Formation of Large Agrarian Empires
* Article: A theory for the formation of large agrarian empires. Peter Turchin.
URL = http://thesciencenetwork.org/docs/BB3/Turchin_AgrarianEmpires.pdf
Abstract
"Before the Industrial Revolution the greater part of the inhabitable world was occupied by small-scale societies and large territorial states were, comparatively speaking, a rarity. Nevertheless, between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were at least 60 agrarian “mega-empires” that controlled at the peak an area equal to or greater than one million of squared kilometers. What were the social forces that kept together such huge agrarian states? A clue is provided by the empirical observation that over 90 percent of megaempires originated at steppe frontiers — zones of interaction between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists. I propose a model for one route to mega-empire. The model is motivated by the imperial dynamics in East Asia (more specifically, the interface between the settled farmers of East Asia and the nomads of Central Asia). It attempts to synthesize recent developments from theories of cultural evolution with insights from previous work by anthropologists on nomad/farmer interactions."
Discussion
Peter Turchin:
"Understanding the rise and fall of empires (large territorial states) is one of the most important research directions in world history. Beginning with Gibbon (1932), most theoretical efforts have been directed to the second part—the causes of imperial disintegration and fragmentation (Tainter 1988). The first part of the question, however, is theoretically more challenging. Large territorial empires are a comparative rarity in the historical record. Before the Industrial Revolution the greater part of the inhabitable world was occupied by small-scale societies, and even regions where empires repeatedly rose and fell were, as often as not, in the fragmented state. Thus, the really difficult question is not why large agrarian states kept disintegrating, but how they arose in the first place. What were the social forces that kept together huge states controlling populations of millions or tens of millions spread over millions of squared kilometers? What were the preconditions for the rise of such “megaempires,” defined here as territorial states that controlled at the peak an area equal to or greater than one megameter squared (one million of squared kilometers)? Despite some promising approaches, reviewed, for example, by Michael Mann (1986), these questions remain essentially unanswered. In this article I propose a model for one route to megaempire. The model is motivated by the imperial dynamics in a particular world region, East Asia (more specifically, the interface between the settled farmers of East Asia and the nomads of Central Asia). It attempts to synthesize recent developments from theories of cultural evolution with insights from previous work by anthropologists on nomad/farmer interactions. The main focus of the paper is not on the origin of the state, but rather on the processes explaining how small states scale up to megaempires. "
(http://thesciencenetwork.org/docs/BB3/Turchin_AgrarianEmpires.pdf)
Excerpts
From the conclusion, Peter Turchin:
"The main argument in this paper is that steppe frontiers are very special places for politogenesis and, especially, imperiogenesis; places where very large territorial states are much more likely to arise than elsewhere. To account for this broad macrohistorical generalization, I propose a model of the social scaling-up process that leads to the coevolution of agrarian megaempires and nomadic imperial confederations facing each other across the steppe frontier. The model advanced in this paper was strongly influenced by the warfare theories of the origin of the state (Carneiro 1970, Webster 1975, Wright 1977). However, this influential current in anthropological theory, in my opinion, suffers from its failure to integrate the insights of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, as well as much more recent developments from the evolutionary theory. State formation involves much coercion and profit-seeking, but an additional key ingredient is cooperation, as I argued above. The basic idea of evolution of cooperation by group selection was clearly formulated by Charles Darwin (1871): “Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence, nothing can be effected. A tribe possessing … a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other … would spread and be victorious over other tribes.” During the twentieth century group selection first went through a period of uncritical acceptance, resulting in a lot of bad theorizing, followed by a backlash, when the concept was completely repudiated by evolutionary biologists. The influential figures in sociobiology, such as E. O. Wilson (1975, 1979), preferred to emphasize kin selection and reciprocity as chief evolutionary forces explaining cooperation. The rejection of group selection by evolutionary biologists was reflected in sociological literature (Sanderson 1999). In recent years, however, group selection, or rather multilevel selection (which emphasizes that natural selection can operate at all levels—genes, cells, individuals, and