The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

One immediately sees the parallel with Hincmar’s description right down to the two sorts of assemblies, one where the political elite met and set the agenda and another one with mass participation. The assemblies had other tasks such as presenting young men with a shield and spear and thus publicly making them citizens. In terms of their leaders,

they choose their kings for their noble birth, their commanders for their valour. The power even of the kings is not absolute or arbitrary.

Julius Caesar, who briefly crossed the Rhine during his conquest of Gaul, also observed that the Germans elected their leaders during wartime at assemblies, but had no leaders in peacetime except chiefs with limited powers. The absence of kings greatly irritated some writers. Gregory of Tours, who wrote his History of the Franks in the late sixth century, is our major source of information about the origins and political development of the Franks. Gregory quotes Sulpicius, from a long-lost book, as mentioning “the royal leaders of the Franks,” but then adds exasperatedly, “When he says ‘regales’ or royal leaders, it is not clear if they were kings or if they merely exercised a kingly function.” Even more annoying for him, when it finally looks like Sulpicius is talking about a Frankish king, “he forgets to tell us what his name was.” Really.

The people who were to become the Franks, though not mentioned explicitly by Tacitus, inherited the popular assemblies as a central part of their political organization. We first hear of them in 250 and 275, when along with the Alamanni and other German tribes they raided the Roman province of Gaul. The Franks seem to have been an amalgamation of other German peoples such as the Bructeri, Ampsivarii, Chamavi, and Chattuari who later constructed, or invented, a collective identity. There is little archaeological evidence for their origins, but we know from Roman sources that they were settled around the Rhine in the fourth century and were fighting for the Romans in the early fifth century (see Map 8). Between 400 and 450, the Roman military frontier on the lower Rhine collapsed and the territory became occupied by the Franks. By midcentury, they had spread as far west as Arras and Tournai in France and were still organized in separate kingdoms. The kingdom based in Tournai gained in strength and influence between 450 and 480, first under Chlodio and then his son Merovech, who established what was to be the Merovingian dynasty, lasting for nearly three hundred years. Chlodio and Merovech are partly mythical figures. Indeed, Merovech is fabled to have been conceived when Chlodio’s wife went swimming and encountered a sea monster called the Quinotaur, giving the dynasty supernatural legitimacy. The Franks emerge into clearer historical focus with the reign of Clovis, Merovech’s grandson, who came to the throne in 481. Clovis was the real founder of the Frankish state and he expanded the kingdom to unite nearly all of France by the time of his death in 511.

The Frankish kings had a thing about hair. Long hair. For boys, having long hair was a sign of manhood, so important that cutting a long-haired boy’s hair without his parents’ consent was considered a crime equivalent to killing him. Gregory records an instance where

Childebert and Lothar sent Arcadius to the Queen … with a pair of scissors in one hand and a naked [unsheathed] sword in the other. When he came into the Queen’s presence, he held them out to her. “Your sons, who are our masters, seek your decision, gracious Queen, as to what should be done with the princes. Do you wish them to live with their hair cut short? Or would you prefer to see them killed?” … she answered: “If they are not to ascend the throne, I would rather see them dead than with their hair cut short.”

The assembly politics of the long-haired kings and their powerful, assertive societies were the first blade of the scissors that would put Merovingian, Carolingian, and other related European societies in the corridor. The other blade came from the Roman Empire.

The Other Blade

The Roman Republic was founded in 509 BCE, after the overthrow of King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. By the second century BCE the republic had to deal with deep conflicts between the rich, aristocratic families and the growing number of Roman citizens. It collapsed for all practical purposes when Julius Caesar declared himself dictator in 49 BCE, though the emergence of its successor state, the Roman Empire, took shape only after a series of civil wars and the accession of Octavian as “Augustus” in 27 BCE.

At this time there was little in the way of an institutionalized state. Rome had been ruled by the Senate and the army, and there were few bureaucrats beyond the slaves and retainers of the elite. Though a more systematic central administration began with Augustus and developed partly to feed the residents of Rome and supply the army, it was not until the second half of the third century that a real bureaucratic administration developed in the empire. The Roman state employed at least 31,000 full-time paid civil servants during the late empire, but this is likely a severe underassessment since it excludes municipal personnel, on whom we have no accurate information. The basic unit of administration was the province, and at the end of the reign of Diocletian in 305 CE there were 114 of these. Each was run by a governor, whose main responsibilities included taxes and justice, and who usually had 100 civil servants working for him. The provinces were grouped together into larger units called dioceses run by a Roman official, vicarius (vicar), and above them were four praetorian prefects, one in Gaul (including Britain and Spain), one in Italy (which also covered Africa and the western Balkans), one in Illyricum (Greece, Crete, and the rest of the Balkans) and one in Byzantium in the East. These prefects had very large staffs, of up to 2,000 people. Though civil servants were not recruited on the basis of any examination, the great late Roman legal codes promulgated by emperors Theodosius in 438 and Justinian in 529 mention principles of merit and seniority in promotion.

The best description we have of how this bureaucracy operated comes from the record left by John Lydus (“the Lydian”), who worked for the Eastern praetorian prefect in Byzantium. John came from the town of Philadelphia in Lydia, now the Turkish town of Alaşehir. He was recruited into the civil service by a fellow Philadelphian praetorian prefect, Zoticus. The Eastern prefect was split into two main departments, one administrative and judicial and the other financial. John was assigned to the former, and his book On the Magistracies of the Roman State lists the senior officials in this department: princeps officii, cornicularius, adiutor, commentariensis, ab actis, cura epistularum, and regendarius. Indeed, a law of 384, subsequently amended by the Code of Justinian, sets out a model for this bureaucracy with 443 different positions, divided into eighteen groups listed in order of seniority.

Scrinium exceptorum:

One official with the rank of perfectissimus second class, who is the primicerius of the whole schola.

One official with the rank of perfectissimus (third class), who is the primicerius of the whole exceptores.

Two officials with the rank of ducenarius, who are the tertiocerius and quartocerius.

One official with the rank of centenarius, who is the primicerius instrumentorum.

Two epistulares.

Thirty-six exceptores constituting the first grade.

And on and on for another nineteen groups of officials. John started as a middle-ranked exceptor in 511.

The bureaucracy ran on, as John put it, a complex set of “customs, forms and language” and members of it wore “distinctive regalia,” uniforms of military origin. They had to deal with regulations and procedures and “registers, titles and duties.” John was also keen to point out that it had an esprit de corps and an identity that separated it from “ordinary people.” Language and writing were particularly important. Only the palatine bureaucrats most closely associated with the emperor were allowed to use the litterae caelestes (literally “heavenly writing”), a specific type of script of restricted use, deployed to help stop forgeries because it was so hard to fake. John recounts in detail the various bureaucratic procedures that had to be followed. For instance, everything that came before the prefect’s tribunal had to be summarized twice. One was the responsibility of an official known as the secretarius, while the other was written by the personalium, the most senior judicial official. John was certain that such procedures were critical for a well-functioning government, for example by guarding against fraud or loss. He noted, “And I myself well remember such an occurrence. For although a hearing had been held, the transactions relevant to the case were nowhere to be found. But when the personalium, as it is known, had been brought before the magistracy, the case was completely restored.”

What John describes is an extensive bureaucracy with well-defined rules, functioning within an elaborate legal system. Of course it was not immune to personal influence, and it didn’t work out exactly as the rules specified. John himself got his job not entirely on the basis of merit, but with the help of his Philadelphian contact Zoticus. Moreover, many of the senior positions were reserved for elites, particularly people from the senatorial class, and there was certainly some corruption. For all these faults, the Romans at least had a bureaucratic state with an elaborate structure and territorial organization. This lay institution was paralleled by the hierarchy of the Church, which had already been integrated with the political institutions by the time the Franks came to interact with Rome.

Bringing the Two Blades Together

The early history of the Franks was a struggle to combine the bottom-up political traditions of the Germanic tribes with the state institutions of the Romans. As Clovis ascended to the throne, it wasn’t clear how these two blades would come together.

Imposing a stable political hierarchy on Franks was challenging. Gregory recalls how once after a raid Clovis was greatly taken by a particular vessel, a ewer, and asked his men, “I put it to you, my lusty freebooters, that you should agree here and now to grant me that ewer over and above my normal share,” to which one of his men replied by cutting the vessel in half with his ax, declaring, “You shall have none of this booty except your fair share!” Clovis eventually got even with this particular soldier, but this episode highlights the egalitarian, non-hierarchic ethos of the war band, which was one of the foundations of the assembly politics of the Franks. It was also a significant impediment to centralizing power.

A major step in the process of state building was the conquest of the last Roman subprovince of Soissons. Clovis took over Roman institutions and seems to have hired Roman administrators. Next, in a skillful move to bring the two blades closer together, Clovis adopted Christianity. He didn’t simply convert himself, he converted en masse with his army. From that day on, Clovis could appeal to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which he commanded for the Merovingians. He then proceeded to declare himself emperor. The setting was a very Roman ceremony in the city of Tours, as described by Gregory:

In Saint Martin’s church he stood clad in a purple tunic and the military mantle, and he crowned himself with a diadem. He rode out on his horse and with his own hand showered gold and silver coins among the people present … From that day he was called Consul or Augustus.

Leaders of Germanic war bands didn’t wear purple or call themselves Augustus, but Clovis did. In doing so, he was bringing the blade of the assemblies and bottom-up norms of Germanic tribes together with the blade of the Roman model of a centralized state. What emerged was something greater than the sum of its parts. The blueprint for bureaucratic organization Clovis got from Rome and the Christian church got embedded in the diametrically different politics and norms of the Germanic tribes. This combination placed the Merovingians at the entryway to the corridor.

Apart from wearing purple, the Roman legacy is also seen in the persistence of the basic administrative unit, as in Roman times, called the civitas, or city, along with its surrounding areas. The senior Merovingian official in charge of a civitas was called a comes, literally “companion,” and often translated as “count.” This was a position adapted from the late Roman comites civitatis and its duties seem to have been closely modeled on these—solving legal disputes, administering justice, and commanding military units. Subordinate officers below the comes were called centenarii, also of Roman origin, and administered a unit called a centenae, or a hundred. The likely origin of the hundred was a German war band comprising a group of fighters who elected their leader, but, as with Roman territorial institutions, the elected warrior leader became an official in the Frankish state.

One of Clovis’s defining acts as emperor was the promulgation of a new legal code, the Salic Law, and a picture of a surviving Merovingian copy is included in the photography section. Clovis was part of the Salian Franks, who distinguished themselves from another group of Franks farther east called Ripuarian. The Salic Law formalized existing norms and customs that had governed the behavior of the stateless Franks. These norms included elaborate rules for regulating feuding. Clovis wanted to codify them and ultimately bring them under the control of his new centralized state. From this perspective the first clause of the Salic Law is significant. It read, “If any one be summoned before the Thing by the king’s law, and do not come he shall be sentenced to 600 denarii, which make 15 solidi.” Here “Thing” is the archaic word for the assembly. The first thing Clovis had to do was to make sure people turned up. In terms of formulating the laws, one of the surviving prologues is particularly telling. It reads:

With God’s help it pleased the Franks and their nobility and they agreed that they ought to prohibit all escalations of quarrels for the preservation of enthusiasm for peace amongst themselves … Therefore four men, chosen out of many among them, stood out: Their names were Wisogast, Arogast, Salegast and Widogast. They came from the villae of Bothem, Salehem and Widohem, beyond the Rhine. Coming together in three legal assemblies, and discussing the origins and cases carefully, they made judgement on each case as follows.

So the Salic Law, though introduced by Clovis, was not his imposition on society. It wasn’t even written by him, but by four lawgivers and three assemblies.

The lawgivers, Wisogast, Arogast, Salegast, and Widogast, had to deal with all of the usual problems, which included frequent “quarrels.” So “Title XVII. Concerning Wounds” stipulates:

If any one have wished to kill another person, and the blow have missed, he on whom it was proved shall be sentenced to 2500 denarii.

If any person have wished to strike another with a poisoned arrow, and the arrow have glanced aside, and it shall be proved on him; he shall be sentenced to 2500 denarii.

If any person strike another on the head so that the brain appears, and the three bones which lie above the brain shall project, he shall be sentenced to 1200 denarii.

But if it shall have been between the ribs or in the stomach, so that the wound appears and reaches to the entrails, he shall be sentenced to 1200 denarii.

If any one shall have struck a man so that blood falls to the floor, and it be proved on him, he shall be sentenced to 600 denarii.

But if a freeman strike a freeman with his fist so that blood does not flow, he shall be sentenced for each blow—up to 3 blows—to 120 denarii.

The law covered other areas related to feuds, particularly insults, so that it was illegal to slander someone by calling them a fox or a hare. It also regulated relations between Franks and Romans, though it made it clear who was running the show. For instance, “Title XIV. Concerning Assault and Robbery” stated:

If any one have assaulted and plundered a free man, and it be proved on him, he shall be sentenced to 2500 denarii, which make 63 solidi.

If a Roman have plundered a Salian Frank, the above law shall be observed.

But if a Frank have plundered a Roman, he shall be sentenced to 35 solidi.

It was obviously worse for Romans to plunder Franks than the other way around. The different treatment of Romans and Franks shows that while the Franks had laws, they did not have “equality before the law”—the notion and the practice that laws applied equally to everybody. This critical aspect of laws under the Shackled Leviathan emerged only slowly as the Red Queen got to work.

The Salic Law didn’t resemble Roman law. It was much more like the codification, regulation, and strengthening of existing norms attempted initially by Draco and then Solon in ancient Athens. But in this process, the laws were also bringing the resolution of conflict under the remit of the state. By the late sixth century, legislation was taking a decidedly more Roman turn, incorporating elements of the Theodosian code. The Salic Law was another step in the fusion of Roman state structure with the norms and political institutions of the Franks.

The significance of the way the Salic Law was formulated is evident once we get to the reign of Charlemagne, who reached the apogee of the Roman connection by crowning himself emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800. All the same, Charlemagne did not act like a Roman emperor when it came to his relations with his people. The same assemblies, customs, and expectations that shackled Clovis’s reign constrained Charlemagne too. Two royal edicts issued at Regensburg in 789 indicate that agents of the state were misusing their power and the king received complaints from people that “they do not have their law maintained.” The emphasis on “their law” is critical. It was the law of the people, not of the king, and it was the king’s job to enforce it. Indeed, “if a count or missus or any man has done this, let it be reported to the lord king, for he wishes to set such matters most fully to rights.” Here missus refers to “sent men,” royal agents who linked the provinces with the central court.

What about liberty? Though Clovis and Charlemagne led states that had entered into the corridor, one wouldn’t see many signs of flourishing liberty in their empires. These were turbulent times where few would feel any security from violence. Clovis’s followers were warriors, and martial norms were powerful among the Franks. This can be seen from the fact that it was the gift of a spear and shield by the assembly that made a young Frank a citizen. The Franks were also still firmly in the cage of norms, with customs, traditions, and practices severely restricting the economic and social actions of all people, not least because there were many religious and cultural taboos as well as a clear social hierarchy in Frankish society. Slavery was still common, and men and women could voluntarily place themselves into servitude, not unlike what we saw in African societies in Chapter 1, but something that had disappeared in Athens after Solon’s reforms. Torture was routinely used for extracting a confession in court procedures. Feuding remained endemic too, as our excerpts from the Salic Law indicate. All the same, in getting a foothold in the corridor these societies started on a process that would gradually change all of these things.

Disunited Kingdom

While the Franks were trying to unite Western Europe, across the English Channel stood a very disunited kingdom. The Western Roman Empire collapsed most completely in Britain. Money, writing, and the wheel vanished, and cities were abandoned. York, once a major Roman urban center, reverted to marshland in the fifth century. Archaeological evidence from this period shows the fossils of beetles that would have lived in high grass and reeds, and we find the remains of field mice, water voles, shrews, and froghoppers that had taken over the city. They weren’t the only newcomers. Peoples from continental Europe, particularly Germany and southern Scandinavia, identified by the eighth-century historian the Venerable Bede as “Angles, Saxons and Jutes,” had also migrated to the isles. By this time these peoples, along with the survivors of Roman Britain and other migrants such as Celts from Ireland and Scotland, had formed an unstable set of competing polities, many of which are today remembered only in the names of current English counties, like Kent. Nevertheless, these polities gradually coalesced. By 796, at the death of King Offa of Mercia, there were just four left: Wessex in the south, East Anglia in the east, Mercia straddling the center of the country, and Northumbria in the north (see Map 9).

In 871 the twenty-two-year-old Alfred succeeded his brother Æthelred as the king of Wessex. This succession was probably agreed to in a witan, the assembly of the Anglo-Saxons. In the words of abbot Ælfric of Eynsham:

No man can make himself king, but the people has the choice to choose as king whom they please; but after he is consecrated as king, he then has dominion over the people.

Map 9. Disunited Britain: The Kingdoms During the Ninth Century

The best surviving description of a witan from this period comes from the monk Byrhtferth of Ramsey. He describes the second coronation of King Edgar (“the Peaceful”) at Bath in 973:

At that time it was the holy season when, in accordance with custom, the archbishops and all the other distinguished bishops and the glorious abbots and religious abbesses, and all the ealdormen, reeves and judges … were all to assemble. From “the sun’s rising in the east, from the west, from the north, and from the sea” went out the king’s edict, that all these persons should assemble in his presence. This splendid and glorious army of his realm did not assemble thus in order to depose him, or to take the decision to put him to death or hang him … but rather they came for the entirely plausible reason … that the venerable bishops should bless, anoint, and consecrate him.

This remarkable account makes it clear that the assembly, composed of people like the ealdormen, high-ranking royal officials usually in charge of a shire, and reeves who were their subordinates, could have deposed Edgar rather than crowned him. Then the king vowed:

I promise in the first instance that the Church of God and the entire Christian populace shall under my authority keep true peace at all times; I also promise that I shall proscribe theft and all manner of wickedness for persons of all stations; and thirdly, that in all judgements I shall enjoin justice and mercy.

Shortly after this, bishop Dunstan placed a crown on his head.

