Systemic Inter-State Fragmentation Enabled the European Miracle
Walter Scheidel’s 'Escape From Rome'
Walter Scheidel wrote:
Modern development has improved our life experience on many fronts, and has increasingly done so on a global scale … Why has the world changed so much? All this development was rooted in initial breakthroughs that took place in northwestern Europe … But what made it possible for that corner of the globe to launch a process that unleashed previously unimaginable productivity and human welfare by harnessing an ever-broadening range of natural resources …?
… Scholarly opinion is divided. Some take a long-term view, searching for causes and trends that go back many centuries. Others stress the role of more recent contingencies that enabled some pioneering—or, depending on whom you ask, particularly rapacious or just plain lucky—societies to pull ahead. Some accounts privilege politics and institutions; others overseas trade and colonization; others still culture, education, and values.
I argue that a single condition was essential in making the initial breakthroughs possible: competitive fragmentation of power. The nursery of modernity was riven by numerous fractures, not only by those between the warring states of medieval and early modern Europe but also by others within society: between state and church, rulers and lords, cities and magnates, knights and merchants, and, most recently, Catholics and Protestants. This often violent history of conflict and compromise was long but had a clear beginning: the fall of the Roman empire that had lorded it over most of Europe, much as successive Chinese dynasties lorded it over most of East Asia. Yet in contrast to China, nothing like the Roman empire ever returned to Europe.
The enduring absence of hegemonic empire on a subcontinental scale represented a dramatic break not only with ancient history. It also set Europe on a trajectory away from the default pattern of serial imperial state formation—from the boom and bust of hegemonic powers—we can observe elsewhere. By laying the foundations for persistent polycentrism and the transformative developmental dynamics it generated over the long run, this rupture was the single most important precondition for modern economic growth, industrialization, and global Western dominance much later on …
… My book stands in a long tradition of scholarship that has invoked fragmentation and competition as an important precondition or source of European development. It differs from existing work in that for the first time, it develops a much more comprehensive line of reasoning to establish once and for all a fundamental axiom: without polycentrism, no modernity.
Empire was an effective and successful way of organizing large numbers of people in agrarian societies. Large, composite, and diverse, comprising multiple peripheries loosely held together by an often distant center whose dependence on local elites belied grandiose claims to universal rule, traditional empires were kept afloat by their ability to concentrate resources as needed without intruding too much upon their far-flung subject populations. Empire’s adaptiveness is made strikingly clear in the fact that for more than 2,000 years, with primitive technology and under enormous logistical constraints, a very large share of our species has been controlled by just a handful of imperial powers.
Yet from a developmental perspective, traditional empire failed in three ways, all of which mattered greatly for the making of the modern world:
in the specific sense that the Roman empire released its grip on Europe and gave way to a very long period of polycentrism of powers both international and domestic;
in the broader sense that near-monopolistic empire failed to be reestablished in Europe; and
in the most general sense that empire, as a way of organizing people and resources, consistently failed to create conditions that enabled transformative development …
… The productive dynamics of a stable state system were key: fragmentation generated diversity, competition, and innovation, and stability preserved gains from what worked best, rewarding winners and punishing losers. Empire contributes to this story insofar as it prevented both: monopolistic rule stifled competition, and the waxing and waning of imperial power rendered polycentrism intermittent and curtailed its cumulative benefits. Thus, traditional empires did not need to maintain hegemonic status all or even most of the time in order to derail modernizing development: sporadic “imperiogenesis” on a large scale was enough. Only the persistent absence of empire allowed polycentrism and its corollaries to flourish …
… I wrote this book to establish, as firmly and comprehensively as I could, two simple points: that interlocking forms of productive fragmentation were of paramount importance and indeed indispensable in creating the specific set of conditions that gave birth to modernity, and that the divergences that precipitated this outcome in only one part of the world but not in others were highly robust. In the end, only Western Europe and its offshoots fit the bill: had our “Great Escape” not begun there, it would most likely not have happened at all.
Why does it matter that Europe was so fragmented? My answer is straightforward. This polycentrism is key to explaining the (Second) Great Divergence, the Industrial Revolution(s), and thus the Great Escape. Almost all of the many competing interpretations that seek to account for these radical transformations are predicated on this one feature of European sociopolitical evolution. This is true irrespective of whether these reconstructions privilege institutions, global connectivity, or cultural characteristics—and whether or not their proponents are aware of this shared underlying premise …
… I begin with a deliberately overly simple model of two starkly different ideal types of state formation and their respective developmental corollaries (figure 10.1).
