The great leveler, p.35
The Great Leveler, page 35
32 Jacquerie: Anonymous, about 1397–1399, quoted from Cohn 2004: 162. El Salvador: Anderson 1971: 135–136, 92 (quotes). Quote: herein, p. 250. Jacobins: Gross 1997.
33 See Milanovic 2013: 14 fig. 6.
34 Ranis and Kosack 2004: 5; Farber 2011: 86; Henken, Celaya, and Castellanos 2013: 214; but cf. also Bertelsmann Stiftung 2012: 6 for caution and Veltmeyer and Rushton 2012: 304 for a lower Cuban estimate for 2000 (0.38). SWIID registers a decline from 0.44 in 1962 to 0.35 in 1973 and 0.34 in 1978. In view of this, the question whether communism’s effect on social policy in Western nations (see herein, chapter 5, pp. 172–173) has been its most durable contribution to economic equalization is worth considering.
Part IV
COLLAPSE
Chapter 9
STATE FAILURE AND SYSTEMS COLLAPSE
”AND SNEER OF COLD COMMAND”: STATE FAILURE AND SYSTEMS COLLAPSE AS LEVELERS
The more violence that wars and revolutions unleashed and the more deeply they penetrated society, the more they were capable of lowering inequality. But what if these dislocations destroyed entire states and the existing social and economic order? Based on the evidence presented so far, we might expect ever greater upheaval to result in ever stronger leveling. This grim prediction receives ample support from historical evidence that ranges across thousands of years of recorded history. State failure and systems collapse upended hierarchies and compressed material inequalities on a sometimes dramatic scale. Complementing the predominantly more recent processes discussed in some of the previous chapters, most of these cataclysmic events took place in the premodern age.
I begin by defining terms. Large social structures may unravel with different degrees of intensity and severity. At one end of the spectrum we find processes that are primarily related to the exercise of political power, conventionally known as state failure. From a contemporary perspective, states are considered to be failing if they are unable to supply public goods to their members: corruption, lack of security, breakdown of public services and infrastructure, and loss of legitimacy serve as markers of state failure. Yet this definition holds states to standards that need not have applied in the more distant past. The notion that states are supposed to provide varied public goods beyond basic security and that failure or collapse can be inferred from their inability to meet this expectation seems anachronistic for most of history. For the purposes of this global survey, we are better served by a bare-bones characterization of essential state functions. Inasmuch as premodern polities focused in the first instance on checking internal and external challengers, protecting the key allies and associates of rulers, and extracting the revenues required to perform these tasks and enrich the power elite, state failure is best understood as the loss of the capacity to accomplish even these basic objectives. The erosion of control over subjects and territory and the replacement of state officials by nonstate actors such as warlords are typical outcomes, and in extreme cases political power could even devolve to the community level.1
At the opposite end the spectrum is bounded by a more expansive concept—that of systems collapse, a phenomenon that goes well beyond the failure of political institutions of governance. A more comprehensive and at times all-encompassing process of unraveling, systems collapse has been defined as “rapid, significant loss of an established level of social complexity.” Extending across different domains of human activity, from the economic to the intellectual sphere, it typically results in diminished stratification, social differentiation and division of labor, the abatement of flows of information and goods, and a decline in investment in civilizational features such as monumental architecture, art, literature, and literacy. These developments accompany and interact with political disintegration that weakens or altogether removes centralized control functions. In severe instances, population as a whole contracts, settlements shrink or are abandoned, and economic practices regress to less sophisticated levels.2
Breakdowns of states or entire civilizations are of vital importance to our understanding of the forces that are capable of leveling disparities of income and wealth. As we have seen in the discussion of the effects of civil war, state failure may create new opportunities of enrichment for the few. Yet existing elites are likely to suffer, and insofar as larger states splinter into smaller entities, the potential for resource concentration at the top will shrink. Systems collapse is bound to be even more detrimental to the rich and powerful. The dismantling of centralized bodies of governance undermines formal hierarchies and the elite class as such and prevents the latter’s immediate replacement by rivals who might hope to operate on a comparable scale. Premodern societies frequently left only inadequate written evidence and sometimes literacy disappeared in the wake of collapse. In such cases, we are able to infer elite decline from proxies that include, in the words of the eminent archaeologist and theorist of systems collapse Colin Renfrew, “cessation of rich, traditional burials . . . abandonment of rich residences, or their reuse in impoverished style by ‘squatters’ . . . cessation in the use of costly assemblages of luxury goods.”3
