I recently came across this amazing factoid from a Wall Street Journal review of famous historian Mary Beard’s new book Emperor of Rome: “the Roman Empire functioned with about 95 percent fewer senior personnel than the Han dynasty that ruled at the same time in China.” These two empires contained roughly the same population, around 60 million people, during the early centuries of the Common Era. The population of the Roman Empire was in fact, more ethnically, religiously, and linguistically heterogeneous, and more spread out, throughout the Mediterranean basin, than that of contemporaneous Han China.
And yet, Rome functioned for centuries. There is something to be said, then, about the benefits of a loosely construed empire, with many local autonomous communities and towns. The early Roman Empire, of the first two centuries of the Common Era is described in the book The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium as such:
“In the past, emperors demanded a set tribute from each province or city, and local authorities, usually the city councils under loose supervision by imperial officials, allocated the tax burden, often in ways that benefited them. The governors toured the provinces with a small staff to prevent major problems and resolve disputes. The central government was essentially a skeleton staff.” -Kaldellis, Anthony. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (p. 34). Oxford University Press.
The move toward a more centralized, bureaucratic state is generally seen as a net positive, especially in the the eyes of modern people. After all, bureaucracy represents efficiency, standardization, and impartial justice and rules. These are all true. I do believe that a state needs uniform laws and a single military apparatus. Butone can also see plainly the disadvantages of the overly bureaucratized state from the example of the Roman Empire.
After the Crisis of the Third Century (a period of constant strife, coups, and civil wars), the Roman Empire began to move toward a bureaucratic model during the reign of Diocletian (284-305 CE), and this work continued for centuries. The centralized bureaucratic state is a venue for homogenization of laws, politics, and culture, that can have an adverse impact on local traditions and even the ability for local communities to defend themselves. In a state with a professional army stationed at the frontiers, communities further within the empire often have trouble defending themselves if the frontiers are breached: they lack military experience, arms, fortifications, and the armed men needed to fight back. This was an issue in the Roman Empire of the 4th and 5th centuries CE. In fact, one can argue that the rise of feudalism was a self-correcting local response to the phenomenon of centralization. Consider this in the light of the fourth chapter of Machiavelli’s The Prince:
“The kingdoms known to history have been governed in two ways: either by a prince and his servants, who, as ministers by his grace and permission, assist in governing the realm; or by a prince and by barons, who hold their positions not by favour of the ruler but by antiquity of blood. Such barons have states and subjects of their own, who recognize them as their lords, and are naturally attached to them. In those states which are governed by a prince and his servants, the prince possesses more authority, because there is no one in the state regarded as a superior other than himself, and if others are obeyed it is merely as ministers and officials of the prince, and no one regards them with any special affection.
Examples of these two kinds of government in our own time are those of the Turk and the King of France. All the Turkish monarchy is governed by one ruler, the others are his servants, and dividing his kingdom into “sangiacates,” he sends to them various administrators, and changes or recalls them at his pleasure. But the King of France is surrounded by a large number of ancient nobles, recognized as such by their subjects, and loved by them; they have their prerogatives, of which the king cannot deprive them without danger to himself. Whoever now considers these two states will see that it would be difficult to acquire the state of the Turk; but having conquered it, it would be very easy to hold it. In many respects, on the other hand, it would be easier to conquer the kingdom of France, but there would be great difficulty in holding it.”
The centralization of the Roman Empire in the 4th century CE took resources and initiative away from communities. It consolidated property and make the grant of money and land dependent on patronage from the state. From the same book as before:
“In antiquity, the gods owned lands whose revenues paid for the maintenance of their temples and for religious events. These assets had formerly been managed on behalf of the gods and cities by councilors, who often rented them on favorable terms to themselves. Some or most of these lands were now appropriated by the imperial government…Julian restored the temple lands in order to enable local pagan worship, but Valentinian and Valens took them back. Under their arrangement, cities could use a part of the revenue produced by their former endowments in order to carry out basic functions, such as maintain their fortifications, while the rest went to the government. The net result was that less money was available locally and more was redirected to imperial projects. City councilors were more hemmed in by imperial officials and had access to fewer public assets. They increasingly fell back on their personal resources to do good works. Accordingly, they complained that their cities had been stripped of cultural amenities: the gymnasia were closed, there were no speeches in the forum, temples were empty, and so on.” -Kaldellis, Anthony. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (p. 38). Oxford University Press.
