Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires

by Walter Scheidel

Transcending ethnic, linguistic, and religious boundaries, early empires shaped thousands of years of world history. Yet despite the global prominence of empire, individual cases are often studied in isolation. This series seeks to change the terms of the debate by promoting cross-cultural, comparative, and transdisciplinary perspectives on imperial state formation prior to the European colonial expansion.

Two thousand years ago, up to one-half of the human species was contained within two political systems, the Roman empire in western Eurasia (centered on the Mediterranean Sea) and the Han empire in eastern Eurasia (centered on the great North China Plain). Both empires were broadly comparable in terms of size and population, and even largely coextensive in chronological terms (221 BCE to 220 CE for the Qin/Han empire, c. 200 BCE to 395 CE for the unified Roman empire). At the most basic level of resolution, the circumstances of their creation are not very different. In the East, the Shang and Western Zhou periods created a shared cultural framework for the Warring States, with the gradual consolidation of numerous small polities into a handful of large kingdoms which were finally united by the westernmost marcher state of Qin. In the Mediterranean, we can observe comparable political fragmentation and gradual expansion of a unifying civilization, Greek in this case, followed by the
gradual formation of a handful of major warring states (the Hellenistic kingdoms in the east, Rome-Italy, Syracuse and Carthage in the west), and likewise eventual unification by the westernmost marcher state, the Roman-led Italian confederation. Subsequent destabilization occurred again in strikingly similar both empires came to be divided into two halves, one that contained the original core but was more exposed to the main barbarian periphery (the west in the Roman case, the north in China), and a traditionalist half in the east (Rome) and south (China).

These processes of initial convergence and subsequent divergence in Eurasian state formation have never been the object of systematic comparative analysis. This volume, which brings together experts in the history of the ancient Mediterranean and early China, makes a first step in this direction, by presenting a series of comparative case studies on clearly defined aspects of state formation in early eastern and western Eurasia, focusing on the process of initial developmental convergence. It includes a general introduction that makes the case for a comparative approach; a broad sketch of the character of state formation in western and eastern Eurasia during the final millennium of antiquity; and six thematically connected case studies of particularly salient aspects of this process.

Genres: History, China, Ancient History, Nonfiction, Politics, World History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2008

About the author

Dickason Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Classics and History
Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Scheidel's research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He is particularly interested in connecting the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences.

Reviews

[J K Hoffman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, this book had a great premise and did contain information that I found interesting and valuable, but it was so dry it was a challenge to read. This is a book written by history professors for history professors. It's the perfect book for someone doing initial research into a doctoral thesis about aspects of the economic life of ancient empires, but I just cannot recommend it to any normal person. I struggled through it because I very much wanted the information discussed, but no one else should have to suffer to get it.

[Aislinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ancient Romans enjoyed more civil rights than modern Chinese. Ancient China, especially in the Qin period, was more militaristic, centralized, and bureaucratic than the early Roman Empire. Isn't that a comforting thought?

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Published in 2008, this book is a collection of essays by professors from a variety of disciplines who are nevertheless well versed in the comparative study of ancient Rome and China, with a particular focus on the early Roman Empire and Qin-Han China, when the two empires were still in their (relatively) nascent stages, grappling with a series of choices that laid the foundations of their statehood, identity, and perhaps legacy that is so keenly felt in many, many places around the world.

The goal is ambitious, and this is undoubtedly one of the pioneering works in this area. Written by professors who are passionate about their subject, this book covers an incredibly wide range of topics: Military institutions and their relationship to state-building; law and punishment and the role of the god-emperors in the legal system; women and eunuchs and their uneasy place as "illegitimate" power holders in the courts; tributary systems and the resulting impact on commercialisation and elite culture; the culture of "gift-giving" and how the different definitions of "gifts" reflect the idea of public and private spheres; and last but not least, the development of the monetary system, in particular the coinage system, and what it tells us about society.

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General Timeline

1600-1045 BCE: Shang Dynasty

1045-771 BCE: Western Zhou Dynasty

(770-256 BCE: Eastern Zhou Dynasty)*

771-481/476 BCE: Spring and Autumn period ----- 753 BCE: Foundation of Rome the city; 509 BCE: end of monarchy and the beginning of the Roman Republic

476-221 BCE: the Warring States period ----- 396 BCE: conquest of Veii; 338 BCE: full control over Latium, extension of citizenship to non-Romans after a revolt; 275 BCE: end of Pyrrhic War


247-210 BCE: Reign of King Zheng of Qin, the future first emperor of China ----- 264 to 146 BCE: the Punic Wars (241 BCE: Roman acquisition of Sicily from Carthage)

