Chapter 19: The Classical
World System, Natural Adaptive Cycles, and Societal Collapse at the End of
Antiquity
In
97 AD the Chinese general and Protector General of the Western Regions, Pan
Chao (Ban Zhou), led a sizeable army (reportedly 70,000) across the Pamir
Mountains into Bactria and advanced across the Oxus River all the way to the
shores of an unnamed sea, presumably the Caspian. Some fifty kings in this
nomadic region submitted to his authority en route. While camped there he
dispatched an officer named Kan Ying to investigate
further regarding the location of the “Other China.” Kan
Ying reached a neighboring sea where he was told by inhabitants that Rome could
be reached by a sea voyage that would require three years, round trip, and
untold quantities of provisions. Since the Chinese army of Pan Chao had taken
the “northern route” across the steppes of Central Asia to the Caspian, it is
more than likely that Kan Ying had journeyed across
the Caspian to the Caucasus region, perhaps Armenia or Georgia, and had made
his way to the eastern shores of the Black Sea. If so he was indeed a long way
from Rome. With his commander and an entire army waiting behind him, he thought
better of the idea and returned to his encampment. Pan Chao and his forces returned
to the Tarim Basin after a four year, roundtrip expedition. A seemingly pointless expedition had
brought the Chinese army to the borders of the Roman Mediterranean world. What
seems certain is that Pan Chao and his army were trying to gain intelligence
about the existence of a distant empire, the one that the Chinese referred to
as “Ta Ch’in,” the “Other China,” or the Roman Empire.
Nor
was Pan Chao the first Chinese official to explore beyond the frontiers of
China. After the Early Han dynasty secured authority in China at the beginning
of the second century BC, it needed to address the persistent danger of Hsiung Nu depredations along its northern border. As we
noted earlier, the Han first tried a policy of appeasement, hoping to purchase Hsiung Nu compliance with foodstuffs, bolts of silk,
lacquered utensils, and other Chinese products and eventually to draw them into
the Chinese sphere of influence. Around 130 BC the Han attained a sufficient
level of internal control to shift from accommodation with the Hsiung Nu to an active policy of expansion. The emperor Wu
Ti dispatched a courtier named Chang Ch’ien to
distant nomadic confederacies on the western flank of the Hsiung
Nu to persuade them to join the Chinese in war against a common foe. Chang Ch’ien’s journey resulted immediately in his capture by the
Hsiung Nu where he was forced to remain so long (a
decade) that he took a Hsiung Nu bride. But
eventually he escaped and proceeded west, taking the northern route beyond the Tien Shien Mountains into Sogdiana and Bactria. His intended objective was to locate
the Yueh Chih, a Turkic-Hunnic people who had been driven westward by the Hsiung Nu into the region of Sogdiana.
To western sources these people were known as the Sacae
and were linked through confederate relations with the Kushan
rulers of India. Although he was unable to convince Sacae
tribesmen to join China in a war against the Hsiung
Nu, he traveled extensively through Afghanistan and the upper Indus valley
gathering crucial intelligence about the urban societies of this region. He
observed, for example, that people in the upper Indus were using products
(bamboo and silk) that originated from his home country China. According to the
natives these goods had arrived from China not via the Tarim
Basin but by sea. Returning to the court of Wu Ti many years later, Chang Ch’ien wrote a detailed report of his journey that
convinced the Han to explore connections with India via both directions – by
establishing a road system through the Pamir Mts in
the west and by constructing a second road system through provinces in the
south west extending from Canton to within 100 miles of Burma. While the
southern route proved impractical, Chinese conquest of the western regions
became a viable option. It is important to stress that the motivation for the
development of Chinese territories in the west was the unending conflict with
the Hsiung Nu and the need to find allies (not to
mention horses) to oppose them rather than any overt interest in trade. What
the experience of Chang Ch’ien demonstrated,
nonetheless, was that trade between India and China was on going at this time
and that it flourished sufficiently to warrant the attention of the Han emperor
himself. A year did not go by that the Han emperor did not dispatch some five
to ten caravans of envoys, each one consisting of hundreds of officials and
attendants, to regions to the west and south.
The
Emperor Wu Ti also dispatched a general, Li Kuang-li,
the brother of his favorite concubine, to undertake a prolonged campaign
against the Hsiung Nu, focusing on the conquest and
reorganization of the independent city states of the Tarim
Basin as a Chinese protectorate. Li Kuang-Li’s
initial campaign into western Mongolia nearly ended in disaster, with 90% of
his army lost in a disastrous desert campaign. In 104 BC, he was assigned a new
army and this time he not only conquered the Tarim
Basin, but he successfully invaded Ta Yuan, Sogdiana,
defeating a native army outside the walls of the royal capital Er Shih and ultimately reducing the inhabitants to
submission. Slightly later when he learned that Chinese envoys had been
murdered by a distant king of Chi Pin, he returned across the Pamir Mts.,
deposed that king and installed a puppet regime more to his liking. Scholars have identified Chi Pin with a Kushan principality situated in the Kashmir region of
northern Pakistan, and the king with a ruler whose name appears on coins as Heraios. The Early Han remained in control of the Tarim Basin ready to strike across the mountains until the
end of the first century BC. Chinese policy toward the west remained driven
predominantly by considerations about the Hsiung Nu.
