Those who have land and herd people must heed the four seasons and watch over the granaries. If the state is wealthy, people will come from afar. If the land has been cleared for cultivation, they will settle down.
—“On Herding the People,” fourth century BCE
OVER THE PAST FEW millennia, a mere instant in the long history of life on earth, humans have come to dominate the earth’s surface. We and our livestock now constitute over 95 percent of the mammals on earth by weight and are causing one of the largest mass extinction events in the history of our planet. Why has this happened? The simple answer is that we are exploiting more and more of the earth to provide for ourselves, leaving less for other species.1
If we want to understand how humans have been so successful (so far), we must look back not decades or centuries but a few millennia, to the origins of farming. Domesticating plants and animals enabled us to build ecosystems for ourselves and allowed our species to expand across the globe. By replacing most of the species in a given area with a few that produced for the human species, human populations could grow far larger than they could have from foraging. Farming also allowed people to produce surplus food and resources that could feed people who did things other than produce food. Over time political institutions formed that were funded by the surplus food and labor of the farming masses. As these organizations grew larger and more effective, their leaders became capable of mobilizing the resources of their populations to transform ecosystems far more profoundly than we could have done if we had remained in small, decentralized groups. Political organizations have played a central role in converting the world’s landscapes into human ecosystems and in creating the environmental crisis that we now find ourselves in. They must also be central to our attempts to solve these problems.
Walter Benjamin wrote that the cultural treasures of humanity “owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Like Benjamin, I use the word “civilization” to refer to societies in which elites exploit the labor of the population to accumulate wealth and use it to fund advancements in the arts and sciences that can then be taken by members of those societies as evidence of their superiority over others. History books often describe artistic masterpieces such as sculptures and cathedrals as symbols of their times, but the only way societies could support professional artists was by mobilizing resources produced by the work of slaves, wage-laborers, and taxpaying peasants, often with considerable brutality. In the Anthropocene we must extend this argument one step further to recognize that all the achievements of human civilization have been based on destroying natural ecosystems and replacing them with anthropogenic ones like farmland or pasture. Only once extensive forests, grasslands, and wetlands had been transformed into farms could human societies produce enough surplus to support people who specialized in the arts, scholarship, governance, and war.2
Each human needs between one and three thousand calories of food per day to survive, in addition to clothing, shelter, and fuel to burn for heating and cooking. So a certain amount of the earth’s surface must be used to produce the resources that support each person, land that would otherwise be available to other species. For this reason, population is a good proxy for environmental impact in pre-industrial societies, unlike now, when wealthier people often consume more than dozens of poor people. Two thousand years ago there were over forty million people in lowland North China. If we multiply that number by the size of official farm plots at that time, it suggests that roughly 360,000 square kilometers were in use—an area around the size of Germany—and that most of the natural ecosystems of the lowlands had already been replaced with farmland.3
People who lived from foraging, fishing, and hunting could consume only a tiny percentage of the biological productivity of a given area. Domesticating plants and animals allowed people to clear away plants that they did not find useful and build ecosystems whose whole purpose was to produce for humans. This greatly increased how many people could be supported in a given area and allowed human populations to grow enormously. In North China this began with the domestication of millets and pigs in the early Neolithic and was followed in subsequent millennia by the indigenous domestication of dozens of different plants. Beginning in the third millennium BCE, domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and horses arrived from Central Asia and opened up grasslands and other marginal environments to human exploitation. Over time farming settlements became their own ecosystems, homes not only to humans and our domesticates but also to weeds, rats, bats, sparrows, and a host of insects. Dense population of humans and livestock also provided ideal conditions for many diseases. Diseases made life less pleasant for individuals but paradoxically gave agrarian populations a significant biological advantage over foragers who lacked antibodies to them. As agrarian societies developed political organizations able to organize large numbers of people to achieve specific goals, their comparative advantage over nonagricultural peoples increased even further.4
We humans are unusual animals, able to create a wide variety of different cultures and socioeconomic structures. We nonetheless eat, breathe, and breed like other animals, and our societies can be understood in the same ways that ecologists study other species. But human societies have their own logics, so we must combine the social and the natural sciences to understand ourselves, and this is how I propose to study political organization in early China. If ecology is the “study of the distribution and abundance of organisms and the interactions that determine distribution and abundance,” political ecology can be defined as the study of how the form and organization of states affect the distribution and abundance of organisms. In general, states encourage people to replace ecosystems that do not create taxable surpluses with organisms that do, especially grains and other domesticates.5
