Why the West Rules--For Now (44 page)

Qin and Rome had a lot in common. Each was a spectacular example of the advantages of backwardness, combining organizational methods pioneered in an older core with military methods honed on a violent frontier; each slaughtered, enslaved, and dispossessed millions; and each drove social development up faster than ever before. Qin and Rome also exemplify what we might call the paradox of violence: when the rivers of blood dried, their imperialism left most people, in both East and West, better off.

For both Qin and Rome, the secret of success was simple—numbers. Qin and Rome got there by different paths, but each was just better at raising, arming, feeding, and replacing armies than any rival.

In the East, Qin had for centuries been the weakest of the six great warring states.
*
It started moving toward high-end organization late, introducing land taxes only in 408
BCE
. By then relentless fighting had forced the other states to conscript their subjects, tax them, and use Legalist methods to discipline them. Rulers did everything possible to increase revenues, and the best practices spread quickly, since the alternative to copying was destruction. Around 430
BCE
the state of Wei had begun rounding up laborers and digging vast irrigation channels to raise farm output; the other states, including (eventually) Qin, followed suit. Zhao and Wei built walls to protect their valuable irrigated land; so did the others.

In the fourth century
BCE
Qin caught up. Lord Shang made his name there in the 340s, advising Qin’s ruler on how to turn his state into a nightmare of surveillance and discipline:

[Lord Shang] commanded
that the people be divided into tens and fives and that they supervise each other and be mutually liable. Anyone who failed to report criminal activity would be chopped in two at the waist, while those who reported it would receive the same reward as that for obtaining the head of an enemy …

This was no mere authoritarian fantasy; records on bamboo strips recovered from the tombs of Qin magistrates show that the laws were enforced in all their savagery.

If it is any consolation, Lord Shang was eventually hoist with his own petard, condemned to be torn apart with his ankles and wrists tied to chariots. By then, though, the high-end Legalist state had triumphed and the Eastern core had become an armed camp. Thirty thousand men had counted as a big army in 500
BCE
, but by 250
BCE
a hundred thousand was normal. Two hundred thousand was nothing special, and really strong armies were twice that size. Casualties were
correspondingly enormous. One text says that a Qin army killed sixty thousand troops from Wei in 364
BCE
. The numbers may be exaggerated, but since Qin soldiers were paid by the head (literally; they turned in severed ears to claim bonuses), they cannot be too far from the truth.

So alarming were the forces being unleashed that in 361
BCE
the great powers set up regular conferences to negotiate their differences, and diplomats-for-hire, known as “persuaders,” appeared in the 350s. A single man might shuttle among several great kingdoms, serving as chief minister for all of them at once, weaving webs of intrigue worthy of Henry Kissinger.

“
To jaw-jaw
is always better than to war-war,” said Winston Churchill, but brute force still beat out bargaining in the fourth century
BCE
. The problem was Qin. Secure behind mountainous borders that made it hard to attack, and free to use its position at the edge of the core to bolster its manpower by drawing in people from the stateless societies even farther west, its armies constantly pressed into the core. “
Qin is the
mortal enemy of ‘All Under Heaven,’” said
The Stratagems of the Warring States
; it wants “to swallow the whole world.”

The other states recognized that they needed to combine against Qin, but four centuries of war had created such mistrust that they could not resist stabbing one another in the back. Between 353 and 322
BCE
Wei led a series of coalitions, but as soon as the allies won a few victories they turned on Wei, terrified that it might do better than the rest of them. Wei responded like many a spurned lover or leader, switching its affections to the old enemy, Qin. Between 310 and 284
BCE
Qi led a new set of alliances, only to be brought down as Wei had been; then Zhao took the mantle. In 269
BCE
Zhao won two great victories over Qin and hope flared in every heart, but it was too little, too late. Qin’s King Zheng discovered a terrible new strategy: simply kill so many people that other states could not rebuild their armies. Qin had invented the body count.

Qin generals killed about a million enemy soldiers over the next thirty years. A dismal record of massacres fills the annals, then ends suddenly in 234
BCE
, when, we are told, Qin beheaded a hundred thousand men of Zhao. After that no credible enemies remained and the surrender of states replaced slaughters in the annals.

With neither jaw-jaw nor war-war working, Qin’s remaining enemies pinned their hopes on murder. In 227
BCE
a hit man talked his
way past the Qin king Zheng’s minders, grabbed Zheng’s arm, and lunged at him with a poisoned dagger—only for Zheng’s sleeve to tear off in his hand. Zheng ducked behind a pillar, thrashed around to get his ridiculously long ceremonial sword out of its scabbard, then hacked the assassin to bits.

There were no more chances, and Qi, the last independent state, fell in 221
BCE
. King Zheng now took the name Shihuangdi, or August First Emperor. “
We are the
First Emperor,” he thundered, “and our successors shall be known as Second Emperor, Third Emperor, and so on, for endless generations.” No one argued.

Rome’s path to empire was different (
Figure 5.7
). Persia had already united most of what was then the Western core by the time Darius won the throne in 521
BCE
, but his desire to tap the wealth of the Mediterranean frontier set off waves of defensive state formation and created forces that would eventually destroy the Persian Empire. Greek and Italian cities were already very developed, scoring high on energy capture and information technology but less so on organization and military power. So long as Darius tackled them one by one he could bully them into submission, but the bullying itself drove the cities to combine, ratcheting up their organizational and military powers.