With the collapse of the Hsiung Nu Empire around 53
BC, Han administrators were free to address other more pressing issues. Some 65
years passed before the Later Han were in a position to dispatch Pan Chao to
the region to reconsolidate Chinese control in the Tarim
Basin. His seventeen year long tenure as Protector General of the Western
Regions culminated in the unprecedented march to the Caspian sea
noted above.
The
passes through the Pamir and Tien Shien
Mts., one via Sogdiana (Ferghana)
to the north, the other through Bactria slightly south, appear to have
fascinated other rulers of ancient world empires as well. In 329 BC Alexander
the Great journeyed across the Oxus River to Bactria and Sogdiana.
He established his most remote colony, Alexandria Eschata
(Alexandria of the Furthest Extent), somewhere in the valley of Ferghana. He conducted this campaign ostensibly to
eradicate Achaemenid royal connections to the region
and to prevent Persian nobles from provoking uprisings behind the Macedonian
supply lines across Afghanistan. Earlier that year, while Alexander was
wintering in the region of Lake Seistan in southeastern
Afghanistan, the satraps Bessus and Spitamenes had employed a route similar to the one taken
later by Pan Chao along the Jaxartes and Oxus Rivers
to slip behind his lines into Iran. The mobile detachments of Sogdian and Bactrian horsemen knew the routes through the
desert and could seemingly strike at will and disappear without a trace. There
was no choice but to root out their bases at the foot of the distant Pamir
Mts., despite the hardship this brought on his army. During a winter encampment
in Sogdiana in 328 BC, discontent was rife at the
Macedonian camp. After a heated exchange during a banquet
Alexander in a drunken rage unwittingly murdered one of his best friends, Clitus the Black, after informing him that he would be left
behind as the governor of Sogdiana. The following year when Alexander married the
Bactrian princess, Roxane, another conspiracy emerged
among his royal pages, leading to the arrest and execution of Artistotle’s nephew Callisthenes. Leaving behind merchants
and veterans, Alexander hoped to maintain control over this distant region, and
it is interesting to observe that a handful of Macedonian generals managed to sustain
“Macedonian” control of Bactria during the confused decades that followed
Alexander’s death in 323 BC. The Eucratid dynasty controlled
the region until they were overrun by the Yueh Chih / Sacae, mentioned above, in
the early second century BC. Heraios of Chi Pin,
deposed by Li Kuang-li in the 90s BC, was possibly
connected to these rulers as well. Like the Chinese, in other words, the
Macedonians seemingly understood the importance of this remote highland region
to world affairs.
When
invading Afghanistan Alexander followed a road that was first opened up by
Darius I of Persia, who journeyed through Afghanistan to reassert Persian
authority (first imposed by Cyrus I) in Bactria, Sogdiana,
and the Indus around 515 BC. Alexander greatly expanded this road network by
establishing colonies along its length. He established irrigated agricultural
communities near Lake Seistan to generate food stores
for the army, he offered huge incentives for merchants and veterans alike to
set up way stations along the route to accommodate the flow of traffic, and he
even went so far as to implement the use of camel caravans and wagon trains to
move men and material across the central Asian plateau. Phenomenal, if not
extravagant accomplishments are recorded during this journey, such as the
constant flow of men and weaponry from the Mediterranean and the importation of
Aegean Greek wines. While encamped in Bactria his officers allegedly imported
wagon loads of fine “wrestling” sand all the way from the Nile river delta.
Since Alexander had the benefit of the captured Persian treasury, he spared little
expense to move supplies along this route to distant places such as Sogdiana and India. Only rarely did his supply system break
down. The transportation nodes he created appear to have survived not only his
demise but the relentless political upheavals of the following century. In the
early third century BC, the Mauryan Emperor
Chandragupta shipped five hundred war elephants to Seleucus
I of Syria during his epic conquest of portions of eastern Iran and
Afghanistan. Antiochus
We
raise all this by way of introduction to address questions of the
interconnection of ancient world systems and the reasons for their simultaneous
collapse. As noted in the last chapter, the Roman imperial administration in
the Mediterranean, the Kushan dominance in India, and
the Later Han Dynasty in China all collapsed toward the end of the second
century AD, when all three societies were seemingly at their height with
respect to population size, productivity, and general prosperity. Through the
implementation of more disciplined, possibly more efficient, administrative practices,
the Romans and the Gupta Dynasty in India were able to stabilize things by the
late third century AD. They sustained their urban societies for another two
centuries before collapse overtook them in the form of external invasions by
nomadic peoples from the north. In China, the most distant of the three world
systems, a period of confusion, the Era of Disunity, set in with the collapse
of the Later Han Dynasty (220 AD). The political situation did not right itself
until the emergence of the Tang Dynasty (618-907) in the seventh century AD.
During the interim repeated invasions by nomadic peoples offset each new
threshold of stability [the Three Kingdoms (220-280), the Jin Dynasty
(265-420), the Sixteen Kingdoms (304-439), the Sui Dynasty (588-618)]. Collapse
came swiftly in each region, in other words, but it was not necessarily similar
in form or duration. For example, the eastern half of the Roman Mediterranean
where most of the productive capacity of the empire lay was able to sustain itself
relatively intact as the Byzantine Empire for several hundred years. But the
overall effect was a decline in production and living standards throughout the
three regions of these ancient world systems. This fact can be demonstrated in
a number of ways, archaeologically as well as textually. Perhaps the most
compelling evidence comes from the ice core samples obtained in Greenland,
already used in Chapter Three to demonstrate the impact of the Ice Age.
