Beyond kingdoms and empires

A revolution in archaeology is transforming our picture of past populations and the scope of human freedoms

https://aeon.co/essays/an-archeological-revolution-transforms-our-image-of-human-freedoms





Contemporary historians tell us that, by the start of the Common Era, approximately three-quarters of the world’s population were living in just four empires (we’ve all heard of the Romans and the Han; fewer of us, perhaps, of the Parthians and Kushans). Just think about this for a minute. If true, then it means that the great majority of people who ever existed were born, lived and died under imperial rule. Such claims are hardly original, but for those who share Arnold Toynbee’s conviction that history should amount to more than ‘just one damned thing after another’, they have taken on a new importance. For some scholars today, the claims prove that empires are obvious and natural structures for human beings to inhabit, or even attractive political projects that, once discovered, we have reproduced again and again over the longue durée of history. The suggestion is that if the subjects of empire in times past could have escaped, they’d have been unwise to do so, and anyway the majority would have preferred life in imperial cages to whatever lay beyond, in the forest or marshes, in the mountains and foothills, or out on the open steppe. Such ideas have deep roots, which may be one reason why they often go unchallenged.



In the late 18th century, Edward Gibbon – taking inspiration from ancient writers such as Tacitus – described the Roman Empire (before its ‘decline and fall’) as covering ‘the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind,’ surrounded by barbarians whose freedom was little more than a side-effect of their primitive ways of life. Gibbon’s barbarian is an inveterate idler: free, yes, but only to live in scattered homesteads, wearing skins for clothes, or following his ‘monstrous herds of cattle’. ‘Their poverty,’ wrote Gibbon of the ancient Germans, ‘secured their freedom.’ It is from such sources that we get, not just our notion of empire as handmaiden to civilisation, but also our contemporary image of life before and beyond empire as being small-scale, chaotic and largely unproductive. In short, everything that is still implied by the word ‘tribal’. Tribes are to empires (and their scholarly champions) much as children were to adults of Gibbon’s generation – occasionally charming or amusing creatures, but mostly a disruptive force, whose destiny is to be disciplined, put to useful work, and governed, at least until they are ready to govern themselves in a similar fashion. Either that, or to be confined, punished and, if necessary, eliminated from the pages of history.

Ideas of this sort are, in fact, as old as empire itself. In their diplomatic correspondence, which can be followed back to a time more than 3,000 years ago, the rulers of Egypt and Syria grumble incessantly about the subversive activities of groups calledʿApiru. Scholars of the ancient Near East once tookʿApiru to be an early reference to the Hebrews, but it’s now thought to be an umbrella term, used almost indiscriminately for any group of political defectors, dissenters, insurgents or refugees who threatened the interests of Egypt’s vassals in neighbouring Canaan (much as some modern politicians have been known to use the word ‘terrorist’ for rhetorical effect today). In Babylonia, such groups – when not given tribal or ethnic labels – might be variously described as ‘scattered people’, ‘head-bangers’ or simply ‘enemies’. In the early centuries BCE, emissaries of the Han Empire wrote in similar ways about the rebellious marsh-dwellers of the tropical coastlands to their south. Historians now see these ancient inhabitants of Guangdong and Fujian through Han eyes, as the ‘Bai-yue’ (‘Hundred Yue’), who were said to shave their heads, cover their bodies in tattoos, and sacrifice live humans to their savage gods. After centuries of resistance and guerrilla warfare, we learn, the Yue capitulated. On the order of Emperor Wu, most were deported and put to hard labour, their lands given over to colonial settlers from the north, including many retired soldiers.



Empires have always created vivid and disturbingly violent images of tribal life on their frontiers, placing in a different, paternalistic light the violence at the heart of their own political projects. In such ways, we convince ourselves that these things are somehow deeply related, that violence and domination are the necessary substratum of ‘civilisation’, or that Europe after the fall of Rome achieved something unique – unnatural even, on a global scale – by breaking decisively from ancient cycles of empire and forging a singular path to liberty and prosperity. Once entrenched in our imaginations, such ways of thinking are fiendishly difficult to reverse. Even experienced scholars of empirically grounded disciplines may find themselves advancing such arguments based on the flimsiest of sources. According to Walter Scheidel, a professor of classics and history at Stanford University in California, the population figures cited at the start of this essay ‘convey a sense of the competitive advantage of a particular type of state: far-flung imperial structures held together by powerful extractive elites.’ In ‘quantitative terms,’ he tells us in The Great Leveller (2017), this ‘proved extremely successful.’ Looking deeper back in time, to the very ‘origin of the state’, Scheidel further conjectures that ‘3,500 years ago, when state-level polities covered perhaps not more than 1 per cent of the earth’s terrestrial surface (excluding Antarctica), they already laid claim to up to half of our species.’

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