Scythian woman. Zoroaster likely came from pastoral Iranian society. There are references to Confucius suggesting Central Eurasians had answers. Whatever the reason why such widely separated cultures showed such a striking surge in intellectual creativity in the same period, it is surely likely to involve the cultural realm that linked them—Central Eurasia (Pp73ff).

Steppe nomads generally led longer, more prosperous and easier lives, than the inhabitants of agrarian cultures (p.76). This would certainly provide the basis for their own intellectual surge. Moreover, by being link cultures—that is, being in contact with a range of different civilisations—that may well have encouraged asking more basic questions, given the range of cultural outlooks they were confronted with. That, after all, was the experience of early Islam, as it surged across the Middle East and North Africa, and of post-medieval Western Europe, as it surged across the globe.

The trade imperative
Beckwith argues forcefully that the notion of barbarian nomads raiding and pillaging victimised agrarian cultures is a result of accepting uncritically the self-justifying propaganda of the great imperial agrarian empires. On the contrary, he argues, the steppe peoples were far more often subject to aggression and disruption by the imperial states. This could be ultimately self-defeating, as encouraging instability and division among steppe peoples undermined the flow of trade:

The aggressive foreign policy successes of the Chinese and Roman empires had disastrous consequences. The partial closing of the frontier to trade by other empires, and their destabilisation of Central Eurasia by their incessant attacks, resulted in internecine warfare in the region. The serious decline in Silk Road commerce that followed—observable in the shrinkage of areal extent of Central Asian cities—may have been one of the long-lasting recession that eventually brought down both the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Han Empire… and with them the end of the end of Classical civilization (p.92).

The cooling weather and spread of disease may also have been factors, of course.

In the C3rd, a great wandering of peoples roiled around Central Asia, Northern China and Western Europe, spreading the Central Eurasian Cultural Complex from Spain to Japan (p.94). The most dramatic manifestation being the rise and vanishing of the Hun empire, though the destruction of the army of the Eastern Roman Empire by the Goths at Adrianople was the most cataclysmic single event. Beckwith points out the persistent pattern of Roman duplicity in dealing with the Central Eurasian peoples (Pp94ff). When things (eventually) settled down, Germanic warrior cultures manifesting the Central Eurasian Culture Complex dominated remnants of Mediterranean Classical Culture (with a Judaic religious overlay):

The resulting blending of the Central Eurasian Germanic peoples and their Romanized subjects laid the foundation of what eventually became a distinctive new European civilization (p.101).

Beckwith examines the incentives and imperatives driving the Central Eurasian peoples. Beckwith notes that:

All empire builders, whether ruled by nomadic or agrarian dynasties, attempted to expand as far as possible in all directions.

But the steppes are lands without natural borders and herds do not have the same attachment to specific territory that farming does, so

… from a Central Eurasian point of view borders were meaningless. As a consequence, when a winning clan was extraordinarily successful, the new nation would rapidly expand across the entire expanse of the Central Eurasian steppe zone right up to the walls and fortresses of the peripheral empires (p.108).

The archetypal examples being Scythians (or Northern Iranians), the Turks and the Mongols.

Imperial instability
The decline of Rome and Han China encouraged migration. The economic difficulties of the border lands of the Empires encouraged nomad rulers—wanting trade goods to bind their comitatus—to move closer to the wealthy centres of the Empires, setting in place destructive spirals that consumed the Western Roman Empire, though the (somewhat reduced) Eastern Roman Empire and Persian Empires managed to survive (Pp108ff). The consequence for the rest of Europe was the creation of warrior rule leading to the “feudal” (peasants work for knight, knight protects peasants) system and the creation of medieval Europe (Pp110-1).

Beckwith sees the reforms of Heraclius and his grandson Constans II (the last Roman consul)—creating the system of themes—and the loss of Syria and Egypt to the Arab Conquest as marking the end of the Eastern Roman Empire and the beginning of the Byzantine Empire (p.122). If one is going to make such a division, that is a good place to make it, even though its inhabitants continued to consider themselves Romans and they were named such by the cultures around them.

The pattern of brief and bloody unification under the Qin followed by long reign of the Han was repeated with a brief and bloody unification under the Sui followed by the long reign of the T’ang, a dynasty with strong Central Eurasian antecedents and connections (p.124). Turks had been invited by various contestants for power during the turmoil that saw the T’ang replace the Sui, and this “aggression” was used as an excuse to expand into Turkic territories as part of the T’ang desire to emulate and outdo the Han and establish the greatest empire yet (p.125). The T’ang allied with the Arabs to break a Turkic-Tibetan alliance that raised the perennial Chinese fear of “being cut off” from the trade to the West (p.134) (i.e. having to deal with a single jurisdiction in its landward trade).

Beckwith notes the attention given by surrounding civilisations to Central Eurasian affairs in this period, due to concern for trade and because of a common ideology of a single legitimate ruler (their own: whether Roman Emperor, Caliph, Son of Heaven or whatever). Contact via Central Eurasia helped force awareness of other empires and led to some almost amusing diplomatic circumlocutions. Yet, despite the constant warfare this ideology of single legitimate ruler encouraged, trade continued to expand across the Silk Road until the middle of C8th (p.139).

Religious branding
Religions played their own role in this mix: the Frankish Empire with Catholicism, the “Byzantine” Empire with Orthodoxy, the Islam of the Arab Empire, the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism, of the Uighurs to Manicheanism and the Tibetan Kingdom to Buddhism (Pp148ff). The T’ang empire adopted Taoism (to the disapproval of the Confucian mandarinate) and became increasingly severe towards other religions while the “Byzantine” Empire had a series of Iconoclast rulers, who supported this unusual diversion from mainstream Orthodoxy with torture and murder (p.150). (Though, of course, there had been plenty of torture and murder in the establishment and maintenance of said Orthodoxy in the first place.)

With these religions went literacy—sacred texts generally being central to them—and the result was a great flowering in literary and graphic art from Japan to Europe (p.156).

The late C8th saw a decline in international trade for reasons which are unclear, though Beckwith points out the systematic Chinese massacre of Sogdians (men, women and children) “and anyone who looked even remotely non-Chinese” after the suppression of the disastrous An Lu-shan Rebellion could hardly have helped trade relations (p.157). The T’ang Empire suffered continuing economic decline, with barter increasingly replacing money, and apparently pulled the international trading system down with it (p.156). The T’ang massacred the Uighurs, exterminated Manicheanism and went on to attempt the same with Buddhism, ending the T’ang cultural revival and going into a spiralling decline that led to the collapse of the dynasty within 50 years (p.160). The Frankish, Tibetan and Abbasid empires broke up leaving the “Byzantine” Empire as the remaining large state in or around Central Eurasia (Pp161ff).