The crown was a Roman symbol of royal authority, imported to Britain by Germans. But even more important than that, Saxons brought their assemblies, on which the witan was based. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede reports:

Old Saxons have no king, but several lords who are set over the nation. Whenever war is imminent, these cast lots impartially, and the one on whom the lot falls is followed and obeyed by all for the duration of the war, but as soon as the war ends, the lords revert to equality of status.

Apart from such direct influences, Anglo-Saxon leaders traveled in Europe and borrowed freely from the institutional models they encountered. Alfred even had a Carolingian adviser, Grimbald of Saint-Bertin. Byrhtferth of Ramsey mentions another assembly held in 965, also attended by “an incalculable number of the populace” in addition to “all the important leading men, and the outstanding ealdormen, and powerful thegns from all the boroughs and towns and cities and territories.”

When Alfred ascended to the throne, he had his hands full. Since 865 the British Isles had been occupied by what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of annals instituted by Alfred, refers to as the Great Heathen Army. This army was a massive force of Scandinavians, mostly Danes, who had come not simply to raid, but to conquer the island. Alfred had already fought them a number of times as they rampaged around the four kingdoms. Alfred’s army then suffered a series of defeats, and it is likely that Alfred had to pay the Danes to retreat. By 878 three of the kingdoms had been conquered, and Wessex, beleaguered, stood alone. By that summer, however, Alfred had reorganized his forces and inflicted a severe defeat on half of the Great Heathen Army commanded by the Danish king Guthrum at the battle of Edlington, in what is now Wiltshire (see Map 9). This victory resulted in a peace treaty with Guthrum, which entailed the Danes retreating into the Danelaw territories (where Danish law held), roughly the former kingdoms of East Anglia and Northumbria along with eastern Mercia. This relative peace allowed Alfred to reorganize his kingdom and rationalize taxation and the military, yet another step in the state-building process. His successors, his son Edward (“the Elder”) and three grandsons, Æthelstan, Edmund, and Eadred, gradually conquered the Scandinavian kingdom. Eadred finally expelled the last Scandinavian king of York, Eric Bloodaxe, in 954. England was unified.

From this period we have detailed evidence of the nature and actions of assemblies. We discover that in 992 military expeditions against the Danes and a subsequent treaty were made by “the king and all his councillors (witan).” The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records how defense measures were discussed after “all the councillors (witan) were summoned to the king.” But the witan didn’t just discuss defense and military matters. It also legislated. The major legal text from the reign of Æthelstan noted, “All this was established at the great assembly at Grately, at which Archbishop Wulfhelm was present, with all the nobles and councillors who King Æthelstan had assembled.” Of the twenty-two law codes that exist from the period between 899 and 1022, nineteen include similar clauses. Byrhtferth’s “incalculable number of the populace” notwithstanding, just as in the Frankish kingdom, the number of people who could attend such meetings was relatively small. Nevertheless, as in Francia, the Anglo-Saxons made systematic attempts to consult more broadly and disseminate decisions. During the reign of Edgar, we learn, “many documents are to be written concerning this, and sent both to Ealdorman Ælfhere and Ealdorman Æthelwine, and they are to send them in all directions, so that this measure may be known to both the poor and the rich.” These assemblies, together with the law they helped formulate and enact, formed the basis of two critical institutional features of the corridor—the English parliament and the notion that kings were constrained by law.

King Alfred’s law code is reminiscent of the surviving fragment of Draco’s and Clovis’s Salic Law. On the one hand, it represents a transition from a society without a state where conflicts and disputes were resolved via feuding, to centralized state authority. On the other, it is meant to work with and strengthen existing norms, not to repudiate them. So it spends quite a lot of time institutionalizing punishments to stop feuds from breaking out and escalating. It begins,

I, then, Alfred King of the West Saxons, have shewn these to all my councilors, and they have declared that it met with the approval of all,

again invoking the role of the witan. A central concept in the laws is that of wergeld. The wergeld of a person was the amount of money that his life was valued at if he was killed. Paying wergeld stopped a feud. For example, clause 10 reads, “If anyone lies with the wife of a man whose wergeld is 1200 shillings, he shall pay 120 shillings compensation to the husband; to a husband whose wergeld is 600 shillings, he shall pay 100 shillings compensation; to a commoner he shall pay 40 shillings compensation.” Thus higher-status people, like ealdormen, had higher wergeld, and this status influenced how other violations of the laws were dealt with. As in the Albanian Kanun, if someone was wronged in a society based on feuding, then his relatives were responsible for retribution, and liability for wrongs was collective. Clause 30 states, “If anyone who has no paternal relatives fights and kills a man, his maternal relatives, if he has any, shall pay one-third of the wergeld and his associates shall pay one-third. In default of payment of the [remaining] third, he shall be held personally responsible.”

Other clauses outlined how specific conflicts can be handled without feuds.

We further declare that a man may fight on behalf of his lord, if his lord is attacked, without becoming liable to vendetta.

And

A man may fight, without becoming liable for vendetta, if he finds another [man] with his wedded wife, within closed doors or under the same blanket.

The law code also introduced a detailed specification of fines for the loss or wounding of different body parts, fingers, toes, eyes, the jaw, etc.

But the similarities with the Kanun are less striking than the differences. Alfred’s law code didn’t just codify and rationalize existing norms for dispute resolution; it also brought these under the authority of the newly emerging state (recall that the Albanian Kanun wasn’t written down, and wasn’t even recorded until the early twentieth century). This is significant for at least two reasons. First, it underscores the distinction between the feud in an environment without state authority and the beginning of a process of conflict resolution managed by the state. Once the king’s law code asserts how various conflicts are to be resolved, the next step is for the state to start doing the resolving, which is exactly what eventually happened after Alfred. Second, the law code reminds us again that Alfred, as a leader shackled by existing institutions and norms, wasn’t so much imposing his laws upon society as he was working with society and its assemblies to rationalize existing norms. This is all in evidence in Edgar’s coronation oath at Bath, which forms the basis for the modern British coronation ceremony. Edgar promised to judge with justice and mercy. It is also clearly visible in key moments in post-Alfredean England, particularly the reigns of Æthelred (“the Unready”), Cnut, and Edward (“the Confessor”). Æthelred suffered a series of military defeats at the hands of the Danes and took refuge in Normandy in France. He was recalled by “all the councillors (pa witan ealle) who were in England,” but on terms that were clearly imposed by the witan involving reforms of his laws and behavior.

The British historian Sir Frank Stenton pointed out that it was a moment of “great constitutional interest as the first recorded pact between an English king and his subjects.” Yet it was not a rupture with the past, but a continuation of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic political norms. Indeed, the witan made a similar constitutional deal with the Danish king Cnut when they accepted him as king in 1016. And in 1041 when Edward, who had also been in exile, returned to England from Normandy, “the thegns of all England” met him where he landed at Hurst Head on the Hampshire coast and told him they would only accept him to be king if he swore to uphold Cnut’s laws.

1066 and All That

In 1066, England was invaded by William “the Conqueror” and his Norman army, which decisively defeated the English forces at the battle of Hastings in Sussex, killing their leader, Harold Godwinson, in the process. William expropriated the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and implemented the feudal system created by the late Carolingian kings in France. To head off dissent, he claimed to be the legitimate king of England because Edward the Confessor supposedly named him as his heir during Edward’s years of exile in Normandy. In the photography section we include a scene from the Bayeux Tapestry, woven by the women of the Norman court to celebrate 1066, that shows Edward instructing Harold Godwinson to travel to Normandy and confirm that William is his successor. Hence one of William’s first acts was to reconfirm Edward’s law codes. But this act also reaffirmed the shackles that existed before the Conqueror had arrived, ensuring continuity between the two regimes.

The feudal order that the Normans had adopted in France and William exported to England was a consequence of the fragmentation of the Frankish state after Charlemagne. The central state weakened in the face of the power of local lords, and a new state structure based on a series of hierarchical relationships emerged. All land, at least in principle, was owned by the king, who granted it as a fief to his vassals in exchange for “council and aid,” particularly military aid. At the time of the Domesday Book, the great census that William collected in 1086 to catalogue the assets of his new realm, there were 846 “tenants in chief” in England who were the first-line vassals. These men then engaged in what is called subinfeudation, granting land to lower-level vassals in a cascade of “council and aid.” Thus, if William needed aid in the form of military service, or maybe money, he first called on his tenants in chief, who then went to those they had subinfeudated, and so on. This feudal organization strengthened the elites, especially the barons, and weakened the ability of common folk to participate in politics. For example, open opposition to the king, such as that targeted at Edward the Confessor on his return from France, was now impossible as it would have been construed as breaking feudal oaths. Perhaps a step out of the corridor? But in the context of deeply rooted assemblies, society’s participation in politics couldn’t be easily cast aside.

The influence of assemblies was soon recreated under the requirement to give “council and aid.” Like the assembly politics of Germanic tribes, this involved meetings between the king and the leading elites, both lay and religious, and in some contexts much broader segments of society. Moreover, vassals’ obligation to give counsel turned out to be not so different from the right to give counsel, especially since this right had been exercised under the old system of government, ratified when William came to power. There was still the latent right of freemen to be consulted too. By the time of the reign of Henry II, William the Conqueror’s great-grandson, who ascended the throne in 1154, a number of factors coalesced to make councils even more powerful in shackling the emerging state, particularly in the way they interacted with the legal system.

The law had been in transition since the early days of William’s reign. A notable feature of the laws of Clovis and Alfred is that they specify compensation to the victims, not state punishments, like prison sentences or fines paid to the state. In Alfred’s laws, if you struck off someone’s ear, you had to pay 30 shillings (you had to pay 60 shillings “if the hearing is stopped”). But this wasn’t a fine that you gave to the state; it was compensation to the person whose ear you had struck off. Under William there was a movement toward punishments with fines being payable to the state. The most famous example was the crime of murdrum, whereby a whole community (usually a “hundred” or village) was fined if a Norman was killed and the community did not bring forth the perpetrator. A related institution was the tithing. The tithing, a group of ten or twelve men who had to take an oath to keep the law, was responsible for catching and bringing forward any one of its members who committed an offense. If a crime took place in a particular community and nobody was caught, then the whole community could be fined. This system was often called frankpledge and those pledged in effect became the local enforcers of the law.

The idea of collective responsibility and punishment probably comes from feuding codes that identify groups of people, usually extended kin, as being responsible for avenging wrongs. But there is a big difference between kin groups and a geographically based village community being held responsible, especially when it comes to the implications of this for the cage of norms. In fact, William removed the legal right of vengeance and continually attempted to discourage kin groups and clans from dispensing justice themselves and engaging in feud and vendetta. A consequence was the disintegration of kin relations. The French historian of feudalism Marc Bloch pointed out that in this period

the vast kindreds of not so long before were slowly being replaced by groups much more like our small families of today.

This began to show up in the practice of naming. In the early Norman period people might have a single name, often associated with the name of a broader kin group or clan. But by the twelfth century they began to add a surname of some sort. This was at first an individual decision which seems to have started with the aristocracy and spread through society. Non-aristocrats often took craft surnames, like Smith, Baker, or Cooper, which reflected their occupation. Bloch emphasizes the fundamental role of the state in this process, or as he put it:

The permanent family name, which today is held in common by men often devoid of any feeling of solidarity, was the creation not of the spirit of kinship, but of the institutions most fundamentally opposed to that spirit—the sovereign state.

The state was reconfiguring the nature of society, and in the process slowly dismantling myriad restrictions on behavior, obligations, and social hierarchies.

The nature of the law took a dramatic new form during Henry II’s reign. England had been plagued by succession disputes and civil war during the reign of Henry’s predecessor Stephen. Henry needed to rebuild the country and wanted to recover territory that had been lost in Scotland, Wales, and especially France. Furthermore, he wanted to help sustain the Crusader states in the Holy Land. To do all this he needed money, and in 1166 he levied a tax on revenues and moveables. Until then the king had survived on revenues from his own lands, feudal dues, and fees from judicial actions. The new tax was controversial and Henry levied it in a council of the archbishops, bishops, and magnates of his French fiefs “with the counsel and assent of all.” For taxes that fell on everyone like this, Henry needed consent from society.

While Henry began to raise taxes, he also implemented a series of legal reforms that greatly increased the power of royal government over the judicial system. The most famous was the creation of the “eyres,” instituted sometime around 1176. This was a system of itinerant royal judges who toured the country with broad authority to judge different types of cases. But Henry’s reforms also triggered the Red Queen. Society came to participate in conflict resolution in new ways because judges now would have to create a type of court called assizes, and would summon “twelve lawful men” to aid them. This had already been anticipated in the Assize of Clarendon in 1166, a law that stated:

Inquiry shall be made throughout every county and every hundred, through twelve of the more lawful men of the hundred and through four of the more lawful men of each village upon oath, that they will speak the truth, whether there be in their hundred or village any man accused or notoriously suspect of being a robber or murderer or thief, or any who is a receiver of robbers or murderers or thieves.

This was significant in establishing the jury system, even if it was to a large extent anticipated by the tithing system. It is also noteworthy that it emphasized the collection of evidence as opposed to determining guilt. The assize did not yet give the “jury” the right to pronounce guilt or innocence, just provide information. The right to give verdicts would come later.

The notion of trial by a “jury of your peers” is a key part of the emergence of what came to be known as the “common law” in England. The other major part associated with Henry II’s reforms is the idea that judges made laws. When judges ruled on cases, they had to interpret existing laws that were vague and often open-ended. Their rulings set precedents for how laws were to be interpreted and these cases themselves became a basis for new laws. The emerging autonomy of what was to become a legal profession in England, whose rulings accumulated into the common law, was another significant step in the development of a new way of resolving conflicts. It ensured that the ruler could not impose arbitrary laws on society, because the norms working through the power of the legal profession would constrain it. The Red Queen was now in action, with yet more sweeping consequences. For one, in a significant step toward equality before the law, the rising authority of the legal profession also meant that laws could be applied to everybody, and even to the king. For another, it empowered the legal profession to start relaxing the cage of norms, ruling against practices that were most restrictive and most inconsistent with the spirit of the laws that were developing. As we’ll see shortly, this power was most significantly manifested in the collapse of the feudal system.

That equality before the law was on people’s minds is evident in the writings of Richard FitzNigel, one of Henry’s itinerant judges. As he put it in his famous treatise about the exchequer, The Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer, published in 1180:

The forest has its own laws, based, it is said, not on the common law of the realm, but on the arbitrary decree of the king; so that what is accordance with the forest law is not called “just” absolutely, but “just” according to the forest law.

The king could make laws. But these were “arbitrary,” not “just”!

Stepping back we can see these measures as playing a defining role in the strengthening of the central state at the expense of society—for example, by taking judicial authority away from local courts controlled by barons. However, this process of centralization was still subject to two major limitations. First, Henry’s reforms were constrained by norms, and the common law meant that decisions by the judges in local communities created precedents for future decisions, whether the ruler liked it or not. This ensured that the implementation of laws could not deviate too much from prevailing norms. Second, the ability of courts to impose the state’s will on society was highly circumscribed. For example, nearly all legal actions and prosecutions were initiated by ordinary people. The judges who sat in the assizes had no independent investigatory power. They had to wait for people to bring cases so the demand for justice was critical.

That society helped to summon this greater state capacity made it no less real. Underscoring the nature of state building in the corridor, there was a simultaneous increase in the enforcement of laws (often with society playing a critical role in the process), in various public services, and in the bureaucratic capacity of the state. This last point can be seen from the estimates of the increase in the amount of wax used to seal letters by the English chancery, the personal staff of the lord chancellor, one of the king’s most important advisers and the “keeper of the king’s seal.” Between the late 1220s and the late 1260s, the amount of sealing wax increased from 3.6 to 31.9 pounds per week. This ninefold increase reflects a ninefold increase in letters that needed sealing, itself the result of a large expansion of recorded state business. State capacity was growing by leaps and bounds.

The Red Queen Effect in Action: The Magna Carta

The reaction of society to the strengthening of the state continued after Henry II’s centralizing reforms and after his son John ascended to the throne in 1199. Antagonized by what they saw as King John’s endless demands for taxation and attempts to break free of the constraints imposed by law and norms, a group of barons rebelled and captured London. John met them at Runnymede on the river Thames, just west of London, to negotiate a peace on June 10. The place for the negotiation was significant. The name Runnymede seems to be derived from the Anglo-Saxon words runieg (“regular meeting”) and mede (“meadow”), and indeed Runnymede was one of the places where the witan had met during Alfred’s reign. At this assembly the barons started by proposing what came to be known as the Articles of the Barons. Over the next ten days they negotiated the Magna Carta, the Great Charter.

The Magna Carta became the foundation of England’s political institutions. It focused on many things: the role of the Church; the hostages held to control the Welsh and Scottish kings; and John’s French officers (the charter insisted they should be fired). But its key clauses focused on the issues of taxation without consent and on how to constrain the king by laws and institutions. Critically, though the Magna Carta might have been negotiated by some rebellious barons, it was conceded by the king “to all the free men of our kingdom,” and “the whole community of the land” could be called on to enforce it. With respect to the issues of taxation and “illegal” charges levied by John, paragraph 12 read:

No “scutage” or “aid” may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent.

“Scutage” was a sum of money that a feudal vassal could pay to the king in exchange for exception for military service. “Aid” included other feudal payments that a vassal owed to his lord. But the charter didn’t just limit the aid that vassals had to give to the king. Paragraph 15 stipulated, “In future we will allow no one to levy an ‘aid’ from his free men” unless it is “reasonable.” More startling, the charter protected non-free people, that is, serfs or villeins. The next paragraph read:

No man shall be forced to perform more service for a knight’s fee, or other free holding of land, than is due from it.

This meant that villeins were protected from increases in labor services. Moreover, in judicial fines a “villein” would be spared the “implements of his husbandry.” Villeins were also directly protected from arbitrary behavior by royal officials since paragraph 28 stated, “No constable or other royal official shall take corn or other movable goods from any man without immediate payment.” The words “any man” are significant.

Everywhere the Magna Carta tried to uphold the participation of the people in the implementation of the law and a broadly, even if not perfectly, equal standing in front of the law. Paragraph 20 noted that fines could not be imposed “except by the assessment on oath of reputable men of the neighborhood,” and 18 said that

inquests … shall be taken only in their proper county court. We ourselves … will send two justices to each county four times a year and these justices, with four knights of the county elected by the county itself, shall hold the assizes in the county court.