Of course, bureaucracy and centralization had their advantages too, namely meritocracy, uniform justice, a leveling of hierarchy between parts of the empire and within communities, where the local aristocracy had less chance to lord it over the rest.
“The entire political apparatus consisted of functionaries who worked for the court. Even the Senate, which retained a sense of its corporate identity, was by now an extension of the court. Functionaries could originate in any region and be posted to any other in the empire, serving in many locations throughout their careers. This created opportunities for social mobility, as exemplified by the Balkan peasant Justin who became emperor. Nor was there a regional aristocracy of local ‘barons’ with whom the court had to negotiate to get things done, as happened in the Persian empire and in the later western European kingdoms. In its political organization, Romanía was a proper state, not a coalition of noble families. Moreover, it was second to none among its medieval peers in the density and depth of its bureaucratic organization. A hostile observer groused that there were more employees in Diocletian’s government than there were taxpayers. While exaggerated, this complaint captured the unprecedented scale of the new empire’s intrusion into local society. Imperial bureaucracy on such a scale was massive by ancient standards. According to one estimate, the number of the central state’s salaried officials rose from fewer than 1,000 to 35,000 or more…” -Kaldellis, Anthony. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (pp. 35-36). Oxford University Press.
The expansion of the Roman bureaucracy was a key factor in the mass Christianization of the empire as well, as the bureaucracy, headed by the emperor, favored Christians, controlled appointments to key positions, and was able to transfer wealth and endowments away from local religious traditions. This argument is made with convincing force by the historian Peter Heather:
“As we’ve already seen, the idea that Christianity was already on course for religious domination of the Roman world by ad 300 is not convincing, since it’s impossible to place the overall numbers of Christians above 1 or 2 per cent of the population at the moment of Constantine’s conversion…But by the mid-sixth century, two hundred years or so after Constantine’s conversion, the vast majority of the Empire’s population was at least being baptized. It is a straightforward chronological observation, therefore, that widespread Christian conversion within the Roman world followed Constantine’s declaration of a Christian allegiance. But chronology is not necessarily the same thing as causation, and the dominant strand in recent writing about the spread of Christianity in late antiquity contains little or no discussion of the possibility that the structures and mechanisms of the Roman imperial system might have played any significant role in the process. This isn’t an accidental omission but is firmly tied to the idea that the structures of the imperial state were much too feeble to have bent a thousand years of organic Graeco-Roman cultural development out of its long-established, non-Christian trajectories of development. In my view, both the nature and the chronology of Roman conversion in the decades immediately after Constantine strongly indicate that the structures of the imperial system, and, in particular, the precise ways in which they shaped competition between members of the landowning elite, played a critical role in the process. The governmental structures of the Roman state were weak, but in ways that required local elites to engage with the system, and this in my view provided an extremely powerful mechanism that dramatically accelerated the overall process of elite conversion.” -Heather, Peter. Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 (pp. 124-125). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Heather goes on to argue that local elites were highly incentivized to gain a leg up by converting to the favored imperial religion, especially as the distribution of funds and taxation policy became more dependent on imperial favor, saying that the structure of the Roman state “demanded that Roman landowners engage with it, since the potential benefits of doing so were enormous, and the possible costs of failing to do so catastrophic.” He goes on to argue that a similar process of incentivization for the elites occurred throughout much of the same lands that used to be the Roman Empire when most of North Africa and the Middle East converted to Islam several hundred years later.