State failure was a powerful means of leveling because of the multiple ways it interfered with the enrichment of the ruling class. As we have seen in the opening chapters, in premodern societies, elite wealth was primarily derived from two sources—the accumulation of resources through investment in productive assets or activities such as land, trade, and finance and predatory accumulation via state service, graft, and plunder. Both income streams critically depended on the stability of the state: the former because state power provided a measure of protection for economic activity and the latter even more so for the simple reason that state institutions served as a vehicle for generating and allocating gains. State failure might lower returns on capital and completely erase profits derived from the exercise of or from proximity to political power.
As a result, established elites stood to lose on a grand scale. Political turmoil not only deprived them of opportunities for continuing enrichment but also threatened their existing property holdings. Significant reductions in elite income and wealth were likely to curtail inequality: although everybody’s assets and livelihoods were at risk in times of state failure or systems collapse, the rich simply had vastly more to lose than the poor did. A subsistence peasant household could afford to lose only a relatively modest fraction of its income and still get by. Greater shortfalls might threaten its members’ survival, but those who perished or fled no longer belonged to a given population and thus no longer played a role in that population’s distribution of resources. The wealthy, on the other hand, were able to survive even after having lost most of their income or property. Those among the formerly rich and powerful who weathered the storm, and those who replaced them in whatever diminished positions of leadership remained, were likely to end up far less wealthy not only in absolute but also in relative terms.
The compression of material disparities in the wake of state failure or systems collapse was a function of different scales of impoverishment: even if these events left most or all people worse off than before, the rich had farther to fall. Moreover, we have to allow for the possibility that to the extent that political unraveling interfered with predatory surplus extraction, commoners may even on occasion have experienced an improvement in their living standards. In that case, leveling would not merely have been the result of a race to the bottom conducted at different speeds but might also have been reinforced by gains among the working population. However, owing to the nature of the evidence, it is generally easier—or at least somewhat less desperately difficult—to document the decline of elites than to identify concurrent improvements among poorer groups. For this reason alone, I focus primarily on changes in the fortunes of the rich and powerful and their implications for the distribution of income and wealth. My discussion begins with some of the best-documented premodern case studies. After moving on to less clear-cut evidence that probes the limits of our knowledge, I conclude with a modern example of state failure, Somalia, to see whether its equalizing properties can still be observed in the world today.
”FOXES AND HARES CROSS WHERE THE GRANDEES OF STATE RESIDED BUT RECENTLY”: THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TANG ELITE
The terminal phase of the Tang dynasty in China shows with exceptional clarity how state disintegration led to the destruction of elite wealth. Established in 618 CE, the Tang emperors built on the successes of the short-lived Sui dynasty in reimposing political unity on the far-flung territories that had once been held by the Han and Western Jin dynasties. Under the Tang, initial land allocation programs meant to equalize access to resources gradually gave way to growing concentration of both wealth and power within the highest tiers of the imperial ruling class. A small number of eminent families came to form an entrenched aristocracy, and although individual families were unable to hold on to top positions for more than a few generations, as a group they monopolized political power for several centuries. Privilege derived from holding high state office fueled personal enrichment, a process that was tempered only by interfamilial rivalries and eventually more violent factionalist struggles that checked or reversed the rise of individual families but that failed to undermine their collective grip on the most lucrative positions of public service. Wealth accumulation was greatly aided by the fact that even distant relatives of the imperial family, as well as all families endowed with noble titles and all officials and holders of official rank, were exempt from taxation and labor services, an eminently regressive system that openly favored the powerful and well-connected. Members of the same group engaged in private purchase of public land, a practice repeatedly but unsuccessfully prohibited by their rulers.