Paragraph 38 stated, “In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it,” while the next one stipulated:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way … except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

The final remarkable piece of the charter was the mechanism it set up to make sure that the clauses were implemented. It called for the creation of a council of twenty-five barons, and if four of them became aware that the king or his officers were violating any clause, they could “assail us in every possible way … by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, or anything else saving our own person.” Everyone could get into the action since this clause went on to note, “Any man who so desires may take an oath to obey the commands of the 25 barons for the achievements of these ends.”

This monitoring mechanism was never set up, and the barons and John were soon at war. Nevertheless, the power of the Magna Carta as a statement of some critical political principles was continually reaffirmed by subsequent kings and assemblies that came to be called Great Councils. By 1225, taxes at the Great Council were formally conceded by “archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, knights, free tenants and everyone in our kingdom.” It was significant that taxes were agreed not just by the usual elites but also by “knights and freemen.” Moreover, the magnates and knights were making decisions “on behalf of themselves and their villeins,” suggesting a notion of representation for the wider community. By April 1254 this representation was taken one step further. For the first time two knights were chosen from each shire, initiating a system that would last until the Representation of the People Act of 1918. The word “parliament” seems to have been used for the first time in a legal case from November 1236 when an action was delayed until the next meeting of Parliament in January 1237. During the parliament convened without the king’s permission by the rebel Simon de Montfort in 1264, two burgesses were summoned from each urban borough for the first time. Though Montfort was defeated, the structure he initiated became the norm, and the knights and burgesses started to become known as “the Commons,” from the same root as “commune,” a word we met in the previous chapter.

It was in this period that the knights and burgesses also began to be elected rather than appointed by the king’s sheriff. By the middle of the fourteenth century the Commons were meeting separately from the House of Lords, marking the beginning of the bicameral system that came to define English democracy.

The fingerprints of the Red Queen are everywhere in the evolution of the English parliament. Though initially based on the popular assemblies that the Anglo-Saxons had brought to the island, Parliament had now become a more powerful institution. This took place despite the rise of feudalism, which could have increased the despotism of the king and elites greatly, as in other parts of Europe. Even more notably, this was all happening as the capacity of the state was growing, as witnessed by its much greater role in codifying and enforcing laws, in the reorganization of the administrative structure of the realm, and in its increasing bureaucratic footprint, for example, with the usage of sealing wax. Of course, Parliament in the fourteenth century wasn’t a democratic institution as we understand it today (even if we leave aside the fact that it was only for men). Even after the 1290s, when members of Parliament began being elected, the franchise was restricted to adult males who were quite well off. Parliament continued to be a body for the more aristocratic and privileged part of society. All the same, society’s further mobilization and the institutionalization of its power during this period support our interpretation that England was already in the corridor and traveling toward greater state and societal capacity, albeit with major ups and downs. And this balance of power wasn’t simply rooted in Parliament, but rather emerged from how society was structured, how it was playing a critical role in the implementation of laws and provision of public services, and how it was initiating change.

To see one of the most significant changes, note the language of “knights” and “villeins” in the clauses of the Magna Carta we reproduced. Feudal society was a society of relatively rigid and highly hierarchical orders; one either fought, prayed, or worked. Those who worked—the villeins or serfs—were decidedly at the bottom and were trapped into hereditary servitude. Contemporary attitudes toward such people have lingered on in the modern use of the word “villain.” In practice this meant they and their descendants were tied to the lands of particular lords and were subject to various types of social and economic restrictions as well as fines. In fourteenth-century England these included “merchet,” which meant that a villein could not marry without the lord’s permission. Permission was usually granted in exchange for a payment of money. Another, “millsuit,” was a charge on the wheat grown by villeins, which had to be ground in the lord’s mill. “Tallage” was a more ad hoc charge that was periodically levied on villeins who farmed the lord’s land. Landless villeins weren’t exempt; they got hit with “chevage.” Perhaps most onerous of all, villeins had to provide free labor services all year round on the land of the lord. This nexus of feudal institutions choking the liberty of villeins crumbled away in the second half of the fourteenth century. Their demise happened in the wake of the Black Death, the catastrophic spread of the bubonic plague that wiped out at least one-third of Europe’s population between 1347 and 1352. The collapse of population created a severe shortage of labor and a general disorganization of rural society. Villeins started to refuse to undertake labor services and obey the whole gamut of feudal regulations. They refused to grind their corn in the lord’s mill. They didn’t bother asking permission to marry. Courts of law refused to enforce the old rules. Highlighting the critical role of the state in modifying and shaping norms, villeins could now appeal to the new systems of courts and judges established by Henry II. Lords were forced to offer new types of tenancy and leasing arrangements for land, which by 1400 had replaced most of the old hereditary tenures based on villeinage. The cage of norms of the feudal order was disintegrating bit by bit.

The Grumbling Hive

In 1705 the Anglo-Dutch philosopher and satirist Bernard Mandeville published a poem, “The Grumbling Hive,” in which he compared English society to a colony of bees. People lived in “luxury and ease” and there was a balance between the state and society.

They were not Slaves to Tyranny,

Nor ruled by wild Democracy;

But Kings, that could not wrong, because

Their Power was circumscrib’d by Laws.

But yet the bees were discontented, and while “No bees had better government,” it was also true that no bees had “More Fickleness, or less Content.” But why was this society “Grumbling”? Let’s look at a famous case, the village of Swallowfield in Wiltshire. In December 1596 a number of inhabitants of the village got together to write a little constitution. It was made up of twenty-six different resolutions. Resolution 25 stipulated, “The whole company promesethe to meete once in every monethe,” so there were to be regular meetings with clear protocols. The first resolution read:

ffirst it is agre[e]d, That every man shal be h[e]ard at o[u]r metynge quyetly one after an other, And th[a]t non shall interrupte an other in his speeche, And th[a]t every man shal speake as he is fyrste in accompt, & so in order, th[a]t therby the depthe of every mans Judgment w[i]th reason may be concedered.

People were to be respectful and not interrupt others when they were speaking so that the depth of everyone’s judgment could be considered. Resolution 11 required that there was to be proper record keeping of the meetings in a paper book.

What were the substantive resolutions about? They were in effect customary laws for controlling misdemeanors, as resolution 25 put it, “wilffull & vyle synns.” These included petty theft, malicious gossip, wood stealing, pride, dissent, and arrogance (resolution 18); insubordination and disturbance of the peace (resolution 15); fornication and illegitimacy (resolutions 8, 13); improvident marriage (resolution 20); harboring inmates (resolution 21); profanation of the Sabbath (resolutions 22, 24); and drunkenness (resolution 23).

It’s clear from the resolutions that the residents of Swallowfield thought of their community as self-governing. If they waited long enough, they might get help from the central state in terms of indictment and punishment. But even after Henry II’s massive expansion of state capacity, most state activity was voluntarily conceived and implemented by local communities. For example, though there were one or two constables for each “hundred” and usually a petty constable in each village, these had to be jacks of all trades. Petty constables were responsible for controlling any disturbances and for enforcing most types of economic, social, and military regulations and obligations. They had to collect local taxes, maintain roads and bridges, and attend the quarter sessions and twice-yearly assizes. Existing legal records show the extent to which it was left to individuals and the community to catch criminals and bring them to law enforcement officials.

Take the case of George Wenham of Penhurst in Sussex in the early seventeenth century. He woke up one morning to find that a hog had disappeared from the pen next to his house. He started to search the vicinity, and half a mile from his house he found a spot which recently had been used for slaughtering. There was blood on the ground and he found entrails thrown over a hedge along with the prints of a horse’s hoofs. Wenham followed the hoof marks and drops of blood, but had to stop when night fell. The tracks were leading in the direction of John Marwick’s house. At this point Wenham went to the local petty constable and asked him to search Marwick’s house. Although eventually law enforcement officials got involved, it was the victims who had to do the legwork of identifying and often even catching the criminals. If people decided not to enforce a law, the wheels of justice would grind to a halt.

Returning to Swallowfield, who were these people who wrote the resolutions? They were not closely related kin (kin groups had long ceased to play such roles in England). They were not the local elites or the clergy. There were two large landowners in the neighborhood, Samuel Blackhouse and John Phipps, but neither was present. Nor was the local priest. Rather, the drafters of Swallowfield’s constitution were what British historians call the “middling sort of person,” likely the same people that the Assize of Clarendon referred to as the “more lawful men of each village.” None of them had enough income to be among the eleven taxpayers listed in the parliamentary tax return for Swallowfield of 1594. These were the people who ran the local state even in the late sixteenth century. They were the people who served in local administrative positions as jurors, churchwardens, overseers of the poor, and in the new position of local constable.

This bustling civic engagement did not escape the notice of contemporaries such as Sir Thomas Smith, a scholar, diplomat, and member of the English parliament. In 1583, a little before the Swallowfield constitution, Smith published De Republica Anglorum: The Maner of Governement or Policie of the Realme of England, which became one of the most famous political analyses of Elizabethan England. He noted, “We in England divide our men commonly into foure sortes, gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeoman artificers, and laborers.” The fourth sort of person was made up of “day laborers, poore husbandmen, yea merchants or retailers which have no free lande, copiholders, all artificers, as Taylers, Shoomakers, Carpenters, Brickemakers, Bricklayers, Masons etc. … And in villages they be commonly made Churchwardens, alecunners, and manie times Constables, which office toucheth more the common wealth.” Even laborers played an extensive role in running local government and so did yeomen who “hath his part” in the “administration in judgementes, corrections of defaultes, in election of offices … and in making laws.” With respect to the popular administration of justice Smith stated, “Every English man is a Sergeant to take the thief.”

This example and many others like it show that, just as the Red Queen effect implies, there was a huge amount of participation at the bottom of the English state. Participation and representation didn’t just take place in Parliament. They happened at all levels and through many channels. One estimate suggests that in 1700 there might have been 50,000 parish officers at any one time in England, representing around 5 percent of adult males. Since there was frequent rotation of offices, the number of people who had held office must have been considerably larger. In 1800 the figure was probably more like 100,000.

This popular participation in the operation of the state had major consequences. It was very difficult for the central state and the national elites to implement policies that were not consistent with what local people wanted. Indeed, the early modern state couldn’t completely ignore existing norms, because its legitimacy originated from its claim to deliver justice and improve social welfare, even if its ability to do either of these things was dependent on the cooperation of ordinary people. Exactly as in Athens we are seeing the multifaceted relationship between laws and norms in the corridor. On the one hand, norms mobilized society, constrained what the state could do and how far state building could go. On the other hand, state centralization and new laws gradually and little by little relaxed some aspects of the cage of norms, especially as the growing clout and presence of the courts and the legal profession weakened the feudal order, its social hierarchy, and its role in conflict resolution.

Finally, local communities didn’t just decide whether or not to implement national policy, they also initiated it. Before the early twentieth century, the English social safety net for the destitute and the poor, such as it was, consisted of the Poor Laws. The first of these laws was enacted in 1597. Yet even before this, there were many similar local initiatives: in 1549 in Norwich, 1550 in York, and then in Cambridge, Colchester, and Ipswich in 1556–1557. The Poor Laws were not some inspired policy by Queen Elizabeth or her advisers. They were local initiatives that the state picked up and rolled out nationally. There are many other examples of the central state following the local lead. For instance, a 1555 act stipulated that the parish be responsible for the appointment of surveyors to coordinate the repair of local roads, but such surveyors are documented from at least 1551 in Chester.

Why then were people grumbling? Because, inside the corridor as they were, they wanted more, expected more, and demanded that the state deliver more. At the same time they were competing with the state, competing for authority, contesting its power.

A Profusion of Parliaments

The story we are telling in this chapter is not confined to England; it is a European one as well. England was politically distinctive in a few small senses, for example in the extent of continuity between Anglo-Saxon assemblies and subsequent parliaments, in the territorial way in which parliamentary representation was organized, and in the various events that further strengthened assemblies, such as the critical role they played in legitimizing successions of new kings. But other parts of Europe weren’t all that different from it, and also experienced the fusion of Germanic assembly politics with Roman state institutions (even if, as we’ll see in Chapter 9, once you look more closely at Europe there is plenty of interesting diversity that our theory can help explain as well).

One way to see this is to return to the Magna Carta. How unique was it? Answer: not at all. Later, in 1356 in Brabant, subsequently partitioned between the Netherlands and Belgium, a parliament extracted from the new duke the “Joyous Entry,” a charter that the duke had to swear an oath to obey and implement. The duke agreed that the assembly had to consent to war, taxation, and the minting and debasement of the coinage. One can find similar documents and joyous entries all over Europe, and more or less at the same time as the Magna Carta. These include a charter by Peter I, king of Aragon, given to Catalonia in 1205; the Golden Bull granted by Andrew II of Hungary in 1222; and a charter by Frederick II in Germany in 1220. These entries all focused on many of the same issues, particularly making sure that rulers had to consult citizens and get agreement to raise taxes.

There weren’t just “great charters,” there were also parliaments everywhere in Europe. They started in Spain, with the Cortes of León in 1188 and then spread to the Crown of Aragon, which was a merger of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, all of which had their own parliaments. Parliament-like assemblies subsequently developed in the Iberian kingdoms of Navarre and Portugal. In France, even if the development of a national assembly, the Estates General, was slower, there was a great proliferation of regional estates. Farther east in Switzerland, the rural cantons had their own assemblies, which then merged into the Swiss Confederation in 1291. To the north, German principalities making up the Holy Roman Empire typically had assemblies, called Landtage. In the West in what was to become Belgium and the Netherlands, Flanders, Holland, and Brabant all had vibrant assemblies. Moving north, there were parliaments in Denmark starting in 1282 and in Sweden from the middle of the fifteenth century. Both of these, along with that of West Friesland in the Netherlands and Tyrol in Austria, also granted representation to peasants. Scotland had a parliament from the thirteenth century, and in Poland there was, and still is today, the Sejm.

Northern Italy of course had its own version of charters and parliaments in the context of the communes as we saw in the previous chapter. These too had their roots in assemblies. In fact, the north of Italy was a perfect mixing ground for the state institutions of the Roman Empire and the tradition of assembly politics brought first by another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, and then later by the Carolingians. This in fact distinguished the north from the south of Italy, which did not have a history of assemblies, and neither developed charters and parliaments nor experienced the same flourishing of liberty.

When we look around the continent in the medieval and early modern periods, we see not just joyous entries and parliaments but also the same vibrant community life administering its own affairs, engaged in sustained attempts to influence and shape the more centralized political institutions. A well-documented example is the German territory of Hesse, where an assembly called a diet was convened by the ruler. The diet comprised nobles and elites but also delegates from towns, and it emerged as a forum to approve demands for taxation. Unlike the English parliament, the Hesse Diet did not have the right to draft legislation, but it had considerable influence through a process of formulating gravamina (grievances), which it presented to the ruler of Hesse. This process was related to a more general pan-European approach of “petitioning” rulers, particularly prevalent in the English case. In Hesse, by the end of the sixteenth century, the state was receiving 1,000 petitions a year, and this increased to 4,000 a year by the end of the eighteenth century. It’s clear that the gravamina and initiatives of the diet had a large impact on legislation and policy in Hesse. Many prologues of princely edicts acknowledge the role of local initiatives and record that the impetus for a policy came from the diet. In 1731, for example, at least fifteen different initiatives from the diet are mentioned as impulses for government policies. Between 1764 and 1767 these “initiatives from below,” as they were actually referred to, influenced tithes, brewing, taxation, urban jurisdiction, and fire insurance, among many other things. They also involved a request for a common law code covering all parts of the Hessian territory, suggestions for the improvements of schooling, in 1731, 1754, and 1764, and measures to promote manufactures in 1731 and 1764. The diet also called for more “open government,” including measures such as the publication of all current ordinances, court sentences, and resolutions agreed to in the diet.

The gravamina emerging from the diet did not only address the concerns of urban dwellers and elites. We see complaints about Kontribution, the heaviest form of taxation, which fell primarily on peasants, and also complaints about the damage caused by deer and other wild beasts. There were persistent complaints about land laws that interfered with traditional inheritance customs as well. In the end, the ruler relented and revoked the laws. The Hessian experience is not exceptional. One sees similar things in the territories of Lower Austria, Hohenlohe, and Württemburg.

At the root of the remarkable clustering of great charters, parliaments, and popular participation in politics in medieval Europe is the Red Queen, and the impulse she generated both for the emboldening of society and the increase in state capacity. Indeed, the amount of wax use didn’t just increase in England; throughout Western Europe states became more bureaucratized and more centralized.

Society didn’t just respond by demanding representation, it organized in lots of other ways too, including in the form of communes, as in Italy. Also present were many kinds of “leagues,” alliances that asserted their authority against rulers and tried to influence their policies. Some, like the famous Hanseatic League, were groups of city-states that began to coalesce around the shores of the Baltic Sea after the 1240s. Another, the Rhenish League, which formed in 1254, consisted of over one hundred members that included towns, churches, and even princes, all within the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire. In Spain there were various “brotherhoods,” such as those in Castile and León and the Hermandad General, which formed in opposition to King Alonso X of Castile in 1282.

But life in the corridor is never tranquil, and it wasn’t easy to reach a peaceful balance between the demands of the state and the reaction of society. One consequence in the fourteenth century was a wave of popular revolts driven by the expanding authority of the state. People revolted against tax payments and they revolted against what they perceived to be abuses by their governments. The Flemish revolt of 1323–1328 reacted to the reintroduction of a “transport tax”; the Jacquerie of 1358 in northern France was partly a response to increased taxation in the 1340s and 1350s; so was the Tuchinat, which convulsed Languedoc and southern France in the 1360s and 1380s; and the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was a reaction to the imposition of a series of new poll taxes starting in 1377, in addition to attempts by lords to maintain feudal restrictions. Interestingly, these revolts targeted political centers, such as Paris or London, which they were trying to influence. This was because people felt they were part of a political community, even if they didn’t like the way this community worked, and they revolted to influence politics and improve the way things functioned.

From Thing to Althing: Europe Outside the Corridor

Do we see the beginnings of the Shackled Leviathan everywhere in Europe? No, for the simple reason that the requisite balance of power between state and society wasn’t present everywhere. Some parts, like Iceland, were outside the influence of Roman institutions, making it much more likely for them to remain under an Absent Leviathan.