The decline of powerful secular states left religious authority to fill the vacuum. Tibet became dominated by Buddhist monasticism, which also spread across China, Korea and Japan. Christian monasticism flourished in Europe. The Sufi brotherhoods provided an Islamic equivalent. Monasticism spread literacy, but also spread religious orthodoxy. A climactic downturn encouraged southward migrations from the northern steppes, a major disturbing factor in Central Eurasia. The Rus Norse-Slavic culture, and nomadic dynasties in northern China, both straddled the geographic boundary between nomadic and agrarian cultures, spreading agrarian urbanisation into the Western and the Eastern Steppes (Pp163ff).

At first, the relatively small size of individual states “limited the evil that governments and politicians could do to individuals” (Pp176-7) as artists, philosophers, scholars and thinkers could move to more amenable polities: the competitive jurisdictions effect once more. But the consequent intellectual flowering in Islam failed under the assault of religious conservatism led by al-Ghazali, who used the techniques of the philosophers against them in the service of dogma. Averroes (ibn Rushd) rebutted his arguments, but he was on the periphery of the Islamic world in Spain while al-Ghazali operated near its centre. Averroes was very influential in Latin Christendom, had almost no influence in Islam and “saw the destruction of Islamic intellectual life by rabid religious conservatives in his own lifetime” (Pp178-9).

Just as Islam was turning it back on reason, Latin Christendom was in an intellectual ferment from the interaction with Islam in Spain and Outremer (Pp180ff). One reinforced by the (albeit temporary) Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204.

Eventually, the Mongols—who had remained animist during their great imperial expansion—adopted Buddhism (P.194). The pax Mongolica promoted trade and movements of people. Which also promoted movement of disease. The Black Death started as a pandemic in northern China, killing possibly 90% of the population, spreading across the trade routes to Europe, where it killed perhaps a third of the population. It had a disastrous effect on the Mongol successor states. “The Calamitous Fourteenth Century” was so throughout Central Eurasia (Pp195ff).

The spread of the plague also had a disastrous long-term effect on the mamluk regime in Egypt: medieval Europe, on the other hand, was given a major impetus (back) on the path of economic development through capital-substitution which the great expansion in European population up to the Great Famine of the early C14th had threatened to derail.

Beckwith places Tamerlaine very much as a Central Eurasian figure: a dynastic founder with armies of cavalry and infantry, expert at conquering cities operating off a base that was substantially urban and agrarian (p.200). Beckwith notes the positive effect Mongol rule had for trade and transmission of ideas and techniques, including art and literature, but downplays the notion that it was some transformative event in world history: the ethnic patterns that outlived it already existed (Pp202-3) while the promotion of trade had been a perennial aim of Central Eurasian nomadic peoples.

But, with the passing of Tamerlaine and the failure of his dynasty to produce anything other than squabbling (and shrinking) local principalities, the old patterns were about to be transformed by a revolution in world affairs, covered in the next part of this book review, which concludes in a third post.

Why Latin Christendom overtook Islam (and Orthodox Christendom)

Scholars and others write about the golden age of Islam, how it created a brilliant, urban and urbane, sophisticated and scientifically curious civilisation when Latin Christendom was sunk in a Dark Age.

This is broadly true. Islam was the crossroads civilisation, the one in touch with all the other major civilisations of Eurasia, and so able to mix and match ideas. It had access to the achievements of Greek science. It had a common language of scholarship (Arabic). It used these advantages in a flourishing period of Classical Islam. Then Islam declined into a spreading stagnation—intellectual, scientific, technological, economic. So, the question arises, as Bernard Lewis famously asked, what went wrong?

What did not go wrong was the West. With exception of the Reconquista, Islam spent a thousand years generally advancing against Christendom until the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The stagnation of Islam was not caused by the West: on the contrary, it was the stagnation of Islam that allowed the West to counter-attack successfully and conquer most of Islam, to the extent that, by 1942, the only Islamic countries which were not protectorates or colonies were Turkey and Afghanistan. Even in 1453, when Sultan Mehmet II was about to take Constantinople, he was using guns which relied on infidel gunners.

So, what advantages did Latin Christendom, perched on a bunch of peninsulas on the edge of the Eurasian landmass, have?

The key factors are:
A range of political forms.
A range of legal forms.
Stronger use of the hereditary principle.
Effective competitive jurisdictions.
Belief in an ordered cosmos.
Ability to harness talent.

Most of these applied to also advantage Latin Christendom over Orthodox Christendom, which had the further disadvantage of suffering far more from Islamic and Mongol depredations.
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A range of political forms
Islam essentially only had one political model: autocracy. The autocrat might merely be a warrior king, or he might be able to claim extra religious sanction, but all Muslim rulership was autocratic. By contrast, Latin Christendom had republics, self-governing cities, hereditary monarchies and elective monarchies that varied notably within themselves and typically came to incorporate the representative principle, as it spread from the innovations of Alfonso IX of Leon and Castile. This political variety meant that Latin Christendom had far more institutional possibilities for the selection processes of history to work on.

A range of legal forms
Although Islam has a variety of schools of jurisprudence, it has only one basic set of laws, Shar’ia. While Islamic law was taken to come from God, in Latin Christendom, all law was human, even canon law. Latin Christendom had a wide range of legal system and laws, all of which were alterable. Latin Christendom had far more possibilities for the selection processes of history to work on plus the capacity to engage in legal experiments far more easily.

Stronger use of the hereditary principle
Not only was the hereditary principle much more widespread in Latin Christendom, applying strongly throughout the political and social structure, so much more stable across the society (since those who might attack hereditary suzerains were themselves holding their lands and service on the basis of the hereditary principle). It was also, with the evolution of primogeniture, much more stable in its internal operation within dynasties and landed families.

In Islam, warriors held tax farming rights, not lands, and these rights were revocable at any time, and were not heritable, being allocated according to the whim of the ruler. Amin Malouf contrasts the situation where peaceful succession occurred moderately regularly in the crusader states with the surrounding Muslim states thus:

Nothing of the sort existed in the Muslim states. Every monarchy was threatened by the death of its monarch, and every transmission of power provoked civil war … Let us note that in the Arab world the question is still on the agenda, in scarcely altered terms, in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Being landlords, the warrior elite of Latin Christendom had, compared to the Muslim warrior elite, much more interest in the long-term productivity of land and peasants, since that preserved (and hopefully expanded) their children(s) inheritance (what economists call longer time horizons).