FIGURE 10.1. An ideal-typical model of the developmental dynamics of different types of state formation
The “polycentristic” variant provides a rough approximation of conditions in post-Roman Europe. The fall of Rome ultimately gave rise to multiple states that did not dramatically differ in terms of capabilities (smaller but more cohesive polities balanced less-well-organized larger ones), mobilization intensity (Roman-style levels of conscription did not return until the French Revolution), mode of production (most Europeans were farmers and lived far from the steppe frontier), and religion (Christianity steadily spread into the northern and eastern reaches of the continent while Islam failed to make much headway). All this ensured that interstate competition was fairly symmetric in style: with like fighting like. Not least because of this, it also remained inconclusive, as no one party ever managed to overpower all the others.
In the long run, this environment rewarded political, military, and economic performance, which was largely a function of state capacity. In principle, this impetus might have fashioned European states into ever-more-tightly centralized and autocratic entities akin to the ancient Warring States of China. That this did not generally happen in Europe—and that individual states greatly differed in terms of how far they shifted in that direction—was due to a second, complementary kind of polycentrism, which manifested itself within individual states and societies.
After Rome’s collapse, the four principal sources of social power became increasingly unbundled. Political power was claimed by monarchs who gradually lost their grip on material resources and thence on their subordinates. Military power devolved upon lords and knights. Ideological power resided in the Catholic Church, which fiercely guarded its long-standing autonomy even as its leadership was deeply immersed in secular governance and the management of capital and labor. Economic power was contested between feudal lords and urban merchants and entrepreneurs, with the latter slowly gaining the upper hand.
In the heyday of these fractures, in the High Middle Ages, weak kings, powerful lords, belligerent knights, the pope and his bishops and abbots, and autonomous capitalists all controlled different levers of social power. Locked in unceasing struggle, they were compelled to cooperate and compromise to make collective action possible.
As Europe remained sheltered from major outside threats, many of its conflicts took place within sometimes large but increasingly brittle polities. Over time, the growth of population and economic output both enabled and encouraged more sustained competition between states. These pressures provided growing incentives for the reconsolidation of domestic power. The long and tortuous process of rebuilding state capacity involved both top-down coercion and extensive bargaining to bring powerful constituencies into the fold.
In the early modern period, rulers for the most part managed to regain control over the concentrated means of violence, co-opt economic powerholders, and incorporate the church(es) into emergent national structures. Yet the scale of Europe’s political fragmentation—the sheer number of its sovereign states—ensured considerable variety of outcomes as differences in initial conditions and subsequent opportunities and constraints sent individual states along their own specific pathways of institutional elaboration. The durability of the multipolar state system—the fact that the major states were not periodically swallowed up by larger empires—allowed incremental changes along those pathways to accumulate over time.
Intensifying interstate competition and concurrent intrastate bargaining favored certain performance-enhancing strategies. Innovation, whether institutional or technological, helped increase and mobilize domestic resources to prevail in interstate conflict. This environment also generated powerful demand for the acquisition of external resources: where appropriation of domestic elite wealth or the conquest of neighboring polities were not viable options, overseas colonies represented an attractive alternative. Back home, meanwhile, integration had the potential to boost state capacity, most crucially in the conjoined spheres of fiscal extraction and military mobilization.
These moves toward state-strengthening in turn raised performance expectations: the more some states embraced these strategies, the greater the pressure on others to follow suit or fall behind. This feedback mechanism rendered these developmental dynamics self-sustaining as well as self-reinforcing, promoting a circle that was vicious in its relentless violence and (eventually) virtuous in terms of economic outcomes. It also prepared the ground for transformative breakthroughs, for Schumpeterian growth through creative destruction of established orders and techniques. Britain’s peculiar mix of parliamentary bargaining, mercantilist protectionism, overseas expansion, naval power, and technological progress was merely the proverbial tip of a much bigger iceberg of European experimentation and adaptation.
Contrast this massively simplified outline of the dynamics of productive competitiveness with a different but equally ideal-typical scenario, in which a region of subcontinental proportions is dominated by a single (“monopolistic”) super-state. Under these conditions, any remaining external competition will be asymmetric in nature, between the imperial hegemon and groups in peripheral and often ecologically marginal areas beyond the former’s logistical reach: the persistent conflict between China and steppe formations is a classic example; ancient Rome’s containment of Germanic tribes is another.
Hegemonic empires were likely to prioritize maintenance. Once they controlled most people and assets in a given geomorphologically circumscribed macro-region, the potential for further gains was bound to be trivial compared to what had already been obtained. Holding on to far-flung possessions by checking elite autonomy and regionalism became the principal challenge.
