CHAPTER 6 THE COMMERCIALIZING EURASIAN WORLD-SYSTEM In the last section we saw, in the Eurasian world-system, a complex multicentric network of empires, city-states and peripheral regions in which redistributive and tributary economies were the dominant form, but there were also important sectors and regions in which market exchange flourished. In this section we shall continue to examine the growing world-systems of China, India and the Near East. We shall examine the nature of their incorporation of new areas and the further expansion of commercialization. We shall examine the changing relationship between states and markets, and the expansion of "ecumenical" trade areas linking societies with very different cultures. Greeks and Hellenization The Eurasian world-system, including India, developed trade links with China (McNeill, 1963: 296). The Chinese world-empire expanded to the north and south, and Chinese trade across the Silk Road and by sea with Indochina and India expanded. India expanded to the East, influencing Indo-China and beyond. Along the steppe frontier from Europe to China the migrations of peripheral nomadic pastoralists and invasions by war alliances among these tribal horsemen exercised a varying pressure against the great agrarian empires. The Eurasian world-system exhibited a shifting of cultural and economic florescence. First the dynamic Greek interstate system exhibited rapid development and was the basis of cultural Hellenization as well as a new wave of empire formation which affected nearly the whole Eurasian world- system. The absorption of Hellenization was followed by another irruption from the West, the Roman Empire. And this was followed by a long period of ecumenical gestation which eventually burst forth in the Islamic revolution. The Greek polis has already been mentioned above as an important social structural development. The relative weakness of monarchical power in most of the Greek city states, and the long gestation period before the Greek interstate system was converted into an empire, along with the existence of an ecumenical trading network throughout the Mediterranean littoral, were the conditions for an expanding commercialization which involved both urban manufacturing industry and a commercialized agriculture producing olive oil and wine. Within the Mediterranean subsystem of the larger Eurasian world-system the Greeks enjoyed the profits of an hierarchical division of labor. The terms of trade by which they exchanged their manufactures, oil and wine for the timber, metals and grain of less developed areas were quite favorable (Hopper, 1979). The success in staving off the Persian invasion of Attica provided the impetus for the Athenians and the Spartans to liberate the Ionian cities of Asia Minor which had been under Persian rule. The long struggle between Sparta, a predominantly land-based power, and Athens, the inheritor from the Eastern Phoenicians of predominance at sea, led eventually to a partial Spartan victory in the Peloponnesian wars. Greek culture, like most cultures, gives merchants a low place in the social order. Hermes, the thief, was the patron god of Greek merchants. Nevertheless Greek society increasingly made room for commercial exchange and profit-making. Foreign merchants were protected under Greek law, and commodity production became an important source of wealth for the Greek city-states. The victory of the Spartans and Athenians over the Persians was under- stood by Herodotus, and by most modern historians, to be the result of political differences between East and West. Western democracy created a motivated citizen army defending its own livelihood and its own state, while the mercenary and enslaved soldiers of the Persians demonstrated the political weakness of "oriental despotism." But, if we place this victory of a relatively less-stratified semi-peripheral army over a relatively more stratified and more encrusted older empire into long run perspective, we will see that it is similar to many confrontations we have noted before. A less stratified polity was not a monopoly of the West. The Persians them- selves were such a polity when, as a young marcher state, they conquered earlier empires. Indeed the Greeks were to meet their own semi-peripheral conquerors, the Macedonians. The very success of Greek culture and economy created problems for the Attican core states of the Greek regional subsystem. Both manufacturing and commercial production of olive oil and wine spread to areas all around the Mediterranean littoral. According to Rostoftzeff (1941) this created an economic slump in Attica as competition increased. This is a pattern of uneven development with which we are familiar in our own world-economy. An important difference should be noted, however. Athens, the economic hegemone; reacted to this crisis by pursuing a policy of empire-formation. This policy was opposed by another core power within the Attican subsystem, Sparta, and the attempt by Athens to convert the Aegean into an empire was unsuccessful.15 What is different is that, in our modern world-system, such attempts are not made by declining hegemonic core powers. The reasons for this difference will be discussed in a later section. The Hellenization of the Near East, was