Comparing World-Systems || The Middle Kingdom, the Middle Sea, and the Geographical Pivot of History

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The Middle Kingdom, the Middle Sea, and the Geographical Pivot of HistoryAuthor(s): John FitzpatrickSource: Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 15, No. 3, Comparing World-Systems (Summer,1992), pp. 477-521Published by: Research Foundation of SUNY for and on behalf of the Fernand Braudel CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40241233 .

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The Middle Kingdom, the Middle Sea, and the Geographical Pivot of History

John Fitzpatrick paper examines the intersecting dynamics of military com-

petition, state-making and economic development in pre- modern Northeast Asia, with special reference to a critical phase ot geopolitical restructuring and economic development from 800 AD to 1400 AD. The region in question is regarded as comprising agrarian China,1 an arid zone periphery encompassing the northeast Eurasian steppe and associated sedentary/nomadic fringe areas from Turkestan to Manchuria, and a littoral/maritime zone periphery stretching in an arc from the Chinese Southeast Coast and Taiwan through the Japanese archipelago to the Korean peninsula.

The argument is informed by a comparison to a West Asian- Mediterranean-European geopolitical complex and development trajectory. This comparison emerges only in piecemeal fashion in the historical narrative which comprises the bulk of the paper (it will be developed at length in a subsequent paper) but it is central to the reasoning process throughout. However, my approach differs from most comparative approaches to the relation between western and East Asian history in several crucial ways.

First, and most obviously, my claim is that the relevant scope of the comparison is not between China, on the one hand, and Rome

1 By agrarian China here I mean the area described by Mark Elvin (and others) as "China proper": that is, the territory of late imperial China "excluding Manchuria, Mongolia, Chinese Turkestan and Tibet" (1973: 17). My preference for the former over the latter term stems from my central argument that China as an imperial state- as opposed to China as a complex imperial socio-economic formation- was in large part the product of nomadic or semi-nomadic social forces which by Elvin's definition would fall outside the orbit of China proper.

review, xv, 3, summer 1992, 477-521 477



478 John Fitzpatrick

or Europe at different stages of their respective development on the other, but between the entire Northeast Asian and West Asian- Mediterranean-European complexes and development trajectories. Viewed in this broad based perspective, I would argue, the socio- economic development of the Northeast Asian trajectory involved a momentous, though ultimately truncated secular shift from an arid zone beginning towards a potential maritime zone conclusion, which has important features in common with the southwest-northeast succession of economic center-shifts in the western trajectory. Similarly, such a perspective highlights the point that- far from Northeast Asian history being dominated by the unchallenged supremacy of a Chinese world-empire- it was to a much greater degree than the western trajectory dominated by a dynamic of relentless competition between approximate military equals, which remained effectively caged in a single field of forces right through to the conclusion of this macro-warring states dynamic in the late fourteenth century.

Secondly, the paper rejects the notion that the relevant comparison is between a dynamic, linear western development pattern and a static, cyclical pattern in East Asia- or at best one marked by the development of extensive power at the expense of the kind of intensive power which ultimately fueled the European industrial revolution (Mann, 1986: 532-33). Rather, my contention is that the entire period 400 BC-1400 AD was marked far less by a dynamic of cyclical oscillation than by one of continuous linear transition, with strong tendencies towards the emergence of an entrenched interstate system and capitalist world-economy virtually until the very end. The combination of large-scale Iron Age economic development and intense military competition started later in Northeast Asia and advanced much more rapidly, before its advance was turned back with relative abruptness by an extraordinary constellation of social forces unleashed at the time of the Mongols and the early Ming. Moreover, though the Northeast Asian dynamic in this period seems to have been primarily endogenous in a regional sense, the western one seems to have been in crucial respects contingent on the prior trajectory of its Northeast Asian counterpart. Without the great economic stimulus provided to Asian development more generally by the "Chinese economic revolution" from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, the rise of the west may have taken consider-



GEOGRAPHICAL PIVOT OF HISTORY 479

ably longer than it did. Without the striking Chinese withdrawal from a position of unchallenged maritime dominance throughout Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century, the rise of the west, as commonly conceived, may never have got off the ground.

It is in this connection that the argument takes on board the first half of the rather labored piece of wordplay signaled in the title- namely the application of the notion of a world-historical "pivot area" to the entire Northeast Asian region specified here. The term was first applied by the English geopolitician Halford Mackinder to the Eurasian steppe zone alone, to dramatize the critical impact of the horse-riding peoples of central Asia on the whole range of sedentary societies bordering the steppe zone; and this paper yields to none in its estimate of the impact of pastoral nomadism in this regard (Mackinder, 1904, see also Frank, 1991; Hall, 1991). However, it would be simplistic to imagine that the Eurasian nomads could have had such an impact in isolation, without the enormous stimulus in military technology and organization provided by more than a millennium of continuous competition with large and highly advanced states in agrarian China, and indeed without the additional great stimulus to Chinese development provided in turn by the rapid acceleration of expansion into the littoral/maritime zone in the closing centuries of the period under review.

Thirdly, the paper rejects the general assumption, often closely associated with specific verdicts on imperial stagnation in Chinese history, that large-scale empires are necessarily parasitic on private economic forces and inimical to rapid economic development. Rather, I would argue that Northeast Asian history to around 1300 AD provides powerful support for Michael Mann's emphasis on the crucial role played by imperial states in pre-industrial contexts in establishing an economic arena in which private forces can emerge and successfully operate- and also for his corollary proposition that the most economically-dynamic historical trajectories have been those which experienced a highly-developed dialectic between centralized imperial control and private/regionalist civil society forces over an extended period (Mann, 1986: 165-74, 520-21). In regard to the latter, the paper places special emphasis on the state/society dialectic involved in the consolidation and relatively




rapid erosion of a powerful centralized regime in the Sui-T'ang era (late sixth to late ninth century AD), which is seen as laying the groundwork for a major economic revolution in the subsequent era of the northern and southern Sung.

This argument in turn is crucial in defining my approach to the notions of "interstate system" and "world-economy," which are freely applied in this paper to an extended period of Chinese history commonly assigned to the "world-empire" category in mainstream realist theories of international relations and the more orthodox versions of Wallersteinian "world-systems theory." The paper does broadly subscribe to what might be called the core analytical proposition to emerge from the debates between world- systems theory, neo-realist perspectives on international political economy, and the new geopolitically-oriented historical sociology of state-making and capitalist development over the past ten to fifteen years (see, for instance, Chase-Dunn, 1989; Gilpin, 1981; Tilly, 1990). This is the view that the emergence of entrenched capitalist development in Europe was co-dependent upon the emergence of an entrenched interstate military order: both because of the impetus to ongoing technological and state-making innovation provided by the long-term competition of approximate military equals, and because of the mobility and consequent bargaining power afforded to capital by the fact that no one state could monopolize the relevant geopolitical space and set protection rents at exorbitant levels. However, I would argue that in its more categorical form this proposition can involve a simplistic reification of the maritime zone dynamic in northwestern Europe at a relatively late historical stage (roughly 1500-1800 AD), and obscure the fact that broadly similar processes had been set in motion by the internal geopolitics of allegedly imperial China over 500 years earlier.

Finally, I follow Mann and other recent contributors to the geopolitics and state-making debate in emphasizing the severe logistical and infrastructural constraints on the long-term survival of large-scale empires in the pre-industrial era (Mann, 1986: 130-46; see also Elvin, 1973: 17-22; McNeill, 1983: 1-10). This suggests a straightforward reversal of the extensive attention given in much comparativist argument about the western trajectory to the allegedly unique constellation of forces making for a pluralistic interstate order in northern Europe. The real puzzle is not the failure of




empire in Europe but the long-term survival of empire in China, in an ecological environment less favorable in terms of natural com- munications and logistical advantages than the Mediterranean or even, arguably, the north European plain (Fairbank, Reischauer and Craig, 1973; 9-10).

Indeed, for most of the 800-1400 AD critical phase of geopolitical and economic restructuring mentioned at the outset, the Chinese imperial order appeared to have definitively succumbed to the centrifugal logic of what Randall Collins has called the "no intervening heartland rule": the tendency in pre-industrial empires for rapid disintegration of effective central control "over territories beyond the heartlands adjacent to [the] states own base" (Collins, 1981: 99). This process of disintegration began around the mid- ninth century- with the unravelling of the later T'ang regime's precarious balancing act between a politico-strategic center in the northwest and an economic center which had shifted to lower Yangtze region. It continued not just through the immediately subsequent Five Dynasties/Ten Kingdoms period but also through the 300 year history of the southern and northern Sung and their various steppe fringe adversaries. And it was only through the extraordinary military capacities of the Mongol world-empire that the various components of imperial China were finally brought back together again.

However, the temporary reunification of China by the military power of the transient Mongol colossus is one thing: the longer- term cohesion of China as an agrarian-redistributive empire in the face of an increasingly complex intervening heartland problem is another. My broader argument on this score concerns the contrasting geopolitical logic of what might be called archipelagic and inland sea configurations of heartlands, and the conditions in which one configuration might, even if only temporarily, be converted into the other. In this connection, the paper invokes the second dimension of the wordplay involved in the title, in that it follows Mark Elvin's suggestion that the great canal network of medieval China facilitated a constructed and- from the viewpoint of the centralized state- more enduring substitute for the natural inland sea configuration of heartlands which the Mediterranean provided for the shorter- lived Romano-Byzantine empire (Elvin, 1973: 54-55). However, I differ sharply from Elvin on the timing of this great increase in the




logistical effectiveness of the centralized state, arguing that for much of the period prior to the Mongol conquest (and the defini- tive shift of the politico-strategic center to the northeast region around Bejing) the canal network operated to strengthen not the state but the private/regionalist economic forces of civil society.