Muslim traveller and chronicler ibn Jubayr noticed the difference, again contrasting the crusader states of Outremer with their Muslim neighbours:

Upon leaving Tibin (near Tyre), we passed through an unbroken skein of farms and villages whose lands were efficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims, but they live in comfort with the Franj—may God preserve us from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and all their property is unmolested. All the regions controlled by the Franj in Syria are subject to this same system: the landed domains, villages, and farms have remained in the hands of the Muslims. Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lots to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, whereas the Franj act with equity.

Incentives make a difference. There will be more investment in the creation and maintenance of productive assets, and better relations with people working those assets, the longer the time horizon of those controlling said assets. Over centuries, even a marginal difference in such things generation after generation will add up to major differences in economic outcomes and institutional development.

Effective competitive jurisdictions
Rulership in the Muslim world was autocratic. It was also unstable. The pattern of pastoralist conquest of settled river valleys establishing regimes which decay and are then replaced, as described by ibn Khaldun—and whose dynamics have been further explicated by more recent anthropological work, particularly by Phillip Carl Salzman—created fluctuating and unstable rulerships. This was not a good basis for institutional evolution. In particular, it was not a good basis for competitive jurisdictions to operate effectively in driving institutional development. Particularly once most of the Muslim Middle East became dominated by Ottoman rule.

Contrasting with the Middle Eastern pattern of isolated river valleys and coastal plains constantly threatened by nomadic hinterlands, Europe—as a mountainous peninsula of peninsulas, which inhibited unification ambitions while promoting the flow of ideas, goods, people and capital—had greater continuity in polities and in jurisdictional divisions. Competitive jurisdictions operated over time to develop institutions that embodied social learning including stronger defense of private property, more dispersed power arrangements driven by competition amongst jurisdictions to attract capital (financial, human, etc).

The same processes operated in the mountainous archipelago of Japan, but with less variety in law, political forms and cultural influences to work with. The Reformation—with its creation of greater religious variety—and the global break-out with the age of exploration making Latin Christendom the crossroads civilisation—the one in contact with all the others so able to mix and match ideas and capacities—magnified the effectiveness of competitive jurisdictions in driving technological, commercial and institutional development.

Belief in an ordered cosmos
From the C11th to the C13th centuries, all three of the Abrahamic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) struggled with the impact of Aristotelian philosophy on the tradition of scriptural revelation. In Judaism (as epitomised by Maimonedes) and in Christianity (as epitomised by St Thomas Aquinas) Aristotelianism—and the belief in an ordered creation—won.

Not so in Islam. There the Aristotelianism of Ibn Rushd aka “Averroes” (whose writings were very influential in Latin Christendom) was decisively defeated by the occasionalism of al Ghazali. Mainstream Islam turned its back on the notion of an ordered cosmos, without which the further development of science is impossible. Even in contemporary Islam, there are continuing difficulties with science and a low rate of research and development.

I would argue that this outcome in Islam was significantly driven by the context of tribal society and predatory autocracy encouraging a particular conception of God whereby to suggest He was bounded in any way was a slight on His honour. Conversely, the notion of God—as the ultimate Good Authority—creating a structured order rather than being an arbitrary tyrant fitted in with Classical, Germanic, Celtic and (ultimately) Christian and Jewish notions of proper authority. Though, in both Christianity and Judaism, there were adherents of untrammelled Godly authority, these have always tended to lose out over time.

This belief in an ordered cosmos, assisted by the religious diversity after the Reformation (where priestly control over printing in Catholic Europe encouraged printing of banned books in Protestant Europe), the reaction against the Wars of Religion, plus the wealth of information brought back by the voyages of discovery and by exploration of the cosmos undermining Aristotelian physics, set the stage for the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and—coupled with the long-term effects of competitive jurisdictions and the diversity and forces for productiveness feeding into that—to Western economic, technological, intellectual and (for a while) territorial domination of the globe.

Ability to utilise talent
‘Islam’ literally means ‘submission’. A Muslim is ‘one who submits’. That is, submits to the word (and rule) of God. The trouble is, Islam is a system of layered submission, which turns it into a system of domination: believers dominate non-believers under the dhimmi system, men dominate women. In Latin Christendom, women were rulers and generals (Æthelflæd, Lady of Mercia, Mathilda of Tuscany), intellectual figures (Hildegard of Bingen), saints (Theresa of Avila), writers (Marie de France, Christine de Pizan) and so on in ways that were simply not true of Islam at the same time. There were far more women rulers in Middle Eastern history before Islam conquered the region than after.

Germanic law, Celtic law, Roman law before Christianisation all treated women much better than did Sharia. Even after Christianisation, Roman law and canon law were still better for women than Sharia. Which meant that Latin Christendom was better at harnessing the skills of its women than was Islam. As George Patton observed:

To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Muhammad and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing.

Latin Christendom used female talent much more than did Islam, an advantage that has accelerated over time.

In embracing new knowledge and technology, Latin Christendom became Western Civilisation. As a result of the Enlightenment, Western Civilisation also began to harness the skills of its Jewish population in ways that Islam had long since abandoned and far more than Islam had ever done. Consider simply how many Jews have won Nobel Prizes, particularly in science.

Islam as a system of domination
Classical Islam was far more tolerant (at least outside Arabia), and far better at harnessing the talents of conquered dhimmis, than later Islam. That was due to the shift in the costs of intolerance. When Muslims were a small ruling layer over a majority non-Muslim population, the costs of intolerance were high. As Muslims became a larger and larger proportion of the population, the costs of intolerance fell and its level rose. The long-term tendency of Islam has been to become less tolerant, not more. Ottoman rule was the most murderously intolerant at the end of its rule, not the beginning. Just as the Jews fled the Muslim Middle East after the creation of Israel, so Christians have also been leaving.

Which means that Islam is less and less able to harness the talents and perspectives of non-believers (except as guest workers).

One can see similar patterns within Latin Christendom of intolerance increasing as its costs fell (Norman-cum-Hohenstaufen Sicily; Reconquista Spain with the expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscos) but the dominant long-term tendency in Western civilisation has been very much the other way.

