3.2.1. Signals of imperial stabilization
An empire is a system of governance reigning over multiple cohesive polities. By cohesive polities I mean societies whose citizens have been bound together for multiple generations through the sharing of a common worldview. Over time such a binding necessarily resulted in the creation of institutions and habits that grew their specific national flavors.
The worldview shared by the citizens, their institutions and their living habits, procure them the feeling of belonging to a national home that takes the form of specific lines, colors, music, smells, ideas, behaviors and so on. But not all the territories ever conquered by empires were necessarily fully fledged nations. Some of these territories were tribal unified cultures while other were at different stages of stabilizing their power over confederations of cities.
An empire is thus not a nation. Many political theorists define the appellation “empire” as being a confederation of nations, or a centralized system, governing various territories having different systems of governance while all territories shared a common worldview imposed by the center. Seen through this lens it appears evident that empires would inevitably have had a hard time to stabilize their institutional control over their parts. And, in the end, it also explains why so few empires succeeded to persist to this day. As Arnold Toynbee (1) documented there have been many trials at empire building along the last 5,000 years of human history. But very few of those trials converted into the real thing. And the few that have arisen finally collapsed eventually leaving a civilizational legacy to their territorial components.
The Western Roman empire for example governed over all the territories bordering the Mediterranean, transmitting to them ‒ its Christian worldview ‒ its axioms of civilization, and when it collapsed all these territories scrambled together as best as they could while synchronizing with their contextual settings. Some kept sharing the Christian worldview of the empire while other soon converted to Islam.
As the image here after shows by 405 AD this synchronization had partitioned the empire between its Western branch centered in Rome and its Eastern branch centered around Constantinople (present day Istanbul). And by 650 the Muslim troops had taken over the northern African territories that had been controlled by the empire. The future inheritance of the empire’s Roman Christian worldview, and axioms of civilization, was thus limited to Western Europe where Early-Modernity emerged a few centuries later…
An empire is thus not a nation. Many political theorists define the appellation “empire” as being a confederation of nations, or a centralized system, governing various territories having different systems of governance while all territories shared a common worldview imposed by the center. Seen through this lens it appears evident that empires would inevitably have had a hard time to stabilize their institutional control over their parts. And, in the end, it also explains why so few empires succeeded to persist to this day. As Arnold Toynbee (1) documented there have been many trials at empire building along the last 5,000 years of human history. But very few of those trials converted into the real thing. And the few that have arisen finally collapsed eventually leaving a civilizational legacy to their territorial components.
The Western Roman empire for example governed over all the territories bordering the Mediterranean, transmitting to them ‒ its Christian worldview ‒ its axioms of civilization, and when it collapsed all these territories scrambled together as best as they could while synchronizing with their contextual settings. Some kept sharing the Christian worldview of the empire while other soon converted to Islam.
As the image here after shows by 405 AD this synchronization had partitioned the empire between its Western branch centered in Rome and its Eastern branch centered around Constantinople (present day Istanbul). And by 650 the Muslim troops had taken over the northern African territories that had been controlled by the empire. The future inheritance of the empire’s Roman Christian worldview, and axioms of civilization, was thus limited to Western Europe where Early-Modernity emerged a few centuries later…
"Roman Republic Empire map in 405 AD" image extracted from animated gif by Roke (d).
Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.
Having summed up, what is an empire and how after its fall its regional polities synchronize with their contextual settings, lets now observe what are the signs that an empire has stabilized. Here follows a non-exhaustive list of 10 signs, in decreasing order of importance, that are generally accepted as signals that an empire emerged :
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Institutional reproduction and civilizational realm :
The reproduction of imperial institutions over the generations indicates that an empire has stabilized into a civilizational realm. -
Dynastic rule :
After the passing of an emperor the mantel of power is being transmitted, most generally to his nearest descendant. Rome and later Constantinople were somehow exceptions to this rule. Some of their emperors passed the hand to their descendants but most imposed themselves by violent means. They acted as usurpers. But this exception to the rule vastly weakened these empires by constantly plunging them into wars of succession. The lack of a clear rule of succession is often cited as one of the causes of the demise of Roman and Byzantine empires. -
Hegemonic worldview :
In the Middle-East and Europe religion was imposed as the worldview of empires while in China the master narrative was associated with pragmatic principles concerning human existence, and the working of the universe, that had been inherited from animism. In the early days of the Roman empire religion transformed from dealing with practical matters, like sickness insecurity and death, to serving the political integration of the public into a system of political legitimization.