According to these records the levels of airborne pollutants such as heavy
metals that are released during the smelting of metals, having risen gradually
during the course of antiquity, dropped to nearly Neolithic levels after the
fifth century AD. The production of metals world-wide clearly declined at this
time. A heavy reliance on firing technologies across Eurasia to produce metal
tools and weapons, not to mention the kiln firing necessary to generate massive
quantities of roof tiles and ceramic wares, suffered significant decline at
this time. In some regions such as northwestern Europe where evidence for the
reintroduction of thatched roofs and wooden utensils is certain, firing
technology practically went out of use altogether. Empirical evidence such as
this raises two important questions, accordingly. One, did the trade routes
across central Asia have anything to do with the high level of prosperity
enjoyed by ancient world systems in three distant basins? Two,
in view of the evidence of urban prosperity in all three regions, why did they
collapse in such a seemingly coordinated manner?
To
answer the first question concerning the relative importance of the trade
routes between the Mediterranean, India, and China, one has to consider the
nature of the trade itself. Skeptics who believe that transcontinental trade in
antiquity was marginal to the economies of the regions insist that the trade
itself represented “high value, low volume” commerce in prestige goods that
inevitably did not affect general well being in any
of the regions in question. They argue that the volume of this trade at any
given time was minimal and that the sorts of commodities being transported,
precious metals, gems, incense, exotic plants and animals, coral, and spices,
were non productive in character. At best they
represented prestige goods obtained by ruling dynasties in distant basins of
the world to be distributed as rewards among their subordinate elites. Even in
the Roman Mediterranean, where luxuries were distributed independent of the
imperial court at Rome, the difficulties entailed in transshipping these
commodities across vast distances ultimately rendered them too rare and
expensive to be enjoyed by the general public. Accordingly, their impact
economically would have been marginal. As we have noted, recent archaeological
investigations in East Africa, south India, and Afghanistan have revealed the
presence of relatively inexpensive Roman commodities, such as ceramic finewares, metal wares, glass. Amphoras laden with eastern Mediterranean, wines were
equally components to this trade. The weight and size of Mediterranean amphoras recovered in southern India all but necessitating
that they traveled in large ocean going merchant vessels. In other words, Roman
merchants appear to have sailed to India to exchange what were essentially
Mediterranean staple goods. In exchange they obtained commodities that were
unavailable in the Mediterranean, such as silk, spices, aromatics, and precious
stones. Much like Roman wine and oil, many of these products were neigher rare
nor expensive in the regions of their origination. What affected their prices
at the opposite end of the ancient world were the inherent costs of transport
and the manifold layers of tariffs and commissions that were incurred along the
way. To some degree the widely varying climates of ancient world production regions
rendered one region's staple goods another region's luxury commodities.
Accordingly, the international luxury trade of the Roman era needs always to be
considered within the context of various socio-economic and political systems
in the geographic regions through which it passed. Finds of Chinese jade
statuettes in Pompeii and Roman coin hoards in Vietnam indicate that regardless
of the actual volume of this trade, adventurous merchants found the necessary
incentives to make it occur.
Questions
regarding the volume of this traffic remain more speculative. Although
archaeological data for the commodities from the eastern ends of this trading
network, silk and spices, remains inadequate, the amphora evidence at Arikamedu raises the possibility that Roman maritime trade
with India during the first centuries BC and AD was vibrant, and that
Mediterranean staple commodities circulated in the Indian Ocean at a pace
relatively similar to that which occurred in the Mediterranean itself. Roman
merchants who established the trading contacts in India utilized those
"finished goods" that the Roman world was most adept at producing.
The Auximite kings of east Africa used Roman weapons
to assert local supremacy; the Tamil princes of southern India used their
geographical position at the center of ancient oceanic sea lanes to raise
standards of living of an otherwise unproductive region. Traders from the Far
East made the difficult journey to India bearing commodities that, according to
available documentation, were readily available in their home regions. No one
would argue that commonplace wines from the eastern Mediterranean bore
intrinsic value commensurate with those of spices or silk from the East.
Asymmetrical values of the commodities in circulation may have required much
larger shipments of Mediterranean staple goods to obtain sufficient amounts of
the goods in question. This would explain not only the presence of so many
Roman amphoras at Arikamedu
but the perception as well that the trade with India imposed an unfavorable
balance of trade on the West. The repeated references to silk garments in Roman
literature and the widespread finds of artifacts such as pepper shakers
throughout Mediterranean archaeological contexts indicate, nonetheless. that however expensive these luxuries may have been their
prices were affordable to wealthy elites outside the city of Rome. Assuming
that eastern luxury goods were relatively plentiful in the Roman Mediterranean,
the volume of traffic across the Indian Ocean may very well have been
significant, at least at times.