Behind this dispute about timing lies a theoretical proposition derived from Mann's account of the developmental potential of the state/society, center/regions dialectic. The striking engineering advances which allowed the Mongols and their Ming successors to establish a relatively direct, year-round, inland water link between the northeastern capital and the main production centers in the south and southeast were themselves largely the product of an intense dynamic of military competition and economic revolution in the centuries of geopolitical division which had gone before. Moreover, a version of this argument also applies to the temporary ability of the Mongols to realize the world-empire potential of "Eurasia's inland sea of grass" (McNeill, 1963: 484-94), in that the rise of Mongol power was critically dependent on military advances originally generated in the competition of Chinese and steppe fringe military powers over the preceding centuries. In this sense the metaphor invoked is of a critical thirteenth-fourteenth century conjuncture between two "inland sea" configurations of heartlands- one around the north-south Grand Canal axis, the other around the east-west axis of the Eurasian steppe. The first was enduring, the second ephemeral. But together they fulfilled for a time the various critical functions fulfilled by the Mediterranean at the high-point of the Roman empire, and in the process changed the course of history.

The overall argument is very much focused on the role of "the periphery [or semi-periphery, or marchland zone] as a locus of innovation" (Lattimore, 1980; see also Chase-Dunn, 1988; Chase- Dunn & Hall, 1991; Collins, 1981; Mann, 1986: 161-67, 536-40). As in Lattimore's own path-breaking analysis of China's "inner Asian frontiers" (1940) it treats steppe and steppe fringe social forces as crucial actors in the state-making process in agrarian China; and indeed it attributes the longevity of the imperial form substantially to the operation of a recurrent arid zone dynamic, in which the centralized state was reconstructed after periods of major breakdown by fresh infusions of nomadic military power. However, to characterize the steppe frontier simply as an external peripheral or




marchland zone in relation to an unproblematic agrarian civilization called China would seriously misrepresent the complex geopolitics and political economy of the northeast Asian trajectory. Rather the core agricultural centers of north China were only the largest and most productive sections of an extended belt of loess soils stretching in a "continuous semi-steppe from the sea to Turkestan." It was precisely the semi-arid zone conditions of this loess belt, "free from both forest and marsh . . . [but] favorable to agriculture and the wheeled vehicle, that made early settlement and the continuous diffusion of culture possible" (Ting, cited in Chi, 1970: 13).

From this perspective, the southward expansion of agrarian China into the sub-tropical riverine and lake-filled environment of the Yangtze region- to say nothing of the full-fledged littoral environment of the Southeast Coast- was a movement into "a different country" (Barfield, 1989: 18), and just as much a marchland phenomenon, in its way, as the development of large-scale pastoral nomadism in the arid zone marchlands to the north. Rather than treating China as essentially a continuous entity throughout the southward expansion process, the paper argues, it is more plausible to see the post- 1400 Chinese empire partly as the conjunctural outcome of the dialectical interplay between northern and southern social forces unleashed in this critical phase of restructuring.

The paper covers a huge area and advances a number of highly controversial (some might say bizarre) claims. It would be all too easy to spend the entire paper merely justifying the paradigmatic shift proposed, without ever coming to the substance of the argument; I have opted instead to move at this stage to a "grand narrative" expanding on the major points alluded to above, leaving broader questions about relations with established paradigms to a brief theoretical reprise in the concluding section. Even so, the narrative itself inevitably remains highly compressed in comparison to the ground it purports to cover, and the whole exercise unfortu- nately imparts an air of dogmatism to claims which are based on a still very preliminary reading of secondary sources. However, any apparent dogmatism is an unintended consequence of the attempt to provide a concise exposition of a complicated argument, and to define my (current) position as clearly as possible in order to facilitate understanding and critique- both my own and others.




THE TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL PATTERN

This section is organized around a crude periodization of Northeast Asian (and more particularly Chinese) history prior to the intervention of industrializing European powers in the nineteenth century. Instead of starting with the question of imperial unity and disunity that overshadows conventional Chinese historio- graphy, it starts with a materialist periodization based upon the kind of technological and demographic criteria which are routinely invoked in analyses of "the rise of the West" and then attempts to relate geopolitical patterns to that independently derived periodization.

Figure 1

1. Early Iron Age to Onset of North-South Demographic Revolution: 400 BC-800 AD. First Macro-Warring States Phase (Includes Ch'in-Han, early Sui- T'ang empires).

2. Onset of North-South Demographic Revolution to end of Medieval Economic Revolution: 800 AD- 1400 AD. Second Macro-Warring States Phase (Includes Later Tang, Sung, Jurchen, Mongol empires and Ming rebellion).

3. Reversal of North-South Demographic Revolution/Medieval Eco- nomic Revolution to Pre-Industrial Stagnation9: 1400 AD- 1800 AD. Unified Chinese Empire Phase ([Sung-Mongol]-Ming-Manchu world- empire).

As indicated in Figure 1, this periodization yields a tripartite sche- ma of macro-phases: but only the third corresponds to the standard picture of the dominance of a unitary world-empire in Chinese/ Northeast Asian history. The first and the second phases are described in geopolitical terms as predominantly warring states' rather than unified empire in character. Because of constraints on length, there is no detailed treatment of the third, post 1400 phase. In contrast to the other two phases, where my periodization and analytical claims vary markedly from most other analyses, periodiza-




tion and analysis are much closer to the mainstream in regard to the third.

1. The First Phase

In this scheme, the first phase begins at the (inevitably approximate) point where the diffusion of Iron Age technology began to have a decisive impact on both warfare and economic development (crucially including accelerated population growth, which in turn dramatically influenced the scale of military and state-making competition). Iron Age development began in Northeast Asia only around 500BC, some six or seven centuries later than in West Asia, and it intersected with and reinforced a crucial pattern of 'internal geopolitics' already emerging in north China.

Prior to this point, there had been roughly 1000 years of Bronze Age development, concentrated in two major agricultural heartlands: the middle and lower Huangho floodplain (hereafter north- central China); and the Shensi basin watered by Wei, the Ching and other tributaries of the upper Huangho (hereafter the northwest). The former was the more productive, and its importance in this respect would continue to grow with the increasing economic development of the adjacent territories of the Shantung peninsula. But the latter- a region bordering on the steppe and desert zone of central Asia but itself virtually enclosed between protective moun- tain ranges- was the more strategically crucial. This strategic centrality had already been registered by the eleventh century BC, when the embryonic Chou empire overthrew the still more shadowy Shang regime based in the north-central floodplain, and it continued to shape the pattern of imperial state-making until the end of the first phase as defined here. "Nearly all the major dynasties originated there (Chou, Ch'in, Han, Sui and Tang)." By contrast the plains, which were vulnerable to attack from both the northwest itself and increasingly from the northeast (as nomadic military power grew progressively in what is now Manchuria and inner Mongolia), were in strategic terms "a region of contraction and retreat" (Wiethoff, 1975: 38-39, 47-48).

Beyond this specific geopolitical continuity, however, the demographic and economic revolution wrought by Iron Age technologies marks a broader structural break in Northeast Asian history. And




this provides the primary reason for starting this account of centralized state-making in China not with a supposed unified empire (the Ghou) but with a period of multiple "warring states" (the only period designated in these terms in conventional Chinese histor- iography, but in my terms merely the first of two "micro" warring states eras within the first of two "macro" warring states eras). The Chou state was a loose Bronze Age imperial confederacy with a narrow "charioteer aristocracy" social base. The total population of north China at this point may have been as low as 5 million (roughly comparable to that controlled by imperial regimes in West Asia a millennium earlier) (McEvedy & Jones, 1978: 124, 172). But even so, the extent of the Chou's effective political control was sharply circumscribed, by virtue of the basic logistical and infrastructural constraints spelled out in detail for the West Asian case by Michael Mann (1986: 130-46). Even at its height, Wolfram Eberhard suggests, the Chou empire comprised up to a thousand semi-independent statelets, centered around garrisons of the conquering Chou aristocracy which subsisted like "islands in the sea" of the surrounding population (Eberhard, 1977: 24-26).

From this perspective, the transition from the later Chou to the systematic competition of the early Iron Age warring states era represents, not the genuine breakdown of a larger unit but actually the growing aggregation of multiple smaller units into more effective middle sized states. The hypothesized correlation between large-scale military competition and economic/technological growth seems very clear in this case. By the fourth century, the population of north China was at least 25 million (compared to around 16 million in contemporary West Asia and Egypt); a process of competitive emulation among seven roughly equal states was well established; and the level of technological development was already comparable with and in some respects superior to that of the contemporary West Asian-Mediterranean region (McEvedy & Jones, 1978: 125, 172; Times Atlas, 1983: 80-81).

The most striking early manifestation of this development was the emergence of the first real Chinese empire under the Ch'in (in 221 BC) and its subsequent consolidation under the Han. This in turn produced a further major demographic leap, bringing the population nominally under imperial control to a peak of almost 60 million in the second century AD (over 10 million more than the




contemporary Roman empire). The first real economic and demographic expansion in the south- where in 400BC the population had probably been around 2.5 million and ethnically non-Chinese- also occurred at this time (McEvedy & Jones, 1978: 126-27).

These developments must clearly be attributed not just to exogenous technological determinants alone, but also to the major advances in the logistical and infrastructural capacities of the centralized state generated by the intense competitive emulation process of the first (micro) warring states era. However, as will be emphasized further below, neither the Ch'in-Han nor the subsequent Sui-Tang possessed any real equivalent to the natural logistical advantages conferred on the Roman empire by the inland sea configuration of heartlands around the Mediterranean-Black Sea complex. Thus the great increase in population and area nominally under imperial control probably involved a significant decrease in the infrastructural effectiveness of the state relative to "civil society," (Mann, 1986: 160-67) in comparison to that achieved by the leading contenders of the late warring states period. The attempt of the first Ch'in emperor to implement at the imperial level the strongly centralist policies earlier developed at the regional level resulted in massive internal upheavals, and the early Han regime which emerged from these reverted to a much looser, quasi-feudal structure, involving the creation of numerous "kings," "dukes," and "marquises," whose regional power was only gradually reduced by his successors (Wiethoff, 1975: 78; Fairbank, Reischauer & Craig, 1973: 60).

This infrastructural weakness (manifest in further dynastic breakdowns within the overall Ch'in-Han period) was most pronounced in the south. "During the Han dynasties, the Yangtze was the empire's limit, often used as a place of exile" (Barfield, 1989: 18). As for the sub-Yangtze region, "large parts of [which] were covered with sub-tropical swamps" on the eve of the first warring states period, even formal imperial control was restricted to a limited corridor stretching down to the Pearl river/Canton area, with much of the Southeast coast (later so crucial to China's maritime development) falling totally outside the imperial boundaries (Wiethoff, 1975: 33).

