The great leveler, p.25
The Great Leveler, page 25
Table 6.1Property in 1870 relative to 1860 (1860 = 100), for Southern whites
Wealth shares
Property type
0–55
55–90
90–95
95–99
99–100
Real
46.4
66.0
68.0
77.3
74.3
Personal
72.3
32.1
18.8
18.0
22.8
Total
61.9
48.2
38.4
40.8
46.0
Changes in the distribution of income echoed this transformation (Table 6.2). Across the entire Southern population, the Gini coefficient of property income fell from 0.9 in 1860 to 0.86 in 1870. Overall, the southern “1 percent” saw their share in total income dwindle by more than a third, and regional income Gini coefficients sharply contracted by between 7 and 9 points.7
Table 6.2Inequality of Southern household incomes
Gini coefficient
Top 1 percent share
Region
1860
1870
1860
1870
South Atlantic
0.61
0.53
13.7
8.5
East South Central
0.56
0.49
12.5
8.5
West South Central
0.57
0.48
16.0
7.5
Yet Southern leveling was not a function of mass mobilization warfare as such but simply a consequence of military defeat. For all its trappings as one of the first “modern” wars of mass mobilization, its harnessing of industrial resources, and its strategic targeting of civilian infrastructure, the Civil War, in terms of its consequences for material inequality, was still a very traditional conflict in which victorious elites gained and defeated elites lost—and did so disproportionately relative to the general population. I discuss this historically widespread outcome later in this chapter. In the 1860s, only the methods differed from those commonly applied in more archaic conflicts, such as outright plunder. In this particular case, the main result was a shift of wealth and power from Southern planters to Northern capitalists. Aided by the absence of redistributive mechanisms—itself a function of the relative weakness of the federal government and of democratic institutions more generally—the wealthy elite on the victorious side gained by profiting from war and war-related economic development instead of enriching themselves by capturing Southern assets. In a war fought in earlier centuries, they might have taken over Southern plantations or transferred Southern slaves to their own holdings. The wealthy elite on the losing side forfeited assets, in this case not to outright seizure by the winners but to expropriation without transfer. This mitigated the scale of their losses, as slaves were freed without depriving planters of their labor.
At the same time, the totalizing character of the conflict and the consequent pervasiveness of the loss of human property made defeat more costly and intrusive than it would have been in a more traditional premodern war fought with more limited ambitions and capabilities. The Civil War was a hybrid, located at a particular juncture of social evolution, with one foot in modernity (represented by mass engagement and nationwide impact) and one in the past (represented by unconstrained profiteering among victorious elites and heavy depletion of elite assets only among the losers). Perhaps for the last time in history, inequality outcomes differed greatly between the winning and losing sides. By contrast, judging from the evidence of top income shares, elites generally lost out in both world wars regardless of whether their countries had won or had been defeated.8
The only other early modern series of conflicts that qualify as mass mobilization events on a large scale are the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. In 1793 France was under exceptional strain as it found itself at war with many of Europe’s major powers, including Austria, England, Prussia, and Spain. On August 23 of that year, the French National Convention launched the “levée en masse,” seeking to draft all unmarried able-bodied men aged eighteen to twenty-five. The rhetoric of the moment—and increasingly also the practice that followed—was that of mass mobilization warfare:
From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic, all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn old lint into linen; the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.9
History would show that this was a momentous step. Carl von Clausewitz, whose distinguished military career began that year when he first fought the French at the tender age of thirteen, later marveled at this innovation in the final book of his treatise On War:
In 1793, a force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people—a people of thirty million, all of whom considered themselves citizens. . . . The full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance. The resources and efforts now available for use surpassed all conventional limits; nothing now impeded the vigor with which war could be waged.10
Under Napoleon’s leadership, military forces of unprecedented size campaigned all over Europe. Between the 1790s and 1815, about 3 million Frenchmen served in the military, or a ninth of the country’s total population—a level of mobilization comparable to that of the United States in the Civil War and World War II. As we will see in chapter 8, the distribution of income is thought to have become somewhat more equitable between the onset of the French Revolution and the post-Napoleonic period. We cannot tell, however, whether this change owed more to domestic revolutionary expropriations and redistributions than to the costs and consequences of France’s external wars. Mass mobilization warfare and revolution have repeatedly come in tandem: Germany and Russia after World War I and China after World War II are the best-known examples. The French case is unusual in that revolution preceded rather than followed mass war. This makes it hard, perhaps impossible, to disentangle their equalizing effects but gives priority to the revolution, inviting us to treat the consequences of war as an outgrowth of the revolution. For this reason I consider the French experience in chapter 8, which is devoted to leveling by revolutionary means.11