Based as it is on archaeological discoveries at a handful of sites (Kapisa, Arikamedu) which may or
may not be representative, any argument for a significant volume of interregional
trade during the Classical era remains speculative. If we accept the prevailing
“reductionist” argument and assume that international trade at this time was
minimal and restricted largely to limited quantities of exotic prestige goods,
it is still possible for long-distance luxury trade to have stimulated the
simultaneous development of urban societies in all three basins. The
explanation lies with the effect that globalism had on world systems
development in general. As we have demonstrated, each of these regions
developed highly integrated world systems capable of moving locally produced
commodities throughout the topographical limits of society. The Mediterranean
Sea enabled inhabitants in that region to move heavy commodities and staple goods
from Egypt to Rome, Spain to Syria, and Libya to the Aegean; iron mines near
the mouth of the Ganges furnished materials for metals production throughout
the Indian subcontinent; rice, grain, and metals produced in the lowlands of
the Huang Ge and Yangtze Rivers in China furnished
the necessary foodstuffs and materials for imperial courts, such as Ch’ang An, situated in the highlands and ultimately enabled
the the Han dynasties to project force as far as the Tarim Basin to the west and Vietnam and Burma to the south.
Most production was probably consumed locally in a subsistence manner. Another
significant portion appears to have circulated in delimited regional networks.
However, some portion of the materials produced in each basin was transported
across vast distances. It is interesting to note, for example, how often the
breakdown of these transport systems, particularly the overland supply of
foodstuffs in China, forced the ruling houses to relocate their capitals from
the western highlands to locations more proximate to the centers of production
themselves. In short, the progressive development of world systems enabled
stratified urban societies to harness resources throughout their respective
regions in a manner necessary to sustain more prosperous ways of life.
Globalism,
or in this instance the access to exotic prestige goods from regions beyond the
immediate world system, appears to have acted as an accelerant to the pace of
production in each respective basin. As anyone who has witnessed the worldwide
appeal of contemporary music, Hollywood movies, American blue jeans, or Asian
produced electronic equipment will acknowledge, modern
global inhabitants display an enormous appetite for exotic goods and the latest
technologies. The authors themselves have repeatedly marveled at the
incongruous display of satellite dishes perched atop rustic cinder block houses
otherwise devoid of running water or toilets in the mountains of southern
Turkey. Some people will forego basic necessities, in other words, to acquire
the latest consumer goods. The first tenet of globalism, therefore, is that the
availability of exotic prestige goods in and of itself
tends to drive demand. It does not matter how rare or how expensive a commodity
was when it reached the opposite end of the globe. Provided that an exotic
prestige good was available some limited element of the population, the
wealthiest elites, could afford it. Hence, the relative volume of long distance
trade was less important that the existence of the trade in and itself. The
driving force to this principle rests with the means used to purchase expensive
imported goods. To make these purchases the inhabitants of interconnected
ancient world systems made use the most widely accepted media of exchange,
money in the form of coins, bullion, or goods such as silk or incense whose
ease of transport and intrinsic net worth enabled them to serve as “liquid
capital.” To generate the liquid capital necessary to obtain expensive imports,
local property-holding elites in all three regions raised productivity by
investing in their landholdings. They opened up virgin terrain to agriculture,
they constructed kiln sites and forges, they built ships and wagons, and
ultimately they generated surplus staples commodities intended for wider
consumption within the world system. This pattern is visible in all three
regions, along with evidence of population growth both in terms of its
expansion spatially across the landscape and in terms of density at urban
centers. In addition, all three regions exhibited a gradual transition from
subsistence production by dispersed rural populations to highly efficient
agricultural systems (oftentimes slave driven) intended for the production of
surplus commodities. These commodities were circulated at local, regional, and
world systems scales of the trading network. The availability of expensive
prestige commodities, that is, trade globalism, had the capacity to quicken the
economic pace in distant corners of the world by furnishing wealthy elites with
the necessary incentive to expand the base of production in their respective
localities. The rate and volume of exchange in distantly traded commodities did
not “flow” so much as it “pulsated” with variable ebb and flow depending on
political conditions along the trade routes and the relative success of
regional staples production at any given time. The essential point to recognize
is that globalism, the availability of exotic prestige goods from opposite ends
of the world, had the capacity to accelerate productivity and to raise living
standards in distant regions of the globe. The Chinese general, Pan Chao, knew
relatively little about Rome, its location, its organization, or its size, but
he returned to China from the shores of the Caspian Sea with the report that
the inhabitants of Rome lived prosperously. It was the rumored prosperity of
the Romans and the fact that a large civilization so far removed from China
could afford to import its locally produced prestige goods that had attracted
his and his ruler’s attention in the first place.