Winston Churchill, in his book on the Sudan campaign of 1898, The River War, famously wrote:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries.
Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.
The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.
No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

There is something in what Churchill says. Islam is a universal monotheism without the softening factors of “love thy neighbour”, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and natural law theory. The things that saved Christianity from itself do not operate in Islam. One will search in vain for a text in Islam of similar sentiments and similar authority as Pope Paul III’s 1537 encyclical Sublimus Dei:

… to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

It is clearly in the intellectual tradition that fed into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Something that has not escaped the attention of, for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran:

In his 7 December 1984 statement to the UN General Assembly's Third Committee, the Iranian representative, Mr. Rajaie-Khorassani, again put on record his country's position on the UDHR:

In his delegation's view, the concept of human rights was not limited to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Man was of divine origin and human dignity could not be reduced to a series of secular norms [...] certain concepts contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights needed to be revised. [Iran] recognized no authority or power but that of Almighty God and no legal tradition apart from Islamic law. As his delegation had already stated at the thirty-sixth session of the General Assembly, conventions, declarations and resolutions or decisions of international organizations, which were contrary to Islam had no validity in the Islamic Republic of Iran.[...] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which represented a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition, could not be implemented by Muslims and did not accord with the system of values recognized by the Islamic Republic of Iran; his country would therefore not hesitate to violate its provisions, since it had to choose between violating the divine law of the country and violating secular conventions.

Islamic countries have felt the need to adjust the Declaration, issuing the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. It is precisely the universalism of the Universal Declaration (identified as “Judaeo-Christian”) that is objected to on Islamic grounds. (That there is an Organisation of Islamic Conference is revealing in itself: no one thinks to have an organization of Christian, Catholic or Buddhist states, for example.)

It is worth noting that as soon as the “love thy neighbour” precept is subverted, the behaviour of Christianity converges with that of Islam as the dynamics of universal monotheism—of supporting a (masculinized) divine sovereignty against which no human claims have standing—take over. Hence the Christian origins of dhimmitude, Georgian and Regency England and C18th Netherlands killing men for having sex at about the same rate as that of contemporary Iran as well as common law denial of property and other legal rights of married women.

Or sometimes even more so than in Islam. Consider the famous reaction of the Ottoman Sultan regarding the tens of thousands of Jews whose wealth and skills were now his to benefit from after Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Jews:

How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king, the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?

(Note the Sultan apparently does not consider Isabella worth noting as a ruler in her own right.)

Still, in its purest form, gospel Christianity bans one from using God to oppress one’s fellow human beings. In its purest form, the Islam of the Qur’an and the hadith permits, indeed requires, believers to use God to oppress their fellow human beings. People being people, Christians have often done precisely that, while many Muslims have failed to do so. But the underlying logics remain what they are.

Indeed, the most important dynamic in Christian history is that priests are the means by which Christianity is propagated but priests get their power from being “gatekeepers of righteousness”, from subverting love thy neighbour so that they can say who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down. Hence it is very apposite that the patron saint of preachers was a queer-hating, Jew-hating misogynist. That dynamic of propagating-but-subverting is at the heart of Christian history. Christ, after all, was crucified for subverting and denying priestly authority—what were the moneylenders in the Temple if not use of God to oppress one’s fellow humans?

The Quakers rejection of priesthood may not be coincidental to their very positive reputation. [Just as the oppressive history of the Catholic Church owes so much to its very elevated notion of priesthood.]

Plague and knowledge
The point is sometimes made that Islam suffered particularly from the effects of the Black Death. But, of course, so did Latin Christendom. The difference was that the Black Death in Middle Eastern Islam led to the undermining of commercial vitality and increased autocratic domination. Conversely, the Black Death in Latin Christendom had reverse effects: leading to more technological dynamism, commercialisation and mercantile power.

Similarly, Latin Christendom made massively more use of becoming the cross-roads civilisation than Islam had when it was so. Indeed, the exploration efforts of Prince Henry the Navigator, and Isabella’s sponsorship of Christopher Columbus, were both specifically aimed at outflanking Islam. At which they were spectacularly successful. (Henry and Isabella both being crusaders.)

The only reason the Muslim Middle East matters nowadays is because of oil: itself parasitic on Western technology. There are a lot of reasons for the long-term failure of Islam, but they are internal to Islam—to Islam as a religion and to the geography that created and moulded it. And oil itself is a curse as much as a blessing, since it entrenches autocratic rule and funds religious obscurantism in the same way silver flows undermined Iberian parliamentarism and entrenched autocracy and funded religious obscurantism in Spain and Portugal.

What is Middle Eastern Islam without oil? Try Afghanistan, or Yemen, or Pakistan, or Egypt. An American soldier makes the point very bluntly:

Had the Crusades not been waged; had the Habsburg Monarchy not turned back the Ottoman tide at the end of the 17th Century; had Isabel of Castile not driven the Moors from Grenada, you would not be reading this diatribe. You would be illiterate, ruled by a tyrant, and squatting on the dirt floor of a mud-brick shack picking your nose.

Perhaps the prospect of Muslim domination of Latin Christendom was not quite that much a near run thing. But its consequences would have been fairly grim. I doubt geography would have been enough, on its own, to counteract the other factors. As V.S.Naipaul observed, Islam is very thorough in its colonising of conquered lands.

All of which makes modernity very confronting for contemporary Islam. Hence the rise of Islamism and jihadi terror as modernising revolts against modernity both within Islamic countries and among Muslim émigré communities. Just as fascism and Nazism were modernising revolts against modernity in the period 1919-1945. Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda, the Iranian regime are the equivalents of the NSDAP and similar movements.

No Islamic country has comparable power now to that of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in the 1930s, but the organising and destructive capacities of modern technology provide their own level of threat. And there are far less bases inherent within Islam both for a full embracing of modernity, or to oppose said modernising revolts against modernity.

The reasons why Islam stagnated and Latin Christendom did not—indeed, came, as Western Civilisation, to dominate the globe—still operate. And continue to generate policy dilemmas.

ADDENDA This post has been edited to clarify and extend (but not change) arguments.

Knights in History

Frances Gies’s The Knight in History, a highly readable work which conveys recent scholarship very easily.

The book is built around interspersion of biographies of prominent knights (William Marshal, Bertrand du Guesclin, Sir John Fastolf and his Paston heirs) with thematic chapters (Troubadors and the Literature of Knighthood, The Knights Templars) and narrative chapters (What is a Knight, the First Knights, Knights of the First Crusade, The Long Twilight of Chivalry).

The format works well. The du Guesclin chapter in particular conveys very effectively the raid-and-siege nature of so much medieval warfare.

I was struck with another similarity between Latin Christendom and medieval Japan – the knightly class's rise to nobility very strongly parallels the rise of the samurai class in Japan to similar status. The main difference: Latin Christendom already had a military nobility while Japan had a civil nobility, so in Christendom the interweaving became more complete.