By the end of the Roman Empire Christianity had gradually grown as the primary popular belief system and it was co-opted by Constantine as State religion to enhance the falling legitimacy of the empire. Constantine nevertheless displaced his capital to Byzantium in 330 AD which was subsequently renamed Constantinople (present day Istanbul). And after the subsequent fall of the Western branch of the empire Christianity emulated its institutional model. By the time Rome collapsed Catholicism had established its dual rule over all religious and secular matters in Western Europe. Over the following centuries this acted as a limitation to the reach of secular power over state institutions. That limitation, in turn, was one of the factors that coalesced to impose representative democracy along the 18th and 19th centuries.
In China pragmatic principles concerning human existence, inherited from animism, were kept as the primordial substance of the worldview shared by all which fostered a vision of public governance being necessarily at the service of the citizenry. That system is still largely intact today. I laid out extensively in “2.2.5. Power - religions versus animism+” how the worldviews of the TCA and of China came to differentiate so drastically during the transition from tribal to power societies. -
The emperor is the earthly representative of Heaven :
The larger political entities became territorially the less legitimate they were and the more evident it appeared to attentive observers of societal evolution that worldviews were the only factor gluing the people together. It took Millennia, during the transition from tribal to power-societies, for this reality to sink in the minds of the men of power. It was only by working closely with the men of knowledge that they slowly and gradually strengthened their legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens.
The integration, of the men of power as the earthly representatives of God or spirits, in the narratives of shared worldviews was the last phase in that process of consolidation and it proved to be the key to imperial stabilization. And so when Christianity was established as the official religion of Rome by Emperor Constantine the emperors were presented as being God's earthly representatives. But this proved not to have been very successful after all for the Roman Empire.
The Chinese worldview was pragmatically a-religious and so the emperor was portrayed as the representative of heaven on earth. The emperor of heaven was conceived as a father spirit, a kind of master spirit, in charge of governing the affairs of spirits. His government was depicted by the earthly (wo)men of knowledge as a carbon copy of the imperial government on earth. Unfortunately this heavenly function was given the name god in the early Western translations by the Jesuit monks who had been received by the Chinese as Western men of knowledge from whom they hoped to learn Western skills in mathematics, cartography, astronomy,... Hey the Chinese never quit being pragmatic !"In 1601, Ricci was invited by the Emperor to become an adviser to the Imperial court of the Wanli Emperor; the first Westerner to be invited into the Forbidden City. This honor was in recognition of Ricci's scientific abilities, chiefly his predictions of solar eclipses, which were significant events in the Chinese world" (2).
The initial translation by the Jesuits of the Chinese “Master Spirit of Heavens” into god has been sticking in Western discourse since then. There is no doubt that this translation was given with the afterthought to ease proselytizing Christianity among the Chinese. But this leaves us with a conundrum (3). The Western concept of god was accepted, by Westerners and by Chinese alike as the English translation of what was the Chinese concept of ‘master spirit of heavens'. This naturally leads to absurd situation as the one mentioned by Joseph A. Adler in “Chinese Religion: An Overview” :“One indicator of the problematic nature of the category "religion" in Chinese history is the absence of any pre-modern word that is unambiguously associated with the category. The modern Chinese word zongjiao was first employed to mean "religion" by late 19th-century Japanese translators of European texts. Zongjiao (or shky in Japanese) is a compound consisting of zong (sh), which is derived from a pictogram of an ancestral altar and most commonly denotes a "sect," and jiao (ky), meaning "teaching" (The compound had originally been a Chinese Buddhist term meaning simply the teachings of a particular sect.) Zongjiao/shky thus carries the connotation of "ancestral" or sectarian teachings. The primary reference of this newly-coined usage for shky in the European texts being translated was, of course, Christianity.”
It was clear from the start that Mateo Ricci was not interested in a faithful translation. It seems indeed that he knew perfectly well that the Chinese language had no equivalent to the Western concept of god and so he used existing Chinese concepts to treacherously situate god within the Chinese sphere of operationality. But there never was any equivalence between these concepts and the concepts god. Speaking about this misrepresentation by Ricci Wikipedia points to the following :"He did not explain the Catholic faith as entirely foreign or new; instead, he said that the Chinese culture and people always believed in God, and that Christianity is simply the completion of their faith. He borrowed an unusual Chinese term, Lord of Heaven (Chinese: 天 主 ; pinyin: Tiānzhǔ) which is based on the theistic Zhou term 'Heaven", to use as the Catholic name for God".
But even this recognition in Wikipedia is not going without its own Western centric implication in the words ‘the theistic Zhou term 'Heaven'. The term heaven or sky, in Chinese traditional thought, had never a theistic implication at all; it was simply conceived as one of the polarities of the category universe; its other polarity being the earth.