Figure 5.7. Ancient empires in the West: from Persia to Rome, 500–1
BCE
. The broken line shows the maximum extent of the western end of the Persian Empire, around 490
BCE
, and the solid line shows the extent of the Roman Empire in 1
BCE
.

Thus, when Darius’ son Xerxes led a huge force into Greece in 480
BCE
, Athens and Sparta set aside their differences to resist him. The historian Herodotus (and, rather differently, the film
300
) immortalized their extraordinary victory, which left Athens a great power at the head of a league of cities. Rather like what happened when Eastern states tried to ally against Qin, Athenian power scared Sparta even more than the Persians did, and in 431
BCE
the terrible Athenian-Spartan conflict known as the Peloponnesian War broke out (immortalized by Thucydides, but so far no movie). By the time the defeated and starving Athenians surrendered their fleet and pulled down their walls in 404
BCE
the war had drawn in Sicily and Carthage, and its tentacles had turned parts of the Mediterranean, notably Macedon, into Greek economic dependencies.

Macedon was a sort of ancient banana republic, rich in resources (especially timber and silver) but chaotic. For fifty years Greek cities pushed it around, backing rival claimants to its throne and turning its politics into a soap opera of adultery, incest, and murder, but in 359
BCE
Philip II, a Macedonian version of Tiglath-Pileser, seized the kingdom’s throne. Philip did not need social scientists to explain the advantages of backwardness to him: instinctively understanding, he adapted Greek institutions to his large, rich, but anarchic kingdom. He dug up silver, hired mercenaries, and got the riotous aristocracy to work with him, then brushed the Greek cities aside. He would surely have done the same to Persia had not a mysterious assassin—driven to the act, rumors said, by Philip’s drunken rages and/or a love feud ending in a homosexual gang rape—struck him down in 336
BCE
. Not missing a beat, Philip’s son Alexander fulfilled Philip’s plans in just four years (334–330
BCE
), hounding Persia’s king to his death, burning his sacred city, and marching as far as the borders of India. Only his troops’ refusal to march any farther could stop his conquests.

Alexander was a child of the new, disenchanted world (Aristotle had been one of his tutors) and probably did not realize how difficult it
was to fill a godlike king’s shoes.
*
Devout Persians held that their kings were Ahuramazda’s earthly representatives in his eternal struggle with darkness; Alexander, therefore, must be an agent of evil. This image problem doubtless lay behind Alexander’s tortured efforts (mentioned in
Chapter 4
) to convince Persians he was godlike. Maybe, given time, he would have succeeded, although the more he tried to impress Persians with his divinity, the more insane he looked to Greeks and Macedonians. And time was short: Alexander dropped dead, perhaps poisoned, in 323
BCE
, and his generals fought civil wars, broke up the empire, and gradually became kings (edging toward divinity) in their own right.

Eventually one of their kingdoms might have conquered the others, following Qin’s route, but Alexander’s successors were as short of time as the great king had been. In the fourth century
BCE
Macedon had been drawn into Greek conflicts, adapted Greek institutions to its own needs, defeated the Greeks, and then destroyed the great empire of the day; in the second century Rome virtually reran the script.

Rome is a perfect example of how colonization and developments on the periphery combine to expand cores. The city had been heavily influenced by Greece since the eighth century
BCE
, but grew strong in local struggles with its neighbors and created an odd mix of high-and low-end organization. An aristocratic senate made most big decisions, while assemblies dominated by middling farmers voted on matters of peace and war. Like Qin, Rome was late in moving toward the high end; it began paying its soldiers only in 406
BCE
, and probably instituted its first taxes at the same time. For centuries Rome’s budget relied mostly on plunder, and instead of taxing defeated enemies it made deals with them, extracting troops to fight more wars.

Romans were as averse to godlike kings as Greeks, but understood all too well the link between conquest and divinity. Really successful generals were awarded triumphs, ticker-tape parades through Rome in chariots pulled by white horses, festooned with images of sanctity, but accompanied by slaves whispering in their ears, “
Remember
, you are a
mortal.” The triumph effectively put divine kingship in a box, making the mighty conqueror god for a day—but no more than that.

Old-fashioned as this system looked to Greeks in the third century
BCE
, its combination of high-and low-end practices generated manpower on a scale to match even Qin. Persia had raised perhaps 200,000 troops to invade Greece in 480
BCE
, but after losing them needed decades to refill its treasuries. Rome faced no such constraints. A century of war gave it all the manpower of Italy, and in 264
BCE
the senate began a titanic struggle with Carthage to control the western Mediterranean.

The Carthaginians lured Rome’s first fleet into a storm, sending it—and a hundred thousand sailors—to the bottom. Rome simply built a bigger fleet. This went down in another storm two years later, so Rome sent out a third armada, only to lose that as well. A fourth fleet finally won the war in 241
BCE
because Carthage could not replace its own huge losses. Carthage needed twenty-three years to recuperate, whereupon its general Hannibal marched his elephants over the Alps to attack Italy from the rear. Between 218 and 216
BCE
he killed or captured a hundred thousand Romans, but Rome just raised more men and ground him down in a war of attrition. And like Qin, Rome redefined brutality. “
The Roman custom
,” said Polybius, was “to exterminate every form of life they encountered, sparing none … so when cities are taken by the Romans you may often see not only the corpses of human beings but also dogs cut in half, and the dismembered limbs of other animals.” Carthage finally gave up in 201
BCE
.