221-206 BCE: Qin Dynasty ----- 218 to 207 BCE: threat of Hannibal; 215 to 168 BCE: wars against Macedon (167 BCE: abolishment of tax collection after the conquest)


206 BCE-9 CE: Western Han Dynasty ----- 192 to 188 BCE: war against the Seleucid Empire

141-87 BCE: Reign of Han Wudi ----- 91 to 88 BCE: the Social War against (84 BCE: the extension of citizenship to all free people in Roman Italy); 48 to 44 BCE: the dictatorship of Julius Caesus; 49 to 31 BCE: civil war; 27 BCE to 14 CE: reign of Augustus (late 100 BCE: rise of northern tribes)

25-220 CE: Eastern Han Dynasty (150 CE: invention of paper) ----- 49 CE: Agrippina married Claudius; 211 CE: the Edict of Caracalla, extending citizenship to all free people in the empire


(220-589 CE: Chinese Period of Disunion; during the period, the former Han Empire broke into multiple independent kingdoms)

220—265 CE: Three Kingdoms ----- 235 to 284 CE: period of the Soldier Emperors

265-316 CE: Western Jin Dynasty ----- mid 200 CE: the Military Anarchy; 284-305 CE: reign of Diocletian (286 CE: Diocletian's decision to establish a co-emperor in the western half, standardization of agriculture and manpower)

304-439 CE: Sixteen Dynasties (which includes the Eastern Jin Dynasty) ----- 306 to 337 CE: reign of Constantine (313 CE: beginning of state support for Christianity; 330 CE: establishment of Constantinople); 391 CE: ban of pagan temples and sacrifices; 395 CE: final separation of east/west Roman Empire; 410 CE: sack of Rome by the Goths

420-589 CE: Northern and Southern Dynasties (where the former Sixteen Dynasties had largely merged into two camps) ----- 476/480 CE: termination of the Western Roman Empire; 527-565 CE: reign of Justinian; 534-554 CE: East Roman wars of reconquest in the western Mediterranean


581-618 CE: Sui Dynasty, restoration of most of the former Han territory ------ 602-628 CE: War against the Sasanid Empire

618-907 CE: Tang Dynasty (before 850 CE (?): invention of gunpowder) ----- 634-718 CE: Arab invasions; 800 CE: Charlemagne crowned Roman Emperor


960-1126 CE: Northern Song Dynasty (somewhere in there: first issuance of paper money) ----- 962 CE: Otto I crowned Roman Emperor

1127-1276 CE: Southern Song Dynasty* (1235 to 1279 CE: war with the Mongols) ----- 1204 CE: crusader conquest of Constantinople


1271-1368 CE: Yuan Dynasty (1271 to 1295 CE: travel of Marco Polo)

1368-1644 CE: Ming Dynasty ----- 1453 CE: Turkish conquest of Constantinople

1644-1911 CE: Qing Dynasty (1912 CE: the beginning of the Republic of China) ----- 1806 CE: dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation; 1870 CE: end of the Papal State

***The book has provided one timeline for China and another timeline for Rome. I have combined them into the timeline above, adding and deleting elements in the process. All credit goes to the authors.

*****Due to the word limit on Goodreads, I cannot include the notes in this review. Please check the comment for more context.
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Now that we've got the basic timeline out of the way, we can delve deeper into the specifics. I have chosen three themes that I find most interesting: the system of government (specifically, the degree of centralization), the perception of public and private spheres, and the monetary system in terms of coinage.

1. The System of Government

Pre-imperial and early imperial China (i.e. the Qin dynasty) was more centralized, militaristic, and bureaucratic than Rome at the same time (i.e. the Roman Republic). The main reason for this, as the authors would argue, was the immense danger that Qin and the other six kingdoms faced, whereas the Roman Republic, although constantly at war, had not faced an opponent that could pose an existential threat to it since the Pyrrhic War, with Hannibal being only a debatable competitor.