A further temporary boost to southern economic development also occurred as a result of the turmoil in the north following the




effective collapse of the Han empire in the late second century, and this time it was associated with the outright emergence of two separate imperial states there, based in the lower and upper Yang- tze regions. Despite this further development of the south, the overall population of agrarian China either remained static or declined during this period of division, with estimates for the situation in 600 AD, at the outset of the new Sui-Tang imperial epoch, ranging between 45 and 55 million (McEvedy & Jones, 1978: 171-72; Times Atlas, 1983: 127).

The first century of this epoch saw Chinese military power and Chinese territorial expansion raised to unprecedented heights. On first blush, one might expect a corresponding jump in overall population, by simple analogy with the striking increases associated with the first real political unification under the Ch'in-Han, and the quite extraordinary increases associated with the next imperial reunification under the Sung (which never controlled important Chinese territories in the northwest and northeast and finally lost control of the north altogether) However, the demographic recovery recorded during the effectively centralized period of the Sui- T'ang was actually quite modest. The real takeoff only began after the central power was in an advanced state of decline, and after the outset of a dramatic shift in the distribution of population from the north to the south.

This development is treated at length in the discussion of the second phase. However, it is important to emphasize here that Sui-T'ang policies in this early stage of military effectiveness worked directly against the further rapid development of the south, which in practice posed a serious centrifugal threat to the cohesion of the just reconstituted imperial state. Thus the regime was concerned less with the expansion than with the redistribution of the overall economic and demographic base, and above all with the repopulation of the old strategic heartland of the northwest, which had been especially devastated by the preceding wars (Eberhard, 1977: 171- 72; Wiethoff, 1975: 58-59).

As noted earlier, this was the least productive of all the great agricultural heartlands, and relatively resistant to the growth of large commercial estates, especially in the increasingly eroded loess highlands of Shensi. It was also the region in which a major Chinese agricultural base was most intimately involved with the




ecology and social forces of the arid zone proper- being immediately south of the Ordos region of steppe and desert enclosed in the great horseshoe bend of the upper Huangho, and immediately southeast of the Kansu corridor, where a substantial oasis chain projected Chinese style agriculture out through semi-desert conditions towards the still more arid zone of Turkestan proper (Bar- field, 1989: 18). However, precisely because of this sharp juxtaposi- tion of ecologies supporting irrigation agriculture and pastoral nomadism, the northwest as a whole produced a unique juxtaposi- tion of human resources- an extensive free peasantry and powerful semi-nomadic cavalry under aristocratic leadership- which was crucial to the "divisional militia" system underpinning the centralized imperial power in the seventh century.

Such a free peasant-mounted aristocracy combination appears aberrant from a historical perspective conditioned by the experience of north European feudalism. But it was juxtaposed in turn with a second equally aberrant constellation of forces in the richer parts of the country, for the intensifying development of the water- logged regions of the south was increasingly producing an economically dominant landlord stratum in an ecological context strongly resistant to the formation of a European-style mounted warrior elite (Barfield, 1989: 18). The result by the late T'ang and Sung eras would be a condition of "manorialism without feudalism" (Elvin, 1973: 69-83), in which these dominant economic strata pursued their regional interests (vis-à-vis each other and the centralized state) not through the mobilization of independent military power but rather through the institutional arena of the meritocratic Confucian bureaucracy, whose consolidation in these centuries is often presented as the beginning of a new, more modern career of the centralized state in China.

By the seventh century, therefore, internal Chinese geopolitics were entering a critical phase in which the rapid economic and demographic development of China as an overarching economic region would increasingly undermine the political cohesion of China as a centralized imperial state. However, this was closely intertwined with a critical stage in the external geopolitics of Chi- nese relations with the nomadic and semi-nomadic military powers of the Eurasian steppe, and a brief consideration of the evolution of these relations will conclude this discussion of the first phase.




Two overlapping arenas may be distinguished in the pattern of geopolitical competition throughout the period 400 BC-800 AD, yielding two complementary ways of delineating the relationship between imperial and warring states formations. If one focuses only on agrarian China and the immediate steppe fringe zone, the basic pattern involves two micro-warring states periods, each leading to a unified empire phase- the Ch'in-Han (begins 221 BC) and the Sui-T'ang (begins 589 AD). Each imperial phase emerged out of a prolonged unification sequence in which a semi-barbarian power exploiting the unique resources of the northwest established its military and organizational supremacy over its competitors. In the first case, this sequence involved the Ch'in itself, emerging at a time when semi-nomadic pastoralism was still extensively practiced within the later boundaries of intensive agrarian settlement in the northwest and southeast. In the second, the Toba Turks brought all of north China and much of the adjacent steppe under a "dualistic" empire from 386-534 AD, before disintegrating in civil war as a result of an unsuccessful experiment in radical Sinification during which the capital had been shifted from the steppe fringe to Loy- ang in north-central China. After further intense warfare, north China was again re-unified under the most "barbarian" of the successor states to the Toba empire- from a base in Shensi and Kansu- and both the Sui and T'ang regimes which subsequently ruled China as a whole grew directly out of the "Sino-barbarian synthesis" in this region.

In each imperial phase, the original unifying regime disintegrat- ed in the face of widespread rebellion within a generation, and each successor regime had to fight its way back to a more secure and institutionalized basis for the central power- the Han over a period of 60 years, the T'ang over less than a decade. Each of these reconstituted regimes in turn eventually succumbed to major civil conflict, the Han in the early first century AD and the T'ang in the mid-eighth; and their successor regimes were based from the outset on a more fundamental compromise with the forces of landlordism and regionalism- with the principal capital being shifted eastward to Loyang in the first case but not in the second. The later Han nominally continued to 220 AD, but real power seems to have passed to regional warlords around 180 AD, if not earlier (Eberhard, 1977: 99, Wiethoff, 1975: 84, Elvin, 1973: 33-35). The later T'ang




nominally continued to 907 AD. But the drift to regional warlordism was consistent from the time of the great upheaval of the An- Lushan rebellion in the mid-eighth century, reflecting in good part the anomaly of retaining the political center in the northwest when the economic center was increasingly shifting to the southeast. The survival of the central power was also heavily dependent on successive military interventions (purchased at the cost of huge protection payments) by the Uighur deep steppe confederacy. When the Ui- ghur empire was itself destroyed by a rival steppe power in 840 AD, the Pang had "lost its protector on the steppe," and within a generation "was destroyed by the next major rebellion in China" (Barfield, 1989: 14,13).

Even on a generous reading of imperial achievements, therefore, the overall balance of time between warring states and imperial patterns would be almost equal, while the balance of time within each sequence shifts markedly against the imperial pattern along with the historical expansion of the effective area of Chinese economic development (short warring states-long empire in the first sequence, long warring states-short empire in the second).2 Howev-

2 The emphasis here on an extended micro-warring states period between the Ch'in-Han and Sui-Tang imperial eras broadly conforms (with some differences as regards beginning dates) to several critical accounts of major developmental phases in Chinese history. Much more controversial, however, is my claim to identify in the decades around 800AD the beginnings of a new, greatly enlarged warring states phase which was not concluded until the Mongol conquest of the south or arguably until the success of the Ming rebellion. A useful point of comparison here is with Elvin, who explicitly emphasizes that the reconstitution of the empire after the Han breakdown was "a close-run thing" and heavily dependent on nomadic inputs into a "Sino-barbarian synthesis in north China." By contrast, he restricts the post-Tang period of multiple geopolitical division to the conventionally recognized "Five Dynasties/Ten Kingdoms" interregnum between the formal dissolution of the long-powerless Tang dynasty in 907AD and the formal declaration of the Sung dynasty in 959AD. This conventional periodization, and the very limited disruption to China's imperial unity which it suggests, in turn becomes an important buttress for his theoretical argument that the longer term survival of the empire had been assured by the growth of economic unity under the late-Tang and Sung (1973:17).

However, the periodization given in this paper seems more in line with the verdict of Wang Gungwu, the author of the leading political history of the Five Dynasties period. Gungwu argues that this period was no mere interregnum but was rather crucial in the formation of the subsequent Sung, and that the relevant time-span is

really from 884 (when the Tang dynasty effectively fell to internal rebellion) to 979 (when the first Sung emperor completed the reunification of most of agrarian China). Equally important, he sees this intense breakdown/reconsolidation phase as growing directly out of the more gradual process of disintegration under the later Tang (755-




er, the foregoing account still seriously understates the overarching warring states dynamic of this period, by ignoring the third great center of military power- the deep steppe.

As Thomas Barfield has demonstrated, the unification of at least north China under a conservative, "civilian" regime (such as the later Tang) created the preconditions for powerful and long-lasting imperial confederacies based upon the extraction of a regular flow of disguised tribute or protection payments from the Chinese regime in question. Barfield emphasizes that such deep steppe confederacies did not try to conquer China but rather to "milk" it from a distance, primarily through an "outer frontier" strategy of deliberately destructive attacks alternating with negotiations de- signed to increase the level of effective tribute. They also tended to collaborate with Chinese regimes both against rising steppe fringe powers which might break down the "bipolar" China-deep steppe power configuration, and against rebel forces inside China which threatened to dismember their source of revenue (Barfield, 1989: 12-16; 90-91). Nonetheless, the economic costs to the Chinese empire of either defence against or protection payments to such steppe confederacies were formidable, and so was the "'arms rac- ing" impetus towards technological and organizational innovation which the nomad challenge created. Thus from the perspective of the overall military field of forces, this whole phase is best viewed as a single macro-warring states phase- alternating between predominantly multipolar and predominantly bipolar configurations-

884). In regard to the latter, he distinguishes two sub-periods: "a period of relative recovery [from the An Lu-shan rebellion] from 755 to 820 and one of gradual but unmistakable decline to the catastrophic uprisings of 875-884 (1967: 1-6).