Gies also presents well the transmutation of knights into officers and local officials – agents of the Crown – due to rise of royal taxing powers and the force of polity-competition. She misses the full significance of the cost of knightly equipment in the changes around the C11th, but that seems a common failing in current scholarship. The Knight in History is a book well worth reading.

The Gates of Power

The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers and Warriors in Premodern Japan by Mikael S Adolphson is a narrative history of political demonstrations by Buddhist monks in Japan up until the C14th. A little too much of a narrative history—I would have liked some more in-depth discussion of the institutional arrangements.

Nevertheless, it is a very informative rendition of disputes within the Japanese political elite from the C9th to the C14th. That is, the period when the warrior class was steadily increasing its role in Japanese society. Adolphson argues that Japan had a tripartite arrangement of power (courtiers, monasteries, warriors) where power shifted only gradually to the warriors.

For anyone interested in medieval European history, medieval Japan is a fascinating compare-and-contrast, because a completely different cultural milieu produced great institutional similarities.
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Japan did not suffer the same prolonged assault that Latin Christendom did from the C7th to the C11th centuries, where the Norse, the Avars-then-Magyars and the Saracens raided and plundered from the North, the East and the South respectively. Nor did it suffer the collapse in literacy and trade that occurred in Western Europe during and after the evaporation of the Western Roman Empire. What Japan had in common with Latin Christendom was a temperate climate, a geography that facilitated movement in ideas and skills but impeded full political unification and a lack of external conquest (which thereby permitted continuous institutional evolution: in effect, what game-theory might call "long term games").

Latin Christendom turned to the arrangement of protection-by-knights-in-return-for-labour-by-peasants comparatively thoroughly and speedily. Warrior rule in Japan took much longer to evolve. In Latin Christendom, whatever remained of the old Senatorial aristocracy (and any Germanic imitators) was completely replaced by (or transmuted into) a warrior aristocracy by the C9th. The Japanese civil aristocracy lost ground much more slowly to the warrior class, still having some governmental role at least up to the consolidation of the Tokugawa bakufu.

Which is not to say there were not persistent institutional differences. Japan never evolved any equivalent of the Hospitallers, Templars or Teutonic knights, still less of the Spanish crusading orders. Its “warrior monks” were much more like the monastic thugs who made Alexandrian politics so dramatic under the Eastern Roman Empire. Buddhism and Shinto got along much better than Christianity did with Judaism or pagan beliefs.

While local-samurai-protecting-local-peasants-in-return-for-labour arrangements did grow up in Japan, particularly in the Kanto plain, what Crusader historians would call “money-fiefs” were much more common in Japan (most likely because administrative skills never became as scarce as they did in Latin Christendom) and eventually became the dominant form of samurai remuneration.

Yet the similarities remain striking. Historians of Japan talk about the “privatisation” of government, whereby estates stopped being the recoverable gift of the tenno (the imperial administration) and became increasingly private property. This is a process recognisable from early medieval history in Latin Christendom. Similar processes occurred in Islam and India, but regular waves of conquest by pastoralist conquerors meant that arrangements kept “returning” to revocable local tax-rights.

In terms of long-term economic development, private property is more efficient. It is obviously also preferable for the property holders. In terms of central control, revocable tax-rights are preferable. Such “privatisation” into local property rights is a sign of loss of control over its agents by the central authorities, a persistent problem in agrarian rule and a major factor for the collapse of states. Europe and Japan were protected by their geography from the conquests which tended to follow such decay in central power.

But they were also “tough” societies. Latin Christendom dealt with the assaults of the C7th to C11th rather more successfully than the Western Romans dealt with the equivalents from the C3rd to the C5th, and from a lower (though expanding rather than shrinking) population base. Latin Christendom was much more successful at expanding—territorially, demographically and technologically. The knights came to rule over more of Europe than the Romans ever did.

One of the trends Adolphson mentions is rising peasant power in Japanese society. Competing power hierarchies give peasants leverage. This is a process one can see in both Japan and Latin Christendom. Both societies evolved comparatively strong property rights, independent family households with women marrying later. Merchants similarly benefited, with both societies evolving sophisticated mercantile arrangements.

Japan did not, however, evolve any equivalent of the boroughs of Latin Christendom. It, like other civilisations, lacked the tradition of deliberative assemblies one sees in Classical civilisation and Germanic societies. It entirely lacked Latin Christendom’s invention of representative assemblies.

(The largely independent domains of the Tokugawa daimyo remind me of the Counts of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar, except the Shogun took great efforts to ensure the daimyo were never all in the same place at the same time.)

Different religious traditions resulted in very different attitudes to suicide. But bushido and chivalry obviously performed similar functions—trying to integrate a warrior elite within the wider society via the dominant religious tradition. The desired trade-off being a warrior elite other folk could live with via a framework of warrior legitimacy. (Adolphson’s discussion of Zen being used as a tool by the new Ashikaga bakufu, both to buttress expanded warrior rule and to tame the esoteric Buddhist sects, has a certain congruence with Brian Daizen Victoria’s analysis in Zen at War of Imperial Zen and Corporate Zen from the Meiji Restoration onwards.)

I enjoyed the tales of competition and intrigue that Adolphson tells. While thematically concentrating on the history of monastic protest, Gates of Power gave me much more insight into the operation of the various Buddhist monasteries and sects—particularly as vehicles for providing religious support for legitimate authority, more easily fulfilled by esoteric forms of Buddhism—the diffuse and competitive nature of power in Japanese society after the founding of the bakufu, the rise of the Ashikaga family, the often dominant role of retired Emperors (the role of Emperor itself was largely ceremonial and ritual so, by retiring, an Emperor rid himself of such time-consuming duties while exercising paternal authority over the notional head of state). I was also amused by the discussion early on in the book of how commentators have often seen religious or monastic power as inherently illegitimate, this tending to get in the way of careful analysis. The Gates of Power is a useful and informative read.

Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation

There has been quite a wave of revisionist scholarship pointing out that Europe’s rise to global dominance was somewhat later, and owed much more to non-European influences, than is often realised. Scholars such as R. Bin Wong, Janet Abu Lughod, Kenneth Pomeranz have produced notable works in this field.

It is a reaction against scholarly narratives that stress longstanding European inventiveness and institutional advantage, with Eric Jones’ book on the puzzle of why growth in actual living standards was such a rare occurrence being something of an intermediate work between the two approaches.

For much of the period under review, the Europeans invented very little for themselves. They only genuine innovations that they made before the eighteenth century were the Archimedian screw, the crankshaft or camshaft and alcoholic distillation process.

