Fiscal Regimes and the ‘First Great Divergence’ between Eastern and Western Eurasia

Abstract

In the most general terms, state formation in eastern and western Eurasia unfolded in similar ways from the late second millennium BCE into the early first millennium CE.1 I n bot h cases, large Bronze Age states collapse d into hundreds of small polities (in the Iron Age East Mediterranean and in Spring-and-Autumn China) that were subsequently consolidated into unified political-military systems in which a small number of major powers competed for dominance (in the Mediterranean in the last eight centuries BCE and in Warring States China). This process culminated in the creation of core-wide empires that lasted for several centuries (the mature Roman empire and the Qin-Han empire). The institutions of the late Roman empire in the fourth to sixth centuries CE resembled those of the mature Han empire much more closely than those of any of the earlier western states had resembled those of earlier eastern states: in this sense we may speak of convergent rather than merely roughly parallel development. Abiding differences can be identified in the spheres of military and ideological power, with stronger marginalisation of the military and closer ties between political and ideological power (Legalism-Confucianism) in Han China compared to the Roman Empire. However, even in those areas some convergent trends did eventually emerge, such as warlordism in the late Han, Three Kingdoms and Western Jin periods, and the attempted cooptation of Christianity by the late Roman state. Moreover, both states ended in similar ways, with their more exposed halves (the west in the case of Rome, the north in China) being taken over by semi-peripheral ‘barbarians’ and turned into a handful of large but unstable successor states that relied to varying degrees on existing institutions of government (Goths, Franks, Vandals and Lombards in the West, the so-called ‘Sixteen Kingdoms’ in northern China), while traditionalist regimes survived in the other halves (Byzantium and five of the ‘Six Dynasties’ in southern China, respectively).