If
one accepts the idea that globalism functioned as an accelerator of economic
production, then the last question remains why these world systems failed and
failed contemporaneously as they did at the end of the second century AD? If
the trade between them was minimal to the point of being intangible, is it
really possible for its demise to have precipitated economic and political
collapse in all three basins sumultaneously? To
address this question we need to return to points raised in our initial chapter
concerning the building process of world systems and their natural adaptive
cycles. In a useful book, The Collapse of
Complex Societies (Cambridge, 1988), J. A. Tainter
identifies eleven different factors that contribute to societal collapse. These
include
Ø the depletion or cessation
of a vital resource(s) on which the society depends
Ø the establishment of a new
resource base that renders current procedures obsolete
Ø the occurrence of some
insurmountable catastrophe
Ø a failure to respond adequately
to changing circumstances
Ø unsuccessful competition
with other complex societies
Ø the arrival of foreign
intruders
Ø the emergence of class
conflict
Ø societal contradictions, or
elite mismanagement or misbehavior
Ø a general social dysfunction
Ø the existence of
debilitating mystical factors
Ø a chance concatenation of
events
Ø unforeseen economic
influences
Although
the range of variables inevitably dilutes his argument, Tainter
concludes that collapse is fundamentally a sudden pronounced loss of an
established level of sociopolitical complexity. According to Tainter the ancient state emerged as a problem solving
organization due to changing circumstances. Ancient states required legitimacy
and the ability to mobilize resources. These sociopolitical organizations
encountered repeated problems that required increased investment merely to
preserve the status quo. This investment typically came in the form of:
Ø an expanded bureaucracy
Ø an expansion to the
specialized departments of a bureaucracy (increased stratification)
Ø cumulative organizational
solutions that grow bewilderingly unwieldy (consider the example of modern US
tax codes)
Ø increased costs of
legitimizing activities
Ø the increased costs of
internal control and external defense
All
of these must be borne over time by levying greater costs on the supporting
population, often to no increased advantage. As the number and costliness of
organizational investments increase, the proportion of a society’s budget
available for investment in future economic growth invariably declines. Tainter defines the overall effect as one of “declining
marginal returns.” Eventually declining marginal returns from state
institutions precipitate collapse, sometimes sudden, sometimes in the form of
the slow disintegration of a regime.
Although
Tainter’s interpretation tends to focus inordinately
on the role of central authority or governing institutions in the process of
collapse, the model of declining marginal returns does seem to offer crucial
insight into the patterns seen occurring in the Mediterranean, India, and China
at this time. By placing appropriate emphasis on the tendency toward growth it
enables us to identify essential patterns to the growth cycles of past
societies. Then as now, growth was viewed as a requirement in the construction
of world systems. Growth yielded an array of benefits including better
administration of resource storage and distribution, a better investment in
agricultural energy and minerals production, improved internal order and external
defense, and greater information processing and public works. In so many words,
these improvements represent the seven criteria to civilizations noted at the
outset of this book. One additional insight furnished by Tainter’s
analysis is that growth in human societies has ceilings or thresholds that confront
continued growth in ancient societies. To move beyond a threshold or ceiling
requires innovations, new technologies, or new means of conservation. The
ancient historian Polybius observed that ancient empires were always in a state
of expansion or contraction; they never attained “steady state equilibrium”
because conditions were always changing. At the same time, it seems clear that
no society had the resources to grow indefinitely. “Sustainability,” thus,
becomes an important part of the problem. One must recognize, however, that the
further one pursues “collapse theory” in the ancient record, the more
speculative our arguments inevitably become.
Questions
about “sustainability” have received enormous attention in the current era,
particularly the ecological argument of resource depletion. It is entirely
possible that modern historians of the ancient world have underestimated the
impact of firing technologies on the landscapes that we have visited in the
Classical world. As the ice cores in Greenland demonstrate, the reliance on
firing technologies to generate metalwork in the Classical period was so great world wide that its heavy metal by-products are visible in
the sampled remains. Moreover, these cores factor in only the heavy metals
released through smelting; they do not address the quantities of fuel exhausted
by ceramic kilns, heated baths, and household uses that were employed
extensively throughout the Classical world. Unlike modern energy supplied by
various means such as oil, gas, coal, and hydro-electricity, in antiquity the
principle source of fuel was wood harvested from forests. To generate the
necessary firing temperatures for smelting and glazed ceramics, charcoal was
needed. Given the limited means of charcoal producing technology, it typically
required seven to eight units of wood to generate a single unit of charcoal. In
other words, the ancient reliance on charcoal for high firing temperatures
placed even greater demand on timber extraction from ancient forests. When
combined with the expanding land clearance and conversion to agricultural
production that is visible in every landscape of the ancient world, questions
arise regarding the sustainability of urban societies of ancient world systems
that were overly reliant on wood-based fuels for sustained growth. Many recent
scholars have argued that resource depletion played a role in the collapse of
ancient societies. J. Hughes, for example, categorically indicts Roman failure
to adapt their society and economy to the limits of the natural environment.
Hughes points to erosion resulting from deforestation, exhaustion of the most
readily accessible minerals, and the overgrazing and excessive utilization of
agricultural terrain as evidence of environmental failure. Food shortages and
population decline sapped the Roman Empire’s strength and ultimately led to
collapse. Geoarchaeologists investigating evidence of
eroded landscapes (pollen counts in alluvial soil) have in many instances observed
a disastrous change toward the end of Roman Empire. This transition is
characterized by a major decline in pollen counts of cereals, arable plants,
and pasture weeds, combined with a rise in tree pollen. This would seem to
indicate that the agricultural landscape went out of use and reverted back to a
more natural state with woodlands encroaching on formerly cultivated fields.