Until the use of fossil fuels vastly increased the energy available to us, virtually all energy in human societies came from photosynthesis in plants. Political leaders could not tend crops or herd livestock themselves. They could only exploit the farmers and herders who did so, which means that political power was all about controlling people. There were only a few ways that leaders could gain more power. They could find more people and land from which to extract labor and resources. They could improve agricultural productivity to increase the amount of taxable surplus each farmer produced. And they could find better ways to extract surpluses from the economy, for example, by casting coins that made it easier to convert different types of wealth into one another, thereby allowing the state to take a cut of a wider variety of economic activities. Agrarian states thus had strong incentives to occupy and populate new territory, encourage agricultural intensification, and promote economic and demographic growth. This is the ecological logic of agrarian states, and it was clearly understood by Shang Yang, the early Chinese political thinker who wrote, “If there are too many people for the land, strive to expand farmland; if there is more land than people, work to attract new colonists.”6
The evolution of stratified societies, in which a minority of the people lived off the labor of the majority, bears some comparison to the domestication of plants and animals. Just as it took millennia for people to fully domesticate plants and animals, the evolution of complex social structures like states was a multimillennial process in which humans became accustomed to being ruled and to giving their surplus production and labor to support the interests of a small group of rulers. The similarity of herding animals and ruling people was obvious to people across the Old World. The essay “On Herding the People,” whose opening passage serves as this chapter’s epigraph, was one of the most famous works of political theory in early China. On the other end of Eurasia, people wrote hymns with lyrics like “The lord is my shepherd,” which helped legitimize the power of the earthly lord while also glorifying the celestial one. The herding metaphor recognizes that political power entails having authority over large numbers of people and responsibility for their safety. It rarely acknowledges that the relationship between shepherds and sheep ends in slaughter.7
As the shepherd metaphor makes clear, people have been searching for ways to describe political power for as long as it has existed. I will define a state as an organization that extracts enough resources from society to support its administrative personnel, promulgate ideologies that encourage acceptance of its authority, and fund armed groups that use violence to defend or expand their territory and maintain control of the subject population. This definition may seem pessimistic to those of us who have the good fortune to live in a modern welfare state, but many premodern states were parasitic or predatory, giving their subjects little in return for their taxes. An empire is essentially just a very large state, but the increase in scale requires different strategies of rule. The larger the territory, the more its rulers have to deal with controlling areas that they cannot visit in person and ruling over people with different languages and cultures than their own. Regardless of scale, all competent rulers have been concerned with revenue and therefore with the economic productivity of their domains. And the more power they had, the more human labor they could mobilize to increase economic production, reshape water systems, conquer and colonize territory, and expand agriculture.8
This description emphasizes the perspective of those on the top of the system, but it is important to consider political organizations from the perspective of working people. Commoners have always been aware of who is collecting their taxes and rents and have always had some collective power to demand something in return. One of the most important functions of states has been to mitigate risks and disasters. Agrarian societies were beset by droughts, floods, earthquakes, and storms. They were also invaded by various kinds of pests. Dealing with these problems was a way for political leaders to legitimate their wealth and power. If they successfully mobilized workers to build infrastructure that helped people—such as walls to defend them from invaders and dikes to defend them from floods—people might value their leadership. Since taxes were often collected in the form of grain, leaders could ostentatiously redistribute grain when crops failed, which bolstered their legitimacy and ensured that their subjects survived to pay more taxes. Leaders also demonstrated the value of having someone in charge when they mobilized people to deal with short-term threats like floods or human attacks, which incidentally makes clear how the militarism of political organizations is never separate from their other capacities. States also mobilized people’s labor to build large-scale infrastructure such as aqueducts, roads, and bridges that no decentralized group could have done. States were appreciated not only for their ability to change environments for human benefit but also for their ability to prevent undesirable changes. As agrarian populations grew and devoted more land to growing a few key crops, societies tended to become more complex just as they simplified the ecosystems on which they depended. Political structures played essential roles in maintaining the resilience of these systems.9
