Gojko Barjamovic wrote:
From the earliest well-documented manifestation in the twenty-fourth century BCE, imperial states built on a formation of composite statehood that was tied to the joint rise of city and state on the alluvial plains of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers a millennium earlier. This shaped the conditions under which early empires rose and ruled, and city-states remained the chief building blocks of most larger states until the first millennium BCE …
… This characteristic type of micro-polity was only gradually demolished or incorporated by the larger and looser empires, ceasing to exist as independent social and political units toward the middle of the first millennium BCE. Empires became increasingly dominant over time …
… Although empires were often transient, and always based on the self-governed cities and tribal groups, their continued reappearance suggests that they possessed organizational capabilities beyond those of their constituent components …
In terms of origins, the history of empire in Western Asia begins with the unification of the cities of present-day Iraq, Iran, and Syria under Sargon of Akkade in the twenty-fourth century BCE … A specific and shared cultural sense of a “Mesopotamian world” … reaches back at least into the third millennium BCE, independent of the presence of a unifying state …
… Theoretical studies of state dynamics in the region have mostly concentrated on pristine or primary state formation with less attention devoted to the subsequent process of regional integration and different phases of imperialism. Early writers focused on conquest, emphasizing the coercive role of empires in general10 and religious imperialism in particular. Later, structural typologies of social evolution, world- systems theory, and center- periphery took over as dominant explanatory models. Focus has shifted toward imperial ideology and elite self-representation. Recent studies also explore the social basis of political and infrastructural power with prominence given to an understanding of social and political networks and the limits of state power …
[This is overview section, followed, separately, by a case study of Assyrian Empire]
… Following the collapse of the Empire of Ur, periods of political unification and fragmentation in Western Asia prior to the Persian conquest in 539 BCE can be divided into three blocks …
… (1) Conglomeration. Western Asia circa 2000– 1760 BCE was divided into hundreds of micro-polities forming shifting military and political alliances …
… (2) Regional empires. After 1600 BCE the area between Iran and Egypt [Iraq, Syria, Anatolia ..] was united into a dynamic regional system of empires …
… (3) Universal empires. A period of political fragmentation swept across the Near East and the Mediterranean circa 1050– 900 BCE, leading to mass migration and shifts in population. Assyria and Egypt survived in a diminished form, while present-day southern Turkey, Syria, and southern Iraq reverted to a conglomerate of self- governed city- states, small territorial principalities, and tribal nations. All were gradually integrated into the Assyrian Empire …
… [The] existence of empires at a given point depends upon the definition of the term itself. Here it is left deliberately vague to denote any type of territorial state that (a) held political hegemony over several formerly sovereign cities and kinship groups through military power, (b) formed a supranational elite, and (c) developed a sense of state ideology distinct from that of the individual communities it controlled [references here to Mann 1986 Vol 1 Sources of Social Power and Runciman 2011]. Structural features are given precedence to variables that are hard to measure in ancient states, such as territorial size and degree of state integration …
… [The 1-3] list above permits comparative analysis and highlights a repeated oscillation between political fragmentation and centralization in Western Asia. It also emphasizes the overall shift from micro-polities toward imperial states during the two millennia covered by the chapter. From the Assyrian expansion in the eighth century BCE, the heartland of Mesopotamia essentially remained under control by changing empires for nearly three millennia. Such continuity of imperial rule is distinctive to the region, and although a sweeping historical overview conceals major political and social breaks, there appears to be a remarkable bias at play in favor of large-scale territorial integration in the region where states first arose …
… Principles of military mobilization would vary from period to period with a trajectory toward permanence and professionalization. Military contingents were generally paid directly or by land allotment, while territorial armies were drafted through systems of corvée. The importance of taxation as a source of state income also increased through time. The early city-states did not support themselves by levying taxes directly on land or production, but set aside prebendary lands to generate an economic surplus for the support of its central institutions. Imperial taxation strategies would include such systems of corvée and generally make use of already existing systems of land ownership. They would in time include also direct taxation of land and estimated crop surplus. Levies were imposed primarily on a provincial basis through local officials and were often entirely dependent upon the resolve and skill of such areas to organize the collection themselves.
One may conceptualize institutions and individuals as operating within vertical patrimonial structures, rather than referring to abstract entities, such as “administration” and “empire”. But crosswise forces were also always in operation, with authority being shared and contested between urban officials and kinship groups, popular assemblies, merchant councils, and religious institutions.
Imperial economic policies are visible in the textual record mainly in relation to production. They include the founding of settlements dedicated to a particular purpose (cattle stations, fortifications, logging communities, ports of trade), communication infrastructure (roads, inns, postal systems), and promoting agricultural specialization (viticulture, olive growing, date cultivation, etc.) through a control of labor forces. The distortion of the sources often makes it impossible to determine what level of private entrepreneurship existed at any given point in complement to the state- controlled economy, but there seems to be a developmental trend toward increased privatization.
The Mesopotamian alluvium is suited for supporting a large population through irrigation-based agriculture and animal husbandry. During periods of political stability the soil was capable of producing one of the largest crops known in premodern times. At the same time, the fertile river valleys lack a number of key strategic resources, including stone, quality timber, and metal. This situation led to a permanent dynamic in which all states centered on the floodplains supported a differentiated economy through varied measures of conquest, the establishment of new industries, and support of long-distance exchange. Trade was probably always a major source of state income, as well as a venue of social mobility, but since the domain of writing usually concentrated on central imperial administration, extant sources seldom overlap with the world of trade. Its importance is mostly indirectly visible in the form of traded goods in both texts and excavations, and through the strategies by which empires strove to control trade routes and restructure administrative procedures and systems of production in order to promote industries for the benefit of consumption and business …
…. As a rule, silver bullion functioned as base currency. Income generated by trade was subject to imperial taxation in various ways, including mandatory gifts, the right of pre-emption on select cargo at favorable prices, requirements that private merchants carry out trade on behalf of state institutions, and through the collection of duty or tolls on imports or traffic in transit. Trading communities were often kept under indirect state control, presumably to outsource economic risk, and due to the fact that private entrepreneurs may have been better suited to negotiate transnational commercial ventures. Social issues may have been at stake as well, as suggested by the common physical separation of the state administration and trading communities. The fact that market trade is often visible only on the periphery of our sources signals a public attitude toward the potentially inauspicious effects of trade on established patterns of social mobility and political influence among those who produced most of the written record. Nevertheless, the importance of international trade for the economy and strategy of early empires is evident and points to the control over trade and trade routes as one triggering factor of imperial expansion.
The Source:
Gojko Barjamovic, ‘The Empires of Western Asia and the Assyrian World Empire’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume 2, The History of Empires, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, Oxford 2021 [pp. 74-82]
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