Another
much discussed possibility is climate change. Even some slight variation in
climate could result in significant deterioration in ancient human well being. Preliminary models do suggest that the
Mediterranean basin during the Roman era was slightly wetter and warmer than it
is today. Assuming that the same was true throughout the temperate regions of
Eurasia, even mild climatic variation, such as a slight drop in temperature,
could potentially have placed inordinate stress on all ancient societies
including nomadic tribes that for some reason became increasingly mobile at
this time, moving southward and westward throughout Eurasia. Such an
environmental fluctuation could potentially have overwhelmed existing
production systems, political hierarchies, and social organization. As Tainter has observed, however, the available environmental
data for antiquity is extremely limited, too much so to verify an ecological
argument for ancient world systems collapse. A compelling argument requires
precise data regarding climate, population, available crop production, and
other resource yields alongside data for the annual requirements of the
population and of the sociopolitical system and the adaptive capabilities of
the society in question. This sort of comprehensive data simply does not exist
for the Classical world, where many economic assumptions, such as the 5% income
tax imposed by the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus, are based entirely on
anecdotal testimony. Given the limits of ancient technology (particularly the
limitations of land transport for the shipment of bulk commodities such as
timber, metals, or stone), the development of so many urban populations, built
environments, agricultural landscapes, and fire-based production centers
simultaneously across the globe may conceivably have resulted in resource
depletion. If this is true, however, it left little trace in the historical
literature. Apart from the generally
apocalyptic tone of “gloom and doom” recorded in most societies at the end of
antiquity, there is little in the eye-witness accounts that points directly to
evidence of an ecological disaster, certainly nothing that compares with the
current debate about the impact of global warming, the depletion of fossil
fuels, and the rise in population in the modern global world. The ecological
argument may ultimately bear weight, in other words, but the fact remains that
the research is in its infancy and the verdict is out.
Despite
the inadequacy of empirical data, the ecological argument remains valuable for
another reason altogether, namely, its ability to place human societies within
the proper order of the natural ecosystem. This has become increasingly evident
to specialists who focus on sustainability and human growth. This argument
proceeds as follows. Humans as organisms are actors engaged in a wider
ecosystem that supports numerous additional species of plants and animals. Like
humans all the species that we see around us, including many that have
disappeared, successfully survived the irreversible winnowing process of the
Pleistocene Era. Unlike most other species, humans emerged from the Ice Age
with no natural predators. From a natural perspective, that is, humans as
organisms have the capacity to expand to the limits of their ecological niche.
During the Classical era that niche was restricted by and large to the river
valleys and temperate zones of the northern hemisphere, extending along an east
west trending line from the Mediterranean to the shores of Asia. Within the
limits of ancient technology, this was the region most capable of sustaining
large urban populations, and centuries of significant technological innovation
were required before any similarly sized populations could emerge in other
parts of the globe. If we look at patterns of growth and collapse in ancient
world systems, what scientists refer to as sociopolitical organizations, what
we find is a rhythm, an ebb and flow in human population growth, that closely
resembles the adaptive cycles that are commonplace in the wider ecosystem.
Natural Adaptive Cycles and
the Ancient World Systems
The
theory of natural adaptive cycles is best explained in the book Resilience Thinking, Sustaining Ecosystems
and People in a Changing World (Washington Island Press 2006), by B. Walker
and D. Salt. Their concepts are actually modeled on the teachings of the noted
economist, Joseph Schumpeter, who studied recurring patterns in economic growth
(the “Schumpeter curve”) and coined the expression “creative destruction.” Its
chief premise is that change is constant and that for any system within the
natural order to survive it must be resilient to change. Human systems, accordingly,
must be sufficiently flexible and adaptive to withstand shocks and disturbances
that occur naturally the wider ecosystem. As we noted in the introduction,
natural adaptive cycles progress through four visible states: rapid growth, conservation, release, and
reorganization. An examination of each phase may be useful. As Walker and
Salt explain, early in the cycle a human or social-ecological system is engaged
in a period of rapid growth as
people exploit new opportunities and available resources. These actors make use
of available resources to exploit every possible ecological or social niche.
The system’s components are weakly interconnected and the internal state is
weakly regulated. In the human historical experience the rapid growth cycle can
be identified with the process of state formation and the growth of early
empires.
Eventually,
as resources become harnessed, the opportunities for rapid growth diminish and
a transition occurs to the phase of conservation.
During the conservation phase energy gets stored and materials slowly
accumulate. Connections between the actors increase and elite elements seek to
secure their position at the top of society. By the end of the growth phase few
if any new actors are able to establish themselves. The competitive edge shifts
from opportunists to specialists who reduce the impact of variability through
their own mutually reinforcing relationships. Conservation strategists tend
live longer and are more conservative and efficient in their use of resources.
As strong competitors they operate across large spatial scales and over longer
time periods. In growing economies this often translates into a move toward
greater specialization and greater efficiency through large economies of scale.
As the system’s components become more strongly interconnected its internal
state becomes more strongly regulated. Conservation results in the
establishment of a status quo, in other words, that excludes new entrants or
new ways of doing things. Capital (human and material) continues to grow but it
is increasingly harder to mobilize. Efficiency and connectedness increase but
the growth rate tends to slow. The cost of efficiency is a loss in flexibility;
the system becomes increasingly rigid and resilience declines. Different ways of
performing the same function (redundancy) are eliminated in favor of doing
something in the one most efficient way. Increasing dependence on existing
structures and processes renders the system increasingly vulnerable to
disturbance. In the human historical experience the conservation phase is
typically the phase of large urban civilizations.