Iceland was settled by Vikings sailing from Norway sometime in the ninth century and had previously been uninhabited. What we know about this early period comes from the famous Sagas, oral stories, that were passed from generation to generation before being written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Archaeological and linguistic research suggests that after the end of the last Ice Age, starting in the third millennium BCE, Scandinavia and northern Germany received waves of migrants speaking Indo-European languages. Out of this emerged the Germanic branch of Indo-European that includes German and all of the Scandinavian languages (except Finnish). It seems likely that the sorts of political institutions described by Tacitus characterized not just the German tribes but also the peoples of Scandinavia. The fact that the lower region of Sweden was called Götaland is suggestive of close cultural connections between the settlers of this area and another one of the major Germanic tribes, the Goths. When Scandinavians, usually in the guise of Vikings or Norsemen, come more into recorded history, their political organization is similar to those of earlier Germanic tribes described by Julius Caesar and Tacitus. They held things, which all free men participated in, they were not unified into states, and their chiefs had very limited powers.

The first settlers of Iceland had similar institutions too. To start with, Iceland was divided between possibly fifty or sixty different chiefs, and by 900 CE things were meeting regularly. In 930 an assembly for the whole of Iceland, the Althing, was established at Thingvellir, now a national park just east of Reykjavík. Though the chieftains agreed to the establishment of the Althing, they did not agree to the creation of a state. There was no centralization authority, just the office of “law speaker,” who had to recite one-third of the laws annually (he had a three-year term), though this became less important after 1117, when the laws were written down. The Althing then took on only legal functions. During the subsequent Icelandic Free State, there was no centralized authority and independent chieftains fought each other and amalgamated, ultimately creating a set of territorial lordships in charge of “realms.” Rather than the things’ evolving and strengthening over time as in England and Western Europe, they weakened and lost their ability to choose their chieftains. Iceland, without a Leviathan of any sort, became famous for endless feuding.

Iceland had the Germanic shackles, but not the Roman bureaucracy and centralizing institutions. Its early history shows that there is nothing straightforward about moving into the corridor; it’s certainly not the natural outcome of the deliberations of stateless societies or a direct consequence of the cultures and customs of Germanic tribes, thing or no thing. It’s not enough to have only one blade of the scissors.

The Dollar of the Middle Ages: The Byzantine Leviathan

Though the Western Roman Empire did fall in the fifth century, the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire survived and occasionally thrived for another ten centuries. By the fifth century, Byzantium was already embodying almost all of the Roman institutions, so one of the blades of the European scissors was faithfully represented in this powerful empire. Indeed, our account of late Roman bureaucracy, composed by John Lydus, comes from Byzantium. One indicator of the strength of the state was its ability to maintain a stable and widely circulated coinage. As Cosmas Indicopleustes, a contemporary of Emperor Justinian, put it, the Byzantine gold coin, the nomisma, “is accepted everywhere from end to end of the earth. It is admired by all men and in all kingdoms, because no kingdom has a currency that can be compared to it.” The economic historian Robert Lopez dubbed it “the dollar of the Middle Ages.”

Byzantium faced more challenges after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, particularly the Justinian plague of 541–542, which devastated the population, and the loss of half its territory during the Arab conquests of the seventh century. Nevertheless, the Byzantine state maintained its coherence, and Justinian even kept the fiscal system functioning in the teeth of the plague. In the words of the historian Procopius:

When pestilence swept through the whole known world and notably the Roman Empire, wiping out most of the farming community and of necessity leaving a trail of desolation in its wake, Justinian showed no mercy towards the ruined freeholders. Even then he did not refrain from demanding the annual tax, not only the amount at which he assessed each individual but also the amount for which his deceased neighbors were liable.

The Byzantines inherited this fiscal system from Rome, and implemented it much more faithfully than did the Merovingians or the Carolingians; Clovis wasn’t able to levy land taxes, but the Byzantine emperors were. They even had a rural cadastre that valued land and was updated every thirty years. The tax rate was set at around one twenty-fourth of the value of land per year. There were other taxes too, including on animals and even bees, and in the 660s a household tax was introduced. There were also various types of labor corvées for the construction of roads, bridges, and fortifications.

The state didn’t just tax wealth or production, it was a producer itself. In the eighth century it was the biggest landowner in the empire and marketed the produce. It owned mines, quarries, and workshops for weaving and dyeing, and arms factories. It also regulated the economy. In the eighth century there was a list of “forbidden goods” that nobody was allowed to export. These included cereals, salt, wine, olive oil, fish sauce, precious metals, and strategic commodities like iron, weapons, and high-quality silks. The state provided free food and even tried to regulate profits in Constantinople.

All of this speaks to a state with a great deal of capacity, more than the Merovingian or Carolingian states in the West. Yet what was completely missing in Byzantium was the other blade of the scissors—the participatory politics of German tribes. There were no assemblies, no institutionalized representation, and subsequently no great charters or parliaments.

Byzantium thus provides us with a perfect European exemplar of the evolution of the Despotic Leviathan. Indeed, the concentrated nature of state power allowed Alexios Komnenos to take over the state in 1081 and create dynastic dominance over Byzantium. Komnenos privatized the state to his family, even reorganizing the system of honors and titles so that they applied to his family, rather than more generally. He used the Byzantine state to cow his enemies and took control of the Church hierarchy. It’s true that the capacity of the state was already on the decline, and the nomisma was only 30 percent fine gold at this point. As it happened, Komnenos laid the seeds for the final collapse of the state. In 1082 he gave the Venetians their first commercial privileges and in 1095 he tried to use the First Crusade as a way to retake territory that had been lost to the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia. By 1204 the Fourth Crusade had sacked Byzantium, an event from which the empire would never recover.

Moving On in the Corridor

The relationship between state and society we described in Swallowfield in late Tudor England didn’t stand still. In fact the Red Queen effect implies that just to stay where it was, Swallowfield would have to keep running, developing greater organizational capacity, trying to keep the fearsome face of the state at arm’s length. When the Stuart dynasty in the seventeenth century attempted to assert the “divine right of kings,” society did not take it lying down. Conflict came to a head with the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the overthrow of James II with the Glorious Revolution in 1688.

The seventeenth century was certainly not a time one would associate with liberty. Hobbes, as we have seen, was compelled to turn to an all-powerful Leviathan because of the chaos and carnage created by the English Civil War. But the journey of English society in the corridor during the century ended up securing the preconditions for liberty, and the Red Queen was again in the middle of the action. The Glorious Revolution brought in a host of changes in political institutions, most importantly asserting the sovereignty of Parliament, which now became the unchallenged executive authority, replacing the king. This wasn’t the end, because Parliament was mostly constituted of elites who wanted to exert their own control over society. After 1688 they had new tools to do so because they rapidly ramped up the capacity of the English state. Most notably, the excise tax system created a fiscal administration that penetrated into every nook and cranny of English society. Professional state officials such as excisemen, previously a rare sight in the English countryside, were suddenly everywhere, and quite threatening to the locals. To maintain its position, society had to “up the ante.” The way it did this was studied by Charles Tilly in his book Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834.

Tilly was interested in the changing nature of what he called “popular contention,” the way in which common people organized collectively to try to influence the government. He noted that in the middle of the eighteenth century contention was about “local people and local issues, rather than nationally organized programs and parties.” Yet “between 1758 and 1833 a new variety of claim-making had taken shape in Britain … Mass popular politics had taken hold on a national scale.”

Completely new forms of collective action emerged in this period. Among these he emphasizes the “open meeting,” which had become “a kind of demonstration … a coordinated way of publicizing support for a particular claim on holders of power. Frequently a special-purpose association, society or club called the meeting. What is more, meetings recurrently concerned national issues, emphatically including issues that the government and Parliament were on their way to deciding.” He points out that

the means by which ordinary people made collective claims … underwent a deep transformation: increasingly they involved large-scale, coordinated interaction [and] direct contact between ordinary people and agents of the national state.

What drove all of this was the intensification of the process of state building in Britain, which had begun after the Glorious Revolution. Tilly argued that the “state’s size” and “weight” increased, and

in the process Parliament—critical to every decision concerning government revenue, expenditure, and personnel—occupied ever more space in political decisions. These changes … promoted a shift towards collective action that was large in scale and national in scope.

Particularly significant was the way people stopped focusing on parochial issues since “the expansion of the state pushed popular struggles from local arenas and from significant reliance on patronage towards autonomous claim-making in national arenas.” The continued expansion of the state’s capacity and presence after 1688 had raised the stakes for English people, and Tilly notes:

The increasing importance of Parliament and national officials … for the fates of ordinary people generated threats and opportunities. Those threats and opportunities in turn stimulated interested parties to attempt new sorts of defense and offense: to match association with association, to gain electoral power, to make direct claims on their national government. Through long, strenuous interaction with authorities, enemies, and allies, those ordinary people fashioned new ways of acting together on their interests and forced their interlocutors to change their own ways of making and responding to claims. Cumulatively, struggles of ordinary people with powerholders wrought great changes in the British structure of power.

The expansion of the state generated a reaction from society and this in turn fed back onto the process of state building, exactly as the Red Queen effect suggests. In response to all this newfound contention, by the end of the eighteenth century the state started to finally root out corruption.

The process set in motion by popular contention picked up speed with a series of major institutional changes in the nineteenth century. The First Reform Act of 1832 extended voting rights from about 8 percent to 16 percent of the adult male population, and reallocated representation away from the countryside and unrepresentative “rotten boroughs” toward industrial cities with much larger populations. This process continued with the Second Reform Act of 1867 and the Third Reform Act of 1884, when the electorate reached about 60 percent of the adult male population. Another set of crucial steps in the corridor was taken in 1918 when all men over the age of twenty-one obtained the right to vote (while political rights for women came later, as we discuss next). All of these major reforms were a response to societal organization and demands. For example, universal suffrage, equal constituencies, annual parliaments, and payments to members of Parliament so that common folk could also serve were central demands of the Chartist movement of the mid-nineteenth century.

Together with this greater institutionalized power of society against elites came greater state capacity, but now very much along the lines of society’s demands. The first in a series of reforms was the Saint Helena Act of 1833, which incorporated the East India Company into the administrative structure of the state. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 picked up what the Saint Helena Act started and recommended a professional civil service with meritocratic selection. Even though the report faced opposition, its main recommendations were gradually implemented in the next two decades, ultimately leading to the establishment of competitive examinations for selection into the civil service. Simultaneously, the state also moved in the direction of providing a broad range of public services, including mass schooling, which became effectively free of charge in 1891; health insurance; and unemployment insurance and pensions, all financed by redistributive taxes. This process culminated in the Beveridge Report of 1942 and its implementation, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 15.

The Next Cage to Be Broken

In the same way that a movement into the corridor doesn’t put an end to violence and feuding in one fell swoop, it doesn’t break down the cage of norms all at once. The evolution of liberty is a protracted process, especially for groups, such as women, who have been systematically discriminated against and suffer heavy restrictions on their social and economic behavior.

Caroline Sheridan experienced the full reality of this in 1830s England. Born in 1808, she married a lawyer, George Norton, in 1827 and took his name. Caroline Norton was a talented author and poet, but her husband was abusive and violent. In 1836 she finally decided to leave him. However, under English law she had few rights. The income from her writings went to her husband. Her property was his. As a 1632 compilation, The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, stated baldly,

That which the husband hath is his own. That which the wife hath is the husband’s.

She had no right to either. William Blackstone, the great British legal scholar, summarized the common law situation in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765:

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.

Everything was under the control of the husband “under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything.”

In 1838 Caroline Norton wrote a pamphlet, The Separation of Mother and Child by the Laws of Custody of Infants Considered. She pointed out that under English law a father could give his children to a stranger, and the mother could do nothing about it. The dramatic publicity generated by her case helped induce Parliament to pass the Infant and Custody of Infants Act in 1839, which gave mothers some say for children under the age of seven. Caroline Norton wasn’t finished there. In 1854 she published English Laws for Women, brilliantly outlining the inequity and hypocrisy of the legal status quo. She followed it a year later with A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill. She pointed out:

A married woman in England has no legal existence: her being is absorbed in that of her husband. Years of separation [or] desertion cannot alter this position … the legal fiction holds her to be “one” with her husband, even though she may never see or hear of him.

She has no possessions … her property is his property …

An English wife has no legal right even to her clothes or ornaments; her husband may take them and sell them if he pleases, even though they be the gifts of relatives or friends, or bought before marriage.

An English wife cannot make a will …

An English wife cannot legally claim her own earnings. Whether wages for manual labour, or payment for intellectual exertion, whether she weed potatoes, or keep a school, her salary is the husband’s …

An English wife may not leave her husband’s house. Not only can he sue her for “restitution of conjugal rights,” but he has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom she may take refuge, and who may “harbour her,”—as it is termed,—and carry her away by force, with or without the aid of the police.

In 1857 Parliament passed the Matrimonial Causes Act, establishing grounds for which women could sue for divorce. In 1870 came the Married Women’s Property Act.

Norton and others began to bring into focus the fundamentally discriminatory nature of English law, which had been identified clearly in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s powerful book argued that women “are treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not a part of the human species.” Much of her book was a call to action for women to assert their individuality and throw off the binds that held them. She continued, “To account for, and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character … How grossly do they insult us who advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes.”

Wollstonecraft clearly recognized that this discrimination was rooted in norms and customs as well as laws, and pointed out that the dominance wielded by men over women and these norms of “outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety” stunted women’s development. She powerfully rejected them by stating:

Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are … consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex …

I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.

The cause of liberty for women subsequently acquired an influential supporter in the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose 1869 book, The Subjection of Women, was a powerful call for complete equality for women in legal, economic, and political life. Mill, echoing Wollstonecraft, compared the subjection of women to slavery and argued that “in the case of women, each individual of the subject class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined … All women are brought up from the earliest years in the belief that their ideal character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others.” For Mill, too, it was clear that the norms that were at the root of this subjugation had to be broken, especially when he argued that

human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their facilities, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.

He continued:

We ought … not to ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person’s position through all life… . The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact in modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental law.

In short, the oppression of women grossly violated liberty.

Norton’s victories and the support of figures such as Mill signaled a fundamental change in norms. But they still left women without the right to vote and political representation. Women still suffered massive economic discrimination. This started to change in 1918, when women over the age of 30 got the vote, and finally in 1928, all adult women were enfranchised. These political fruits came after intense mobilization and protests by the suffragettes as we saw in the Preface. Predictably, norms and economic relations changed more slowly. The Equal Pay Act of 1970 establishing the legal principle of gender equality in the workplace was an important step, but equal economic opportunities and pay for women is still a work in progress in Britain as elsewhere. The photography section includes a picture of a woman holding out her bra, something that became a symbolic act of emancipation during the 1960s.

The Origins of the Industrial Revolution

The emergence of the Shackled Leviathan starting in the fifth and sixth centuries was a political and social revolution, even if it took place with gradual, sometimes tentative, steps. The Industrial Revolution, which got under way in the middle of the eighteenth century in Britain, was its economic offshoot because, just as in the Italian communes we saw in the previous chapter, it was produced by the liberty, opportunities, and incentives that the Shackled Leviathan made possible. In the course of a few decades, technology and the organization of production were transformed in a number of key industries. Leading the way were textiles, where a series of innovative breakthroughs in spinning, such as the water frame, the spinning jenny, and the mule revolutionized productivity. Similar innovations occurred in weaving, with the introduction of the flying shuttle and various types of power looms. Equally transformative were the novel forms of inanimate power starting with Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine and then James Watt’s steam engine. The steam engine not only made mining much more productive by enabling the pumping of water out of mines, but also changed transportation and metallurgy. The landscape for transport was reconfigured both because of steam trains in the nineteenth century and because a series of canals and new roads linked up major cities starting in the late seventeenth century. Many other industries, including machine tools and agriculture, were also revolutionized because of cheaper and higher-quality iron, made possible thanks to the replacement of charcoal by coke in iron smelting and the production of pig iron in blast furnaces and then steel with the Bessemer process.

The conditions for the Industrial Revolution were prepared by the progress of British society in the corridor. After the end of the Middle Ages the center of gravity of economic activity in Europe had started moving north toward the Netherlands and England. This was intimately connected with the discovery of the Americas and the impact of the new economic opportunities this created on the race between state and society. Countries that were better poised to take advantage of these opportunities in ways that strengthened state and society were able to move ahead institutionally and then economically. In England, the existing balance of power favored society so that the Tudor state in the sixteenth century was unable to exert monopoly control over access to trade. As a result there was broad-based participation in trade with the Americas, fostering a new class of dynamic and assertive mercantile interests. These new groups didn’t look kindly upon the Stuart monarchs’ attempts to increase their dominance over the economy and social life, and soon got into a prolonged conflict with the crown. Their demands centered not just on greater access to opportunities that were monopolized by the crown’s allies but also on broader institutional changes that would further strengthen them and weaken the elites.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a result of this struggle between the crown and new groups. The sweeping implications of this revolution included the emergence of Parliament as the primary executive body in England and greater economic opportunities and incentives for most in English society, as well as a reenergized Red Queen effect. Society’s mobilization deepened and its power became more firmly institutionalized via the legislative process while the state’s capacity also increased. Equally critical were the changes in the judicial landscape. The Statute of the Monopolies of 1624 had created the patent system, which made the wave of innovations defining the Industrial Revolution possible. Domestic monopolies were subsequently completely dismantled during the English Civil War of the 1640s, undergirding much more broadly distributed economic opportunities. The Glorious Revolution finally established the independence of the judiciary with the Act of Settlement of 1701, a significant further step toward equality before the law, unbiased enforcement of laws and contracts, and secure property rights. The state did not simply remove impediments to economic activity and start providing crucial public services. It also actively encouraged and aided industry (and in this, it had no problem in impinging on the liberty of others; for example, it supported and benefited from English slave traders, and its Navigation Acts made it illegal for foreign ships to carry goods to England or its colonies, helping English merchants and manufacturers monopolize trade).