This environment generated weaker demand for state capacity and performance than a competitive state system, especially if power projection was impeded by structural asymmetries: for instance, a larger infantry army was not necessarily effective against nimble steppe opponents. These constraints favored the persistence of a traditional “capstone” state in which a ruling elite and its institutions “capped” and held together a congeries of areas and constituencies they were unable or unwilling to penetrate, mobilize, and integrate. Keeping its various components in place, but incapable of stimulating further development, this type of government sought to perpetuate itself by limiting centralized extraction and accommodating the prerogatives of established localized power bases.
The absence of strong internal polycentrism served to amplify these tendencies. In imperial China, the closest historical approximation of this scenario throughout much of its history, political and ideological power were closely allied, military power was for the most part safely contained, and economic power was relatively marginalized.
This combination of international and domestic hegemony reduced the need for explicit bargaining and favored a different set of dispositions. Conservatism, congruent with the emphasis on maintenance, was one of them. Reliance on domestic resources was another: as energies were devoted to the vast challenges of taxing those who were already subject to the empire’s rule, rulers lacked strong incentives to develop external assets. In turn, prioritization of maintenance and conservatism supported delegational localism that limited the state’s ability to penetrate society.”
In the case of China, the overall result was a sociopolitical order that helped secure peace and basic welfare for a large population but did not lend itself to disruptive innovation. It generated Smithian growth by promoting division of labor, market integration, and intensification of established techniques but could not lastingly overcome Malthusian constraints.
The differences between these two schematic scenarios are relative, not absolute. Innovation did occur in China, and the societies of early modern Europe labored under the burden of inherited elite privilege and rampant corruption. This comparison is meant to show that certain traits were likely to be more strongly associated with enduring polycentrism than with imperial hegemony, and vice versa. As I argue … the empirical record broadly supports this impression of variance in developmental dynamics in the aggregate and over the long run.
Figure 10.1 [see above] deals in ideal types. Their closest real-life approximations were late medieval and early modern Europe on the one hand and long stretches of Han, Tang, Ming, and Qing history (as well as the mature Roman empire) on the other. These cases delimit extremes; most others fell in between. Not all very large empires achieved a quasi-monopolistic position: the less they did, the more they strove to enhance their capacities. The later Roman and the Mughal empires belong in this category. China itself underwent phases of increased competitive pressure, most notably under the Song: the self-strengthening measures taken at the time are fully consistent with the predictions of my model. Nor were all state systems effectively competitive: for a long time, many of medieval Europe’s states were so feeble that their wars remained fairly modest affairs, and most conflict took place within their brittle shells.
Even so, ideal types and extreme cases are useful in offering a template for organizing historical accounts. Most importantly, they encourage us to assess the causal connections between clearly specified base conditions—polycentrism within and without versus imperial hegemony and consolidated social power—and long-term outcomes …
… THE LONG MARCH OF THE INSTITUTIONS
Eric Jones famously claimed that the European state system “is as crucial to understanding long-run economic development as it is to explaining the pattern of the industrial world that emerged in the nineteenth century”. Yet the precise linkages can prove elusive. Peer Vries, to whom we owe the most detailed critiques of scholarship on the (Second) Great Divergence, defines the problem well: “Those who think there was something like a Western state or a Western state-system that caused the Western economic démarrage must take up the challenge of how exactly to connect political power and steam power”. If we regard steam power as emblematic of modernity, this does indeed take us to the heart of the matter. But this is not merely about the state: polycentrism more generally and the fragmentation of social power are the core issues, as is the need to connect developmental outcomes to institutional evolution. [Jones, Eric. 2003. The European miracle: Environments, economies and geopolitics in the history of Europe and Asia. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Vries, Peer. 2015. State, economy, and the great divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s–1850s. London: Bloomsbury.]
If the onset of the industrial age is our destination [we] cannot stop before we reach the early 1800s. But where to start? How far back in time do we need to go? The fall of the Roman empire in the west and the subsequent erosion of its institutions under Germanic rule did not create a blank slate. Cities had long enjoyed considerable autonomy, an ancient tradition that arguably prepared the ground for even stronger localism later on. The church, which had embraced imperial models of hierarchy and administration after its accommodation with the central state, was and remained a supraregional organization, even if it initially lacked the centralizing focus on Rome it would eventually acquire in the High Middle Ages …
… Institutions were decisive, in terms of both their survival and, especially, their disappearance. In the wake of the empire’s disintegration, centralized state structures faded while the church persisted and became more centralized over time. Eroding state capacity did not merely prevent the return of hegemonic empire … It also laid the foundations for institutional arrangements that subsequently promoted economic activity and helped create political conditions that were conducive to sustainable growth.