Overall, the periodization closest to my own is given by David Wilkinson (1991), in a global comparative survey of "civilizations," explicitly organized around criteria of "politicomilitary connectedness" rather than the more common culturalist criteria. His periodization of "Far Eastern civilization" (excludingjapan), lists three "world states"- Ch'in-Han (221BC-184AD), Sui-T'ang (589-750AD) and Mongol-Ming-Manchu (1279- 1850AD)-and three "states-systems"-Pre-Ch'in (771-221BC), Pre-Sui (184-589AD) and pre-Mongol (750-1279AD). The only substantial differences between this periodization and my own is that I accord less structural significance to the late Bronze Age component of the first warring states phase, and accord much more significance to the continued presence of external military competitors to both the Ch'in-Han and the Sui-T'ang on the deep steppe. These deep steppe military powers tend to be marginalized in Wilkinson's civilizationist picture, but ought to figure much more prominently on his own avowed criteria of politico-military connectedness.




in which the overriding geopolitical reality was the relentless competition of two or more major states rather than the largely untrou- bled hegemony of one. It ended with the accelerating erosion of an imperial order- the early Sui-T'ang- which represented the last great rally of the first empire centered on the old strategic heartland of the northwest, and thus merged into in a second macro-warring states phase in which the geopolitical and economic dynamic seemed to run strongly in the direction of an entrenched interstate system and world-economy virtually until the very end.

2. The Second Phase

The economic cut-in point for this period is taken, not from a major technological watershed as such, but rather from a demographic one: the onset of a dramatic north-south shift in the demographic balance in agrarian China, which in turn was the proximate cause of a major new expansion in the agrarian and urban population as a whole. The exact details are still contested, but there seems broad agreement that there was a shift from a regional split of roughly 75%-25% in favor of the north in the seventh century to an equivalent split in favor of the south in the mid-thirteenth; that the population as a whole probably doubled in this period, and that the change in the distribution of population was well under way by the mid-eighth century, anticipating the overall expansion in numbers by at least a century (Elvin, 1973: 204-09; McEvedy & Jones, 1978: 171-72; Times Atlas, 1983: 127).

The increasing disorder in the north flowing from the An-Lush- an rebellion was probably an important trigger for this development and the intense military conflicts there in the closing centuries of the period undoubtedly accelerated it. But there was also a fundamental pull factor in the enormous agricultural productivity of the Yangtze and sub-Yangtze regions and the extraordinary maritime opening of the Southeast Coast. In this sense, the demographic watershed of this period was also a technological watershed. It involved a decisive shift in agrarian activity from the dry land wheat and millet based culture of the north to a much more de- manding and sophisticated wet rice/aquaculture complex, in which already established infrastructural skills in the control of waterways were also raised to new heights. The general advance in agricultural




technologies associated with this upgrading of the marches in the south was at least comparable to and arguably well in advance of that associated with the roughly contemporaneous marchland expansion in northwest Europe, and interacted with a much larger absolute population expanding at a faster rate (Elvin, 1973: 204-12; Lippitt, 1978: 1-2). Moreover, it was combined with advances in textiles and iron and steel production of a kind not seen in Europe until many centuries later. Since the growth of iron working was closely (though by no means exclusively) associated with military demands, and was concentrated primarily in the north where military and economic contact with steppe and steppe fringe powers was endemic, the development in this area constituted in turn a technological watershed in the arid zone military dynamic on the Eurasian steppe (McNeill, 1983: 34-39; Abu-Lughod, 1989: 323-24).

I will return to this last point at the end of the section. But my major concern here is with the relatively unexamined question of the geopolitical implications of the demographic and economic revolution in the south, and particularly with the potential thus created for a maritime zone re-ordering of established geopolitical patterns in Northeast Asia. In this regard, it should be emphasized that the pattern of population growth within the south as a whole was very uneven in his period, and that the greatest advances of all were recorded on the central sector of the Southeast Coast around Fukien. In contrast to the flat alluvial plain of north China- where the silt laden and highly unstable Huangho failed to drain its lower basin and positively inhibited the development of a maritime dimension in early Chinese history- the Southeast Coast had a classic maritime littoral ecology. The mountains here came close to the sea, the coastline was deeply indented and riddled with creeks and inlets and- again in sharp contrast to the coast north of the Yangtze- the region contained over 2000 islands, including the very large islands of Taiwan and Hainan (Wiethoff, 1975: 37-38). Above all, this was true of Fukien, the coastal region most insulated by mountains from the rest of China. By virtue of this insulation, and a major potential hinterland immediately off the coast in Taiwan, Fukien was exceptionally well placed to emerge as a powerful, independent littoral state challenging the dominance of an overarching agrarian bureaucratic empire (indeed much better placed, in a geopolitical sense, than was the Netherlands in the European context).




Precisely because of these ecological features favoring a major littoral state, the Fukien region had been notably undeveloped in the early history of Chinese expansion. It had remained outside even the relatively limited political control exercised in the South more generally under the Han, and had been by-passed for the more accessible Pearl river region in the early spread of urban development to the south- with Canton emerging as a major port long before any comparable development immediately to the north. But the population of Fukien grew by more than 1000% between 750 AD and 1350 AD, at a time when population in key northern regions was at best static and in some areas seriously declining, and despite the fact that Fukien had become in turn a crucial source of out-migration by the end of this period. Chu'an-chou, the major port of the region, grew from a minor town to a city of over 500,000, surpassing Canton to become the largest port city in China and, according to some contemporary observers, the world (Elvin, 1973; Gung-Wu, 1990: 402-05 Abu-Lughod, 1989: 335-37).

It is crucial here to reiterate my claim, foreshadowed in the previous section, that these new developments radically shifted the balance of power between imperial state and private/regional social forces to the advantage of the latter. Given the combination of long-term ecological constraints upon southern development, and the above-mentioned geopolitical imperatives towards repopulation of the northwest under the early Sui-T'ang, the real onset of the economic and demographic revolution in the south did not come until the period of declining central power under the later T'ang. The whole process was crucially dependent on infrastructural resources originally provided by the central power-above all in the shape of the great canal network constructed under the Sui, which in many respects prefigured the Grand Canal network extending from the Yangtze region to Bejing and the sea from Ming times onwards. Because these resources were provided by the central power, it is sometimes assumed that they necessarily strengthened the central power. Mark Elvin, in particular, explicitly compares the constructed canal link between the Yangtze region and the north with the natural link provided by the Mediterranean between the imperial power centers of the Roman empire and the main imperial granary of Egypt. The Yangtze region was fully "economically acquired," he suggests, at roughly the same time as the regime in Constantinople finally lost control of Egypt to the Arabs, and the




broader economic unity subsequently established on this basis was a crucial factor ensuring the survival of a unified empire in China long after its ecologically more favored Roman counterpart had disappeared (Elvin, 1973: 54-55).

Elvin's image of the canal network as a constructed Mediterra- nean underpinning the redistributive infrastructure of the imperial state is an illuminating one. However, I would argue that he ante- dates by almost eight centuries the stage in imperial development- roughly that of the early Ming- at which it decisively assumed this function; and a brief consideration of this latter stage may clarify the very different circumstances prevailing in the early Sui-T'ang.

In the later period, the critical strategic interface between the empire and the Eurasian steppe had shifted to the northeast, with the longer term growth of powerful nomadic forces in Manchuria and the eastern Mongolian steppe. In turn Bejing had emerged as a kind of northeastern equivalent of Ch'ang-an at this new strategic interface, after centuries of turmoil in which successive capitals in the north-central plains, even in the south, had repeatedly succumbed to external attack (Wiethoff, 1975: 49-50). However, the Bejing region- which had fallen outside the orbit of effective imperial control for most of the five centuries between the An-Lushan rebellion and the Mongol conquest- lacked both the natural moun- tain defenses and the surrounding agrarian heartland of Ch'ang-an. Both deficiencies had to be artificially rectified: the first by a complex of garrison cities to the north, themselves linked to the capital by their own system of water transport; and the second by the Grand Canal itself, which enabled both the capital and the 3/4 million troops garrisoned around it to be supplied with imported grain directly from the Yangtze region (Ayao, 1969; Elvin, 1973: 102-06).

As Elvin himself points out, these new defensive arrangements were perhaps the supreme expression of the logistical supremacy over both external and internal opposition which confirmed the genuine world-empire status of the early and middle Ming. They would also appear to have institutionalized a new and more stable geopolitical alignment linking the dominant economic interests in Yangtze region to the physical defence of the far northern capital, where the top imperial bureaucracy was in any case now predominantly southern in origin. However, the engineering advances underpinning this feat were consummated only in the thirteenth-




fourteenth centuries, and were precisely the product of the four to five centuries of intense military competition and economic revolution preceding this. Both the new logistical potentials and the new geopolitical alignment still lay far in the future in the early Sui- T'ang era. The strategic core of the empire remained in the old northwestern heartland, and Ch'ang-an could only be supplied by an expensive indirect route upriver via the alternate capital of Loyang in north-central China. In fact, the strength of the centralized power in this earlier period actually depended on the regime being able to live of its own on the resources of the Ch'ang-an region- a goal which became increasingly untenable as the seventh century wore on and which provoked major conflicts with the gentry of the richer Loyang and lower Yangtze regions for the brief time during which it was vigorously pursued.

The early history of the canal directly reflected these regional conflicts. It was originally constructed (under the second Sui emper- or) when the Loyang gentry had briefly won out in the struggle to have the capital transferred to their own area; and it was relatively neglected for almost a century when the capital returned to Ch'ang-an and the centralized power of the early T'ang was at its height. Only in the 730's, almost on the eve of the great upheaval of the An-Lushan rebellion, did the regime undertake crucial reforms to improve the efficiency of the operation of the canal system (Eberhard, 1977: 171-72; Pulleybank, 1955: 32-35). Through- out the later T'ang numerous expedients were tried to counteract the natural obstacles to the efficient shipment of grain tribute to Ch'ang-an, but by the ninth century both the economic costs and the military security problems of this route had become crucial sources of weakness of the regime (Twitchett, 1970: 84-96).