”MEN OF SERVICE IN FARMING AND WARFARE”: PREMODERN MASS MOBILIZATION WARFARE
Military mass mobilization has largely been a modern phenomenon, at least in the narrow sense in which this concept has been defined in the previous pages: in most cases, at least a tenth of the entire population had served in the military. A lower threshold would allow us to include more belligerents in the Napoleonic Wars or the world wars without changing the overall picture. Scheve and Stasavage’s minimal requirement of 2 percent of a country’s population serving in the military at a given time translates to a higher overall proportion for longer conflicts, as soldiers died or were replaced for other reasons. Considering the prominent role of infectious disease as a source of attrition in premodern armies, prolonged mobilization even at this threshold level would gradually have claimed a very large share of the total effectively eligible population of able-bodied men. For that reason alone—not to mention economic, fiscal, and organizational constraints—traditional agrarian societies were unlikely to sustain this kind of effort for any significant amount of time.12
That some imperial polities were capable of fielding very large armies was simply a function of their size and not a sign of mass mobilization. For instance, in the eleventh century CE, the Northern Song Dynasty maintained huge military forces to contain the threat posed by the Jin to the north. Reported troop totals of up to 1.25 million may reflect disbursement of stipends, some of which were pocketed by corrupt officers, rather than actual strength, but even an army of 1 million would not have exceeded 1 percent of a population of at least 100 million at the time. The mature Mughal Empire controlled well more than 100 million subjects and never mobilized even 1 percent of them. The mature Roman Empire kept maybe 400,000 men under arms out of a population of 60 million to 70 million, a rate of well less than 1 percent. Ottoman mobilization levels were even lower.13
We have to venture farther back all the way into the pre-Christian era to identify more promising cases. The Warring States of China deserve pride of place. The Warring States period, from the fifth to the third centuries BCE, was characterized by the consolidation of seven major kingdoms that engaged in intense military competition. Ongoing inconclusive conflict turned these polities into increasingly centralized territorial states that strove to mobilize their demographic and other resources to the fullest extent possible. Reorganization of administration likely affected the concentration of elite power and material wealth. Whereas territory and population had formerly been controlled as fiefs by locally entrenched elite families, Warring States rulers imposed a system based on districts (xian) that brought them under their direct control and allowed them to collect taxes and conduct military levies. To break the power of hereditary nobles, kings had officials transferred, dismissed, or even executed. Senior officials, who used to be drawn from the ruling families, came to be recruited from lower elite circles, serving thenceforth as waged personnel whose standing depended entirely on their service to the state. Eventually the majority of officials known from the sources were of obscure origin, as older families had been displaced.14
Administrative restructuring may have involved the reorganization of land: beginning in the sixth century BCE, states reordered fields into grid systems and grouped households into units of five. In the process, the state shored up private landownership, cutting out elite intermediaries who might extract rent or labor in competition with the central state as they had done before. These interventions involved redistribution of land. The most detailed reforms known, associated with Shang Yang in the state of Qin (from 359 BCE onward), envisioned the imposition of a rectangular grid across the countryside. That roads and footpaths found in that region form a rectilinear pattern indicates that these ambitious changes were in fact implemented. Reformers sought to create equal-sized blocks of land, allocated to individual households depending on the number of adult males. To the extent that this actually happened, it would have equalized assets among the rural commoner population. However, military rewards reintroduced disparities: in late Warring States Qin, each head cut off by a soldier bought him an upgrade in rank and a fixed amount of land equivalent to subsistence for a family of five. Moreover, fiefs still existed, although merely as units of income rather than areas of actual control. In Qin, for example, members of the highest nine of the seventeen ranks were entitled to income from this source. Although fiefs were not meant to be hereditary, elites sought to privatize them through purchase or moneylending that plunged farmers into debt.15
The ultimate purpose of this restructuring was to raise larger armies and more revenue for the war effort. The farming population was regarded as a reservoir of military manpower: the idea that farmers and soldiers were the same was expressed in the concept of geng zhan zhi shi, “men of service in farming and warfare.” Divisions between urban and rural were likewise to be broken down, merging the entire population into a cohesive whole. This allowed the extension of previously aristocratic valorization of legitimate violence—that had focused on ceremonial combat involving chariots, and hunting—to the commoner population, which was conscripted for massed infantry warfare.16