As a result, elite landownership expanded at the expense of the state, and attempts to implement land equalization schemes ceased after political instability commenced in the mid-eighth century CE. The growth of large estates sheltered peasants from state taxation, allowing landlords to convert the agricultural surplus into private rent. Linked to long-distance trade, these commercialized estates helped sustain an increasingly rich elite. Those who disposed of sufficient capital to run mills diverted water from peasants, a practice that prompted complaints but only sporadic state intervention. An eighth-century observer who claimed that
the nobles, officials, and powerful local families set up their estates one next to the other, swallowing up peasants’ land as they please without fear of the regulations. . . . They illegally buy the peasants’ equal-field land. . . . They thus leave the peasants no place to live
may have relied on stereotypes and hyperbole but nonetheless put the finger on a pressing problem—the ongoing concentration of landed wealth. The most extravagant disparities were created at the very top, by families that back in the sixth and seventh centuries had closely attached themselves to the imperial court by abandoning their local bases and relocating to the capital cities of Chang’an and Luoyang, where close proximity to the throne ensured the most immediate access to political power and attendant lucre. This spatial clustering helped them secure access to senior government positions and provincial offices. Distinct from a provincial upper class that rarely ascended to state offices, these families formed a closed central elite that was increasingly interconnected by marriage. The most detailed study of this group and the numerous tomb epitaphs it left behind finds that by the ninth century CE, at least three-fifths of all known members of the resident imperial elite of Chang’an were linked by ties of kinship and marriage, including the majority of senior officials such as ministers and most top-tier officials in charge of provincial administration. What has been called a “highly restricted marriage and kin network” had thus come to control the Tang state, in no small part for the personal benefit of its members.4
Yet metropolitan residence came with a price: extremely profitable in times of order and stability, it exposed the top tier of the Tang elite to violent action when the central authorities were no longer able to fend off challenges by usurpers. In 881 CE, Huang Chao, a rebel warlord, took the main capital city of Chang’an. Just a few days into the occupation, resistance by high officials triggered violent reprisals that resulted in the killing or suicide of four current or former chief ministers and claimed hundreds of other lives. Huang Chao soon lost control over his troops, who went on a looting rampage in a city filled with staggering elite wealth that been built up over centuries. The power elite became a favorite target: according to one source, the soldiers “especially detested bureaucrats, killing all those they got their hands on.” Three thousand literati were supposedly massacred in response to the publication of a mocking poem. And that was only the beginning: although Huang Chao’s rebellion failed, Chang’an was sacked several times by rival warlords in the years to come, events that devastated the city and impoverished its residents. In Zheng Gu’s words,
At sunset, foxes and hares cross
Where the grandees of state resided but recently.
How doleful to hear jade flutes,
But not see the fragrant carriages go by.
The properties of the wealthy in the city’s vicinity also suffered gravely. Wei Zhuang, a scion of one of the greatest capital families, describes the desolation of his family estate:
On a sea of a thousand mulberry trees, there is nobody in sight.
Hearing a lone note played from a flute, I shed a tear in the emptiness.
Mulberry trees were understood to be a symbol of wealth. Zheng Gu also bemoaned the fate of the estate of his cousin Wang Bin:
Desolate and forsaken were the old fields . . . . Inquiring in turn about each of the neighbors, [my cousin] pointed over and over again toward the tombs . . . . After prolonged shortages, the servants had all dispersed.5
Over the course of these recurrent crises, nobles who lost their lives probably numbered in the thousands, and those who survived were deprived of their urban residences and suburban estates. Purges continued until little was left of the old elite. In 886, after a failed coup, hundreds of officials who had backed the contender were executed. In the year 900, the court eunuchs killed almost everyone close to the emperor in response to a plot to eradicate them, and in retaliation they and their allies were all eliminated the following year. In a single incident in 905, seven of the most influential ministers still alive were killed and tossed into the Yellow River. Perpetrated in rapid succession, these serial atrocities effectively wiped out the metropolitan elite.