Rather than strengthening the centralized state, therefore, the canal network in this period seems rather to have to have strengthened the regionalist forces of "civil society," which re-emerged during the entropie phase of the later T'ang. Indeed, when one combines the above considerations about the internal geopolitics of the T'ang power structure in the north with a serious consideration of the exceptional ecological diversity of the Yangtze and sub-Yang- tze regions, a radical reversal of Elvin's Mediterranean analogy seems in order. Instead of delivering to the state the crucial resources of a single, long-established and relatively controllable




heartland like Egypt, it played a crucial role in promoting the development of a multiplicity of new and potentially uncontrollable heartlands on the southern marches of the empire. In this sense, it acted in this period not as a "constructed Mediterranean" but as a constructed (and obviously much more centralized) substitute for the north-south river systems which occurred naturally in Europe and were similarly critical to the development of the north Europe- an marches in the medieval era. Just as the intensification of economic development in the European context produced many contending states on the territory previously controlled by the Garolingian empire at a more primitive developmental stage, so the final dissolution of the Tang empire produced ten separate states in the south where there had been only two (and sometimes one) in the micro-warring states era following the fall of the Han.

By the late Tang era, therefore, agrarian China was beginning to assume the character of a capitalist world-economy in the Wallersteinian sense: combining effective multi-state political divisions with an overarching economic arena which was substantially indebted to the infrastructural resources bequeathed by the decay- ing imperial power. Within this dual framework, the southward demographic expansion may also be seen as a major expansion of private "transnational" capital on the part of the agrarian elites, who were able to exploit these infrastructural advantages at what were in practice remarkably favorable protection rents. The whole process was marked by a far-reaching revolution in agricultural techniques and in the inter-regional exchange of bulk goods (Wal- lerstein's [1974: 20-21] own criterion for accepting that extensive economic exchange genuinely signifies an effective world-economy). But it also involved a dramatic advance in the scale of landlordism- with all the adverse structural consequences of the latter for survival of the imperial state. Under the late Tang itself, admittedly, the regular flow of taxes from the south remained a crucial fiscal support of the regime. But the quid pro quo for this was the effective surrender to the local authorities of control over the practical determination of tax liabilities within the region, which merely exacerbated the problem of landlordism and tax evasion in the longer term (Peterson, 1979: 464-560).3

3 Peterson observes that the Yangtze region had entered a "deep social and




In the late tenth century, the Sung regime turned a military machine forged in the northern conflicts to the conquest of the south, and temporarily brought the economic core of the empire under centralized control again. But far from producing the suppression of the informal civil society forces now at work, the Sung came close to a modern form of civil society (without the quotes) within an effective and unprecedentedly populous centralized state.

In one sense, the Sung was a highly militarized regime, operat- ing in an exceptionally militarized environment. It had emerged from some 80 years of intense conflict in north China between peasant rebels, steppe fringe nomads and native Chinese regional military warlords (Gung-Wu, 1967); and throughout its 300 year history it confronted a series of steppe fringe and deep steppe states which proved to be its military equals or superiors (Rossabi, 1983). In terms of the formulation used in the previous section, the Sung was superficially the imperial terminus of an initial warring states/unified empire sequence. But it was unable even to extend its territorial control to all of agrarian China; and its very emergence accelerated the process whereby the two external arenas of geopolitical conflict- the steppe fringe and the deep steppe- increasingly collapsed into each other. Thus the consolidation of the Sung empire was not really a terminus but merely a way-station to a second, vastly enlarged, multipolar warring states phase which eventually embraced the entire Eurasian steppe zone and culminat- ed in the Mongol world-empire.

In its "northern" phase (960-1120 AD), when land-based defense was the major priority, the Sung maintained a mercenary army of around 1.2 million, extensively equipped with iron weapons and armor (Elvin, 1973: 80). In the 1060's, an official estimate put the costs of military expenditure at 80% of government revenue (Mc- Neill, 1983: 40). Moreover, the northern Sung still remained locked into to the old geopolitical imperatives for the control of the northwest, to an extent remarkable at a stage when the capital had shifted well to the east, at Kaifeng, and the most productive and populous economic zones were now clearly in the south. "About a quarter of total state revenues" still came from relatively small

economic crisis" by the mid 9th century, which was "not a product of economic decline but an indirect result of rapid development" associated with uncontrolled landlordism and tax evasion (1979: 552; emphasis added).




population of Shensi, which now had "no large landowners, no wealthy gentry with their evasion of taxation, but only a mass of newly settled peasants holdings" established after the latest round of military devastation in the northwest. The largest concentration of Sung frontier troops (around 450,000) was deployed to defend that region in a three-way struggle against the both the Manchur- ian-based Kitan and the powerful Turco-Tibetan empire of the Hsi-Hsia, based in Kansu and the Ordos region (Eberhard, 1977: 216, 228).

Despite this vast military effort, the Sung eventually lost control of Shensi to the Hsi-Hsia, and subsequently lost control of the north as a whole to the Jurchen, an outer Manchurian power who had previously overthrown the Kitan. Along with this enforced shift to a base in the south, came a marked intensification of the linkage (already apparent in the northern phase) between an unprecedented degree of military expenditure and emphasis on military-related technological innovation and an unprecedented reliance on market patterns of economic organization to satisfy these requirements of the state (McNeill, 1983: 32-43). Some ten centuries before the post- 1945 United States, the Sung appear to have stumbled upon the potent combination of a permanent war economy and a night- watchman state, and the result was what has been widely described as an incipient industrial revolution, whose major features have been succinctly described by Victor Lippitt.

During the Song Dynasty (960-1279) an economic revolution swept over China. The development of wet-field rice cultiva- tion in conjunction with a great southward migration led to sharply higher land productivity in agriculture. At the same time, rapid expansion in domestic and foreign trade accom- panied urban growth, and for certain commodities the market became a national one. The growing commercialization of the economy led to increasing sophistication in the means of exchange, and by the end of the eleventh century paper money was used in much of China The entire Song period was marked by technological and organizational innovation, while the transmission of new ideas and techniques was facilitated by woodblock printing, which came into general use early in the period (Lippitt, 1978: 1; see also Abu-Lughod,




1989: 316-40; Elvin, 1973; Shiba, 1970; Skinner, 1977: 22- 26). As Lippitt's account makes clear, the Sung economic revolution

embraced all the ancillary revolutions (in agriculture, commerce, urbanization and technology) commonly associated with the pre- lude to capitalist industrialism many centuries later in Europe. However, it is worth giving special emphasis here to the maritime revolution of this period, because it was this above all which had the potential to carry the earlier expansion of transnational capital (and transnational exchange of bulk goods) within agrarian China decisively outside those boundaries and to entrench a capitalist world-economy and interstate system more broadly throughout East Asia. Initially, two sets of factors combined to produce a striking development in this area. The first were the more obvious economic stimuli associated with the physical transformation of the sub- Yangtze region in general and the Southeast Coast in particular discussed above. The second concerned the military and state-making challenges facing the Sung regime after it had been fully evicted from the north in the early eleventh century. As a result of this, the Sung lost the remnants of the free peasant tax base which had buttressed earlier imperial regimes, its monopoly control of the canal network, and the major coalfields and ironworking centers in north China. Partly as a result of this last factor, it also seems to have lost a good deal of the technological arms race with the invading Jurchens in land-based military technologies. For all these reasons, the southern Sung regime was inclined actively to exploit the riverine and maritime environment of the south for both defence and commercial purposes.

As a result of this confluence of factors, China was rapidly transformed from a country with only a very limited opening to maritime activity into the most powerful economic engine in the most dynamic maritime region in the world. McNeill argues that "the scale of trade through the southern seas grew persistently and systematically from 1000 onwards," reflecting the "rise of a massive market economy in China" itself (McNeill, 1983: 50). When maritime activity first began to boom in the south during the T'ang period, the dominant merchant groups in the then leading port of Canton were Arabs, Iranians, Koreans and Japanese, a fact which




exemplifies very clearly the limited maritime development on the Chinese littoral proper to that point. By the twelfth century, the tables had completely turned. The maritime development in south China during the Southern Sung laid the foundations both for the spectacular (if unsuccessful) maritime invasions mounted by the Mongols against Japan and Java, and also for the great Ming naval expeditions of the early fifteenth century, 70 years before the arrival of the first Europeans. In McNeill's words, "everything about these expeditions eclipsed the scale of later Portuguese endeavors. More ships, more guns, more manpower, more cargo capacity, combined with seamanship and seaworthiness equal to anything the Europeans of Columbus' and Magellan's day had at their com- mand" (McNeill, 1983: 44).

Those analysts who have not simply taken as a foregone conclusion the subsequent closure of this maritime opening under the middle Ming, have tended to frame their "might have been" questions around the possibility of the continued maritime dominance of the southern seas by a unitary Chinese empire, which would have denied the Europeans their later window of opportunity in the region. In terms of this scenario, the skeptics definitely have the stronger case; for the combination of continued maritime expansion and the preservation of a unified empire seems the most implausible of prospects. Far more interesting and plausible is the notion that (without the extraordinary conjunctural break of the Mongol conquest and the Ming rebellion) the remnants of Chinese unity under the Sung in the south and the Jurchen in the north would finally have succumbed to a littoral/maritime zone dynamic of entrenched interstate conflict upon European lines. My case for this scenario depends critically upon the arguments outlined above about the intensifying development of centrifugal forces in the agrarian sector. But two specific points about the littoral/maritime zone can be made here.

First, there are strong grounds for supposing that the merchants of the Southeast coast region in general and Fukien in particular would have developed growing secessionist tendencies the further the Southern Sung advanced into the normal dynastic trajectory of imperial overstretch and intensifying fiscal demands on a limited tax base. One important reason for the longevity of the southern Sung, despite the unprecedented demands of the military budget




and the exceptional erosion of the agrarian tax base by landlordism in the south, appears to have been its unprecedented capacity to make good its deficiencies in more traditional tax areas by taxes on trade. Already in 1137, only a decade after the regime had been evicted from the north by the Jurchen, "something like a fifth of [government] revenue came from excises on maritime trade" (Mc- Neill, 1983: 41), compared to only 2 or 3% from this source under the early northern Sung (Shiba, 1983: 106). In effect, the mercantile expansion of the southeast was a direct compensation for the loss of the overburdened peasant tax base of the northwest; and where- as urban growth directly eroded the tax base in the latter region, it directly expanded the (potential) base in the former. But unlike the effectively "caged" northwestern peasantry the Southeast Coast merchants had an "exit" option which grew more plausible as their economic support grew more indispensable to the imperial state. Three states had emerged in this region after the breakdown of the Tang, but along with the other southern states they had been relatively easily reabsorbed into the expanding empire of the early Sung, whose superior military capacity derived from its origins in the intense military competition in the north. However, the 150 year history of the Sung as itself a southern state, highly militarized and technologically advanced but increasingly dependant on naval power, had brought to the south the crucial ingredient of state of the art military capacity which had been missing from the region in previous warring states eras.