The whole period was replete with military conflict: one modern count tallies up 358 wars between 535 and 286 BCE, or more than one per year. Multiyear campaigns appeared, and operations spread across larger geographical areas. Military mobilization levels were high, although we cannot be sure how much trust to put in often extravagant reported figures. Thus the main states of Qi, Qin, and Chu could each supposedly draw on up to 1 million soldiers, perhaps a rough representation of overall available manpower. Battles involving 100,000 or more combatants are frequently mentioned, with an upward trend. The most infamous instance is the battle of Changping in 260 BCE, wherein a Zhao army of 400,000 was said to have been massacred by Qin troops. Total fatality numbers for the losers of twenty-six major battles in the fourth and third centuries BCE add up to 1.8 million, and another survey yields close to 1.5 million killed by Qin armies in fifteen battles during the same period. Although such figures are almost certainly considerably inflated, the widespread occurrence of mass mobilization and heavy attrition is not in doubt. It is striking to be told that the entire male population aged fifteen or older in Henei commandery was mobilized for the nearby battle of Changping.17
Whether all this promoted leveling of income and wealth remains an open question. The state’s struggle against hereditary nobles and its reliance on salaried officials and lifetime fiefs increased social mobility and ought to have impeded transgenerational wealth concentration. Block grants of land to commoners would have reduced disparities within the general population. Yet private landownership was a double-edged sword. Whereas previously farmers had been dependents and Gini coefficients of effective control over land would have been very high, the alienability of private land facilitated its reconcentration, a feature that was indeed noted in criticisms of Qin governance that were made in the early Han period. Later observers plausibly claimed that peasants lost their land owing to the pressures of taxation and unpredictable service obligations to the state, which forced them to take out usurious loans extended by the rich who at first kept them afloat but eventually took over their land. Ongoing warfare had not only spurred equalizing land reform and privatization but also came to undermine the resultant system of private smallholdings. More generally, this period was defined by growing commerce, monetization, and urbanization, as towns were transformed from fortresses of the nobility into larger cities. All of these trends are predictors of increasing inequality. They also mesh well with reports of farmers losing their land to become landless workers or tenants while capital-holders such as merchants and entrepreneurs bought up their holdings. In this context it made sense for the state to consider surplus resources a source of evil, something to be soaked up by perpetual warfare.18
Yet growing private output could not all have been siphoned off for the war effort. Archaeology has produced ambiguous findings. One study notes a merging of lower elites and commoners in burials in the state of Chu in this period. A previous expression of stratification based on who was entitled to place certain objects in their graves faded as the same kinds of goods appeared across the board. Disparities were now expressed in quantitative terms, such as the opulence of the grave goods or tomb size. Wealth rather than ritual rank emerged as the key marker of status and differentiation. Bronze weaponry was now deposited in graves of all statuses, a sign of popular militarization but not necessarily of wider-ranging egalitarianism.19
All in all, the Warring States period was an arena for countervailing forces that were just as likely to compress as to boost inequality. These forces need not have operated synchronously: initial gains in leveling when established nobilities were displaced, and land reassigned to farmers may well have been eroded and reversed over time as the wealthy employed strategies of reconcentration that were grounded in market transactions rather than feudal entitlements. Ongoing expansion of military efforts coincided with the growth of private wealth and may also have been accompanied by its concentration. State capture of private resources was unlikely to contain a rise of private wealth inequality in the face of intensifying military mass mobilization. The system may even have been effectively quite regressive, considering that it imposed a very heavy double tax—military labor and agricultural products—on those least able to afford it, the farmers, whereas other forms of wealth may have been easier to shield from state demands. Infantry warfare as practiced at the time was relatively low-cost, relying as it did above all on conscription, mass-produced weapons (presumably involving forced labor by convicts and other state workers, as in later centuries), and the food that the farmers themselves produced. Qin farm taxes were reputedly much higher than later on under the Han dynasty. There was no need to pay for expensive equipment such as warships that might have required more sophisticated and perhaps more invasive and progressive forms of taxation. We thus have no compelling reason to interpret mass mobilization and protracted mass warfare among the Warring States period as a successful driver of net redistribution. Inasmuch as mass mobilization warfare in this period was associated with equalization, redistributive measures were a means of launching the warfare state but not its outcome. The modern experience of the world wars did not apply.20