All these economic and social changes unleashed a tremendous amount of experimentation and innovative energy. Thousands from all walks of life started pursuing their own ideas and paths to improve technology, solve outstanding problems, start businesses, and make money. Critically, this experimentation was not just decentralized, but it was unrestrained by political authority. So different people could pursue distinct approaches in order to innovate better, succeed where others failed, and perhaps more important in the process, formulate completely new problems and ideas. We see the significance of this type of experimentation in some of the iconic technologies of the Industrial Revolution, such as the steam engine. Innovators and entrepreneurs such as Robert Boyle, Denis Papin, Thomas Savory, Thomas Newcomen, John Smeaton, and James Watt all approached the problem of using steam power differently and experimented in their own ways in a cumulative process that ultimately led to much more efficient and powerful steam engines.

Both the nature of experimentation, with plenty of false starts and a multitude of disparate approaches, and its critical role in innovative breakthroughs are perhaps best illustrated by the quest for a way for ships to tell their longitude at sea. Latitude could be calculated from the stars, but longitude was a bigger challenge. Ships frequently got lost at sea and the problems this caused became all too obvious in October 1707 when four out of a fleet of five British warships returning from Gibraltar miscalculated their longitude and sank on the rocks of the Isles of Scilly. Two thousand sailors drowned. The British government established the Board of Longitude and offered a series of prizes in 1714 to encourage a solution to this problem.

It was known that one solution was to have two clocks on board a ship. One set to, say, Greenwich mean time, and another that could be reset to noon each day by the sun at sea. Then one would know the time in Greenwich, and the time where you were. The difference between these times allowed you to calculate longitude. The trouble was that clocks were inaccurate, based on pendulums which got hopelessly out of whack at sea, or made of metals which expanded or contracted under different climatic conditions. The great physicist Isaac Newton, charged by the government to advise them on ways to calculate longitude, was deeply committed to the idea that this must come through astronomy and star positions. Though he agreed that in principle the clock solution worked, in practice it was dead in the water because

by reason of the motion of the ship, the Variation of Heat and Cold, Wet and Dry, and the Difference of Gravity in different Latitudes, such a watch hath not yet been made.

And most probably never would be.

People experimented with all sorts of solutions, some of them very wild. Galileo himself had invented a type of mask, called a celatone, designed to calculate longitude by looking at Jupiter and using the timing of the eclipses of its moons. (A reconstruction of this machine is shown in the photography section.) Another proposal involved wounded dogs and a mysterious substance called the “powder of sympathy.” This powder allegedly had the capacity to heal at a distance if it was sprinkled on something belonging to a wounded person or animal. Critically, this healing involved pain. The idea was to keep a wounded dog on board, and at noon every day in London someone would apply the powder to a bandage that had been used on the dog. The dog would yelp, indicating that it was noontime in London. (Sounds completely nutty until you recall that Newton himself was an alchemist and spent much of his life trying to turn “base metals” into gold.) Another idea involved mooring large numbers of ships in open water with huge cannons being fired at appropriate times so that other ships within earshot could tell the time.

John Harrison, an uneducated carpenter from Barrow upon Humber in the North of England, finally came up with the breakthrough. Harrison successfully tackled all the problems that Newton outlined. He got rid of the pendulum. He eliminated the use of lubricants that expanded or contracted depending on the climate, relying instead on a tropical hardwood, lignum vitae, that emits its own grease. To solve the problem of expanding metals he put strips of brass and steel together so that the expansion of one was counteracted by the other. Harrison didn’t get there right away. It took him a series of prototypes and thirty years to arrive at his so-called H-4 in 1761. Along the way he made many profound innovations, for example, using ball bearings for the first time, a technology still used for reducing rotational friction in most machines today. The obsessive search for a solution to longitude and all of the whacky ideas it engendered was was satirized by William Hogarth in a series of paintings called The Rake’s Progress. The last in the series depicts the infamous mental asylum in London, Bedlam, filled with those driven mad by the search for a way to calculate longitude.

A consequence of all of this bustling experimentation was greater social mobility. As people from modest backgrounds succeeded in their efforts, they not only made money, but gained greater social recognition. Consider Richard Arkwright, who invented the water frame and set up arguably the world’s first modern factory at Cromford, Derbyshire, in 1771. Arkwright was the youngest of seven children whose father was a tailor, poor enough that he was unable to send Richard to school. But Arkwright ended up with a knighthood, ascending to the heights of English society. Or take the case of James Watt, the inventor of the Watt steam engine, who came from a middle-class Scottish family. Within ten years of his death in 1819 James Watt had a statue of himself in Westminster Abbey (and there is also a memorial tablet there for John Harrison). The Abbey houses the tombs of many English kings and queens and famous people, such as William Wilberforce, the man who spearheaded the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. No cage of norms blocked experimentation or the ability of these men to succeed.

The Industrial Revolution started in Britain for the same reason that Italian communes started underpinning innovation and economic growth in the Middle Ages—the Shackled Leviathan blossomed in the corridor and this brought people greater liberty and economic opportunities. Powered by the Red Queen, the British state became more effective and built greater capacity during this process, but did not throw off its shackles. The expanding capacity of the shackled state then helped rather than hindered the progress of liberty. In this, Britain was ahead of other parts of Europe. But this chapter has also shown that many European societies were moving inside the corridor, albeit each with its own ups and downs and limitations. As the Leviathans of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany became more shackled and acquired greater capacity, the liberty, economic opportunities, and incentives of their populations also improved and industrialization spread to these areas.

Why in Europe?

The history of Europe is of course rich, complex, and variegated, something to which we cannot do justice in this chapter. Our focus, instead, has been on showing how our conceptual framework provides a different interpretation of this history and the origins of the distinctive set of institutions and political and social practices that emerged in Europe over the last 1,500 years.

Theories that see something distinctive in Europe long before the Middle Ages—its Judeo-Christian culture, its unique geography, its European values, whatever they were—making its subsequent political developments and economic ascendancy inevitable, are plentiful. Our account disagrees sharply with these theories.

There wasn’t anything unique in early European history that preordained the rise of the Shackled Leviathan, other than the fortuitous balance of power created by the two blades of the European scissors—state institutions from the Roman Empire and participatory norms and institutions from Germanic tribes. Neither was sufficient by itself to bring forth the Shackled Leviathan. When only the former blade was present, as in Byzantium, a typical Despotic Leviathan emerged. When only the latter blade was present, as in Iceland, there was little political development and no state building. During another epoch with different circumstances, with different contingencies at critical points and perhaps with less skillful political actors than Clovis and Charlemagne attempting to fuse them, even the two blades together might have failed to balance each other in the same way. But during the tumultuous fifth and sixth centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, together they created a precarious balance, which placed Europe in the narrow corridor and enabled the rise of the Shackled Leviathan.

Placement in the corridor did not immediately create liberty. Violence, murder, and mayhem continued, sometimes very intensively, for more than a millennium. Nevertheless, this placement was the beginning of a process that limited despotism and very gradually led to the development of the preconditions of liberty. Being in the corridor is no guarantee for the rise of the Shackled Leviathan in all its glory either (as we’ll see in Chapter 9 when discussing how large shocks can throw a society out of the corridor, and in Chapter 13 when witnessing how the race between state and society can get out of control). But the remarkable point, from the viewpoint of global history, was that a handful of polities did find themselves in the corridor and continued to evolve there, increasing the capacities of their states and societies with the full force of the Red Queen.

The implications of Europe entering the corridor and the Red Queen dynamics that this unleashed have been nothing short of spectacular. It was in Europe that liberty most clearly took the form that we recognize today (even if this was a long, painful, and at times patently violent process). It was also in Europe that this liberty, and the economic and social environment shaped by the Shackled Leviathan, produced broad-based economic opportunities and incentives, supported functioning markets, and created an environment in which experimentation, innovation, and technological breakthroughs could blossom and pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and sustained prosperity.

Our theory underscores that these lessons are applicable beyond Europe. If there was something uniquely European, something manifest in the rise of Europe, then we couldn’t derive lessons based on the European experience for societies struggling with the same problems today. But not so with our theory. The Romans’ centralized institutions and the norms and popular assemblies of Germanic tribes were of course unique to Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. But the general principle here—that to move into the corridor a nation needs a balance between powerful, centralizing state institutions and an assertive, mobilized society able to hold its own against the state’s power and shackle its political elites—is more broadly applicable. Indeed, we’ll see in the rest of the book that the absence of institutions that simultaneously increase the state’s capacity and uphold the liberty of its citizens is almost always related to the absence of such a balance of power between state and society. This balance is not a uniquely European affair either and has emerged under different circumstances and in different geographies and cultural milieus, as we saw already in the previous chapter and will see again later.

Chapter 7

MANDATE OF HEAVEN

Capsizing the Boat

Chinese history took a very different path from that of Europe and one that created far less liberty. But it didn’t start out that way. To see this let’s turn to an era in Chinese history known as the Spring and Autumn period, which began in the eighth century BCE. The Spring and Autumn period gave birth to Confucius, whose philosophy has been a mainstay of Chinese society and state institutions ever since. Confucianism placed great importance on the welfare of the people and argued that this was to be promoted by a virtuous ruler. As Confucius put it:

One who rules through the power of virtue is analogous to the Pole Star: it simply remains in its place and receives the homage of the myriad lesser stars.

His most famous disciple, Mengzi (often called Mencius), stated, “The people are the most esteemed,” and he reproduced an earlier document that argued that “Heaven sees through the people’s seeing, Heaven hears through the people’s hearing.” Such views were common in this period. Confucius himself noted that “a state cannot stand once it has lost the confidence of the people.”

Evidence that these ideas were relevant to the period’s politics comes from the ancient chronicle of Zuo Zhuan (Commentary of Zuo). It quotes Ji Liang, who was employed by the state of Sui. He advised the emperor that “the people are masters of the deities. Therefore, sage kings accomplished the people’s affairs first, and then attended to the deities.”

Why were the people “masters of the deities” and “the most esteemed”? Most likely this was because society was sufficiently well organized to have some say in politics in this period. Indeed, during this era political power in China was so fragmented that scholars refer to the competing societies as “city states,” even comparing them to the Greek city-states. In Athens politics turned around the capital city, and the citizens could make or break political careers and ambitions. The Zuo Zhuan documents at least twenty-five instances where the dwellers of capital cities actively influenced internal power struggles, including conflicts over who was to become lord. Just as in Athens, in the state of Zheng the people were meeting to discuss and critique the policies and behavior of the government. A famous prime minister from this era, Zichan, is reported saying:

The people at morning and dusk retreat and meet together in order to debate the goodness or badness of the powerholder. If I implement whatever they consider good and correct whatever they consider bad—then they are my teachers.

He goes on to note that trying to exclude the people would be “like obstructing the river: when it overwhelms the dam, more people will be hurt.” Mengzi agreed with the sentiment, writing:

There is a way to attain the people: when you attain their hearts, you attain the people. There is a way to attain their hearts: gather them at what they desire, do not do whatever they detest, and that is all.

A later philosophical treatise known as the Xunzi summed up the politics of this period:

The ruler is a boat; people are the water. The water can carry the boat; the water can sink the boat.

In the photography section we reproduce a version of the original page of the Xunzi that includes this saying in Chinese characters.

All-Under-Heaven

The intellectual ferment of the Spring and Autumn period was followed by political consolidation and the emergence of seven large territorial states, and a few smaller ones, locked in incessant warfare (see Map 10). This Warring States period gave rise to a new and highly despotic political philosophy called legalism. This turned into a key pillar of the domination of the Chinese state over society. Shang Yang, also known as Lord Shang, was one of its most influential thinkers and practitioners. Born in 390 BCE, in the middle of the Warring States period, he was acutely aware of the chaos that state weakness could create. Like Hobbes, who almost two millennia later would come up with a similar solution, Lord Shang saw the way out in building up the power of a Leviathan, because “the greatest benefit to the people is order.” If society were to be further weakened in the process, all the better, since Shang thought that

when the people are weak, the state is strong; hence the state … strives to weaken the people.

He did not just think and write these thoughts, but proceeded to implement them. From his birthplace in the state of Wei, Shang Yang moved to Qin in order to become an adviser to its ruler, Lord Xiao. Under Xiao’s auspices Shang Yang proposed a radical series of reforms, which formulated a new legal approach, restructured land relations, started the reform of the administrative structure of the state, and set up more professional state institutions. By the next century, the centralizing reforms had turned Qin into an economic and military powerhouse that went on to conquer all the other states and found the first Chinese empire and recognized dynasty.

Map 10. China in the Warring States Period, 475–221 BCE

That this was already Shang Yang’s aim from his early days is evident from the first chapter of The Book of Lord Shang, the record of his ideas that has come down to us. The chapter titled “Revising the Laws” sets out a debate between Lord Xiao and three advisers, including Shang Yang. The lord was worried that institutional innovations would lead to the criticism of “All-Under-Heaven.” Xiao wasn’t just concerned about the opinion of the people in Qin, but All-Under-Heaven, meaning the whole world. The Lord of Qin thought this way because he had appropriated an earlier concept from the previous state of Zhou, whose rulers had developed the notion that they had been given a mandate to rule from Heaven. From that point on, emperors of China would claim that they too had received the “Mandate of Heaven.” But how can society constrain a ruler whose mandate comes directly from the heavens?

Shang Yang didn’t think that such constraints were desirable. His aims were simple: “a rich state and a strong army.” Only such a powerful state could bring order and make sure that society did not get any ideas about participating in politics. Without this type of order, discord would result, and that had to be prevented. The Xunzi argues in strikingly Hobbesian language:

Humans are born having desires. When they have desires but do not get the objects of their desires, then they cannot but seek some means of satisfaction. If there is no measure or limit to their seeking, then they cannot help but struggle with each other. If they struggle with each other then there will be chaos, and if there is chaos then they will be impoverished.

It was natural to search for order and the institutions that could achieve it. But how was Qin to do it? The main tool would be the law—but not in the way that law came to develop from society’s norms and constrain rulers in the European context as we saw in the previous chapter. In Shang Yang’s vision, law and state power had to be used to turn everyone into either farmers or warriors. They would be rewarded for farming or fighting, and punished otherwise.

The people can be induced to till and fight … it all depends on how superiors grant them [ranks and emoluments] … Those who do not work but eat, who do not fight but attain glory, who have no rank but are respected, who have no emoluments but are rich, who have no office but lead—these are called “villains.”

In other words, the state and only the state gets to decide who and what is valued. Without the recognition of the state you are a villain. The people had to be controlled “as the metalworker controls metal and the potter clay.” To ensure that people focused on farming, it was critical to not “let the people shift locations on their own initiative,” and to penalize any other sort of economic activity. One way to accomplish this was to structure—or in fact distort—markets to make farming very attractive. Shang Yang proposed:

If you can cause merchants and peddlers and crafty and tricky people not to prosper, then even if you do not want to enrich the state, you will not but attain that. Hence, it is said: “He who wants the farmers to enrich the state makes food within the borders expensive. He must impose multiple taxes on those who do not farm and heavy levies on profits from the markets.”

Those who did not farm were “crafty and tricky people.” It was a sentiment that would have profound consequences for China’s economic future as legalist thought came to shape both how the state approached business, and how merchants, industrialists, and peasants came to fear the state and withhold their cooperation from it.

In the legalist model, order was the priority and it was to be achieved by an all-powerful ruler crushing society with the weight of the state and its law. Even if the Confucian model disagreed with the heavy-handed approach of legalism and recommended moral precepts and earning “the people’s trust,” there was agreement between the two approaches on the basic tenet of despotism—that common people would have no say in politics and would certainly not become a counterweight against the power of the state and the emperor. It was only the moral behavior of the ruler that would make him take into account his subjects’ well-being. As Confucius put it:

Commoners do not debate matters of government.

The Rise and Fall, and Rise Again, of the Well-Field System

Shang Yang’s achievement was proposing a model of despotic state building that allowed the Qin to overwhelm the other six warring states over the next hundred years, bring an end to that chaotic epoch, and set up the Qin Empire. The details of how the state should be organized changed over the subsequent centuries as successive dynasties experimented with different versions. The reason for this was that while Shang Yang’s model was good at eliminating competitors, it didn’t provide an effective template for how to govern the new unified territories.

The version that the first Qin emperor, Qin Shi Huang, and his main adviser, Li Si, came up with involved very tight control. The empire was divided into thirty-six, and subsequently forty-two, commanderies, each headed by a governor, a military commander, and a superintendent. Beneath these appointees was an elaborate hierarchy of officials that exercised a suffocating grip over society, just as Shang Yang would have advocated.

The nature of this control is illustrated by administrative documents published by the historian Enno Giele. These show how an overseer of a sub-county unit wrote to the head of the county to approve the appointment of a new village chief and postman in a local hamlet. Four days after the request was filed, he got a negative response. The request was refused because the hamlet had only twenty-seven households and was deemed too small to have such officials. These documents reveal the intricate web of centrally appointed officials and the efficiency with which they dealt with requests, not to mention the extent of their knowledge (the precise twenty-seven households).

The Qin state also imposed a uniform system of weights and measurements, a unified coinage, and a calendar, and it standardized the script in which Chinese would be written. It also constructed an elaborate system of roads emanating from the capital, Xianyang. One of the most important and durable innovations was the “well-field system,” named after the Chinese character for a water well, a visual representation of nine equally sized plots of land required for the provisioning of a soldier-warrior. The well-field system emphasized the equal distribution of land along with the fiscal and military burden. It first appears in the writings of Mencius, who argued that

benevolent government must begin with surveying and allocating lands. When boundaries are not drawn properly, neither the division of land according to the well-field system nor the levy of grain reserved for the ruler’s emoluments will be equitable.

At this point a drawback of the Shang Yang model became evident. To support such an intrusive system it was not enough to have a “rich state,” it was also necessary to have a heavily taxed society. After all, someone had to provide the resources and the labor commissioned to build the 8,000 life-size terra-cotta warriors that Qin Shi Huang had commissioned for his mausoleum. One consequence of heavy taxation was an upsurge of popular revolts that, shortly after the death of Qin Shi Huang, led to the overthrow of the Qin dynasty after a mere fifteen years of existence and only two emperors. The ultimate winner in the political instability that ensued was a peasant from the conquered state of Chu, Liu Bang, who founded the new Han dynasty under the title of Emperor Gaozu. Gaozu suspended the collection of taxes, eventually reducing them to one-fifteenth of the agricultural crop. He also reduced the extent of compulsory labor services that the Qin state had imposed.