Secondly, the emergence of a strong maritime-oriented state or states on the southeast littoral would in turn have injected into the Northeast Asian geopolitical dynamic a missing structural ingredient commonly accepted as crucial in the emergence of an entrenched interstate system/world-economy dialectic in early modern Europe. This ingredient is the role of an external balancer power, with both the interest and capacity to exploit centrifugal trends on the continental land mass, because the domination of that land mass by any one great empire would threaten its maritime freedom and ultimately its independence. I have already suggested that a power based in the Fukien region, probably incorporating Taiwan, seems the leading candidate to have assumed this role in the first instance. But there are other plausible littoral power candidates, and a fully fledged maritime power based in the Japanese archipela-




go would seem a probable early development had the maritime dynamic of the tenth-thirteenth centuries continued unchecked. Precisely because China's own maritime history was so long in emerging, the upgrading of the marches phenomenon was slow to assert itself in the Japanese case. But this was changing rapidly towards the end of the second phase discussed here, and even without continuing major influences from China, Japan underwent its own dramatic warring states phase at the time of the Ming. Given the economic prizes at stake in the East Asian-Indian Ocean region- prizes for which Europeans subsequently sailed half-way across the world, competition among maritime and littoral powers in this imagined continuation of a European trajectory would surely have been intense. But as the behavior of England and the Nether- lands in the actual European trajectory shows, such powers are perfectly capable of combining to oppose the common enemy of a major land mass empire even while engaged in bitter contests for maritime supremacy among themselves.4

To understand what a circuit-breaking new ingredient the emergence of external balancer powers in the developing southern sub-system might have been, it is necessary to turn back to Bar- field's fascinating analysis of the relations between the Chinese empire and the external deep steppe and steppe fringe powers in the northern sub-system. As Barfield compellingly demonstrates, almost all power balancing considerations in that geopolitical context worked in reverse of those taken as normal in conventional theories of interstate-systems/ world-economies based on the reification of the European experience. Strong deep steppe confederacies-the structural equivalent of a full maritime power like Britain in terms of their physical detachment from agrarian China- used their military capacity not to promote internal threats to the cohe-

4 The term "littoral state" as used here refers to a coastal power like Portugal or the Netherlands with a strong orientation towards maritime trade but without the luxury of detachment from pressing land-based military entanglements enjoyed by an island power like England (in my terms a full maritime state). The term "continental state" is used to refer to a state which, even if not actually landlocked, is primarily built on an agrarian-coercive base. As the paper suggests, the special interest of Northeast Asian geopolitics and political economy is that such agrarian-coercive continental states were closely bounded not just by a maritime periphery but also by a steppe/desert periphery, also involving extensive long-distance trade but generating- so I have argued- a contrasting geopolitical logic.




sion of the empire but to suppress them. Similarly, Chinese imperial regimes would collaborate with deep steppe empires to put down the challenge of rising steppe fringe powers, because both sides valued a bipolar power configuration which kept social structural distinctions between agrarian China and the steppe zone as clear as possible. When strong steppe fringe states did emerge in periods of upheaval in China and the deep steppe, they did not seek to keep China divided so that they could contend for dominance on the deep steppe- as a littoral power analogy with the maritime dynamic would suggest- but rather tried to establish their credentials as legitimate Chinese powers and position themselves to re-constitute the empire.

Thus all major geopolitical forces in the northern sub-system tended towards the periodic reconstitution of an over-arching bureaucratic empire on the territory of agrarian China. Moreover, they tended always towards the re-constitution of a Chinese empire and social formation, for the demographic and organizational weaknesses of any nomadic group attempting to control large areas of agrarian China permitted no other outcome in the longer term. At bottom, the geopolitical (and social structural) dynamic in the north was really a vastly overgrown version of a broader arid zone dynamic- often associated specifically with Islamic society but more plausibly attributable to the basic ecological parameters of relations between pastoral nomads and sedentary social orders based on irrigation agriculture (Gellner, 1981: 24-38). There was nothing immutable about dominance of this dynamic in the northeast Asian case. Its impact was progressively downgraded after the period considered here, despite the reversal under the Ming of the earlier trends towards a multi-state system and capitalist industrialization. It was the continuation of these latter trends which constituted the real threat to China as an agrarian bureaucratic empire, and the major locus of this threat lay not in the barbarian north but in the Chinese south.

I would argue that these tendencies were already far advanced in the century preceding the Mongol conquest and that- given the extraordinary complexity and productivity of peninsula and island East Asia- they would have advanced quickly and over a large area had they become entrenched on the southern marches of agrarian China. It is difficult to see how they could have been contained by




an imperial power based solely in the south like the Southern Sung. But as the 150 year stalemate between the Sung and the Jurchen/ Chin indicates, the prospects for the conquest of the south by a "normal" northern based power were also slim. To bring the separate components of the empire back together, a military force of truly world historical proportions was required- and that is what the Mongols duly supplied.

The extent of Mongol power can only be understood by reference to the general military upgrading of the marches all around the Eurasian steppe zone throughout the closing centuries of this second phase; and this upgrading, in turn, cannot be understood without reference to the longer term influences emanating from the economic and military development of China itself. Obviously, the Chinese impact was most direct on the powers on the immediate northern frontier, such as the Kitan, the Jurchen and the Hsi-Hsia, all formidable opponents of the Sung regime. However, as McNeill points out, the level of military competition and general nomadic- sedentary interaction throughout the Eurasian steppe seems to have passed over "a critical threshold" in the tenth century (1983: 58). The major pace-makers in central and west Asia were a series of regimes established by "radically detribalized" Turkic powers, and these in turn were in good part the product of the westward shed- ding of the great Turkish deep steppe confederacy of the early Sui-Tang era.

Ironically, a crucial trigger for the ultimate rise of the Mongols was the interaction between this new environment and the one genuine pattern of external balancer behavior which the arid zone dynamic of the northern sub-system typically produced. This was the policy- which the Jurchen pursued vigorously during their period in control of north China- of attempting prevent the rise of any major deep steppe confederacy by promoting shifting coalitions of forces against any group which appeared likely to become too powerful. Barfield argues that this strategy had worked very successfully for earlier steppe fringe powers in control of north China. But given the lack of any obvious geopolitical divisions on the deep steppe, it always contained the risk of promoting an unstoppable coalition instead; and in the new environment discussed above, it proved to be the veritable spark that ignited a prairie fire (Barfield, 1989: 182).




The Jurchen power balancing activities fed advanced weapons and iron-making technologies into the steppe zone, and both by their own direct military interventions and by their shifting patron- client relationships they inevitably accelerated the spiral of competitive emulation in military organization and strategy. When a unified Mongol power finally did emerge after decades of intense fighting, its attacks were initially directed against the Jurchen and the other major powers on China's northern borders. But in the critical 50- year interval between the first Mongol attacks on north China and the final defeat of the Sung in the south, their forces were militarily engaged with every major power around the steppe fringe. When they returned to the final campaigns against the Jurchen and Sung they brought to bear all the most advanced military organization and technology of the day.

3. Towards the Third Phase

The Mongols were able to reunify China where a lesser military power would have failed. But this alone would scarcely have en- sured the continuation of the empire. In little more than 50 years, major regionalist tendencies were reasserting themselves, and ultimately the Mongol elite simply retreated to the steppe in the face of a rising tide of rebellion. The real consolidation of the Mongol achievement came with the victory of the Ming over both the Mongol remnants and, more importantly, rival Chinese warlords. This was really the last act of the second great warring states phase, and the numbers mobilized by the various contenders were enormous, with the first Ming emperor being left with three million troops under arms.

The last scene of this last act was a brief civil war within the Ming itself over the succession to the first emperor. This internal conflict resulted in the transfer of the capital from Nanking in the lower Yangtze back to Bejing in the far north, where the victor had his primary military base. The capital remained at Bejing under the second emperor's increasingly "civilianist" successors- probably because to have left the political control of the northeast to frontier military governors would have entailed unacceptable opportunities for the growth of regional military power- and this served to en-




trench the new geopolitical alignment centered on the redistributive infrastructure of the Grand Canal mentioned earlier.

The Ming rebellion was also the last act in an extraordinarily complex "major unification sequence" (incorporating two earlier great sequences leading to the Sung and Mongol empires respec- tively) in which the interplay of steppe fringe, deep steppe and peasant rebel social forces generated military and logistical power on an unprecedented scale. However, as Elvin points out, the paradoxical legacy of this was a slowing of the technological dynamic, since the extraordinary capacities inherited by the Ming effectively lifted the empire clear for several centuries from the intense competition among military equals which had helped to fuel the previous onrush of technological innovation in the first place. In this period, Elvin argues, Chinese imperial regimes were able to concentrate on logistics (which advantaged the central power) and also to exploit the decreased economic burden of military defence by returning to more traditional (and less centrifugal) forms of economic organization than the market-oriented developments occurring under the Sung (Elvin, 1973: 92-102).

External military threats undoubtedly continued, and pressing concerns with new Mongol challenges on the northern frontier may well have supplied an important rationale for abandoning the expensive Indian Ocean expeditions and scrapping the imperial fleet in the fifteenth century. But in some sense the Mongol threat was a direct product of later of later Ming policies which- despite the commitment to an imperial capital almost on the edge of the steppe- resisted both the conciliatory option of extensive trading with the nomads and the activist option of forward military defense against them. These policies, and the rather similar policies which subsequently encouraged a threat of "Japanese pirates" on the Southeast Coast, suggest that the Ming authorities preferred the costs of endemic border problems to the reemergence of major centrifugal pressures within the imperial order itself. The fact that they could indulge in such a choice for so long without succumbing to external conquest is itself a testimony to the logistical transformation to which Elvin refers.