The
transition from the conservation phase to the release phase can happen in a heartbeat. Moreover, the longer the
conservation phase persists the smaller the shock required to precipitate
collapse. A disturbance that exceeds the system’s resilience breaks apart its
web of reinforcing interactions and the system comes undone. Resources that
were tightly bound are now released as connections break and regulatory controls
weaken. The loss of structure continues as linkages are broken and natural,
social, and economic capital leaks out of the system. Although the release
phase tends to be brief, the dynamics are typically chaotic. However, the
destruction that ensues exhibits a creative energy, something Karl Schumpeter
described as “creative destruction.” Tightly bound capital is released and
becomes a source for reorganization and renewal. In the chaotic release phase
uncertainty rules and all options are open. Typically, the release phase leads
quickly into a phase of reorganization
and renewal. In economic or social systems new groups may appear and seize
control of an organization. The reorganization phase begins to sort out the
players and to constrain the dynamic. The end of the reorganization phase and
the beginning of the new rapid growth phase is marked by the appearance of a
new attractor, a new identity. This phase of the cycle may lead to a simple
repetition of the previous cycle, the initiation of a novel pattern of
accumulation, or it may precipitate a collapse into a degraded state. Usually
but not always, a system passes through an adaptive cycle by moving through the
four phases in the order described here but not necessarily in every instance.
The
similarities between the phases of the natural adaptive cycle and the repeated
pattern of rise and fall of ancient civilizations seem remarkably evident. In
addition, the progression through natural adaptive cycles demonstrates a
pattern of “diminishing marginal returns,” as described by Tainter.
As we have observed repeatedly with ancient world systems, ancient empires
typically progressed through phases of rapid growth, during which they
conquered neighboring peoples, expropriated their wealth, and incorporated the
energies and skills of their productive population to expand the empire.
Imperial consolidation was typically followed by a phase of conservation where
an established hierarchy attempted to maintain its supremacy by implementing
greater efforts at efficiency throughout the system. Landowners adapted from
subsistence forms of agriculture that were highly redundant (since each
household produces most of its own necessities) to more efficient use of the
landscape to produce agricultural surpluses. This enabled them to generate the
kinds of products that the landscape in that region was most capable of
producing as surpluses intended for distribution elsewhere. Egypt generated
grain exports, the Aegean wine and oil, Italy, livestock in addition to wine
and oil, and so forth. Increasing interdependency made the system more
efficient and better able to sustain a larger population, but it placed the
overall population at the mercy of a technologically constrained “distribution
system.” This process of integration and heightened efficiency can be applied
to nearly every aspect of the “seven criteria for civilization,” which, in the
end, function in this textbook as signposts to the key components of developed
civilizations that existed in the “conservation” phase of the cycle. Collapse
of the system due to some unforeseen disturbance such as a barbarian invasion
would result in the breakdown of the distribution of necessities throughout the
system. At the very least, inhabitants of surplus producing landscapes would
have to revert back to subsistence practices in order to survive, some more
successfully than others (redundancy). Marginal landscapes that had gradually
been colonized and made productive would be abandoned (release). The ruling
hierarchy would be defeated or collapse on its own. Stored wealth, such as the
Persian treasure conquered by Alexander the Great at Persepolis and Ecbatana,
would be released. Having eliminated the hierarchy and plundered its wealth, newcomers
such as migrating nomads became the “new actors” who reorganized the system and
initiated a renewed cycle of growth.
This
model not only captures the essence of world systems growth (conquest),
consolidation (conservation), retrenchment (“diminishing marginal returns” -- consider,
for example, the Roman adaptation to the military emergency of the third
century AD with the doubling and quadrupling of the size of the army), and
collapse (barbarian invasions), but it even goes so far as to identify the
chronological patterns visible in the “life cycle” of the ancient world system.
A characteristic pattern in the natural adaptive cycle is that of “fore loop”
and “back loop.” A fore loop is characterized by the accumulation of capital
stability and conservation; a mode that is essential for the system’s well being to increase. It represents the part of the cycle
in which levels of human well being can be raised. The
back loop is characterized by uncertainty, novelty, and experimentation. The
back loop has the greatest potential for the initiation of destructive or
creative change in the system. It is also the phase in which human actions can
have the biggest impact. However, capital cannot accumulate during periods of
release and renewal. What is most significant about the pattern of fore loop and
back loop in natural adaptive cycles is that the fore loop tends to be
represented by slow predictable patterns of growth. Resources slowly become
locked up in the most efficient way of doing things. Back loops on the other
hand are represented by sudden collapse and release of resources. Similarly,
civilizations seem to grow to sustainable levels over long periods of time, but
they seem to collapse relatively quickly. As a result, urban societies reaching
the end of the conservation phase invariably try to sustain themselves, their
built environments, and their human material capital, at growing levels. Conversely,
since the back loop is a time of uncertainty and great change, that is, a time
in which wealth and elite status undergo significant and unpredictable
rearrangement, it is feared and resisted by those in power. Ruling hierarchies
may attempt to stem the tide by embarking on even greater measures of
efficiency or greater levels of interconnectivity to the same effect. This
phenomenon closely resembles the pattern of the Late Roman Empire, for example.
Inevitably, the system itself becomes increasingly less resistant to shocks and
disturbances that are a part of the natural order. Eventually it progresses
into the back loop phase of release and reorganization. What is most intriguing
about this process is that the longer ruling hierarchies in a given system
delay the back loop, the greater the likely losses that will occur in the
release phase. In addition, in these circumstances the subsequent forward loop
of the cycle is likely to develop in a far different manne
than it might have had the reorganization phase occurred earlier. In other
words, if the collapse phase is bigger, it is likely that the start of the next
cycle will witness a period of significantly reduced human well
being. In addition, the greater and the more widespread the level of
“creative destruction” that occurs, the less likelihood there will be of
preserved “memory” necessary to reconstitute a system similar to the last.