also of course, the Easternization of the Greeks. Alexander married a Persian noble woman, and arranged for ten thousand of his soldiers to marry Persian women. Macedonian soldiers never liked urban Greeks in the Aegean, but running the three empires which fell out of Alexander's conquests required skilled personnel and Greek immigrants were used everywhere. Ptolemaic Egypt became an important repository of Greek art and literature as well as a manufacturer of copies of Attican statuary for export. The Eurasian world- system became increasingly integrated by both tributary accumulation and commercial trade links, as well as shared culture as a result of the Hellenization process. Rostoutzeff's (1941 Vol. 2: 1248-1271) discussion of the trends among the Hellenized empires demonstrates the extent to which these were part of a single economic network circulating corn, wine, olive oil, fish, timber, metals, manufactured articles and slaves. When we speak of the Mediteranean littoral as the economic subsystem which was linked to the Eurasian world-system we should not underestimate the extent to which overland trade had very early on begun to penetrate into the inland areas of Europe. As early as 500 B.C. Etruscan and Greek products such as bronze bowls, etc. were carried over Alps to the valleys of the Danube and Rhine. Wells (1980) uses archeological evidence to reconstruct the consequences which the trade for prestige goods had for the tribal cultures of central Europe. Some of these seem to have been stimulated toward chiefdom-formation by the trading relationship with the Mediterranean states. The Roman Western subsystem In the central Mediterranean three powers were in competition for dominance: the Greeks, the Etruscans and the Carthaginians. Carthaginians and Greeks had been fighting over Sicily for two centuries, when a rising power, Rome, conquered Sicily, its first province. The Romans were a land power, based on a peasant army, which had preserved its independence of the Etruscan monarchy, and was committed, at first, to a relatively egalitarian polity. The Romans hastily constructed a fleet of warships, incorporating a new feature--boarding planks--which would allow their soldiers to invade an enemy ship. Without skilled pilots, but with their soldiers and boarding planks, they defeated the Carthaginian lords of the sea in the first Punic war. After this defeat the Carthaginians realized that their supremacy on the seas was at an end, and after long specializing in the sea-borne trade, they changed their policy toward the establishment of a land-based empire. Hannibal's father began the expansion of Carthaginian power in Spain. This expansion eventually resulted in another war with Rome in which Hannibal crossed the alps from Spain with his army and elephants, won four battles against the Romans in Italy, but was so depleted in these that he had to retreat to Carthage. The Roman conquest and obliteration of Carthage ended forever the oriental merchant capitalism of the Phoenecians.16 The Roman Republic, like earlier semi-peripheral marcher states, became the Roman Empire. The citizen army became an army of professionals, and eventually an army of mercenaries. The peasant smallholders of the Italian country-side were replaced by commercial slave-worked latifundia owned by the Roman patricians. The empire remained strong as long as it expanded and it expanded a long way. It extended the boundaries of the Eurasian world-system deep into Europe and conquered a large portion of the older core area in the Near East. Keith Hopkins (1978) proposes and defends a model which captures the logic of the Roman system, a logic based on conquest, booty, slave-gathering and tribute extraction. This sounds quite familiar. Finley (1973) present extensive evidence that the Roman elite, despite the fact that much of its wealth was based on agricultural commodity production, did not view life as a search for commercial profits. They saw politics and status within the Roman community as the arena of meaningful action. Although we can agree that Rome was not a social system in which capitalism was the dominant mode of production, nevertheless there was a lot of capitalism in Rome. Monetization and commercialization of the economy was greater than in any preceding empire. Wage labor as well as various types of slavery, tenancy and clientalism existed in Rome (Finley, 1973; De Ste. Croix, 1980). Attempts to demonstrate the effects of a nascent capitalism on Roman politics are the subject of much controversy, but all agree that Roman law, especially the law of contract, reflected and served the needs of a strong market economy. The Roman Empire was never in itself a whole world-system. Rather it became the Western part of the Eurasian world-system and it extended the Eurasian world-system more deeply into Europe and North Africa. Perry Anderson (1974a) discussed the role of Roman slave-gathering and trade in promoting state-formation among peripheral German tribes (see also Luttwak, 1976). Roman trade with India also strengthened the ties with the South Asian part of the Eurasian world-system, and trade with China also developed an important link which decreased the extent to which the Chinese system was a separate one. Commercialization