So writes (Pp60-61) John M Hobson in Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. Hobson seeks to establish that the West was a bunch of late (economic) developers who contributed very few original ideas before 1700 and did not become economically dominant or have a major impact on the global economy until after 1800. It is at once one of the most intriguing and one of the most deeply silly books I have ever read from a major historian.

The intriguing thesis is precisely how large the European debt to other societies (particularly China and then Islam) was, as encapsulated in the quote above. The deeply silly thesis is that the Europeans were successful because they were nasty and lucky.
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The silly bits
Hobson argues that, in effect, we should stop being Eurocentric and become Europhobic—which is to say adopt a “good” Eurocentricism of European sin to replace a wicked Eurocentrism of European virtue.

He has a lot to overcome to defend his view of Europeans as particularly nasty.

Consider his citations of Europeans being impressed by themselves. Large civilisations tend to be full of themselves. The Chinese were (and are), the Japanese, Muslims similarly. Europeans are hardly standouts in this. Moreover, European civilisation became more systematically curious about other cultures and societies than any other civilisation (with the revealing exception of Japan).

Then there is his argument that Europeans needed to create a “racist identity” to justify and motivate imperialism. Imperialism is as old as government and was a normal condition thereof. More territory meant more wealth and power and the raiders were further away. The notion that there is some “proper” and “natural” boundaries to rulership is strictly a (late) European invention.

European imperialism was notable for its success, its relatively low application of resources (most European military forces squared off against other Europeans, not colonial peoples) and that it came to be contentious within European civilisation, to the extent that folk came to feel guilty about it. Thus, Gandhi’s entire strategy against British rule in India was to aim at the conflict between imperialism and classical liberalism.

Hobson wants to build up Western racism as the Great Sin of world history. Alas, he cannot tell the difference between a reason and a rationalisation. Western empire-builders in the New World had longstanding categories to rely on – Christian/heathen, civilised/uncivilised – that dated back centuries, have analogues in other cultures and which it is anachronistic to call "racist".

Nor does the chronology help his argument. Early in the C16th, the notion that the natives were inherently a lower form of life was explicitly rejected by Charles V. The ur-text of racist ideology is Gobineau’s essay, which is not published until the 1850s. The term ‘racist’ itself is not coined until the 1930s, in response to the rise of Nazism. The appeal of what we now see as racism was precisely to give an explanation of already existing European domination.

Hobson seeks to get around this rather basic chronological difficulty by appealing to the notion of implicit racism but, as previously noted, it is a concept so implicit that it is not actually racism. Just a device for turning claims of European or Western superiority into thoughtcrime.

Creating spurious concepts of shared identity Hobson regards as a habit of European history (but, apparently, no one else’s). Inventing identities such as ‘evil Islam’, a created threat, in order to justify and maintain the feudal order (pp 99-100).

The first little difficulty is that Islam was a threat, one that came in waves. The Arab wave from mid C7th peaking at the battle of Calatañazor in 1002. And the Turkic wave from the mid C11th, especially the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, to the second siege of Vienna in 1683. Iberia also had the “Moorish” wave that peaked at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. That all the world should be in the House of Islam was a live idea. And it is not as if contemporary Islam is not showing a revived difficulty in interacting with other cultures.

Without romanticising the knightly order, the suggestion that it needed to create an identity of evil Islam to sustain an identity of good Christendom to keep going is simply deeply silly. It was a extremely practical system based on a “deal” of service for protection. Which is why a very similar system evolved in Japan.

Hobson is for ever denouncing Eurocentric scholars in accord with his good-people-have-good-ideas and bad-people-have-bad-ideas eschatology. Too often he does so via ascribing dubious claims without benefit of footnotes, such as (p.103):

Eurocentric scholars usually attribute the invention of the stirrup to to Charles Martel in 733.

I have read a lot of military history, some of it written in the C19th. I do not remember ever seeing such a silly claim. As for his inflation of the importance of stirrups, I have already had a rant about Hobson’s silly claims about stirrups. Which, by the way, also did not create the samurai just as they did not create the knights. (Japan is, once again, the great corrector for analysis: the similar geography of Europe and Japan has to be an important factor in why two such disparate societies developed such similar institutions.).

Hobson engages in irritating reifications where West and East are movable feasts shifting around as convenient to sustain the thesis.

When clever folk make deeply silly arguments as part of a general pattern, one is driven to the sociology of belief to explain why. Fairly clearly, Hobson is appealing to an academic milieu where West-is-bad and the-really-Virtuous-understand-how-bad. Hobson is just an extreme view of a widespread tendency. One very impressed with its own good intentions.

Yet, it is not as if intentions are such a terrific measure of human benefit. Apart from the exporting of the Eurasian disease pool to the Americas and Oceania, the most destructive thing the West ever did to the Rest was to export revolutionary socialism (in total deaths, the two greatest demographic disasters in history, though the former was proportionately much more disastrous). The socialist model of development was also fairly disastrous, though not on the same scale.

It is conspicuous that Hobson’s analysis makes no mention of property rights. He is very much committed to a technology-drives-history view. But technology does not have merely to be invented, it also has to be adopted, as contemporary differences between societies show very strongly.

One notices, for example, that intellectually serious proponents of liberal economics talk about such things as property rights, transaction costs and public goods: specific things that directly affect human behaviour. Opponents talk about markets (particularly that give-away phrase so-called free markets): that is, higher level abstractions. Yet market transactions come in two quite different varieties: self-enforcing transactions (swap money and goods on spot, transactions any bazaar can manage) versus transactions across time (which require high levels of trust and are crucial for selling most assets). Only bothering with higher level abstraction is a bit of an analytical problem when one of the most salient ways of differentiating societies is how safe or risky they are for the latter type of transaction. Instead, the technique one sees quite a lot (including in Hobson's book) is apparently to work out the conclusion you want, and then assemble the relevant premises to support it. Paying particular attention to things not to be included.

Hobson writing of C18th British society as being 'despotic' is another piece of egregious silliness. He is correct to point out that the C18th British state was larger, as a share of the economy, than its European contemporaries. This was also true of the C17th Dutch state and medieval Venice. Commercial polities had less problem with consent (so could tax more) and engaged in more provision of public goods (including, for example, protection of property rights) than other states precisely because the consent of the political nation was required for taxes. Government share of GDP is a very crude measure.

While there may well be differences between how the first folk achieved industrial take-off and what was required for the subsequent achievers thereof, there is a tendency among revisionist scholars, which Hobson shares, not to think about what the experience of the latter might tell us about the former.