Having argued that states have played an important role in environmental history, I should also emphasize that they are just one element of the fabric of the human societies that have conquered the earth. Most premodern states had little influence at the local level; their main interaction with commoners occurred when they collected taxes or organized corvée laborers, and even these were often done through local elites or tax farmers. The main agents of environmental change in premodern China, as elsewhere, were everyday people looking to improve their circumstances, from poor peasants colonizing frontiers to wealthy families draining wetlands. Empires could install networks of officials across huge areas but were usually too weak to prevent officials from embezzling funds or to support them when they came up against the interests of powerful local elites. People in China often colonized land without any aid from the state, or even illegally. Although it is poorly documented for the period covered in this book, commerce was also an important factor in transforming environments, turning plants and animals into commodities, and increasing general productivity and consumption.10
States were not the main driving force behind environmental change. They might be better described as institutions that weakly incentivized agriculture over large areas for many centuries. Simply by maintaining basic infrastructure and keeping the subcontinent more or less at peace for centuries at a time, they helped expand farmland, increase the population, and commodify nature. Only intermittently did they have the power to actively colonize new areas or build new infrastructure, but these actions often had long-lasting effects. Chinese states may have been even more dependent on agriculture than those elsewhere, or at least had less incentive to protect wild ecosystems. Rulers in South Asia had an incentive to protect the natural forests that provided them with essential war elephants, but Chinese rulers had every reason to encourage their replacement with agriculture, silviculture, and aquaculture. The longevity of these political structures is one reason that almost no trace remains of the wild fauna of lowland East Asia.11
Six thousand years ago the people of the Yellow River valley lived in relatively egalitarian communities. A few millennia later they took it as given that they had to pay taxes to the emperor’s officials, even if they did not like it very much. How did societies become divided into rulers and ruled? In particular, how did the majority of the population come to accept the dominance of a small group of people? Unfortunately, this process is not well documented in any of the places it occurred.
We can search for the origins of political power by looking for archaeological evidence that some people convinced others to work for them or give them resources. When we see that some tombs and dwellings in a settlement became much larger and wealthier than the others, we know that some groups had found a way to extract surpluses from the rest of the community. When people began to build palaces and fortresses, we have a good reason to think that some people had gained the ability to command the labor of many others. When some towns grew far larger than others, we can guess that they were collecting resources from their hinterlands. Of course, any of these processes could also move in reverse. Perhaps a competent and aggressive ruler succeeded in gaining control over surrounding settlements only to be overthrown in a rebellion or have his domain fall apart after it was inherited by an incompetent son. Early polities were anything but stable.12
Archaeological evidence of increasing socioeconomic stratification in late Neolithic China makes clear that people must have begun to provide labor or goods to leaders at a time when the largest settlements had no more than a few thousand people. It is very unlikely that a group of people simply ganged up and forced everyone else to pay them taxes. Instead, the earliest such relationships were probably voluntary and negotiated. The most likely scenario is that local organizations were formed to carry out tasks that many people considered worthwhile, such as mediating disputes, organizing irrigation, fighting, or praying for rain. Communities might have agreed to provide some of their members with goods or labor while they performed these services. Once village-level institutions existed to mobilize the surplus labor or food of the population, they provided perfect vehicles for ambitious people to accumulate wealth and power. And once many communities had such institutions in place, it would not have taken long for one of these groups to try to dominate neighboring ones by employing both coercion and rewards, thereby leading to the formation of regional political entities. We can be sure that the sacrifice and feasting rituals that are so important for building political allegiances and alliances in early Chinese texts were used for these purposes long before writing was invented.13
One of the best-documented histories of the long-term formation of political systems comes from ancient Mesopotamia, which also provides an interesting history of changing extraction methods. Both temples and grain storage facilities existed in relatively egalitarian Neolithic towns and were presumably communal property concerned with managing community resources, including agriculture. Because they had some of the largest stores of grain and other resources in the communities, the people who controlled them gained considerable power and authority. Although the details of this process are unknown, by the late third millennium BCE most people in the region were subjects of large institutional households, including temples controlled by priestly families. Eventually some of them grew powerful enough to conquer neighboring regions and form the world’s first states. These kinds of states grew and collapsed repeatedly. By the late third millennium BCE an elite household known as the Third dynasty of Ur had managed to establish its dominance over many others. At this time, each wealthy household’s income came from the labor of farmers who had some control over their own land while providing surpluses to their rulers. In later periods elites managed to take over much of the best farmland, which left many people without the means to provide for themselves, so they were forced to exchange their labor and surplus grain for access to land by renting land or sharecropping.14 The gradual transition from landowning farmers funding communal institutions to people selling their labor to stay alive was one of the most momentous social changes in human history. As long as the relationship of extraction was understood as farmers providing grain or labor in exchange for services, the recipients were obliged to explain why they deserved this support. There was a distinct advantage to the ruling classes if they could take direct control of the land, in which case the relationship would seem to be reversed: farmers would be renting the land from its owners rather than providing unpaid service. This transition, which Karl Marx called “divorcing the worker from the means of production” and mistakenly considered a unique characteristic of capitalism, is a more sophisticated form of exploitation. It obscures the relationship of exploitation by forcing the laborer to ask for work rather than being asked to work.15