The central power was also strengthened by a major reorienta- tion in the internal political economy of agrarian China, away from a dynamic of rapid and uneven economic development from the




late T'ang through the Sung, and towards a relatively more even development pattern from the middle Ming onwards. A crucial factor here was a massive program of peasant resettlement in the north, where large areas had been depopulated by the constant warfare and by the conscious conversion of agricultural into pastoral land under the Mongols. This reverse migration to the less productive dry-farming lands (which included the demobilization of much of the first emperor's vast military establishment into a system of military colonies) slowed the dynamic of economic advance (Elvin, 1973: 211-12). But it increased the share of resources available to the state- providing the Ming with a far more decisive opportunity in this direction than that provided to the Sui-T'ang by the wars preceding their accession to power.

Complementary trends also occurred in the area of urbanization. In the "medieval urban revolution" of the late T'ang and the Sung, economic determinants began increasingly to break the earlier dominance of politico- administrative determinants, producing a rapid but strikingly uneven pattern of new urban growth. The size and complexity of the reunited empire precluded any complete return to the dominance of administrative criteria, but the great demographic upheavals associated with the rise and defeat of the Mongols laid the groundwork for a substantial move in that direction. Both Bejing and Nanking, the two great areas of urban growth under the Ming, represented the renewed ascendancy of strategic over economic criteria in the siting of capital cities; and the attempt to choke off overseas trade under the middle Ming had a strongly adverse effect on the central Southeast coast, where the impact of economic determinants on urbanization had been most pronounced under the Sung. As a result, William Skinner concludes, the medieval dynamic of rapid and uneven urban growth gave way under the Ming to an "extraordinary, if deleterious synchrony" (Skinner, 1977: 22-29).

At the same time it would be very misleading to associate the restoration of a unified empire with the effective ending of commercial activity. Internal trade remained of great importance, and overseas trade was officially accepted again under the later Ming, through in a context in which the Europeans were now a formidable presence in the southern seas. Nor, despite the emphasis here on certain key strengths in logistics and physical infrastructure,




could the late imperial state be called infrastructurally strong in Mann's sense, that is to say, in terms of its general administrative effectiveness relative to society. The population growth of the late T'ang period appears to have pushed Chinese development over a critical threshold beyond which the strong centralized administration attempted under the early Tang could no longer be sustained (Skinner, 1977: 19-20) and the far greater population growth from the Ming onward only reinforced this fact. The late imperial state was in administrative terms a weak state, heavily dependent on the cooperation of regional elites (Hall, 1986), while the gentry stratum increasingly developed the effective fusion of office-holding, land- owning and commercial elements which has often been seen as its most characteristic feature (Lippitt, 1978: 44-56). Thus the reconstitution of the empire represented not so much the triumph of the state over "civil society," as the triumph of a more "traditional," corruption-oriented form of civil society over the more modern, market-oriented one which had appeared in embryo under the Sung, and this was presumably an important factor in the support of the dominant strata from the reconstituted status quo.

Finally, any consideration of sources of late imperial stability must include the paradoxical social-structural legacies of the Ming rebellion itself for the peasantry. The rebellion had initially a strong social revolutionary tinge, for pressures on the peasantry had been worsening for centuries, and the great landlords of the south had effectively thrown in their lot with the Mongols (Eberhard, 1977: 240-51). According to one estimate, up to 100,000 of the elite lost their lives in the conflict (Hall, 1986: 42), though this may have reflected geopolitical divisions among the elite themselves as well as class conflict. To begin with, the peasantry benefited from the reopening of depopulated areas, from the substantial reduction in the tax burden which flowed from the regime's new logistical supremacy and military reforms, and simply from the predictable order provided after centuries of upheaval. In this sense Ming relations with the peasantry, as indeed with much of the elite, would appear to have benefited from an exceptionally far-reaching version of the "peace of exhaustion" which Owen Lattimore argues was one crucial foundation for the early stability of any major new dynasty (Lattimore, 1940: 531). However, the early Ming measures against the rich were only half-heartedly implemented (Eberhard,




1977: 252-53), and in the longer term the rebellion consolidated the basis for a revival of the "gentry society" social formation which had been fundamentally threatened by the centrifugal challenges to the empire in the previous centuries. Rather like nomadic conquerors, successful peasant rebellions were a form of "barbarian" power whose subsequent "sinification" was effectively a precondition of their longer-term rule. When the Ming itself finally collapsed amid a new wave of internal rebellion, the majority of the elite turned to the semi-nomadic Manchus in preference to the leading domestic rebel who had already effectively overthrown the Ming. The Man- chu conquest- most of which was achieved for them by Chinese generals, and succeeded as a political enterprise because the Man- chu were from an elite a viewpoint "more Chinese" than domestic rebel opponents- fitting expression of the central logic of state-making in imperial China (Michael, 1940; Elvin, 1973: 106-07).

CONCLUSIONS, IMPLICATIONS, AND THEORETICAL REPRISE

This paper argues that for approximately eighteen centuries, from 400 BC to 1400 AD, China should be regarded not as an enduring unified empire (subject to intermittent breakdowns) but as the inherently problematic core area of a constantly expanding multi-power or interstate system. It further asserts that in the second, critical phase from around 800 AD to 1400 AD, southward economic and demographic expansion within agrarian China was also producing an embryonic world-economy in the Wallersteinian sense, involving extensive transnational movements of capital and exchange of bulk goods within an area which was not just more ecologically diverse but also much more populous and economically developed than was Europe for several centuries beyond the high point of this phase. Finally, it attributes the reconstitution of the unified empire in the closing centuries of this phase not to the inherent superiority of its Chinese core over external, barbarian powers, but rather precisely to the military superiority of the greatest of all barbarian powers. And it views the Mongol conquest as the apotheosis of an arid zone interstate system whose inner logic worked towards the recurrent reconstitution of a unified




empire, rather than- as in the balance of power logic of the maritime zone system which emerged in early modern Europe- towards an entrenched, institutionalized "international anarchy of sovereign states."

As regards the critical character of this critical phase, I would argue that the century or so around the Mongol conquest was virtually the last moment at which the trend towards an entrenched European-style interstate order in Northeast Asia could have been turned back. The relative power of the Mongols in the northeast Asian system was a one-off, conjunctural phenomenon, for if the economic dynamic in agrarian China had continued along the trajectory it followed from the mid-tenth to the mid-thirteenth century, the world-historical military potential of steppe powers would have been decisively outstripped by the very industrial capacities whose diffusion to the steppe made them so formidable in the closing centuries of the critical phase. Moreover, without the prior reconstitution of the empire under the Mongols, the Ming rebellion- the second great "barbarian" power which contributed to imperial longevity in this period- would not have occurred in the centralizing proto-"nationalist" form that it did.

Overall, then the paper attributes the survival of China as a centralized political entity to "barbarian" social forces typically marginalized in accounts which present the enduring character of China in institutionalist and ultimately culturalist terms. No Mongol conquest and Ming rebellion in the 13th and 14th centuries, no "traditional," "Confucian," Chinese imperial order from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Moreover (though this is mainly implied rather than argued directly), a major corollary proposition follows regarding what McNeill has aptly called the "Far West" of the "Eurasian ecumene" (1963: 538-59). No Mongol conquest and Ming rebellion in North- east Asia, no subsequent rise of the west in Northwest Europe. If the incipient interstate system/world-economy complex had become entrenched in Northeast Asia it would have expanded outward with a speed and intensity much greater than which marked the subsequent expansion of the European interstate system, given the already high level of economic and military interdependence between this region and Southeast Asia/Indian Ocean on the one hand, and Central/West Asia, on the other. In this context, the rise




of the West- in the common sense of this term-would never have got off the ground. Rather, Europe would have become very much a periphery of a system centered in East Asia.

I think it is fair to say that this picture is very different than the dominant image of China which informs the (implicit or explicit) exercises in world-historical comparative analysis in western social theory. In particular- given the attempt in this paper to apply to Northeast Asia the concepts of "interstate system" and "world- economy"- it is important to note that the orthodox restriction of such concepts to the Western development trajectory is substantially dependent on an uncritical acceptance of the unified empire image of Chinese development.

The gestures towards comparative analysis are especially perfunctory in realist international relations theory, which until recent- ly has been able to maintain quite spurious monopolistic claims to the intellectual territory of war and geopolitics and whose extraordinary culturalism and Eurocentrism I have criticized at length elsewhere (Fitzpatrick, 1987, 1989, 1991). The early Iron Age warring states period in China is usually (though not invariably) given a token place in the otherwise western role-call of historical states-systems, invoked as precursors of the first major states-system which is said to have emerged in early modern Europe. But most of the near two millennia of intense and escalating military conflict in Northeast Asia described in this paper disappears from sight within the definitional confines of the Chinese imperial order. The comparativist moves in Wallerstein's original formulation of world- systems theory are significantly less perfunctory, and he does at least acknowledge the economic dynamism and maritime expansion of medieval China as a problem to be addressed. But nonetheless he ultimately returns an orthodox Weberian answer to this problem; and this becomes in turn a critical support of the sweeping definitional distinction between world-empires and world-economies which allows him to confine the relevant empirical ground for the study of the logic of transnational capitalism to a very late stage of the western trajectory in early modern Europe.

Even if the argument of this paper about the complex dynamics of military and economic interdependence in northeast Asia up to 1400 is only halfway plausible, it is important to ask why a relatively unproblematic picture of China as a world-empire should be so




entrenched in precisely those areas of western social theory which claim to make the interplay of military and economic interdependence their central concern. Part of the answer would be that this picture receives support of the specialist Sinological and East Asianist literature. Much of this literature does seem wedded to a predominantly organicist and culturalist approach which treats China as a distinctive cultural/social/political complex growing progressively outward from a base in the north and characterized above all by the ideological dominance of Confucianism and the political dominance of a fused bureaucrat/landlord stratum- the "Confucian gentry." Very closely related to this is the traditional view (initially derived directly from the texts of Confucian bureau- crats themselves) of a uniquely enduring centralized empire which was simultaneously the expression and the bearer of this unique Chinese civilization, and of the recurrent dynastic cycle through which the empire was periodically renewed following regular breakdowns of the central power.