Religious conversion, then, was a function of power politics and the strength of the state. Heather argues that “taken as a whole, the evidence suggests that Christian conversion at most bolted some elements of a new religious piety onto an established world-view, rather than generating any more profound reconstruction of relations between humanity and the divine.” Whether conversions were:
“Genuine or not the vast majority felt that they had no choice but to come into line in some way with the new imperial cult sweeping through the fourth-century Empire. The emperor was willing to tolerate some carefully tempered dissent, but even this much ran the risk that a well-connected converted competitor might use the operations of public life to undermine you. Unless you were willing to oppose outright, as a minority certainly were, then real, fake, or something in between an accommodation had to be made. The alacrity with which many converted is a strong indication in itself that, for many, deep religious convictions were not in play.” -Heather, Peter. Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 (p. 153). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 is a very detailed, tightly argued, and excellent book, and I highly recommend it. The overarching point, however, is that the centralization of the state and the subsequent dependency of local funds from the imperial government accelerated the move away from local cultural traditions.
One further element of the impact of Roman bureaucracy on the population of the empire can be understood through the concept of antifragility. The geneticist and blogger Razib Khan has argued that simpler, more localized societies are more antifragile—more resilient in the fact of change and chaos, than complex societies. The Roman Empire was very expensive to maintain—the roads, the laws, the navy—and required considerable effort and specialized expertise. The Roman Empire was largely replaced by simpler, more flexible societies: Frankish feudalism, Balkan slaviziation, the flexible tribalism of the Arabs, whereby anyone could become associated with an Arab tribe as a mawla or client. On the Slavs, Razib Khan writes:
“The cities and fortifications, the churches, villages and roads, all the cultural richness and social order of the Roman Balkans, collapsed within a lifetime when the Empire withdrew its protection and the armies pulled back to strong points on the three coasts. What had taken centuries to build evaporated in a matter of decades…[but] when the political and military order that sustained this civilization disappeared, withdrawn elsewhere, glory and greatness faded overnight. Into the vacuum marched illiterate barbarians from the north who knew nothing of Rome, but crucially were hardy enough to survive and flourish in the chaos. The simple, primitive culture of these newcomers was a refuge for the long-suffering common people lately abandoned by the Empire. To survive, Roman peasants adapted, throwing in their lot with pagan barbarians who at least offered an avenue to flourish within a new and less brittle system.”
Archeologist Eric Cline makes a similar argument in his excellent work 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, arguing that the highly complex, networked Bronze Age states of the Middle East were undone by a systems collapse, in which a convergence of factors leads to a domino effect of decentralization and localization as large, complex states simply capsize under the burden of their obligations.
A large, networked empire is a double-edged sword when it comes to economics as well: the manufacturing and acquiring high quality goods. On one hand, excellent products, such as pottery, can be mass produced and shipped to even the most remote part of the empire. On the other hand, if the state suddenly collapses, it is hard to replicate this knowledge quickly at the local level. The quality of pottery did indeed decline drastically in places like Britain after the Romans withdrew. And what’s true of pottery is also true of food, weapons, and other things vital to survival.
It is no surprise, then, that perhaps the withdrawn and decline of the Roman Empire may have been a relief for much of its former populace (as is argued in Walter Scheidel’s book Escape from Rome), and that these lands in fact thrived and became more secure and became more productive as people turned to local ingenuity and initiative. Of course, it was a different type of thriving—more agricultural productivity and better local defense, giant castles—and much was lost as well—the classical cities, with their gigantic infrastructure projects, amphitheatres, sewage, pipes, aqueducts, libraries, roads: things that a centralized, large state can do well.
But these things not be necessarily a function of large, centralized empires. After all, such objects were also built by local cities in classical Greece and local dynasties throughout the ancient world, such as the Ptolemies of Egypt. This is not to mention the many regional kingdoms of the Middle East and India that have existed throughout history. Perhaps there is a compromise to be found between localism and feudalism on the other hand, and the retention of knowledge and efficient use or resources on the other hand to get the best of both worlds. After all, smaller states and kingdoms can themselves be use local taxation and funds to construct great structures locally instead of sending all that money to Rome.