The separation of farmers from ownership of the land they work has occurred many times in human history, but it was not a characteristic of the earliest states. Early states often required their subjects to perform agricultural labor and also do labor service. This allowed states to collect surplus grain from the workers at harvest time and then feed it back to them during the off-season while they toiled for the state. For example, Inka and Aztec farmers kept the harvest from their own land but also farmed separate plots of land whose entire harvest went to elites or to the state. They also provided military and corvée labor to the state. As we will discuss in chapter 3, the situation was very similar in Zhou China. Agricultural labor service was easily converted to a tax payment, which could then be combined with a nonagricultural labor service requirement. In societies without established commercial systems for converting grain and labor into other commodities, labor and grain taxes were among the only forms in which states could extract surpluses. As markets grew, creating systems of exchanging goods and labor for one another, they made it easier for states to extract wealth from the economy. The use of money, in particular, allowed states to commute both grain tax and labor service to cash payments, which they could store indefinitely and use for a variety of purposes. Conversely, powerful states could also establish standards for exchanging commodities that were intended to facilitate administration but also had the unintended effect of facilitating commerce. This happened in the Qin Empire.16
In the Mesopotamian example cited above, political institutions first arose in separate communities, and eventually one of them grew strong enough to extend its control over others. It then became a rival with local groups for the area’s surpluses. This is one of the central dynamics in the history of human political organization: there is only so much surplus produced in any given place, and different elite groups will compete for it. Since complex societies include various organized power groups, central governments seeking to increase their power must reduce that of other groups, and vice-versa. If a state wants to become stronger, it must gain control of the surpluses produced by more workers, which leaves less for other elites, who can be expected to work together to prevent this from happening. This, for example, is why Rome’s ruling elite conspired to kill Julius Caesar to prevent him from becoming their monarch, and why American oligarchs promote the virtues of “small government.”17
Early political organizations were run by small groups of people connected by blood relations and trust. Their leaders had very limited power and had to devote considerable attention to retaining and attracting followers by distributing wealth in the form of gifts or feasts. When they conquered new territory, leaders could do little more than to keep the best lands for themselves and parcel the rest out to their followers, thus providing them with the means to become rivals. Even when rulers succeeded in dominating other elites with force or co-opting them with gifts and intermarriage, they still had to devote time and resources to retaining their loyalty. This was the case with Bronze Age states in China, as demonstrated by the gradual weakening of the Western Zhou state as its leaders gave their land and subjects to their followers. But the Western Zhou alliance was very strong militarily, a reminder that weakly centralized states can be powerful when elites work together to realize shared interests.18
If we place states on a spectrum of centralization, most of the highly centralized ones are modern, while many premodern political systems were so decentralized that they were more like alliances than single states. Those of us living in industrial societies have grown accustomed to large and complex state structures, but these are possible only because our societies have vastly more energy and resources than premodern ones did. Agrarian societies produced small surpluses, so even when rulers did manage to conquer large areas, it was rarely worth the added expense of trying to administer them directly. It was more efficient to delegate the administration of territory to people based in each region. When central power was strong, such polities could work as a unit, but as they weakened, they became more like alliances of independent states. The ruler directly administered his own territory but had limited control over the affairs of his nominal subordinates. This situation has been called “feudal,” but even the central governments of relatively strong early modern states often had relatively limited control of local power structures. The less centralized a state is, the less power the ruler has to affect its environments.19