Similarly, revisionists tend to be very willing to talk about slavery and its evils, without much grappling with the universality of slavery among major civilisations (Muslim slavers were still kidnapping and enslaving Europeans as late as the C18th). Nor thinking through Europe being the first civilisation to begin to abolish slavery since ancient times.

Yet the anti-slavery movement in C18th Britain was the first great modern political movement. The context in which it arose was one where Western science was an increasingly coherent universal analytic that increasingly had no parallel in other civilisations. The development of science, both feeding off and reflecting an increasingly global perspective, interacted with an already universalist religion (Christianity) to produce the Evangelical anti-slavery agitation of the late C18th and C19th which resulted in the 1832 abolition of slavery in the British Empire. It is no accident that the country that had come to dominate scientific advance, and was the most global in its perspective, also pioneered anti-slavery agitation.

The Euro-revisionists drive to belittle the Europe and the West creates inconsistencies. Such as the conquest of the Americas being a great ecological boon to Europe which was absolutely crucial to European take-off (the lucky bit in Hobson’s analysis of European success) yet Japan and China have to be understood as being as rich as Europe until at least the early C19th. So much is obscured by such comparisons at the best of times—such as Venice in 1330 having more sophisticated capital markets than Qing China in 1830.

Hobson shares the inconsistencies of the Euro-revisionists while engaging in a higher silliness. But if the book has a lot of deeply silly aspects to it, it also has some very useful and informative aspects.

The other bits
Hobson does make one think much more seriously about how much Europe was a late adaptor and late developer: how much Europe was reliant in picking up other folks ideas and taking them further. That part of his thesis is striking and informative.

When one considers the matter, it is no surprise that China tended to be the dominant source of key inventions for so long. Even if one assumes that human inventiveness is evenly spread across human populations, the Chinese were always such a significant proportion of the total human population that inventors were likely to be Chinese. But China had further advantages. A high level of cultural continuity, so inventions were less likely to be lost. It was a persistently sophisticated and complex society, so a wider range of problems to deal with and the resources to seek to solve them.

What Europe had going for it was much wider institutional variety than other civilisations and continuity in competitive jurisdictions. Which made Europeans avid adaptors. Once a new idea hit Europe, it was very likely to be taken up and improved. And Europe had more institutional forms “in play” so a wider range of possibilities for social selection to operate on. For example, the deliberative assemblies of the classical world and the representative assemblies of the medieval world seem to have no significant parallels in other civilisations. The institutional richness and diversity, including diversity of rule, of Latin Christendom is striking.

Islam, at least in its early centuries, also displayed a high level of adaptiveness and invention. But that again is not surprising. For centuries, they were the “bridge” civilisation, the civilisation that interacted with more other cultures than any other. Which meant they were more likely to pick up good ideas and more likely to put ideas together in new ways.

The pressure of competitive jurisdictions in Europe eventually led European civilisation to become the first civilisation that interacted with the entire globe. Europe became the ultimate “bridge” civilisation. It was this, operating on competitive jurisdictions and institutional variety, which really led to Europe’s take off. Bureaucratised autocracy (China) or militarised autocracy (Islam) did not generate the same pressure to innovate and adapt. With the scientific revolution, Europe became the first civilisation to, in a phrase David Stove liked to repeat, learn how to learn in a systematic way. All the good ideas and techniques across the globe became accessible to Europe. Invention (both technological and organisational) took off. By the C15th, Europeans were already creating the best armour and cannons. By the C16th, the best ships. By the C17th, the greatest trading networks and best weapons and science. By the C18th, the best armies. By the C19th, the strongest economies and industrial technology. By the C20th, the West had come to completely dominate intellectual invention. Europe became the first civilisation to genuinely escape from the land/population constraint shifting to the far less contrained effectively vistas of living standards being based on the capital/population ratio.

This is not a particularly difficult story. But neither it is a normatively reassuring one. Europeans, their ideas, religion and institutions, are neither unusually nasty nor unusually clever nor unusually virtuous. They are just folks who, through effort and circumstances, created a civilisation that achieved more than any previous civilisation.

Which is only a problem to deal with if you have created an identity of Virtue based on asserting yourself against that civilisation. But, if one defines virtue against success, one is setting oneself up to generate a lot of failure. Including analytical failure. Including a recoiling from “Eurocentrism” which turns into a “Europhobia” which is just a reverse Eurocentrism. Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation has much that is striking, useful and informative: pity it is wrapped in such silly pandering to fashionable contemporary prejudices.

China Transformed

R. Bin Wong’s China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience is the first of the major three recent “California School” studies, and much the best. (The others are Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the making of the modern world economy – reviewed here – and Hobson’s The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation.)

Bin Wong’s central point is that Chinese history had its own dynamics, and one distorts one’s understanding of those dynamics if you import models of politics and state-building applicable in Europe to China. As he says, it is much more useful to understanding if one also looks at Europe through Chinese perspectives rather than only the other way around.

Bin Wong is particularly good at elucidating the patterns of Chinese history and the history of the Chinese state. He differentiates between the rulership structures of medieval and post-medieval European history and those of Chinese history very effectively. Nevertheless, reading Bin Wong’s discussion of the development of imperial Chinese rule (an effectively a one-rulership civilisation) I was struck by the parallels with imperial Roman rule (Europe’s only experience of one-rulership civilisation). For example, the Roman bread-and-circuses dole was an even more elaborate welfare arrangement than Imperial Chinese granaries. The Roman state kept population registers much like the Chinese state did. It showed the same reluctance to raise taxes. Prior to its Christianisation, it had a remarkably similar religious policy. If the history of the Mediterranean basin had been repeated attempts to recreate and improve the Roman Empire of the Antonines, then the resultant state would have probably looked very similar to the late Imperial Chinese state, with Stoicism perhaps playing the role of Confucianism.
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This thought-experiment points to a major analytical difference. I am more sceptical of cultural explanations because of, for example, parallel evolutions of knightly Latin Christendom and samurai Japan, than Bin Wong is.

Bin Wong does pick up on the far greater institutional variety of Europe compared to China and the importance of jurisdictional competition in driving state-formation in Europe. I rather liked his description of the Chinese social order as ‘fractal’ (looking much the same at each level) with much less sharp differentiations between state and society than Europe developed. The Imperial Chinese state, in its various dynastic iterations, was basically concerned with one problem – how do you run an agrarian empire. As Bin Wong makes clear, they got to be very good at it. European rulers, by contrast, had to deal with a much wider range of challenges and, as a result, Europe developed much more flexible social arrangements. That Chinese Imperial rule had less need to mobilise consent and negotiate with organised domestic interest groups also put limits on ability to respond to unexpected challenges. While it is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration to say that Qing China showed all the institutional variety of a petri dish, it is true that, unlike Japan, Qing China had to both attempt to industrialise AND create from scratch appropriate institutional arrangements to mobilise social resources in new ways.