in the old core When the Western empire fell apart and the center of power moved back toward the Near East, the market economy created and extended by the Romans continued to function in the West. Not until the Moslems blocked European access to the Levant did serious economic devolution visit Europe (Pirenne, 1980). The Hellenic and "philhellenic" empires of the Near East also experienced increasing commercialization, with the autonomous cities of the old core continuing to prosper on the basis of long distance trade in spite of periods of political instability. The Parthian empire exhibited a strong tendency to support commerce in the Mesopotamian cities, prefering taxation of the caravan trade to direct state monopolization of enterprises (McNeill, 1963: 285). The origins of Islam in a trade port in the interstices between the great empires which composed the Eurasian world-system should be noted. All the world religions which spread widely emerged from semi-peripheral regions in which people were aware of the competing theologies, and free to synthesize and innovate. The obvious commercialization of many areas which were incorporated into the Moslem empires raises the question of the extent to which these were capitalist (Rodinson, 1981). Weber's rather restrictive definition of rational capitalism would perhaps preclude such as the Phoenicians, who adapted oriental magic-based religion to their commercial needs. But if we have profit-oriented trade in a price-setting market, what difference does it make about the religious values of the merchants? Perhaps it is true that certain religious outlooks and methods of accounting facilitate capitalism, but it would be confusing to make them part of its definition. Amin (1978) describes the mode of production of the Arab societies of the Mahgreb and the old Near East (but not Egypt) as based on the profits derived from the long distance trade between different zones. He points out that merchant capitalist ideology is evident in Islamic theology, and describes the Arab Islamic conquerors as "warrior-merchants," who expanded out of the Arabian peninsula when their livelihood based on the long- distance trade was threatened by disruption of their trade monopoly. Although Amin describes the above as a tributary mode of production, the high level of commercialization and the devotion of states to the ends of profitable merchant capitalism are evident from his analysis. The penetration of Islam into Africa created trading cities in which merchants were the ruling class. As with the Phoenician city states, these cities were not only heavily involved in commercial relations but were politically dominated by merchant interests (Curtin, 1984). Contrary to Max Weber's (1958) distinction between Occidental and Oriental medieval cities, which argues that capitalist rationality only became dominant in the West, these cities developed legal systems which were conducive to commerce and commerce itself was the main goal of policy. Amin (1980: 69) contends that the Arabic cities were indeed moving toward the consolidation of a regional capitalist mode of production when they were peripheralized by the newly emerging European core capitalism. And Ekholm and Friedman (1980: 71) observe "just as the capitalistic world contained different forms of exploitation such as slavery, serfdom, metayage as well as wage labor in the center, so the Medieval Arab system had mostly wage labor in centers such as Baghdad, but fuedal exploitation, slave plantations and free peasantry elsewhere." The development of capitalism in China In China the still substantially separate Chinese world-empire extended its political jurisdiction to marginal areas. But Lattimore (1940) has argued that the Chinese civilization was a segmental mode of production which could only be sustained in areas in which irrigation-based intensive agriculture was possible. Units based on a regional irrigation system which required the services of a local mandarin class could be added incrementally as modules incorporated within the larger empire. But in areas not ecologically suited to irrigation, Chinese sovereignty was problematic. Upland areas in which only rainfall cultivation was possible were temporarily added to the empire, but they remained difficult to permanently incorporate because of the different class structure which such ecology tended to produce. These areas shifted back and forth between the empire and the peripheral marcher states created by the pastoral nomads. In Korea and Japan rice cultivation was carried out in narrow valleys unsuited to large irrigation works, and these areas remained independent, although formally tributary, to the Chinese Empire. In Southern China, on the other hand, irrigated rice cultivation was possible, and it was here that firm incorporation into the Chinese political economy occurred. The commercialization of the Chinese economy was already well-developed by the eighth century A.D. Monetization and credit mechanisms such as "flying money" emerged, and were periodically subjected to state control (Elvin, 1973). Capitalism nearly became dominant in core China during the Sung dynasty (Balazs, 1968: 34-54; Shiba, 1970). The development of an excellent system of waterways allowed for