Ricci was using heaven from the perspective of Chinese Epistemology or the Chinese methodology of gaining the true knowledge about reality. Chinese sages viewed reality as an emerging phenomenon that originates in the activation of the One, or Taiji the essence of reality, by its 2 Yin-Yang polarities which results in the enfolding in heaven (space) of the ten thousand things. One of these things is the earth. The earth is the mother that regulates the here and now.
The philosophic systems of Taoism and of Confucianism are rooted in this epistemology. It seems that Ricci understood this and so he tried to position Christianity as springing from these same roots. The problem evidently is that the traditional animist thought that sustains the Chinese Epistemology is at the antipodes of the Christian epistemology. In the Chinese view of the world the polarities of the universe are heaven and earth and humanity is seen as one of the ten thousands things enfolding from the win-win give and take relation between these polarities.
The “Chinese emperors” were made the earthly representatives of the Heavenly spirits for more mundane historical reasons as I explain in “Power molds the worldview shared by society”. -
Social inequality and class-based society :
Power societies impose the authority of a few on all citizens. This differentiation in societal roles fostered social inequality among the people who generally ended-up being stratified in 3 groups, ‒ ruling class ‒ free men ‒ slaves, which were each eventually split into further differentiations.
What is important to remember here is that, tribal societies procured economic abundance to free tribesmen for tens of thousands of years while power societies institutionalized social inequality, class divisions, and early-individualism which was limited to the men of power and the men of knowledge who occupied the top echelons of power societies.
This kind of inequality is not a natural phenomenon as many believe today. It was a human creation whose origins are decipherable amidst the transition from tribal societies to power societies. 3.1. About Early Kingdoms and Empires -
Public institutions and urban concentrations in cities :
The increase of population that started after the abrupt climate warming at the tail-end of the Younger-Dryas some 11,700 years ago was followed, around 10,500-10,000 years ago, by a second wave of population growth in the wake of emerging villages which resulted in larger settlements that continuously absorbed further excess tribal populations.
The archaeological records indicate that the first cities made their appearance some two thousands years later or around 8,500-8,000 years ago. Çatalhöyük was the subject of Ian Hodder’s extensive studies (4) that document the city's peaceful emergence as a process of rapid population growth that started with only a few families. This was then followed by a period of power consolidation that led to thousand of years of fights for the control of cities.
Around 5,500-5,000 years ago confederations of city-states started to successfully reproduce their institutions over multiple generations and this was soon followed by trial and error conquests of other confederations. The coalescing of multiple confederations of city-states was an exercise in empire building. Those that succeeded to reproduce their institutions over the generations indicated that an empire had stabilized into a civilizational realm.
The larger the territorial domain, of confederations of cities or of empires, the larger was the need for 'state servants' to manage and supervise the activities related to the exercise of power. Most of the institutions of power were located around the palace of kings or emperors. Their 'civil servants' had to be supplied with all kinds of goods and services and, local assemblies of people came thus to inflate the size of cities, while their needs were satisfied by regional markets.
I gave an extensive presentation of the emergence of markets in the context of the Late-Medieval period in Western Europe in “A first blow to Late-Modernity. 7.4.3.2. the transition from Late-Modernity to After-Modernity.” See C. Societal governance : About geography and institutions“. -
The use of writing :
While the reproduction of public institutions over the generations was accompanied by a concentration of state personnel in cities the need arose for tools and methodologies to register their activities as well as the sharing of the resulting information among them and with the men of power. Writing originates precisely at that point as well as the first classification methods. In other words with the reproduction of power institutions arose a functional need to register and share information. And that need got answered by the written language and data organization methods.
But the discussion about the emergence of the written language is perhaps the most controversial among all discussions relating to the emergence of power societies.