The adjustments made by Gaozu were attempts to move in a more Confucian direction. He built on the legalist precepts and combined them with the ideas of Confucianism. Subsequent Chinese governments and laws, right up to the present, can be interpreted as a fusion of and oscillation between these two philosophies, each falling somewhere between Shang Yang and Confucius. Wherever they happened to be on the spectrum, they agreed on some basic principles. The most critical was the core tenet of the Despotic Leviathan—that of monarchical rule with an omnipotent emperor, providing the people with no role or say in government. The emperor was always above the law. Then came the idea that the state should be staffed and run by people of talent, which was necessary for the emperor to rule society in the way he wished. It also had roots in Confucian philosophy, which maintains that “one who excels in learning should devote himself to official service” and one should “promote those who are worthy and talented.” The final key principle was that the emperor should be concerned with the welfare of the people and constrained by moral precepts. This even included the idea that the emperor should promote citizens’ economic prosperity or, using a term from later dynasties, that he should “store wealth among the people.” These three principles amounted to a sort of social contract that gave the state some legitimacy. If they were violated, then people could rebel.

It took some time for the Chinese emperors to come up with a working institutional model that would satisfy these three principles. The turning point came with the realization that it was difficult to micromanage society in the way that Shang Yang or the Qin emperors envisaged. It was just too expensive. To fund it you had to levy heavy taxes, either in kind or with money or labor services, and that was inconsistent with the last principle. Without any way of allowing people to have a say in the government and how taxes were spent, high rates of taxation caused discontent and ultimately helped foment rebellion. As we’ll see, rebellion didn’t go away, but subsequent emperors decided to mitigate rebellion and discontent by reducing taxes, even though this also meant less state capacity to provide public services and even stable law enforcement.

Organizing authority to satisfy these three principles was tricky and it never worked perfectly. In fact, there was a constant struggle between the Shang Yang model of micromanagement and coercion, and the more relaxed Confucian strategy of greater withdrawal from society and a reliance on setting an example of good governance. The Han, though they reduced taxes and labor dues, initially kept much of the Qin vision. The Qin had asserted direct control over the most productive assets, which included mines, forests, and even manufacturing processes such as foundries and workshops. So did the Han. However, with fewer tax revenues they were forced to temper their control of society and gradually retreated from the implementation of the Qin model.

Over time the well-field system went into reverse and large landowners appeared in the countryside. But in the absence of any constraints on the power of the omnipotent ruler, these movements could always be reversed. Over the next 2,000 years China was periodically rocked by various attempts to reassert the model of Shang Yang, the most recent being the rise to power of the Communists after 1949 who implemented their own version of the well-field system in the form of collectivized agriculture. The contemporary incarnation of the Confucian model is what we have seen since 1978 under Deng Xiaoping when collectivization went into reverse and Chinese leaders started attacking corruption, since this violated Confucian principles of virtuous rule. To know what’s likely to happen in the future in China, it is important to understand this historical oscillation between legalism and Confucianism.

The first attempt to reintroduce strict state control over the economy after the demise of the Qin came from the Han emperor Wu, who ruled for fifty-four years, between 141 and 87 BCE. Wu started a royal monopoly on the production of iron and salt, and asserted control over most industries and commercial activities. The contemporary historian Sima Qian observed that “the wealth of the whole world was exhausted to serve the ruler, and yet he was not satisfied.” Wu’s reforms did not last.

The next person who tried the same thing was Wang Mang, who became regent to a Han child emperor in 1 BCE and declared himself emperor five years later when the child died. Wang launched a concerted attempt to reassert control over the economy and society which had been gradually slipping away. He decreed that all land belonged to the state, confiscated the estates of many large landowners, and created more state monopolies. In 23 CE a popular insurrection against his policies broke out, culminating in the capture of the imperial palace and Wang’s death. Thereafter the well-field model went into reverse once again, and by 30 CE universal military service had been abolished, so society was no longer based on the farmer-solider complex.

The Han dynasty ended in 220, to be replaced by a series of short-lived regimes. In the north these were dominated by nomadic tribesmen from inner Asia, while in the south various offshoots of Han power sprang up. Prior to the reunification of China under the Sui dynasty in 581, there were again attempts to reassert the Shang Yang model, including during the Northern Wei dynasty that lasted from 386 to 524 in northern China. In 485 the Wei came up with their “equal-field system,” which was maintained after 581 by the Sui and then by the Tang dynasty when they took over in 618. What sealed the fate of this new version of the well-field system was the An Lushan rebellion, which broke out against the Tang in 755. Though it was finally suppressed in 763 after it sacked the capital, Chang’an, the rebellion cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and devastated the Tang state. With the state’s ability to control society in tatters, the equal-field system collapsed and private ownership of land became the norm.

In 960 a new dynasty, the Song, replaced the Tang and initiated another restructuring similar to the initial Qin-Han transition. Though there were major continuities, the mode of governance shifted from legalism toward Confucianism. One fruit of this restructuring was the more definitive consolidation of bureaucratic control, with the examination system for entry into the civil service replacing the prior recruitment system based primarily on recommendations. (Another fruit was economic growth, as we’ll discuss a little later.) Meritocracy in the civil service, however, was later systematically undermined both by the selling of offices, which took off in the seventeenth century as the state’s fiscal resources declined, and by continual government meddling.

In 1127 the northern part of Song China was conquered by the Jurchen people from inner Asia, who formed a new dynasty, the Jin. The Song moved their capital south in response, but then both the Jin and the rump Song Empire were conquered by the Mongols, led by Qubilai Khan, who set up the Yuan dynasty. After Qubilai died in 1294, there were another ten emperors before the Yuan dynasty also collapsed in the midst of mass revolts in the 1350s. In the meantime they had reconfigured the previous organization of the Chinese state, imposing a personalized model based on the hierarchy of their Mongol tribes and organizing the Chinese into hereditary occupational castes. Labor service was introduced as were a plethora of new taxes. Artisans were carted off en masse to the Mongol capital, Dadu, now Beijing, to meet the demand for goods and labor.

The Yuan were overthrown by Zhu Yuanzhang, who founded the Ming dynasty in 1368 after two decades of civil war. Taking the title Emperor Hongwu, he set off the Ming on the Shang Yang end of the spectrum. Hongwu quickly moved to concentrate more power in his hands, for example by abolishing the position of prime minister, which had until then acted as the voice for the civil service. In 1373 he abolished the examination system because he disliked the results, and he heavily and violently purged the civil service several times. Hongwu then attempted to return China to a new version of the well-field system. During his thirty-year reign, Hongwu strove to reverse the marketization of the economy and even went back to collecting taxes in kind rather than in money. In 1374 he banned overseas trade with an edict known as the “sea ban,” a prohibition that would last until close to the end of the sixteenth century (only to be reimposed periodically thereafter).

Starting in 1380, Hongwu initiated a massive expropriation of land from large landowners and by the end of his reign perhaps half of the land in the core province of Jiangnan, around the Yangtze delta where his capital, Nanjing, was, had been seized by the state. Despotic state power remained palpable throughout the Ming dynasty. In the 1620s Confucian-inspired criticism of the state emerged with the founding of the Donglin faction around the Donglin Academy in Wuxi County, about 50 miles west of Shanghai. This group even had the effrontery to compose a memorial they called the “Twenty-Four Crimes” (of the state). The response of the Tianqi emperor was to execute twelve of the leaders, while a thirteenth committed suicide. Hundreds more accused of being sympathizers were purged. Their supporters persisted along with other groups inspired by them, such as the Restoration Society (Fushe), only to be ruthlessly repressed by the Qing in the 1660s. Criticism was not allowed.

The Song-Ming transition, taking China back toward legalism, reminds us that an unbridled state doesn’t spell liberty for the citizens. On the contrary, it is typically the basis of dominance in the hands of the state, which is what Lord Shang recommended and the Ming quite happily followed.

Cutting the Queue

The intensifying despotism of the Ming state led to a series of uprisings, such as the Red Turban rebellion in the 1620s, underscoring one of the key drawbacks of the legalist model. The dynasty was finally swept away by internal dissent and the opportunism of another expansionary inner Asian people, the Manchus, who formed the Qing dynasty. A firsthand account of the expansion of Manchu power comes from a local history of T’an-ch’eng County, situated close to the coast roughly halfway between Beijing and Shanghai:

It was on 30 January 1643 that the great army invaded the city, slaughtered the officials, and killed 70 or 80 per cent of the gentry, clerks and common people; inside the city walls and out they killed tens of thousands, in the streets and the courtyards and alleys the people all herded together were massacred or wounded, the remnants trampled each other down, and of those fleeing the majority were injured. Until 21 February 1643 the great army pitched its camps in our county borders … They stayed for twenty-two days; over the whole area many were looted and burned, killed and wounded. They also destroyed Ts’angshan-pao, killing more than ten thousand men and women there.

By 1644 the Manchus, even if they didn’t seem intent on “winning hearts and minds,” had taken Beijing and established what would be the last Chinese dynasty. Before they could get there, a bandit leader, Li Zicheng, created another dynasty that lasted six weeks. His improvised regime graded elites, eunuchs, merchants, great landlords, and high officials by income levels and took some 20 to 30 percent of their wealth. Li himself accumulated a fortune of 70 million taels of silver. He even started to talk about the equal-field system, before he was ejected from the throne by a Manchu army.

The Manchus, like the Mongols, were outsiders and had to bring the indigenous Chinese under control. One interesting strategy was the “tonsure decree” which stipulated that all men had to adopt the hairstyle of the Manchus with shaved forehead and a pigtail. The Qing decided that this was a way to force all Chinese to conform to the new dynasty. In March 1647, three years after the Manchus had first occupied Beijing, Chang Shang, the governor of Kansu Province, was on an inspection tour. By March 4 he had reached Yung-ch’ang, a county lying just within the Great Wall. Assembled to greet him was the entire student body of the county school. He noted, “I espied one man who seemed to have retained the hair on the front of his head. After I reached the county yamen [the residence of the local magistrate], I summoned all of the students for academic examination” and “I personally went over to the man in question and removed his cap. Indeed, his hair was totally unshaven.” Local officials assured Chang that posters reporting the tonsure decree had been posted and that the culprit, Lü K’o-hsing, had no excuse. Chang had Lü thrown into jail and wrote to the emperor requesting that he be immediately executed “to uphold the laws of the ruling dynasty.” The reply quickly came, “Let him be executed on the spot. But what about the local officials, the household head, the local headman, and the neighbors?” The outcome was that Lü’s unshaven head was cut from his body and displayed in public to “warn the masses.” The patriarch of Lü’s household, along with the local headman and neighbors, were all beaten and the county magistrate was fined three months wages.

The Qing dynasty’s anxiety about hairstyles persisted throughout their reign. In 1768 a mass scare of “soul stealing” gripped the empire. There was a rash of cutting men’s queues, supposedly to steal their souls. A captured soul would allow one to exert power over others. The Chinese government, under the Qianlong emperor, reacted vigorously to accusations of queue cutting. One technique they regularly used to get to the bottom of a case was the chia-kun, or “pressing beam,” which was applied to extract a confession. This could either be an “ankle-press,” a device for slowly crushing the ankles, or an alternate instrument that created multiple fractures of the shinbones.

One accused of soulstealing in 1769 was a monk, Hai-yin. When arrested he was found to be carrying some short lengths of hair, which he claimed he had obtained years before, and indeed he was carrying them on a pole in full sight. He was interrogated and the local authorities decided that torture was required to get to the truth. But the monk was resilient, and after a few days, the local authorities remarked, “If we torture him more just now, he might die, and then we would be unable to uncover anything.” “Right,” the Qianlong emperor jotted in the vermilion-colored ink he used when annotating official documents. Hai-yin resisted further and the emperor was informed that unfortunately the prisoner “had contracted a prevalent illness of the season” and was also suffering from infected torture wounds. In fact, the situation got so frustrating that the local magistrate decided that it would be “better to publicly execute him in order to dispel the suspicions of the crowd,” since rumors had started to fly around after Hai-yin’s arrest. Therefore the authorities “had the criminal taken to the public square and beheaded and the head exposed to show the crowd.” Another monk, Ming-yuan, was similarly accused. Within a week of being arrested he was dead. “Noted,” the Qianlong emperor added in vermilion. So it wasn’t just the Franks who were obsessed with hair, even if the Qing showed their obsession in quite a different manner.

Enforcement of the tonsure decree wasn’t the only way the Qing signaled to their newly conquered people that they meant business. In May 1645 elites in the Yangtze delta rebelled against the new state and Qing generals massacred about 200,000 men, women, and children. An eyewitness account, A Record of Ten Days in Yangzhou by Wang Xiuchu, makes for harrowing reading. After Qing forces had destroyed the city of Yangzhou, the survivors were sent on a forced march:

Some women came up … they were partially naked, and they stood in mud so deep that it reached their calves. One was embracing a girl, whom a soldier lashed and threw into the mud before driving her away. One soldier hoisted a sword and led the way, another leveled his spear and drove us from behind, and a third moved back and forth in the middle to make sure no one got away. Several dozen people were herded together like cattle or goats. Any who lagged behind were flogged or killed outright. The women were bound together at their necks with a heavy rope—strung one to another like pearls. Stumbling with each step, they were covered with mud. Babies lay everywhere on the ground. The organs of those trampled like turf under horses’ hooves or people’s feet were smeared in the dirt, and the crying of those still alive filled the whole outdoors. Every gutter or pond that we passed was stacked with corpses, pillowing each other’s arms and legs. Their blood had flowed into the water, and the combination of the green and red was producing a spectrum of colors. The canals, too, had been filled to level with dead bodies.

Despotism on the Cheap

Being outsiders, the Qing felt their reign was more precarious than their predecessors’, and were concerned that taxation would incite opposition against their rule. This was, as we have seen, a familiar theme going back to the founding of the Han dynasty. One scare was the Ma Ch’ao-chu conspiracy of 1752. Ma was a peasant from Hupei who fell under the influence of a monk who convinced him that he had a grand destiny. Ma began to assert connections with the remains of the Ming regime that now inhabited the “Kingdom of the Western Sea” and was ruled by a Ming “Young Lord.” The kingdom supposedly contained 36,000 armed warriors as well as the Ming general Wu San-kuei. Ma gathered followers, claiming that he was a general in this kingdom and that magic flying machines would bring the kingdom’s army to attack the Yangtze valley at any moment. As Ma’s movement gained momentum, officials fortuitously discovered newly forged swords at what turned out to be one of his camps. Ma fled, but some of his relatives were captured. A manhunt was launched which led to the arrest of hundreds of suspects and went on for years even though Ma was never found. Captured disciples related how, upon joining the group and entering one of Ma’s bases, people “smeared their mouths with blood and swallowed paper charms. Also they let their hair grow long and didn’t shave their foreheads,” a clear anti-Qing gesture. Those arrested were “tortured with extreme severity” and their lives were only spared if they confessed. The Qianlong emperor noted in vermilion, “A single spark can start a prairie-fire.”

The Qing state was always anxious about rebellion (and for good reason), though this did not mean that they refrained from arbitrary actions. These included the reimposition of the Ming sea ban and Emperor Kangxi’s forceful removal in 1661 of essentially all people who lived along the entire southern coast of China to ten miles inland to control trade and piracy.

To deal with the threat of rebellion, the Qing decided in 1713 to take a step toward the Confucian end of the legalist-Confucian axis and freeze the major source of income for the state, land taxes, in nominal terms. From then on everyone paid a fixed sum of money per mou (conventionally taken to be approximately 0.15 acres). Since prices rose substantially during the century, the real value of tax revenues available to the state fell dramatically. There wouldn’t be much public service provision under the Qing.

Indeed, the few public services that the state provided, such as the granary system of famine relief and large infrastructure projects such as the Grand Canal, withered away. The state could no longer afford to buy the grain needed to stock the granaries, and by 1840 the Canal had fallen into disrepair and was impassable. Between 1824 and 1826 the whole system for controlling the waters of the Yellow River collapsed as a consequence of the lack of maintenance of the locks and dikes, and the absence of dredging necessary to stop silting. Devastating floods followed.

It’s worth understanding how the Chinese state was organized at this time, and why it was unable to support commercial and industrial activities or supply many public services. At the top were six ministries or boards—personnel, revenue, rites, war, works, and punishment. The terminology was long-lasting and interesting; not justice, but hsing pu, translated as “punishment.” In fact, the oldest known legal codes inscribed on bronze vessels were called not law books or legal codes, but “Books of Punishment,” very much consistent with how Shang Yang thought about the law. The Tang code of 653 is the oldest surviving complete legal code that we have (only fragments of the Qin code remain). It was modified significantly over the years, and the Qing produced their definitive version in 1740. These codes reaffirm that Chinese laws weren’t there to provide justice and certainly not to support liberty, but to administer and regulate society. They were not interested in defendants’ rights against the state. Any law could be modified or nullified by the emperor, who was above the law. The treatment of defendants in judicial procedures suggests that the defendant was guilty until proven innocent. Just in case they had forgotten something, statute 386 of the Qing penal code allowed for a severe beating to be administered to someone “doing what ought not to be done.”

As we have seen, one of the great claims to fame of the Chinese state was that they chose civil servants through a system of competitive examinations. The aspiration for meritocracy was present even in the days of the Qin, though it only became more systematic with the Song and perhaps reached its zenith with the Qing. There were three layers to the exam. At the lowest level people could attempt to qualify as licentiates. By 1700, some 500,000 people had qualified at this lowest level. Twice every three years several thousands of them were certified to gather in their provincial capital for a test that took three days and two nights. About 95 percent failed. The stakes were very high.