This mainstream Sinological approach tends to divert attention from questions about the extraordinary ecological diversity of agrarian China (above all in the south); about the growing potential for fundamental regional and sectoral cleavages among the dominant strata associated with the shift of the economic and demographic center of gravity to the south; and about the clearly pre- dominant role in the various unifications of China not just of northern social forces in general but of steppe and steppe fringe social forces in particular. Such questions, and the challenges they pose to any notion of a "natural" unity of China, may in fact be raised, but usually in such a way as to reinforce the basic proposition about the unique capacity of the Confucianism/gentry society complex to overcome the kind of social structural and geopolitical cleavages which ultimately proved fatal to centralized empires in the Western development trajectory (Fairbank, Reischauer & Craig, 1973: 6-16). The development of infrastructural and conjunctural responses to such questions is not treated as the real problem in the understanding of Chinese/Northeast Asian history. Rather, the real problem is a (narrowly conceived) hermeneutic one, of gaining access, through lengthy and sympathetic study, to the extended language of Chinese culture ( or more properly to the Confucian high culture attributed to the dominant strata).




Thus the more conventional Sinological approach exemplifies much of the intellectual structure of Orientalism, whose central "syndrome of beliefs, attitudes and theories" is usefully summarized by Bryan Turner in regard to Orientalist accounts of "Islamic society":

This syndrome consists of a number of basic arguments : (i) social development is caused by characteristics which are internal to society; (ii) the historical development of a society is either an evolutionary progress or a gradual decline. These arguments allow Orientalists to establish their dichotomous ideal type of Western society whose inner essence unfolds in a dynamic progress towards democratic industrialism, and Is- lamic society which is either tunelessly stagnant or declines from its inception. The societies of the Middle East are conse- quently defined by reference to a cluster of absences- the missing middle class, the missing city, the absence of political rights, the absence of revolutions. These missing features of Middle Eastern society serve to explain why Islamic civilization failed to produce capitalism, to generate modern person- alities or to convert itself into a secular, radical culture (1978: 81).

However, the argument that assumptions regarding China/ Northeast Asia in the comparativist or general social theory area merely reflect the prevailing wisdom in the specialist literature cannot be pushed too far. As noted above, even the more conventional specialist literature does not so much ignore historical patterns which challenge the unified empire interpretation as treat them as exceptions which prove the rule. But there is also there is an important body of more critical work, which has grown very substantially over the last couple of decades (Barfield, 1989; Eberhard, 1965, 1977; Elvin, 1973; Gung-Wu, 1967; Rossabi, 1985; Shiba, 1970; Skinner, 1977), but which includes several landmark contribu- tions dating back 40-50 years (Chi, 1970; Lattimore, 1940; Michael, 1940).5 This literature breaks with conventional culturalist ap-

5 Several English language contributors to the recent critical literature also emphasize their debt to an extensive literature in Chinese and Japanese which has re- shaped earlier images of Chinese development from the Tang through to the early




proaches to the Northeast Asian situation, and combines a predilec- tion towards generic social-structural and political economy analyses of the kind more commonly applied to the 'Western' developmental trajectory with a careful focus on the role of specific geographical/ecological features of the Northeast Asian case. It is possible to distinguish three overlapping sets of concerns in this literature. First, to relate the proliferation of key economic regions and major foci of urbanization associated with the southward expansion of agrarian China to the longer term development of a centralized state and gentry social formation originally based in the very different ecological conditions of the north. Second, to assess the relationship of peasant social forces- both in "normal" times and in the great epochs of peasant rebellion- to the continuity of the centralized state. And third, to look behind the traditional stereotypes of "barbarian" invasion from the steppe for the economic and social structural rationality of the complex patterns of conflict and cooperation between Chinese and steppe/steppe fringe elites.

This literature seems to me of the utmost importance. The three sets of concerns mentioned have all been central to the agenda of this paper, and most of the broad-brush empirical claims made here are also indebted more or less directly to works in this genre. It must be acknowledged that nowhere in this literature is there so radical a rejection of the unified Chinese empire problematic as I have attempted to justify here. But however dissatisfied an East Asian specialist might be with this problematic, the kind of interstate system/ world economy alternative proposed here would be unlikely to present itself, precisely because the orthodox render- ing of these concepts is so heavily impregnated with Eurocentric assumptions as to seem largely irrelevant to any reading of East Asian history, critical or otherwise.

The real problem, I would argue, lies not just in the explicitly Orientalist assumptions of conventional Sinology but in the mutual- ly reinforcing relationship between these assumptions and the implicit "western miracle" assumptions encapsulated in supposedly generic theories about the structural dynamics of international

Ch'ing (Manchu) era. See, for instance Elvin, editor's foreword, in Shiba (1970); Gungwu (1969, preface); Grove & Daniels (1984: vii-viii).




relations or global capitalism- which in practice restrict their theoretical field of vision to trends emerging in northern Europe from the late fifteenth century onward. In practice, such theories involve an extreme version of a broader pattern of historical foreshortening exemplified in more candid "western miracle" accounts of the emergence of the modern world order; and some concluding comments on this broader pattern may help to delineate the basic revisionist claims about the Northeast Asian and West Asian-Med- iterranean-European development trajectories advanced in this paper.

It is fairly common to make comparisons between more limited regions and epochs of the entire trajectories as I have defined them here: most notably between Han China and the contemporary Roman empire, and between Ming and Ch'ing China and contemporary Europe at any point from 1400 onwards. Such partial comparisons distort the relationship between the overall trajectories, by treating China as an timeless, organic whole while splitting the Western trajectory into discrete segments and focusing only on the leading edge of the "rise of the West" narrative at any given point (first "Rome," and subsequently "Europe"). The basic effect is to reinforce the generalized image of Chinese stagnation which has been attacked throughout this paper: of a China more than keeping pace with 'the West' in Roman times (and unlike Rome recovering from the catastrophic "fall" of the empire around 200 AD) but paying the costs of its imperial longevity in increasing stagnation relative to the multi-state system of the West from the late medieval era onwards.

Thus standard comparative approaches to the two trajectories are truncated at one end in a symmetrical fashion : by a suppression of the importance of the arid zone dynamic in both Chinese and Western history. However, as regards the other end of the two trajectories- namely that of the two littoral/maritime zones- the pattern of distortion is decidedly asymmetrical. In dealing with the Western case, there is a pronounced tendency to overstate (and cer- tainly to antedate) the importance of maritime activity in deter- mining outcomes before the early modern period. And there is a corresponding tendency to understate the importance of maritime activity in the Chinese case. It is no longer possible to assert seriously that there was no major period of indigenous maritime




expansion in the Chinese case. But it is significant that the incident in Chinese maritime history most quoted in comparisons with the Western trajectory is the one which most strongly reinforces the image of entrenched bureaucratic opposition from the state and its servants to the inevitable centrifugal impact of such expansion: the earlier mentioned case of the great Ming naval armada which asserted Chinese naval hegemony throughout Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century, and was subsequently scrapped as part of a conscious government policy of choking off large-scale maritime contact with the outside world.

However, if we restore the "missing" arid zone component to both trajectories and the "missing" tenth-fourteenth century era of Chinese naval expansion to the Northeast Asian trajectory, a fundamentally different comparison emerges. Up to approximately 1400 AD, Northeast Asian development exhibits all the dynamic, linear tendencies typically associated with the rise of the west, only more so. In the space of around seventeen centuries, it covers an economic and geopolitical 'distance' which takes over twenty-five centuries ( from the run-up to the second Assyrian empire to the onset of absolutism and mercantile capitalism in early modern Europe) in the Western case.

The attempt to justify this alternative perception of comparative developmental patterns has been one central concern of the paper. The second has been to extract the kernel of geopolitical truth from the misleading culturalist image of China as an enduring organic whole, containing within itself throughout its history historical 'stages' which were progressively left behind by the West. There is a sense in which the western trajectory did leave behind the arid zone dynamic (and the recurring land-based empires associated with it) in West Asia, so that the continuing impact of this dynamic in the shape of the Islamic powers appeared as an alien and indirect intrusion into the littoral/maritime dynamic of early modern Europe.

Conversely, the arid zone dynamic remained an enduring feature of Northeast Asian history, and in the period 800 AD- 1400 AD, it became increasingly linked in a single economic and military field of forces with a littoral/maritime dynamic of potentially enormous power- with the greatest concentration of agricultural resources in the world providing the link between the two. By




highlighting this all-embracing character of the Northeast Asian field of forces- in which the late emergence of a "constructed Mediterranean" in the north-south canal complex was an absolutely critical factor- we can come closer to a satisfactory explanation of the anomaly of the striking contrast between Chinese development patterns before and after 1400.

The operative phrase in the above sentence is "before and after 1400." At least on the basis of my current limited knowledge in this area, I am inclined to accept main lines of the conventional picture of Chinese/Northeast Asian development for the post- 1400 period (though obviously not the organicist/culturalist explanatory assumptions which often accompany it). For this period, the persis- tence of the unified empire in the face of the dynastic cycle, the dominance of the gentry social formation and the phenomenon of ultimately arrested development all seem crucial features of the Northeast Asian trajectory. Given comparative research agendas which implicitly equate "world time" with "rise of the west time," these latter trends inevitably loom large in general theoretical accounts of the abstract dynamics of capitalism, international relations and the like.

However, a central theme of this argument is that it is fundamentally misleading to periodize northeast Asian history in terms derived from conventional narratives of the rise of the west. The fifteenth century is in many respects the most plausible beginning point for modern European history. But it is also in many respects the most plausible end point for a precocious "European" trajectory in Northeast Asian history. Looked at in a long-term perspective, the survival of the Chinese empire and the gentry social formation was anything but the foregone conclusion it appears from a truncated post- 1400 perspective. For almost eighteen centuries- a period longer than that which separates us from the fall of the Roman empire in the west- it was a decidedly close-run thing.




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Comparing World-Systems || The Middle Kingdom, the Middle Sea, and the Geographical Pivot of History

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