the commercially profitable transportation of bulk goods across a large area. Industrial production of iron and steel in eleventh century China had a greater output than the British iron industry of the eighteenth century (Hartwell, 1966). Conversion to money rents was widespread and an extensive foreign trade with the South Seas and across the Silk Road to the West further stimulated commercialization within China. Monopolization of profitable commerce by the Chinese state faced challenges from market forces (Worthy, 1975) and eventually the state, rather than trying to control and restrict this development, learned to gain greater revenues by encouraging private enter- prise and then taxing it (Hartwell, 1971). This is perhaps the most important instance of a world-system--prior to the emerence of capitalism in Europe--in which a core state adapted its logic to the capitalist economy in order to benefit from it, rather than simply monopolizing profitable enterprises. This period of capitalist growth in China led, in the Ming dynasty, to overseas explorations in which a Chinese fleet of ocean-crossing junks sailed down the East coast of Africa led by the Imperial eunuch, Chengo-Ho. A main part of the motivation for these explorations was commercial trade. But a reaction against the power of private wealth and the forces it created resulted in a series of dramatic reversals (McNeill, 1982; Wallerstein, 1974). The Chinese imperial state clamped down on private enterprises and repealed the policies which had promoted capitalist development. State control of the economy was reasserted and the overseas explorations were ended. The logic of an imperial tributary mode of production reasserted control and prevented the domination of the mode of production by capitalism. A transformation of world-historical significance was thus left for others, inhabitants of that Western land (Europe) which Paul Vale'ry called "the tiny promontory of Asia." Commercialization in India and the Indian Ocean The Indian subcontinent also expanded its cultural, political and economic reach. Southern India became incorporated into the civilization which had emerged in the Ganges valley, and Indian traders ranged far to the East toward the Malay peninsula Indochina, and beyond. Even though Brahmins were theoretically forbidden to travel overseas (to avoid pollution by contact with foreigners), many did. Wheatley (1975) discusses the Indianization of Southeast Asia by traders and priests, the latter imported by local rulers to sanctify the creation of divine kingships. The main stimulus and source of outside resources which spurred state formation was the trade with Indian merchants. This was not tributary exchange or reciprocal gift-giving. Indian merchant entrepreneurs brought highly valued goods across the sea to trade for scarce metals and other goods which the local economies could produce. Control over access to the Indian goods enabled local leaders to create redistributive states, and provided the motivation for increased production for exchange in the overseas trade. The multicentric nature of the Indian ocean trade network made commerce competitive. Both Indian and Chinese core areas traded with the Southeast Asian periphery, and important groups of trading middlemen emerged. Specialized trade diasporas developed to service the local bulk sea trade (Curtin, 1984) while Chinese and Indian merchants kept the importation of core commodities in their own hands (Meilink-Roelofsz, 1962). In his fascinating study of merchant capitalism on the Indian Ocean K. N. Chaudhuri (1985) examines the same kinds of details of material life and exchange which Fernand Braudel (1972) has provided for the Mediterranean. Chaudhuri's study strongly supports the notion of a commercializing Eurasian world-system. On prestige goods and fundamental commodities he says: It has been pointed out how certain items of trade--gold and silver, silk, fine muslins, spices, incense, and horses--were looked upon as great products of civilization, indispensible accompaniments to a refined and luxurious way of life. But we also know that the trans-oceanic trade of Eurasia was not supported by high-value precious goods alone. The technology of sailing-ships demanded the transport of bulk goods in combination with precious articles. Moreover, many regions around the Indian Ocean supplemented their food production with imports from areas of high agricultural surplus. An active trade in food grains and many different kinds of foodstuffs enabled the chronically deficient regions to specialize in the production of commodities for which there was a steady demand. The level of production in these areas was conditioned not only by the local geography and economy but also by the volume of long-distance trade. The strength of urban centers in different parts of Asia--the Middle East, Central Asia, and China--was derived precisely from the strong flow of maritime and caravan trade. In the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, entire communities depended on food imports from Egypt and India for their daily survival (Chaudhuri, 1985: 203-204). Even though the Chinese empire tried to constrain and control foreign trade, it burgeoned. Many subterfuges and legal loopholes