[Synthesis] Why We Escaped
In this book, I have identified two robust features of European history: post-Roman polycentrism between and within states, and causal linkages between this polycentrism and transformative developmental outcomes. As I argued … once Rome had fallen, Europe’s political fracturing proved impossible to overcome: its state system was highly durable and increasingly resilient. This persistence owed much to the balancing of different sources of social power within individual polities that constrained large-scale state formation. But it also had deeper roots … I sought to make the case that the [‘fragmented’] physical environment greatly influenced the odds of successful imperiogenesis. Interstate and domestic fragmentation sustained the competitive dynamics and constraints on authority that lie at the heart of the principal and often overlapping explanations of modern economic growth, industrialization, and subsequent improvements in human welfare … [This] is true no matter which factors—institutions, overseas resources, science and technology, or values—we choose to prioritize.
This does not mean that these outcomes were themselves a foregone conclusion. My survey merely suggests that they could not just as readily have occurred elsewhere. If European styles of polycentrism were essential and foundational to the creative destruction that spawned modernity, the (Second) Great Divergence and the Industrial Revolution(s) were unlikely to take place in Asia or Africa. And even Europe—Latin, Western, or otherwise—is far too broad a concept: we may take a step further in concluding with Robert Allen that “there was only one route to the twentieth century—and it traversed northern Britain” …
… The factors that (eventually) promoted transformative development were “Western European” or “British” only insofar as enduring productive polycentrism happened to be specific to these areas and shaped their political, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual evolution. Had comparable conditions surfaced in some other part of the world, they might very well have produced similar results. By the same token, had these conditions been absent from Europe, we would not have to worry about the origins of the modern world because it most likely would not exist in any recognizable form.
At the same time, the fact that these vital preconditions arose in Latin Europe rather than elsewhere was not the product of mere chance. European polycentrism was inadvertent but not accidental. Comparative analysis suggests that its endurance cannot be fully separated from the physical environment. Thus, if certain Europeans were the first to nudge humankind onto a novel trajectory away from ignorance, poverty, endemic illness, and early death, they found themselves in that position in no small measure because of where they lived. This fortuitous association must not be mistaken for geographical determinism: over the long run, geography and ecology merely rendered some outcomes more likely than others …
… The question is not who did what to whom: precisely because competitive fragmentation proved so persistent, Europeans inflicted horrors on each other just as liberally as they meted them out to others around the globe. Humanity paid a staggering price for modernity. In the end, although this may seem perverse to those of us who would prefer to think that progress can be attained in peace and harmony, it was ceaseless struggle that ushered in the most dramatic and exhilaratingly open-ended transformation in the history of our species: the “Great Escape.” Long may it last.
[Epilogue]
What, then, were the root causes of the onset of modernity? Two circumstances, one exceedingly remote and the other far less so, were critical for European fragmentation and polycentrism. From the late Cretaceous onward, the collision between the African and the Eurasian tectonic plates caused the Alpine orogeny, a [physical fragmentation] process that formed the Carpathians and Alps and raised them ever higher. Without the former, Transylvania would not have appeared and the great Eurasian steppe would extend to Vienna; and without the Alps, it might stretch even farther west. Tens of millions of years later, mounted warriors might have pushed state formation in a different direction, toward serial empire.
In actual history, at roughly the time when such influences would have made themselves felt, Germanic warriors in the Iberian peninsula, Gaul, Italy, and Germany gained control over their means of subsistence and lordly autonomy undermined central state power. Had taxation and centralized governance been sustained, the odds of imperial restoration would have been improved, and a rerun of the Roman experience might no longer have been impossible.
A third factor arguably contributed as well, albeit in a more ambiguous way: the perseverance of the followers of an obscure Jewish prophet in building up a far-flung network that evolved into a hierarchical and fairly cohesive transnational organization. Its presence simultaneously contributed to and helped offset post-Roman fragmentation.
Plate tectonics, warriors, and—perhaps—preachers interacted in very specific ways to create the environment that gave birth to modernity. But where does all this leave the Romans? What did they ever do for us before their empire fell apart? What seems to me the most honest answer is also disappointingly vague: that they quite possibly may have done something very important for us—if, but only if, their empire, by turning to Christianity, laid some crucial foundations for much later development—but that they just as likely may not have contributed anything essential at all to this eventual outcome and thus failed to shape the general appearance, if not some of the finer points, of the world we live in today.
In the end, competitive fracture may well have mattered more—or rather, even more—than residual cultural unity: the unanswerable question is whether the former, on its own, would have been enough. Rome’s unreversed demise was an indispensable precondition of modernity. But when it comes to explaining this breakthrough, does it really matter that its empire ever existed at all?
The Source:
Walter Scheidel, Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, Princeton 2019 [pp. 8-9, 15-17, 27, 337-345, 501-502, 526-527]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.