Another parallel I noticed with Roman history, is that the problems the Qing state had from the 1840s onwards with the Western capitalist Powers were very similar to the difficulties the Eastern Romans had with the Italian merchant city-states. In both cases, the society the bureaucratised autocracy ruled were central elements of trading systems whose citizens were not themselves major conveyors of trade. In both cases, a series of decisions and omissions led to them being at a perennial disadvantage in dealing with the aggressive, commercially expansive, foreigners whose commercial interests very much had the ear of rulers (in Venice’s case, the merchants were the rulers).

European states operated on higher levels of both coercion and consent than China. But higher levels of provision of public goods requires higher levels of coercion: public goods being based on the state’s capacity to compel contribution and punish transgression.

It seemed to me Bin Wong could have more fruitfully drawn a compare-and-contrast with the similar experiences, yet strikingly different trajectories, of China and Japan from the mid C19th. In the 1840s, China is humiliated in the Opium Wars. In 1854, Japan is forced to open by Commodore Perry and similar humiliations follow. From 1851-1868, China is ravaged by internal revolts (the Taiping and Nian rebellions) with some Muslim rebellions persisting until 1877. Up to 1877 Japan suffers internal revolts (particularly the Boshin War) ending only with the suppression of Saigo Takamori’s rebellion (fictionalised in The Last Samurai) in 1877. Yet, by 1895 Japan is a modern power able to defeat China in the Sino-Japanese War, a take-off even more blatant with Japan’s defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, where China was simply territory to fight over.

All the Japanese had to do was industrialise: they already had the institutions appropriate to mobilise social resources, merely adding a Western “gloss” on them. The problem with Qing China, as Bin Wong manages to make clear (though a contrast with Japan would have made it much more effectively), is that, although the Qing government rose to the fiscal challenge much better than I realised, it could not manage the institutional challenge anywhere near as well.

Bin Wong also conspicuously fails to grapple with the demographic costs of the Chinese Revolution (or, indeed, of events in Chinese history generally). Death tolls in the millions or tens of millions pass without comment or reference, which is not only a moral but an analytical failing since such experiences underpin the power of appeals to order that Chinese rulers regularly use. Though Bin Wong does make clear that, in the context of Chinese history, Mao was much less of an innovator than Western observers, using Western frames of reference, grasped. (Mao’s famous comment that he hadn’t changed China, just a few places around Beijing, may have been more perspicacious than folk realised.)

I was sad to see a passing mention (p.286) to the widespread myth in academe that the welfare state is being dismantled, the common confusing of adjustment with retreat. I am also sceptical about the notion of a 'theory' of revolution. One gets regime collapses (which come in all forms) which then lead to a wide variety of outcomes (regime replacment, regime transformation, state replacement ...) that trying to pick out enough specificity and commonality to get a coherent 'theory' of revolution seems a doubtful exercise to me.

Still, an extremely informative book I greatly enjoyed. I heartily recommend it if you want to better understand the patterns of Chinese history.

The Last Samurai

Mark Ravina’s The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori is a splendid biography of the historical figure who inspired the character of Katsumoto, played by Ken Watanabe, in the film The Last Samurai.

Ravina is particularly good at conveying the ins and outs of Japanese politics in the period before, during and after the Meiji Ishin (Meiji Restoration). He is equally good at dealing with context and characters, so one doesn’t lose track of either who is who or the structures within which they are operating. The highly federal nature of Japanese government under the Tokugawa bakufu is brought out very clearly.
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It is also fun seeing what incidents the film makers used to put together The Last Samurai. Tom Cruise’s character seems to have been completely made up. French and later Prussian (after Prussia won the Franco-Prussian War) military advisers were used to train Japanese troops but Ravina makes no mention of Saigō capturing any foreign military advisers. There was a rebellious group of samurai who refused to use modern weapons and stormed a government fort, but they were put down after a few days and were not directly connected to Saigō Takamori’s own rebellion. Even though his rebellion was in part motivated by concern over the loss of status of the samurai. Indeed, precisely as the film intimates, due to concern of loss of virtue based on honour. Nevertheless, Saigō Takamori’s own forces during his final rebellion used modern weapons, but were greatly handicapped by having no modern base of logistical support for them. He also had a commanding physical presence, was a noted teacher, greatly interested in classic literature and a poet.

Just as Katsumoto is clearly Saigō Takamori, Minister Omura is clearly based on Ōkubo Toshimichi, who wasn’t dismissed by the Meiji Emperor but rather was later assassinated by vengeful samurai from his (and Saigō Takamori’s) home domain (han) of Satsuma. He did, however, go on an overseas mission, was an avid moderniser, did dominate the government and was instrumental in a ban on samurai wearing swords in public. And, along with Saigō Takamori and Kido Takayoshi (who was responsible for the education of the young Meiji Emperor) was one of the three great nobles responsible for abolishing the bakufu and creating the Meiji Ishin.

The sage status the film gives Katsumoto is very much in line with the view of Saigō Takamori in his own lifetime and, even more, after his death. Indeed, the film The Last Samurai’s greatest homage to Saigō Takamori’s role in Japanese popular culture may well be precisely its reinterpretation of events to provide a more congenial image.

Ravina begins and ends his book with a discussion of what happened to Saigō Takamori’s head. A somewhat macabre subject matter one may think, but one which Ravina uses very deftly to illustrate the complexities of Saigō Takamori’s life and role in Japanese culture. He was at once a major figure in the modernising of Japan and very concerned about—indeed, in the end, violently resistant to—the modernising of Japan. Display of heads of defeated opponents had been a traditional feature of samurai warfare. After his assisted suicide, Saigō Takamori’s head was hidden by a friend but later recaptured and placed on his body. This seemed all very unsatisfactory a narrative, so the events have been since reworked and re-imagined so that it is represented that his head was washed, displayed and cried over. Thus Ravina frames his continuing discussion of the contradictory pressures that beset Saigō Takamori and which he ultimately resolved by “dying for principle”.

The book is a complete biography, so Ravina takes us through the entire course of Saigō Takamori’s extraordinarily eventful life, incorporating dramatic rises, dramatic falls, a failed suicide, periods of exile, periods of great power and, throughout it, increasing cultural prominence. He weaves the sourcing of evidence neatly into the narrative, along with deft discussions of the historiography. A highly readable and informative biography.