were employed by private entrepreneurs in the trade between China and Southeast Asia (Viraphol, 1977). By the time the Europeans entered the Indian Ocean trade the direct and indirect links between China and India had strengthened to the point that we can no longer speak of a separate Chinese world-system. Instead European, Indian and Chinese subsystems were linked directly by substantial long distance trade, and the Indian and Chinese subsystems were linked indirectly by their competition for profits in the South Seas. A single state-based world-system which stretched from Europe, through the Middle East to India and China developed. As Jane Schneider (1977) suggested, there was a precapitalist, nearly global, world-system. And there was a lot of capitalism in it, although this mode of production was strongest in semi-peripheral areas. In core areas the states and empires continued to be dominated by non-capitalist classes, and the predominant logic of expansion and contraction continued to be based on political- military power, tribute-gathering and taxation. But even within these empires the states had begun to accommodate rather than suppress markets and profit-making, and in the interstices of the empires, and in some semi-peripheral areas, merchant capitalism had achieved political power. Philip Curtin's (1984) discussion of trade diasporas sheds light on the processes by which a more integrated market economy emerged which linked the different cultural areas which composed the Eurasian world-system. The agents of cross-cultural trade which Curtin studies are those specialized ethnic groups (trade diasporas) which use kin-based ethnic solidarities as an institutional support for long-distance trust which facilitates trade across cultural boundaries. Curtin points out that as a larger "trade ecumene" emerges--a set of institutions and agreements which is transcultural, as states set up mechanisms to protect foreign merchants and to enforce intercultural contracts--the trade diaspora loses its reason for existence. The trade ecumene is the beginning of a world-system-wide set of normative agreements and institutional structures which provide the basis for the intercultural business as usual. Core/periphery relations Barbarian invasions continued to be an important aspect of core/ periphery relations, as increased population density on the steppes and confrontations with the civilized empires stimulated the formation of vast nomadic alliances around a warrior king. These peripheral warrior kingdoms threatened the borders of the civilized empires all along the steppe frontier from Rome to China. Often their incursions were merely temporary desolations or took over border areas, but sometimes they succeeded in setting up a new dynasty to rule over the old core areas, as in China. These caused some cultural and economic changes, but in the Chinese case the striking thing is how little difference there was between the older dynasties and the new conqueror states. The Mongols and Manchus became quickly assimilated to Chinese ways and their dynasties soon faced the same problems that the older ones had faced. Core China sometimes received and sometimes paid tribute to peripheral nomad states. Conflict on the border was often converted into exchange: the employment of nomad mercenaries by the Chinese and the shipping of prestige goods to the nomads, as well as a continuing division of labor and trade between steppe husbandry and Chinese agriculture. The develoment of larger horses capable of carrying heavy metal armor, along with the invention of the stirrup, eventually provided an effective response to the arrow showers of the nomadic light cavalry. Nomads could not afford knightly armor, and the larger horses could not be sustained on the sparse pasturage of the steppe (McNeill, 1963); and thus the peripheral incursions once again achieved an equilibrium. Other peripheral peoples, such as the Scandinavians, were to sweep down upon and conquer areas of the old core, but the long history of important interaction between peripheral raiders and civilized centers was contracting. This form of interaction had affected the development of military technology in the centers of civilization since the first emergence of cities in Mesopotamia, but this pressure tapered off after the Middle Ages. The Manchu dynasty was the last successful conquest of an old core area by a peripheral state. Peripheral nomads remained on the steppes, but no longer presented strong challenges. Their importance was reduced to that of mercenaries in border areas between empires e.g. Tartars and Cossacks in the buffer zone between the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg empires (McNeill, 1964). Of course, peripheral state formation formation continued to produce resistance and conflict in areas becoming dominated by one or another core of the multicentric Eurasian world-system. But these no longer directly threatened the core areas. Thus the old pattern in which both semi- peripheral and peripheral areas sometimes gave birth to new core states, was replaced by a new one in which peripheral areas were permanently exposed to the development of underdevelopment, while new challenges to core status came primarily from the semi-periphery.