The Warring States period was incredibly bloody and intense, for the seven kingdoms that emerged victorious from the massacre that was the Spring and Autumn period were all similarly powerful, and were all similarly aggressive. As a result, the Chinese kingdoms had a much greater incentive to build a state-wide apparatus for the efficient extraction of resources. For an example of what this apparatus entailed, look at the Qin kingdom, whose legalistic reforms virtually created the template for the "warring state" and whose policies quickly spread to the other kingdoms:

... Central to the Qin reforms was the grouping of the population into units of five households that were each responsible not only for providing the squads of five recruits that formed the building blocks of Qin armies but also for mutual surveillance. Members of the households who did not report the crimes of another member were held jointly liable for his or her transgressions. Second, because Qin’s rulers viewed agricultural productivity as crucial to a strong military, the government systematically discouraged other forms of economic activity, for example by imposing various penalties on merchants and craftsmen. To ensure that the maximum amount of land was brought under cultivation, Qin also penalized households with adult sons living at home. These penalties forced sons to establish independent households and to cultivate their own allotments of land in order to support them. In tandem with this step, Qin also divided its territory into a grid of blocks, each of which was sufficient to support a family from the food produced on it. This reshaping of the countryside in order to ensure the maximum extraction of the resources for war was given physical expression through a system of paths forming a rectangular grid over the crop lands of the state. Finally, the government financed its war making through a head-tax imposed on the population. (p. 26)

The Roman Republic, on the other hand, operated under a very distinct, at least superficially democratic system:

... although Rome went to war almost every year during these four centuries and mobilized Italy’s population in proportional terms on a scale comparable to China’s warring states, it never developed the sorts of administrative structures that in China were a concomitant and prerequisite for the full mobilization of state resources for war. Indeed, the institutions of government during Rome’s greatest period of military mobilization, in the late third, second, and first centuries b.c., were minimal compared to those of Qin and the other warring states. Until 49 b.c.e., an aristocracy controlled public affairs through a council (the senate), which had little formal legal power but enormous informal authority. Its members also staffed all magistracies, which were filled through a system of competitive elections in which all Roman citizens were theoretically entitled to vote (although the organization of the voting assemblies and other circumstances made these elections far from democratic). These magistrates conducted all the business of state, but because the magistracies were few, the business they conducted was quite limited. A quinquennial census of the Republic’s citizens was taken for the purposes of establishing liability to military service and taxation. However, despite draconian penalties for evasion, the census basically depended on the voluntary cooperation of registrants for its success. No bureaucracy was in place to enforce compliance. Similarly, to administer its towns and rural areas the Republic relied on the cooperation of local elites whose power bases were independent of the central administration. Conscription, too, was predicated on the willingness of recruits to come forward in the absence of an extensive bureaucracy or police force to enforce compliance. Beginning in the fourth century, taxes of a sort (the tributum) were collected to fund the Republic’s military endeavors, but these were technically loans from the citizens to the Republic that might, at least on occasion, be repaid at the end of a victorious campaign. In 167 b.c.e., following the conquest of Macedon, the senate abolished their collection altogether, and thereafter Roman citizens enjoyed immunity from direct taxation for several centuries (although they were subject to a number of indirect taxes). (p. 29)

This stark contrast between the two systems would outlive their respective founders, lasting long into the Roman Empire and Han China - and arguably into our own time. Three authors in the book have reaffirmed the verdict that Qin-Han China had a much more bureaucratized (and arguably centralized) government than Rome, so I think this is a fascinating point that's worth hitting home:

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 ... [is not an exaggerated label].” In the fourth and fifth centuries, provincial administration expanded. This brought the number of administrators closer to that of Han China, whose administration penetrated to the county level. In 140 c.e., the [Han] 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. (p. 109)

2. Perceptions of Public and Private Sphere

In short, the concept of a nongovernmental "public sphere" almost doesn't exist in Han China. Staying true to the Confucian notion of patriarchy and how the patriarchal household can be seen as the foundation of all larger systems in the cosmos - where the father is the Patriarch of the family, the emperor the Patriarch of the state, and China the Patriarch of the tributary system - we shouldn't be surprised that "... [in] the Han Chinese case the public realm was not clearly distinguished from the political, so that participation in a res publica meant to be in the service of the ruler" (p. 135).

Basically, everything in the state is part of the emperor's private possession. As such, when Han emperors engage in acts of benevolence - such as sending special agents to inspect provincial prisons to check for "injustice" and providing poor relief by holding free public banquets hosted nominally by the emperor - these are attributed to the emperor's incredible benevolence, rather than to, you know, the fact that this is the emperor's job? And, in the case of pardoning criminals, to the emperor's dubious status as someone who can handwave the legal system whenever he wants, however he wants?