Passing the provincial exam guaranteed permanent elite status and important tax and legal exemptions. Members of officialdom could not be arrested, investigated, or tortured without permission of the emperor, and if found guilty, the usual punishments inflicted on commoners, such as bambooing, exile, or death, were commutable to monetary fines. There was the chance to get an official position as well. There was still one more rung to go, however. In the year after the provincial examination, those who had passed gathered in Beijing for the metropolitan exam. There were only 300 slots to be filled, and 90 percent of the candidates failed. These 300 winners were then personally graded by the emperor with the highest chosen for work in the central ministries and the lowest assigned as subnational officials, such as the magistrates. In the Qing period there were about 1,300 counties, grouped into 180 prefectures, which were in turn combined into eighteen provinces, each with a governor. Each county had a magistrate, the executive arm of the Qing state in the county. Because the population of the empire by the end of the seventeenth century was around 300 million, this meant that on average a magistrate was in charge of around 230,000 people. Large counties could easily have one million people in them. Each magistrate had a staff working for him, but these were not state employees; either the magistrate had to pay them himself out of his own stipend or they had to live off what scholars of China translate into English as “squeeze,” what they could extract from ordinary people. When it came to his judicial functions, the magistrate was the detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury all rolled into one. In addition, he was in charge of public works, defense, and policing.

What did these very difficult civil service exams ask? In 1669 the examiners of Shantung asked the aspirants of T’an-ch’eng County to ponder and explain three passages of text. From the Analects of Confucius there was, “They who know the truth,” and then, “The Master said, ‘Man is born for uprightness. If a man lose his uprightness, and yet lives, his escape from death is the effect of mere good fortune.’ The Master said ‘They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.’” They also had to reflect on the man of sincerity: “Shall this individual have any being or anything beyond himself, on which he depends? Call him man in his ideal, how earnest he is! Call him an abyss, how deep he is! Call him Heaven how vast is he!” There was also a passage from Mencius. All the students failed. In fact not one student from T’an-ch’eng passed the exam between 1646 and 1708.

Though the examination system was competitive, it did not test or encourage any technical knowledge or for that matter any skills that would be relevant for running a bureaucracy or governing the country. Magistrates were supposed to enforce the law without any legal training, and there were no private lawyers or law practitioners. Many nonmeritocratic elements had also crept into the system. As many as one-third of magistrates were appointed at the recommendation of governors. Perhaps most important, the whole system was immensely personalized in the hands of the emperor, who could appoint, promote, and demote people at will. As the Qianlong emperor put it himself, “The evaluation and selection [of high officials] will be daily borne in Our breast.”

In response to the lack of tax revenues, starting in the 1680s with the Kangxi emperor, the Qing began selling examination certificates en masse, in effect auctioning off membership to the elite. By 1800 there were an estimated 350,000 holders of purchased degrees. Since the Qing state was unable to pay people properly, there developed an orgy of corruption that reached its peak in the late eighteenth century during the “reign” of Heshen.

Born around 1750, Heshen was a mere palace guard who in 1775 caught the eye of the Qianlong emperor. Supposedly, the emperor saw in him a concubine with whom he had been in love in his youth. He quickly heaped twenty bureaucratic appointments on Heshen, including presidency of the Board of Revenue. Heshen soon built up a massive network of corruption, bringing in appointees who were dependent on his favors. He also developed a veto power over all appointments within the state. He demanded kickbacks for every position and favored people whom he considered loyal to him. In the course of his twenty-year rule over the Chinese civil service, he seems to have systematically undermined the functioning of the Qing state at all levels. As soon as the Qianlong emperor died, his son, the Jiaqing emperor, had Heshen arrested and forced him to commit suicide. He was presented with a list of twenty crimes, including riding a horse and going by sedan chair in the Forbidden City. Most damning, though, was his accumulation of assets and possessions. These included, among others, “Twenty original pavilions and kiosks; Sixteen newly added pavilions; One main residence with thirteen sections and 730 rooms; One eastern residential wing with seven sections and 360 rooms; One western residential wing with seven sections and 360 rooms; One Huizhou-style new residence with seven sections and 620 rooms; One counting house with 730 rooms; One garden with sixty-four pavilions and kiosks; [About 120,000 acres] of farmland.” In addition to all this property Heshen was found to have 58,000 ounces of pure gold, 54,600 silver ingots, one and a half million strings of copper cash, huge amounts of jade, ginseng, pearls, and rubies, 380 silver teaspoons, and 108 silver mouthwashing bowls. Heshen became a symbol of the rapid decline of the Qing state. Significantly, however, though Heshen was eliminated, the Jiaqing emperor did not implement a broader purge of the civil service. Nor were there serious reforms to the institution of the Censorate, which was supposed to investigate magistrates and lower-level civil servants. By Qing times it was present only in Beijing and hardly able to police such a huge empire. The lack of state capacity and public services continued.

The discontent bred by the corruption and ineffectiveness of the civil service, and the arbitrary nature of Qing rule, having no other forum for expression, again fed into rebellion. Between 1796 and 1804 the White Lotus sect started a massive uprising, probably organized in response to arbitrary extortion instigated by Heshen’s collaborators in the state. In 1850 the empire was rocked by the Taiping Rebellion, possibly started by disgruntled examination holders who were unable to find official positions due to all the corrupt practices. It devastated the country for fourteen years, caused the deaths of millions of people, and bankrupted the state.

A Dependent Society

The defining feature of despotism is its ability to deny a society the means of participating in political decision making. This is exactly what happened in China where any element of popular participation in government was snuffed out by the rise of the Qin state. It never reappeared. Could it be that society had other ways of controlling and shaping the Chinese Leviathan? Rebellion was certainly a live option, one that created a great deal of anxiety for Chinese emperors. Nevertheless, the threat of rebellion was not a constant presence and did not translate into a systematic influence on political decisionmaking. What about autonomous societal organizations (what is sometimes referred to as “civil society”), capable of articulating demands and making suggestions to the Chinese state? Was there such societal organization in China, even if the popular assemblies and other institutionalized means of societal control over government were absent?

One place where we might expect to see such societal organization and mobilization is the commercial city of Hankou on the Yangtze River, now part of Wuhan. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hankou was a bustling metropolis, active with merchants and artisans. Guilds and other voluntary associations started springing up in the city. The most powerful business interests were the two hundred or so salt merchants who chose their own “head merchant.” A charge on salt transactions was put into the “coffer funds” and used for famine relief and militia costs for the protection of the businesses. There were also associations for other merchant groups. This might be viewed as the beginning of an autonomous societal organization.

But appearances can be deceptive. There was little autonomy and little local solidarity in this society. The merchant groups all had their roots in “native-place associations” that came from different parts of China; the salt merchants were from Huizhou, while the tea merchants came from Canton and Ningpo, and they didn’t even live in Hankou for most of the year. The tea guild was a branch of the one set up in Shanghai. These associations consisted of groups of families from specific regions or towns, who banded together to share capital or information, and often lived together in separate neighborhoods. Different groups of merchants did not cooperate with each other and had little interest in investing in public services and organizations in Hankou. In fact, a clear sign of a lack of local solidarity was that merchants from different parts of China, rather than working together, engaged in incessant conflict. In 1888 Anhui and Hunan guildsmen got into a conflict over a pier, and when the local magistrate ruled in favor of the former, the latter attacked the Anhui merchants. The annual dragon boat races became so violent, with Cantonese fighting people from Hubei, that they had to be banned. So the nature of mercantile activity in China made it difficult for local society to organize or develop its own identity.

More significant than the local squabbling was the nature of the most important business in the city, salt. This wasn’t the sort of endeavor wherein aspiring entrepreneurs competed to expand their business. Salt was a state monopoly, and the power and wealth of the salt merchants was a consequence of the state’s grant. The head merchant was typically a rising member of the imperial bureaucracy who had passed the lower levels of the civil service examinations and owed his position to official appointment. This made salt merchants quasi-governmental officials, and their warehouses and salt markets were considered part of the public domain. Even the coffer funds were not under the collective control of the salt merchants, nor were they typically used for providing public services for the city or the merchants. Rather, they were controlled by the head merchant and often used for hiring friends and relatives in the salt administration.

In the nineteenth century, we see the proliferation of new types of business bureaus, including the Official Ferry Bureau, the Telegraph Bureau, and the Lijin Bureau (which was in charge of new taxes). Yet appointments at these bureaus were vetted by provincial officials. Notable in its absence is any description of the activities of bureaus, guilds, or organized merchants trying to influence local officials or the functioning of the state. No doubt this went on behind the scenes, but it was not tolerated publicly, which meant that it did not emerge as a vehicle for popular participation in policy making. After 1863 the salt monopoly was reorganized and about six hundred merchants were allowed to buy tickets to trade in salt. Thereafter, official control of trade became even more intense. Other guilds were active in maintaining streets, opening fire lanes, and building bridges, but these actions were initiated by the state. In 1898 when a Hankou chamber of commerce was set up, it was in response to an imperial edict. None of this looks like Swallowfield, in the previous chapter, where it was the local community that instigated its own organization, initiated new public services, and made demands for more and better governance from the state.

In Europe, at least since the seventeenth century, free media played a critical role in the organization of an active, assertive society. This had no parallel in China either. There seems to have been no widely available newspaper in Hankou until the Shenbao in the 1870s. But the Shenbao was published in Shanghai by an Englishman, Ernest Major, and though it did carry news about Hankou, it seems unlikely to have provided a tool for a more mobilized society.

So on closer examination, even where we would expect the most autonomous, assertive society to emerge, we see something quite different—a society subservient to and dependent on the state.

Dependent or not, perhaps Chinese society benefited from the state’s powerful control as this relaxed the cage of norms and created greater room for social and economic freedoms. We have seen that other state-building efforts, such as those of Mohammed and Shaka in Chapter 4, break stifling norms and disrupt kin-based alliances that stand in their way, loosening the cage of norms a little in the process. But in the Chinese context, kin groups appear to play a major role despite the state’s despotism. For example, native place associations were based on lineages. This and other kin relations were in fact encouraged and supported by the state as part of its strategy of managing society.

To see the importance of lineage in China, consider the New Territories, the part of mainland China inland from Hong Kong island. In 1955 this region was still governed by the British, and the commissioner sent out a questionnaire seeking to determine when particular surnames settled in a village and the number of generations since settlement. In the Ping Shan area thirty-four villages were surveyed. Among these, twenty-seven consisted of people who all had the same surname. Of these, one could cite a genealogy stretching back 29 generations, another 28 generations, eight of 27, one of 26, one of 25, two of 23, two of 22, one each of 16, 15, and 14, and so on. But that’s not the most amazing thing. Of the eight villages that could cite their ancestry back 27 generations, seven of them had the surname Tang.

Now, it could be that Tangs just like hanging out with other Tangs (even though neither of us has friends called Robinson or Acemoglu or lives anywhere near any of our relatives). But that’s not the primary reason for this homogeneity. It comes about because the Tangs owned lineage land collectively and have ancestral halls and temples where they honor the Tang ancestors through rituals and ceremonies. In one county in Guangdong Province, close to the New Territories, lineage groups owned 60 percent of total land before the Communist revolution. In another Guangdong county the proportion was 30 percent. Lineages were not therefore just a group of individuals, they were organized corporatively, and these institutions, their halls and lands, have a deep history in China. Lineages imposed their own rules and tight norms. They dealt with disputes and disagreements. They were in turn fostered and encouraged by the Chinese state because they were deemed to be useful for controlling society and managing disputes, especially given how thin on the ground magistrates were and their limited ability to govern society, resolve conflicts, or provide basic services. From the Song state onward, the Chinese state came up with the idea of delegating these tasks to lineage groups. As early as 1064, the Song passed an edict encouraging the creation of charitable estates, which were the basis of lineage land. Lineages then took on many functions. If you got into a dispute, you were far more likely to encounter the lineage elder than the county magistrate. These elders often didn’t arise spontaneously, however; the state legislated them into existence. An order of 1726 stipulated:

In villages and walled rural communities with lineages with more than one hundred or more, members dwell together … A tsu-cheng [lineage head] is established in each lineage.

The lineages were thus integrated into the local state. The Ming built on the Song initiatives, which encouraged the construction of ancestral halls and the institutionalization of the family structures. In exchange for providing state-like services, lineages got rights and perquisites, like the opportunity to take part in the salt monopoly. The Tangs were “masters of the market” with the monopoly right to hold a market in their area, and only they had the right to build shops in the vicinity of a market. They also had their own militia.

A Reversal of Chinese Fortune

The history of state despotism we have sketched had clear implications not just for liberty, but also for the Chinese economy. Compared to the Warring States period, the emergence of a centralized state with its ability to maintain order, impose laws, raise taxes, and invest in infrastructure likely had major positive effects on economic activity, securing an era of despotic growth. But the limitations of such growth are obvious. As we have seen, starting with the well-field model of agriculture, there were periodic attempts to closely regulate and control society, whereupon the despotic power of the state erased economic opportunities and incentives for most Chinese. The resulting economic hardships and discontent then triggered movements away from Lord Shang’s vision of a tightly controlled economy toward a Confucian approach with a more relaxed grip and lower taxes. Though these relaxations improved private incentives to some degree, they created a state bereft of tax revenues and the capacity to provide law and order or public services necessary for greater private investments. As these different approaches to the economy came and went, Chinese economic fortunes ebbed and flowed. But they never went beyond despotic growth. There was no liberty, no broad-based opportunities, few incentives. So there would be no industrial revolution, no economic takeoff.

The implications of the change from one phase of despotic growth to another are clear from the collapse of the Qin and emergence of the Han. They come into even clearer focus in the later transition between the Tang and Song states. The An Lushan rebellion, itself a clear reaction to the overbearing control of the Tang state, destroyed the equal-field system. The Tang state’s onerous compulsory labor services were no longer enforceable, and the decline of other types of servile labor soon followed. The web of market regulations was similarly eroded. Commerce had been restricted to designated markets, and merchants had been actively discriminated against. The state itself undertook all long-distance trade and ran 1,000 state farms. This entire system gradually atrophied.

Out of this undoing came not just a more Confucian organization of society, but also a new and more extensive market economy and a less despotic brand of growth. As the An Lushan rebellion pushed the population to the south, the economy refocused around the Yangtze River floodplain. This was followed by increased investment in land reclamation and the building of dikes, and expanded cultivation of rice as well as tea, which became a common beverage for the first time. We also see during this period the emergence of national markets for luxury goods such as fine silks, lacquer, porcelain, and paper. Other goods, like textiles, were now organized around production for the market. Trade wasn’t just within China. Overseas trade with Japan and all over South Asia boomed. The Song introduced the world’s first paper money, facilitating the expansion of trade that was already on the rise and created an environment that led to the invention of an array of new and fascinating technologies, including the movable-type printing press, gunpowder, the water clock, the compass, windmills, smelting technology for iron, various astronomical instruments, and an early form of spinning wheel. There was also a significant improvement in agricultural productivity, partly due to extensive irrigation. Nevertheless, these technologies were driven by the state’s demand and under its control. The famous water clocks were built by and for government officials. Agricultural innovations and irrigation were state projects, and so were the advances in metallurgy.

Whatever their sources, the increase in agricultural productivity was more than sufficient to support the doubling of the population of Song China, and expanding markets and innovation meant that around 1090, when we have reliable information, China had the highest level of average living standards in the world, about 16 percent above England’s. This enormous achievement of the Song dynasty showcases the potential power of despotic growth, particularly in an era when technology was simple by modern standards and could be shepherded by the state. While Europe was staggering in the corridor, with the state and society struggling with each other, China could get ahead, because the despotic state could do things by fiat that nascent Shackled Leviathans could not.

But it didn’t last. Despotic growth never does. The Yuan dynasty that followed the Song undermined the meritocratic civil service, introduced a system of hereditary occupations, reversed the expansion of trade and industry, and generally curtailed economic opportunities and incentives. The reversal was completed with the Ming accession to power, which brought their own version of the well-field system, sea bans, and a great deal of insecurity for all private businesses. Commerce and urbanization contracted and incentives to innovate vanished. China started falling behind Europe.

An illuminating example of how the Ming emperors further stifled economic development comes again from the organization of the salt trade. The government began to mortgage the right to have the salt monopoly in exchange for transporting grain to troops in border regions. Someone got the right to produce salt if they shipped the grain for the government. When the grain was delivered, the merchant received a certificate to be redeemed in the capital, Nanjing, for another certificate that allowed him to sell a certain amount of salt. Some merchants started specializing in moving the grain to the frontier and then selling the certificates for having transported grain to others who subsequently sold the salt. The price of these certificates fluctuated since the government also granted the right to sell salt to members of the royal family, palace eunuchs, and senior officials in the bureaucracy. In 1617 the emperor decided to scrap the certificates, making the outstanding ones worthless and effectively expropriating the property rights of those who had them. He then sold the monopoly to trade in salt to a few different select merchant houses. This initiated a system that came to be known as “government supervision, merchant management,” which in practice meant connected individuals making money because of government grants. In 1832 the system the Ming had set up was changed once more, this time to attract small investors. Yet as we saw earlier, in 1863 it was altered again in Hankou, further tightening the state’s grip. Participation in the salt monopoly was a risky business.

The transition between the Ming and Qing created yet more chaos, including the reimposition of the sea ban in 1662. Even though the international trade ban was lifted by 1683, trade with Europeans was severely restricted. After 1757 Europeans could trade only in Canton and the right to trade with them was given to a monopoly called the Cohong. It wasn’t just overseas trade; the Yunnan copper mines were similarly granted to a monopoly.

All the same, the Ming-Qing transition seems to have led to some economic revival. The Qing allowed trade as long as it was under their control and deemed to benefit the welfare of rural society. They continued at first to provide some basic public services, most notably the “ever normal granary system” to counteract famine. The Qing also unwound the leftover hereditary occupation system from the Ming by 1683 and abolished bonded and servile labor after 1720. This relaxation led to yet another period of flourishing domestic trade and population expansion. But this revival was still no more than despotic growth, with all of its limitations.

There were several reasons for this. The most obvious was that the history of arbitrary state actions in China, for example in the case of the salt monopoly, still meant fairly insecure property rights and undermined incentives for investment or innovation. Affirming the absence of any shackles on the powers of the Chinese Leviathan, there was nothing, short of a wholesale rebellion, that could stop the imperial state expropriating the fruits of people’s labors except Confucian moral precepts to “store wealth among the people.” Yet the history of the Ming or the early Qing showed that even if the spirit was willing, the flesh was often weak. Only the very optimistic or the foolhardy could trust these moral guarantees in Ming-Qing China.