groups) has staged a comeback (Wilson and Wilson 2007). The role of multilevel selection in the evolution of human sociality has been supported with both mathematical models and empirical analyses (Sober and Wilson 1991, Richerson and Boyd 1998, Bowles 2006). As a result of these studies, we now have good understanding of how cooperation evolved in small-scale societies. The great remaining scientific puzzle is the evolution of our ability to combine into huge cooperating groups consisting of millions of unrelated individuals. This is not to say that all inhabitants of, say, the Han empire were selfless altruists. However, the diametrically opposing view, that the Han empire was held together by force and greed alone, is equally untenable. There had to be a group of “moralistic” individuals broad enough to provide cohesion to this huge conglomerate of humanity that at the peak numbered more than 60 million people spread over 6 Mm2 of territory. The basic premise of my model is that the evolution of such huge societies occurred in a series of steps of adding an extra level of political organization resulting in increasing social and political complexity. This is not a new concept. The level of political integration is reflected in such typologies of societies as band–tribe–chiefdom state of Elman Service (1975) and is coded in the Human Relations Area Files (Ember and Ember 2001). Furthermore, we know that a general empirical pattern in historical dynamics is the cyclic rise and decline of political complexity (Marcus 1998, Turchin and Nefedov 2008). What has been an unresovled puzzle, however, is why in most places, for example, in the prehistoric southeastern United States, the cycle is between simple and complex chiefdoms (Anderson 1996), while in a few special places, such as East Asia, the social complexity repeatedly went through many more levels of political organization — all the way to megaempire — followed by disintegration down to the level of states and complex chiefdoms. The answer to this puzzle, as I argued in this paper, must be sought in the interactions of farmers and nomads on the steppe frontier. Steppe frontiers are a subset of what I termed in my previous work (Turchin 2003, 2006) metaethnic frontiers—areas where two metaethnic communities come in contact and conflict. Meta-ethnic communities (from the Greek meta—beyond and ethnos—ethnic group, nation) are the broadest, supranational groupings of people that include not only “civilizations” (Toynbee 1956, Huntington 1996), such as the Western, Islamic, or Sinic, but also other broad cultural groupings, e.g. the Iron Age Celts or Turco-Mongolian steppe nomads. Typically, cultural difference is greatest between people belonging to different metaethnic communities; sometimes this gap is so extreme that people deny the very humanity of those who are on the other side of the metaethnic fault line. Metaethnic frontiers are zones where groups come under enormous pressure, and where ethnocide, culturicide, and genocide, but also ethnogenesis, commonly occur. Intense intergroup competition creates conditions for the emergence of groups with high capacity for collective action that eventually transform themselves into expansionist states (Turchin 2006). Steppe frontiers often anchor very deep cultural divides. Pastoralist nomads and settled farmers have very different ways of life, and other divisive cultural markers tend to follow suit. For example, the farming people in eastern Europe tended to adopt Christianity, while the nomads and semi-nomads (Volga Bulgars, the Golden Horde, and the Crimean Tatars) converted to Islam, thus adding a religious dimension to the farmer-nomad antagonism. As a result, steppe frontiers tend to be among the most intense metaethnic frontiers, which is why there is a strong statistical association between these frontiers and mega-empires. Less intense metaethnic frontiers should be associated with expansionist states of lesser scale. This expectation is borne out by the empirical test, which I conducted for Europe during the first two millennia CE (Turchin 2003: Chapter 5). The history of Europe is known much better than the rest of Afro-eurasia, and thus it was possible to achieve a much more detailed quantification of metaethnic frontiers. I also considered a much broader spectrum of polities, compared to the present study, by including in the database all states that had peak territory greater than 0.1 Mm2. My conclusion was that there was a strong statistical correlation between the locations of frontiers and regions where expansionist states originated. Thus, the metaethnic frontier theory has been now tested in one region, Europe, where a detailed quantification of frontiers and medium-scale polities is possible (Turchin 2003: Chapter 5), and more broadly within Afroeurasia by focusing on only one kind of frontier and the very largest states (this paper). Because both studies yielded results supportive of the metaethnic frontier theory, our confidence that we have identified a valid macrohistorian generalization is correspondingly enhanced."
(http://thesciencenetwork.org/docs/BB3/Turchin_AgrarianEmpires.pdf)
More information
Bibliography
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