But perhaps the most significant ways Han emperors employed to their benefit was the (re)distribution of land:

"... [Distributed] to peasants [was] land that had been confiscated from high officials, nobles, and the kin of eunuchs who had fallen afoul of the law or a political purge. Rather than having the land worked by convicts or state slaves, which seems to have been inefficient, the state rapidly divided such land into small plots and awarded it to peasants from overcrowded regions. Gifts of land, grain, and livestock, as well as cash payments, were also frequently offered to colonists who were willing to settle at the frontiers. As a correlate of this policy, the Western Han state repeatedly attempted to restrict the scale of landholdings by the wealthy ..." (p. 127)

Everything "public," such as the building of roads, donation to the poor, or erection of monuments, is the duty of the government, which in turn means the duty of the emperor. As such, when it comes to "gift-giving" in the form of poor reliefs and land redistribution, Han China almost always directed them toward the rural areas, or "... the elements of the population who provided the fiscal and military foundations of the state, which is to say the peasantry and the officials whose families and life patterns remained rooted in the rural world" (p. 132). (Things would arguably change later, when the spread of Buddhism led to elites building "public" temples, but that would have to wait till 400 years later in the Tang Dynasty.)

Things were different in the Roman Empire, where clear definitions of property rights and the long-standing concept of citizenship created a distinctive "public sphere." First, "the Roman Empire ... [was always] structured as a multiplicity of urban centers—both old established ones and new ones built to a standard model—and the Chinese Empire, where the political power of the ruler and his agents derived directly from the registration, mobilization, and taxation of rural households. The pattern of Roman euergetism carried on the Greek precedent of local regimes formed through groupings of urban notables who demonstrated a devotion to the public good ... [Roman elites for whom] large estates worked by servile or contract labor and managed by local agents were primarily sources of income that enabled the eminent man to pursue his career in the cities" (p. 132).


3. The Monetary System

In short, Rome was far more monetized than China. This is shown by the amount of coins in circulation in the two empires.

First, we should note that Han China in the late first century BCE and the Roman Empire in the mid-second century BCE had similar annual revenues (in grain equivalent), which is plausible given their similar levels of technological development and population size (p. 205). And yet, in Western Han China, it has been calculated that the total money supply was 6 to 28 billion litres of grain, or 8 to 20 billion litres, depending on how conservative you want to be. On the Roman side, the empire in the 160s had 45 to 90 billion litres of grain, or 22 to 90 billion litres.

As such, Han China's annual tax revenue may have been 1/6 or 1/5 of its coined money stock, especially since it received most of its tax payments in coins. On the Roman side, even if we calculate very conservatively, the annual revenue would still not have exceeded 10% of the total money supply (p. 205).

The reason for this may be that (a) China lacked a supply of precious metals, (b) China never had to issue mass payments to its soldiers as the Romans did (China operated on a conscription and rotation-based system), and (c) China simply had no incentive to change when the low-value monetary system had worked for so long.

Much more could be said on this subject, from ancient hyperinflation due to currency debasement to Gresham's law. Alas, I must stop here. Word limits.

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Reviewer's Thoughts

The strength of this book is that it's informative. I had to stop almost every page to take notes. The book's weakness is that it's too informative; one page is still too much. I originally set myself a reading target of one chapter a day; then one page; then one paragraph. I'm not kidding when I say I dreaded opening this book.

This collection was born out of an international conference on ancient history, and it's painfully obvious that the target audience is fellow ancient history professors who didn't make it to the conference. Knowledge is assumed; there is no introduction (beyond the timeline) to the two empires; we are plunged straight into the specific, sometimes minuscule, workings of the state.

Here's the horror story: even the timeline may just be a courtesy. The authors expect you to know most (if not all) of the stuff in there. For some chapters, I squinted at their words the way I did my college calculus textbook. The author jumps start the chapter with calculations of statistics and explanations for the Roman-Chinese divergence without bothering to provide any context whatsoever. Some chapters are better, with at least a basic run-down of events, but not by much.

This is an academic book through and through. It is an unbelievable chore to get through it, but I find the result rewarding. I dislike reading the book, I dislike taking the notes - but I do like reading my notes, after I have stripped away all the academese and added context based on Google searches.

[Augustus · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book collects seven chapters that attempt to draw comparisons between ancient Rome and ancient China. The book grew out of a 2005 seminar at Stanford University, and its authors are clearly eminent authorities in their subject matter. The book offers useful maps and a chronology, but I expect that much of the material will strike the general reader as overly technical.

The first chapter compares how each state 'converged' and 'diverged' in different ways. The second chapter analyzes how the two empires built and modified their military institutions. The third chapter examines how legal systems in the two states either succeeded or failed in restraining misconduct. The fourth chapter discusses roles of eunuchs and women in Roman and Chinese court life. The fifth chapter focuses on trade and tribute in each society. The sixth chapter looks at charity and philanthropy in each empire. And I found the seventh chapter's comparison of coinage in the two states quite interesting, but I was already more interested in that topic than most people.