Widespread clear-cutting of forests can result in an absence of pollen
necessary to regenerate the same kind of forest. In a similar manner, the
destruction of the recursive institutions of a world system (the educational
systems necessary to generate leadership and skilled artisans) can result in
the development of new culture without the necessary “memory” to reconstitute
the skilled infrastructure of the one that preceded.
These observations help to explain the dramatic, sudden collapse of the Roman
Mediterranean world system, as opposed to the repeated but seemingly less
chaotic transitions in Chinese hierarchies at the end of the Classical era, not
to mention the rapid pace at which the Tang Dynasty was able to reassemble the
constituent parts of the Chinese world system.
In
short, the application of the model of adaptive cycles to social-ecological
systems such as human societies suggests that large urban civilizations are not
sustainable indefinitely. Attempts to make human systems more efficient cannot
be done in isolation from the rest of the natural order. When societies attempt
to hold one part of the ecological system constant (e.g., agriculture), the
rest of the system adapts around these changes and typically loses resilience
in the process. There is always “feedback,” in other words. Human societies
have demonstrated repeatedly that they can hold parts of a system in a static
condition temporarily; however, the broader system is largely beyond human
control. Conceptually, resilience theory and the model of adaptive cycles of social-ecological
systems offer a useful construct for the problem of world systems emergence and
collapse. It posits that the rise and fall of civilizations are a natural
process and that attempts to resist the cycles in some ways only makes matters
worse, particularly insofar as the well being of the
inhabitants of the social-ecological system is concerned. Once we accept this
explanation for the collapse of the Classical world systems, the only remaining
question concerns the simultaneous timing of the “release” or collapse phase of
these world systems at the end of the second century AD. Why did world systems
at distant ends of the Eurasian world experience societal collapse
simultaneously, particularly when the trade occurring between them is generally
dismissed as “low volume, high value” trade in nonessential prestige goods with
marginal impact on the well being of the inhabitants?
At this point it might be useful to recall the point made at the end of the
Bronze Age collapse phase and to remind ourselves that a similar pattern of
simultaneous collapse was visible not only in the eastern Mediterranean, but as
far away as Denmark, Central Asia (1300-1200 BC), and China (the Shang collapse
occurring ca. 1028 BC). Given the limited scale of the urban economies at that
time, the lack of interdependency between these societies, and the vast
distances trade in material goods had to cover, so similar a pattern at the
close of the Bronze Age seems even more difficult to explain. The anwer to this would appear to lie
with the principal of globalism, in this instance, the likely economic
integration of distant world systems. Conceivably, long distance trade in
prestige goods not only functioned as an accelerator of local production, as we
noted earlier, but also as a synchronizer to the rhythm of the adaptive cycles
of interconnected world systems. Since the availability of prestige goods
stimulated increased productivity at distant ends of the trading network, the
respective economies of distant civilizations, once linked into the global
system, would have grown at approximately the same time and pace. Typically, interregional
trading networks took hold at the “consolidation phase” of the rapid growth
cycle in state formation, as hierarchies began to accumulate sufficient wealth
to engage in the risk-prone and costly process of engaging long distance trade.
In other words, they were already well advanced toward the phase of
conservation. As an accelerating factor, interregional trade enabled distant
trading partners to stimulate enhanced productivity through greater
efficiencies. The interregional trading networks thus helped to extend the
conservation phase of the cycle, to sustain the status quo, and to improve the
general well being of the inhabitants of the
respective world systems. In one respect, globalism extended the process of
greater efficiency across a wider portion of the globe, by drawing into the
cycle inhabitants of distant world systems even though they had no genuine
knowledge of one another. But it did so by synchronizing the economic cycles of
these populations and ultimately by putting them on
the same trajectory for “release” (collapse). This would explain why all three
world systems appeared to collapse simultaneously, around 200 AD for the first
wave, and then again around 500 AD in Rome and India.
The
theory of natural adaptive cycles thus appears to explain the recurring pattern
of “rise and fall” in ancient world civilizations. This theory has the
advantage of placing human societies in their proper place in the ecological
order. Humans are undeniably the “exceptional” species of the current phase of ecological
existence, unsurpassed in their ability to utilize the resources furnished by
the natural landscape. However, they remain biological organisms nonetheless
and depend like all others on the sustainability of the ecological systems that
surround them. Humans have demonstrated remarkable resilience at adapting
“strategies for survival” to fit any number of environmental conditions and at
exploiting and inventing ways to utilize natural resources to enhance well being for large populations. The most important skill
of human societies remains the “recursive process,” that enables humans to
preserve the “memory” of past and present skills and insights so that they can
recognize where they stand in the adaptive cycle and proceed accordingly. However
much humans and their societies work to construct systems that enable human
populations to grow beyond the earth’s carrying capacity, the “fore loop / back
loop” pattern of natural adaptive cycles will inevitably restore a sense of
balance.
BIBIOGRAPHY
J. D.
Hughes, Ecology in ancient civilizations,
Albuquerque 1975
J.
A. Tainter, The Collapse of
Complex Societies, Cambridge, 1988
B.
Walker, D. Salt. Resilience Thinking,
Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World, Washington Island
Press 2006