It wasn’t just lack of incentives in the form of insecure property rights. A general resistance, starting from the very top, toward mercantile activities, new technologies, and social mobility blocked economic prosperity. Fearing that economic activity, especially outside the purview of the state, would destabilize the status quo, all Chinese dynasties, not least the Qing, were suspicious of commerce and industry. This was one of the main reasons why sea bans were periodically reintroduced. It was also the reason why Chinese authorities were lukewarm toward new technologies. In the 1870s the first railway in China, the Wusong line linking the port of Wusong to Shanghai, was built by the British company of Jardine, Matheson and Co. It was bought up by the Qing government and duly destroyed. This suspicious, often hostile attitude to new technology and practices had significant consequences. In contrast, we saw in the previous chapter how the European industrial revolutions and dramatic improvements in living standards from the late eighteenth century onward were based on the embrace of new technologies.

Even more important was the inability or the unwillingness of the Qing state to construct the infrastructure necessary for modern economic institutions and economic activity. The civil component of the Qing legal code was mostly focused on the family and provided no guidelines for commercial contracts. Instead, the Qing let individuals write whatever contracts they liked outside any legal framework, perhaps to be enforced by lineages (again that cage of norms). This created a patchwork of contracts and arrangements, with crucial elements such as limited liability remaining absent until the early twentieth century. The Qing government did not even enforce a uniform system of weights and measures. According to H. B. Morse, a Canadian serving in the Chinese Maritime Customs House between 1874 and 1908, weights and measures varied by locality and even at the same place, and they were different in different trades. The dou, for example, was a measure of capacity, but depending on where you were, it varied between 176 and 1,800 cubic inches. Then there was the foot, chi, but what this meant depended on whether you were a tailor or a carpenter, and on where you tailored. So according to Morse, a chi could be anywhere between 8.6 and 27.8 inches. The common measure of area, a mou, showed the same variability. It could be anything between 3,840 and 9,964 square feet. Local guilds and business associations adopted and recognized these different standards, but the state did nothing to systematize them.

More generally, the Qing state, located at the Confucian end of the Lord Shang–Confucius pendulum, collected very little in taxes and was incapable of providing many of the public services necessary for economic activities to flourish. The legal system was so inadequate partly because the state had such a small number of magistrates charged with resolving the disputes and disagreements of 450 million Chinese. With few resources in the hands of the state, not only the administration of justice but also the infrastructure and the famed granary system started withering away.

All of these problems were rooted in the basic political deficiencies of the Chinese system. The Qing state was despotic, even if it chose not to impose high taxes or follow Lord Shang’s imprint. Despotism meant that society and the business community were unable to make demands and influence state policies, for example, in the form of better contract enforcement, more secure and predictable property rights, improved infrastructure, or support for investment and innovation.

The contrast with the European experience is once again stark. Most European states around the same time started playing a critical role in standardizing measures and providing a legal framework to support economic relations. European citizens were also rapidly developing a voice in politics. Britons, for example, could vote and petition Parliament to pass the laws that they wanted, and they did so with gusto. In China, all that a businessman could hope for was to get the right contacts, benefit from state-granted monopolies, and enjoy the security that connections would bring. This was one of the main reasons why the merchant families of the Qing era were so keen on getting a foothold in the civil service.

These pressures and machinations are well illustrated by the history of the biggest and wealthiest merchant group of the Qing period, a native place association from Anhui. The Anhui merchants, based at Hankou, Suzhou, and Yangzhou, traded salt, textiles, tea, and various other items all along the Yangtze River. But illustrating a more general pattern among leading merchants, their families rarely stayed in business, and instead poured their resources into preparing their children for the civil service examinations. One family that exemplified this pattern was the Ts’ao in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially they focused on the salt trade, but they soon merged business with education and government office holding. Ts’ao Shih-ch’ang, who started the prosperity of the family, was a salt merchant. His elder son became a student in the imperial academy, while the other son, Ching-ch’en, stayed in the salt trade. In the next generation, one son went into the salt trade, while all other offspring of Ching-ch’en were in the government. By the early nineteenth century only one branch of the whole extended family was still involved in any type of business. The rest had imperial degrees and had merged with the gentry and state elites (as the family tree of the Ts’ao in Map 11 shows). This transition was common. In Hankou, for example, Anhui merchants created what would become a famous academy for preparing their children, and those of others, for the imperial examinations. If this academy had provided education for workers and businessmen, it could have been useful for economic activity. Yet its focus was not imparting useful knowledge but preparing scions of privileged families for the arcane civil service examination. It wasn’t unsuccessful; between 1646 and 1802 the large salt merchant families managed to produce 208 scions who succeeded at the provincial level, and 139 more qualified at the metropolitan level. Of course, if they couldn’t pass the exams, then they could always buy the positions, and during the same period 140 members of these families did so.

Map 11. From Salt Merchants to Government Officials: The Ts’ao Family in the Eighteenth Century

Why were salt merchants so keen on leaving the business and moving into the civil service? Salt was as profitable as you would expect from a Chinese state monopoly. Since it was so important to the Qing state as a source of revenue, the merchants who had the monopoly enjoyed their fair share. That makes it even more puzzling that these families were so eager for their children to get out. Could it be because of the prestige of becoming part of the Chinese bureaucracy? The real reason was a little different. Even the salt monopoly wasn’t secure, for the state could turn against you at any moment, as we have seen with the Ming emperors. So it was not a bad idea to get out while you could. What’s more, having part of the family in the imperial bureaucracy meant greater security. And the imperial bureaucracy itself wasn’t a bad business during this period, as a contemporary novel, The Scholars, by Wu Jingzi, illustrates. In one passage, he relates how one Fan Jin has unsuccessfully dedicated his life to passing the lowest level of the examination hierarchy. At the age of fifty-four, Fan Jin has failed the exam more than twenty times over a period of thirty-four years. A new commissioner of education takes pity on him and decides to let him pass. Fan Jin is now able to take the next level of the exam at the province levels. The reaction of his relatives, though, is disbelief. Undeterred, Fan Jin decides to take the exam, but when he returns home his family has not eaten for two days and he has to go to the market to sell their only chicken to buy rice. While he’s there, mounted heralds arrive at his house to announce he has passed the provincial exam. He is immediately visited by a member of the elite to which he has now been admitted:

Mr. Zhang alighted from the [sedan] chair and came in. He was wearing an official’s gauze cap, sunflower-colored gown, gilt belt and black shoes … He took from his servant a packet of silver, and stated “I have brought nothing to show my respect except these fifty taels of silver, which I beg you to accept. Your honorable home is not good enough for you, and it will not be very convenient when you have many callers. I have an empty house on the main street by the east gate, which has three courtyards with three rooms in each … Allow me to present it to you.”

The gifts to his family keep pouring in:

Many people came to Fan Jin after that and made him presents of land and shops; while some poor couples came to serve him in return for protection. In two or three months he had menservants and maidservants, to say nothing of money and rice … he moved into the new house; and for three days he entertained guests with feasts and operas.

Passing such an exam didn’t just make you rich, it made you above the law. This is well illustrated by another Chinese novel of the eighteenth century, The Dream of the Red Chamber, written by Cao Xueqin. The book tells the story of a new magistrate dealing with a murder case. But the murderer is a powerful man in the community, his name appearing in Mandarin’s Life Preserver, the book that lists rich and powerful families in the area. The magistrate has to let him go, because if you were rich or you passed the exam and became established in the community, the laws didn’t apply to you. You could get away with murder.

The Mandate of Marx

Today China is no longer an empire. The imperial state collapsed in 1912, and the brief period of Republican rule was followed by the reign of warlords and the autocratic Kuomintang government. The ensuing civil war concluded in 1949 with the triumph of Communists led by Mao Zedong. There would be no more mandate of heaven. Lord Shang’s legalism and Confucius’s moral precepts were to be supplanted by Communist ideology. A rupture with the past.

Except that it wasn’t. The continuities were as strong as the differences. The mandate of heaven was to be replaced by the mandate of Marx. The defining characteristic of the Chinese state since the Qin times had been its overwhelming dominance over society. That did not change. In fact, it got worse under the rule of the Communist Party because of Mao’s insistence on securing a greater presence for the party and the state throughout the country. Despite its despotic posturing, the Qing state was absent in much of the country, and particularly in the countryside. Coming to power at the head of a peasant revolution, Mao intended to change that right away. As we saw in Chapter 1, by the time of the Great Leap Forward, party organizations and members were everywhere.

What created continuity with the imperial period was the essence of despotism—the inability of society to organize and influence policy making outside the hierarchy of the state. Mao wanted the only medium for political participation to be the Communist Party, which effectively meant control of the state and the political elite over citizens, with no reciprocal influence. This became painfully clear when during the Cultural Revolution there would be periodic calls for bottom-up criticism, which were then violently stamped out. There would be no voice for society under Communism.

Mao’s approach to the economy, too, reveals a lot of continuity with the earlier periods, and especially with Lord Shang’s blueprint for tight control and regulation of economic activity. Under a veneer of Marxist ideology, the collectivization of agriculture attempted what the well-field system had tried to do millennia earlier. Its consequences were much worse. Agricultural collectivization, combined with the drive toward industry under the auspices of the Great Leap Forward, led to famines that killed as many as 36 million people.

Nor were the attitudes of Mao and the Communist Party toward private businesses dissimilar to those of Lord Shang, who dubbed them “crafty and tricky.” Confucius similarly observed that “the gentleman understands rightness, whereas the petty person understands profit.” Merchants and industrialists were treated pretty much the same way as they were under the imperial state, and were only allowed to become members of the party in 2001. It was not until 2007 that a law governing private property rights was passed that made their assets more secure.

Growth Under Moral Leadership

Things changed after Mao’s death in 1976. A bitter power struggle at the top of the Communist Party concluded with Deng Xiaoping’s dominance over the party and the state in 1978. Deng initiated a radical transformation of the economy, preparing the ground for the subsequent massive boom of the Chinese economy. Should we see a rupture with the past in this transition?

Though there are undoubtedly many new elements in the post-1978 Chinese economy and politics, and it is critical to recognize these, there are remarkable continuities too. There is much in the Mao-Deng transition that resembles the Tang-Song and Ming-Qing transitions, which had previously stimulated economic growth by loosening the grip of the state over the economy and allowing elbow room for the market and private businesses. Just as in the earlier transitions, the economic transformations resulted from a combination of spontaneous eruptions of society that had been buckling under economic hardships and the elite’s decision to replace Lord Shang–style control with a more Confucian approach to the economy. We see the former in the first part of China to experience rapid industrial growth in the 1980s, Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, just south of Shanghai. As early as 1977, before Deng’s reforms, the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the Communist Party, complained that there was “an alarming case of Counterrevolutionary Restoration in Wenzhou.” The paper went on:

Collectivization had been turned into private farming, black market emerged, collective enterprises had collapsed and been replaced by underground factories and underground labor markets.

Indeed, de facto rural reforms had preceded Deng Xiaoping’s liberalization of agriculture in 1978. In 1986 Wenzhou was granted the status of an “experimental zone,” giving it freedom from “current rules and regulations, and policies of the nation.” By that time 41 percent of industrial production was already by the private sector (up from 1 percent in 1980). Alarmed by these developments, the party instructed local cadres to emphasize Communist leadership in economic matters, and news coverage and visits from outside the region were restricted. If the Communist Party could not stop what was going on in Wenzhou, it did not want that being broadcast. And it attempted to stop it. Local cadres actively tried to restrain private sector development, for example in the 1986–1987 “anti-bourgeois liberalism” campaign. It was only in 1988 that the Chinese Communist Party recognized private businesses with more than seven employees. Before then it had maintained the fiction that all nonstate production was by “households.” As the Communist Party withdrew from trying to control every aspect of the economy, there was a huge upsurge of entrepreneurship (much of this control had already collapsed during the Cultural Revolution, making some of the later loosening inevitable). In 1990 Wenzhou started its own export processing zone and built its own airport. The real initiative in Wenzhou came from society, not the state.

Nevertheless, the top-down element subsequently came to define the direction of the Chinese economy. Deng’s vision was one in which political power would remain in the hands of the Communist Party, which was supposed to be ruled in a more moral manner than under Mao. In fact, there is a striking parallel between the meritocratic Communist Party tapping the best talent to rule the country and the imperial bureaucracy of the earlier empires recruiting the best Chinese minds. Under the tutelage of the party, this system would create enough room for the market economy to flourish. In some ways, it worked brilliantly. China has become the second-largest economy in the world, and its spectacular growth, averaging about 8.5 percent since 1978, is the envy of every leader in the world.

It’s also undeniable that economic opportunities and incentives have improved. China has become an entrepreneurial society, and several of the founders and managers of the most successful Chinese corporations, including Jack Ma of Alibaba, come from modest backgrounds in provincial cities (nine of the ten wealthiest Chinese businessmen come from provincial cities, and only one originates from one of the six major cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, and Chengdu). Indeed, it would have been impossible for China to achieve what it has over the past four decades without such an expansion of opportunities and incentives. This is still despotic growth, however, under the auspices of the state and subject to the whim of the state, and one cannot take for granted that the moral leadership of the Communist Party will always point in the direction of continued economic growth. There is always the potential that unshackled power will be abused for private gain and destroy the potential for economic growth. How the use of despotic power for private gain can undermine incentives is illustrated by the closing down of the Xiushui market in Beijing in 2004. This was a thriving outdoor marketplace that had started spontaneously in 1985 as the government deregulated trade and markets. By 2004 it had become one of the most lively retail outlets in the city, with between 10,000 and 20,000 visitors doing around US$12 million of business per day. In that year local government officials decided to close the market down, relocating it to a new indoor space. The new space was built and controlled by a new entrepreneur with the right political connections who then proceeded to auction off the priviledge to operate in the new market. One bid was as high as US$480,000. In effect, not unlike what the Ming emperors did to salt merchants, the government expropriated the property rights of the old stallholders and transferred them to somebody completely different. It’s not too far-fetched to believe that some of the benefits were shared with people in the local government.

Another recent example of political factors blocking economic activity comes from the Township Village Enterprises (TVEs). TVEs were an innovation of the 1980s and were essentially private businesses, but often owned by local governments. The explanation favored by economists as to why this arrangement was so successful is that, with the imperfect institutions of China, forging a coalition with local government officials was a way for entrepreneurs to protect their property rights. Starting in the mid-1990s, however, TVEs started to decline and by the next decade, they had vanished completely. The reason for this appears not to be some natural transition to a more efficient economy, but reflects the fact that national politicians decided to favor large state-owned enterprises that did not want to face competition from the largely rural TVEs. TVEs were ordered to focus on rural areas and were starved of credit. They were squeezed out of existence by political decisions. This is just one facet of a more general problem—property rights are heavily dependent on political favors in China, and there is neither an independent judiciary nor any attempt to apply laws equally to political elites, just as during imperial periods. One has to hope that the moral leadership of the Politburo of the Communist Party, or better, the connections with the right officials, won’t disappear too abruptly. So the way for entrepreneurs to maintain their property rights is to enter the state and stay on good terms with it in the same way that businesspeople did in the Qing dynasty. This can help explain the enormous expansion of the Communist Party in the past twenty years. Many leading businessmen, including Jack Ma, are members of the party.

In another parallel with the past, the Communist state continues to be worried about revolt and political instability. In 2005, when rural discontent rocked the countryside, the Communist Party responded by abolishing land taxes—a similar impulse that led the Qing to freeze the nominal value of land taxes in 1713. A major problem for the Qing state was its inability to raise enough taxes to provide public services. So far rapid economic growth has solved this problem and allowed the Chinese state to build massive anounts of new infrastructure. But what happens when economic growth slows down? The Communist Party has defined its legitimacy around continued economic growth and its moral leadership. Its current leader, President Xi, is fond of quoting Confucius and comparing himself to the Pole Star. But things can change, especially if the homage that Xi and the Chinese leadership expect ceases. It is not such a far-fetched possibility that any economic growth and social transformation can come to be perceived as politically destabilizing and the party can turn against economic change because it deems it to be politically threatening. For example, Deng Xiaoping’s reform agenda almost went into reverse after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests as Communist elites blamed economic reforms and the social changes they induced for the pro-democracy movement.

Of course, one could hope that China would ultimately transition toward a society with less anxiety about growth and order, more liberty, and greater security. A famous argument in social science, sometimes referred to as “modernization theory,” maintains that as a nation becomes richer, it becomes freer and more democratic. So can we expect such a transformation from China? That’s unlikely. Almost two and a half millennia of travel along the despotic path, away from the corridor, means that any change of direction is unlikely to be seamless and any hope of a swift “end of history” in China is likely to remain a fantasy. (Evidence from other countries does not support the optimistic premise of modernization theory either.)

If modernization will not automatically bring liberty, can we hope that the model forged by the Chinese Communist Party will secure vibrant innovation in an economy organized along despotic lines? Can it cultivate innovation without liberty? Can it pour resources into areas such as artificial intelligence in order to gain an innovative advantage? Historical evidence suggests the answer is no, at least so far as diverse and ongoing innovation is concerned. The lack of an autonomous society and broad-based opportunities and incentives doesn’t mean no growth; China has achieved rapid growth, even if this has been driven by investment and industrialization based on existing technology. It doesn’t mean no innovation and no technological progress, as China’s own experience during the Song dynasty and the Soviet Union’s early successes attest to. The Soviet Union not only produced some of the world’s best mathematicians and physicists, but made important technological breakthroughs in a number of areas, not least in military technology and the space race. Even North Korea today, despite its Shang Yang–style control over the economy and society, has managed to produce advanced weapons. Yet in all of these cases successes came as a solution to well-posed problems in narrow areas and in response to government demands (and not in small part from transferring and copying existing advances from elsewhere). Diverse and ongoing innovation in a range of fields, essential for future growth, depends not on solving existing problems but on dreaming up new ones. That requires autonomy and experimentation. You can provide massive amounts of resources (and data for artificial intelligence applications), you can order individuals to work hard, but you cannot order them to be creative. Creativity is the essential ingredient for sustained innovation and critically depends on a large number of individuals experimenting, thinking in their own different ways, breaking the rules, failing, and sometimes succeeding, which is exactly what we saw in Chapters 5 and 6 among the bustling, unruly, and socially mobile people of Italian city-states and the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution. But how can you replicate that without liberty? What if you got in the way of somebody powerful or ran against ideas sanctioned by the party? What if you broke the rules? Better not to experiment.