The reason for this is related to what I mentioned here above about the introduction of archaeology as a science in universities. Western archaeologists started to dig systematically in TCA countries during the 2nd part of the 19th century while other countries at best only started a century later in the seventies or eighties of the 20th century. This gave Western archaeologists a century or more of 'advanced discoveries' that they presented as portending the entire story of civilization. And so excavated artifacts of the earliest Sumerian written characters were given as proof that the written language originated in Sumer between 2,500 and 3,000 years BC. But this is now contested :"In 1952 University of Chicago Assyriologist Ignace Jay Gelb, considered the first scholar to scientifically analyze writing systems, published his seminal work A Study of Writing. At the Oriental Institute, Gelb developed his theory that writing was invented in Mesopotamia, spread to Egypt, and then spread to China. ... For 30 years Gelb’s view of writing’s origins reigned. Since the 1980s, however, scholars have found evidence suggesting that the four earliest writing systems were born independently of each other. Egyptian and Mesopotamian scripts appeared almost simultaneously (between 3500 and 3200 BC). The Chinese and Mesoamerican systems emerged later…" (5)
Even if archaeology is still rather in its infancy in China, recent discoveries point to the origins of Chinese writing sometime during the Yangshao culture, a tribal-neolithic culture, that was flourishing between 5000 BC and 3000 BC over the Loess plateau where, according to recent archaeological discoveries, the first Chinese cities emerged.(6)
More recent discoveries of rock carvings (petroglyphs) in Damaidi7 seem to push these dates even further down in time. Those petroglyphs represent "communicating signs", says Chen Zhaofu, an expert of ancient rock art with the Central University of Nationalities. As of today archaeologists and historians have located 3,172 petroglyphs featuring 8,453 individual characters. This is now being seized upon by Chinese anthropologists to question the narrative of their Western counterparts.“Many, but by no means all, Western scholars hold that oracle-bone inscriptions are the earliest form of Chinese writing, and that the latter began with little incubation during the Shang period in the middle–lower Yellow River Valley area. In contrast, for many (but not all) Chinese scholars Early Bronze Age inscriptions and Neolithic signs are evidence of the gradual development of Chinese writing over an extended period of time and from a variety of earlier graphic systems. These diverging opinions and their subsets have generated a contentious debate on the origins of writing in China. ... Ultimately, the question is not whether the Dawenkou, Liangzhu, Shijiahe signs are ‘writing’ (this depend on the inclusiveness of the definition), but whether or not they constitute the beginning of a thread that led to Chinese writing. Since they appear to be closely linked to the mature writing of the Shang period, I believe they do." (8)
The debates accompanying the emergence of the written language illustrate how powerful ideological or ethnocentric prejudice really is. To conclude on that point I believe it is still early on the clock of archaeology to proclaim a definitive statement on the matter. Archaeologists are bound to make many more discoveries in the future that could eventually draw a completely different picture than the one we can observe today. We should thus avoid rushing to judgments. And in any case what language came first makes no difference at all for our Late-Modern societies. -
Specialized occupational groups :
We have seen earlier that, starting with agricultural villages, military men were the first group to specialize in a single activity. With the advent of empires they were followed by 'artists' and other craftsmen who offered their services in urban administrative areas. It is interesting to observe that it was with early empires that image making got separated from the men of knowledge and both became specialized functions in their own rights.
With the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of State such images adorned the walls and ceilings of churches and cathedrals that had been built massive and high so as to impress the idea, in the mind of visitors, that they were insignificant in comparison to the majesty and power of the church. Those visual signs were thus instantly sacralized, and the story they illustrated was automatically perceived as the truth, in the eyes of the believers who were the citizens of the empire. -
Demand for monumental works justifies taxation :
The Roman road system comes immediately to mind, that connected the entirety of the imperial territory, and sucked a great deal of state resources. China had its own big works which started during the tribal cultural unification era in the form of anti-flooding infrastructures on the Yellow River. These works initiated the need for new management methodologies that prefigured its later governance systems. -
Imposition of standards :
The unification of empires was vastly strengthened by the adoption of standards: a common instrument of exchange (money), measurement standards, architectural regulations, and so on. In China standards were imposed by Qin Shi Huang the founder of the Qin dynasty who unified China and reigned between 247 to 221 BC.
Notes
1. Arnold Toynbee in a description by Encyclopedia Britannica : "English historian whose 12-volume “A Study of History” (1934–61) put forward a philosophy of history, based on an analysis of the cyclical development and decline of civilizations, that provoked much discussion".
2. Matto Ricci
3. “God and Spirits” by James Legge.
“The Spirits of Chinese Religion” by Stephen F. Teiser.
4. See Ian Hodder’s articles page.
5. “The origins of writing” by Ruth E. Kott. Univ. of Chicago
6. Yangguanzhai : situated in Gaoling County/Shaanxi, goes as far back as 5,500-6,000 years ago
Lingjiatan : situated in east China's Anhui. It goes as far back as 5,500 years
Shuanghuaishu : situated in Zhengzhou Henan. It goes as far back as 5,300 years
Liangzhu : situated in the Circum-Taihu Lake Area. It goes as far back as 5,300 years
Fenghuangzui : located in the city of Xiangyang/Hubei, goes as far back as 5,200 years
7. Damadi is a location in the Heilangshan mountains of Ningxia
8. “The Neolithic Evidence of the Origins of Chinese Writing” by Paola Demattè. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 2010
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