Violence quickly spread beyond the capital proper. Luoyang was sacked and destroyed in 885, and from the 880s to the 920s, provincial centers all over the country came to be engulfed in fighting and purges that caused huge loss of life among the regional elites:
Household after household has been emptied of valuables;
Everywhere, refined mansions with elaborate eaves have been burned to the ground.6
In the end, few were spared. The central ruling class quickly disappeared and by the late tenth century had almost completely vanished from the historical record. In the capital region, excavated tomb epitaphs, associated with those able to afford elaborate burial sites, became exceedingly scarce after the outbreak of violence in 881. Local branches of the elite did not escape the carnage. Some survivors are known, often from their mournful writings, but normally had lost their possessions. With their ancestral wealth gone and their networks dismantled, there was no way for them to regain elite status. From 960 onward, the advent of a new empire under the Song dynasty ushered in entirely different families who often hailed from the provinces and who seized the levers of power as central institutions were being rebuilt.7
The violent and comprehensive demise of the Tang aristocracy may be a particularly extreme example of how state failure obliterates wealth at the top of the social pyramid and levels the distribution of assets by impoverishing and even exterminating the rich. Even so, violence that did not directly target state elites could result in a comparable degree of leveling. State failure deprived them of income derived from political office and connections as well as from economic activity, and it diminished their wealth as territories were lost to the state they helped control and domestic or foreign challengers took over elite holdings. In all these cases, the overall outcome would be similar, even if it is hard to measure in any meaningful sense of the term: a reduction in inequality achieved by cutting off the uppermost end of the tail of the income distribution (on the Lorenz curve) and by greatly compressing the share of the top fraction of a percent of the population in total income and wealth. For the simple reason that the rich stood to lose so much more than the poor, equalization was likely to occur regardless of whether state failure caused general impoverishment or primarily wrought havoc on elite groups.8
”FRAUGHT WITH SO MANY MISERIES AND DIVERSE AFFLICTIONS”: THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE
The fall of the western half of the Roman Empire and the resultant ruin of its wealth elite is a less bloody but no less revealing case of leveling through state collapse. By the early fifth century CE, enormous material resources had ended up in the hands of a small ruling class with intimate ties to political power. Very large fortunes are documented in the western half of the Mediterranean basin, which comprised the empire’s original Italian core and its extensive Iberian, Gallic (now French), and North African territories. The senate in Rome, according to long-standing tradition populated by the richest and politically best-connected Romans, had come to be dominated by a very few grand and closely interconnected families that were based in the city of Rome itself. Those super-rich aristocrats were said to have “possessed estates scattered across almost the whole Roman world.” One concrete example mentions holdings in Italy, Sicily, North Africa, Spain, and Britain owned by a single couple. The result of marriage and inheritance as well as officeholding, transregional landed wealth was sustained not only by the basic security provided by a unified imperial state but also by the state-sponsored movement of goods for fiscal purposes that allowed estate owners to benefit from reliable trade networks. As in Tang China, senators’ immunity from surtaxes and service obligations that weighed heavily on lower elite strata further boosted their fortunes. In the end, the very richest families supposedly commanded annual incomes comparable to the revenue the state expected to draw from entire provinces and maintained palatial dwellings in the city of Rome and elsewhere. The wealthiest provincials, though unable to compete with the central elite, likewise benefited from imperial connectivity: two landowners from Gaul are known to have owned estates in Italy and Spain and in the southern Balkans, respectively.9