One reason that only a few premodern states developed the administrative structures necessary to directly rule large areas was that they did not need to. It was cheaper to get others to extract wealth and then take a percentage of their yield. For example, the Roman state often co-opted the ruling elites of the areas that it conquered and used their existing systems of extraction. One of these was tax farming, in which rulers sold the rights to collect taxes in a specific part of their domain, as immortalized in the Christian Gospels with phrases like “tax farmers and loose women.” Tax farming remained common in early modern Europe. China’s centralized bureaucracy was unusual in the premodern world, and it tended to give Chinese states considerable administrative control and stability. Of course, even in Chinese empires wealthy families tended to have more power in local society than the emperor’s officials. But China’s bureaucratic tradition is one of the main reasons its imperial system extended over such huge territories, lasted so long, and was so often rebuilt on the earlier model after it periodically fell apart.20
Bureaucracy is significant for environmental history because its hierarchical chains of command gave rulers more power over local environments than looser forms of governance had. Bureaucracy was often developed so the central government could extract resources directly from producers who had previously paid taxes to local elites. This required governments to employ more officials and find systematic ways to control them. “Bureaucracy” means “rule by desks,” and it originated as a derogatory term implying that ruling should be done by warriors or aristocrats, not by clerks. The term indicates the central importance of writing and is typically used to suggest paperwork, red tape, and other problems involved in dealing with an impersonal and rule-bound administration. Scholars of early civilizations often use “bureaucracy” to refer to any political organization that employed writing, but this is so broad as to be impractical as an analytic tool. The most useful description of bureaucracy remains that of Max Weber, whose definition emphasized (1) general rules of administrative practice, including well-defined duties and powers of each position; (2) officials perceiving officeholding as their vocation; (3) a clear, hierarchical chain of command up which successful officials hoped to move during their careers; (4) a system for training officials; and (5) officials being paid salaries that corresponded to the levels of their positions. This describes rather well the early imperial bureaucracy of China, and I use the term “bureaucracy” to refer to a system with these five characteristics.21
Bureaucracy is a much more stable form of governance than more loosely organized political systems, whose success was strongly dependent on the abilities of their rulers. Given that hereditary monarchies inevitably produce incompetent, underage, or insane rulers from time to time—democracies are slightly better in this regard—bureaucracy greatly strengthens the continuity of the state by putting it in the hands of people hired for their skills. Another strength of bureaucracy is that, in contrast to states administered by groups of rich men, it tends to employ people who have no other income than their salaries, making it difficult for them to develop their own rival power bases because they are dependent on their employers. Writing increased the power of central governments because it was used to inform each branch of government as to what the others were doing, to keep records, and to monitor officials. In China these practices arose during the Eastern Zhou period (771–221 BCE). Whereas earlier states had only required that scribes keep basic records and convey messages, Eastern Zhou states were expanding in size and centralizing at the same time, which required that they employ more and more officials, not only to administer their subjects, but also to police one another.
These all seem like good things, from a government’s perspective, but bureaucracy is relatively expensive. Farmers could provide only so much surplus labor and grain, and the larger a state’s bureaucracy, the closer it pushed people toward poverty or starvation. Above I used the term “surplus” as though its meaning was straightforward, but in fact the amount of labor or resources that a person can be forced to provide can vary considerably. In its most basic sense, “surplus” simply means anything a person produces beyond what is necessary for them to live. This is a useful concept in situations in which people literally cannot produce much more than they need to stay alive, the situation of many unfortunate farmers in history. However, from the state’s perspective the issue is how to push its subjects to produce more. For example, Shang Yang argued that the state should force people who lived from foraging and other itinerant livelihoods to settle down and farm since the state had no way to tax them otherwise. This is a reminder that the pressure of tax and rent collectors often compelled people to produce more than they would have otherwise and has thus been a factor increasing the intensification of agriculture. But extracting too much pushed people to passively resist, flee, or revolt and could bring down the whole state. For this reason, rulers usually preferred a “prudent and durable rate of exploitation” to strategies that maximized accumulation. The collapse of the Qin Empire proves the wisdom of this strategy, and in fact Qin remained a paradigmatic lesson throughout Chinese history on the danger of overtaxing the people.22
The transition from village-scale societies to powerful states was accompanied by an increase in the relative power of men. Male dominance is not a fundamental characteristic of humanity, a fact made clear by the wide variety of gender relations documented in ethnographic studies of small-scale human societies. But for some mysterious reason agrarian states around the world were all ruled by kings. Women were sometimes allowed to take the throne when they had no brothers of suitable pedigree—or when they managed to wrest it from their husbands—but even in those cases most of the people running the state were men. Patriarchy is therefore a central characteristic of large-scale political organizations. I think that a key reason states have been patriarchal is that they have all been founded by hierarchically organized groups of armed men. I offer this theory hesitantly, not so much because I am convinced it is correct but because patriarchy has been a core feature of states and empires in human history and should be analyzed rather than taken for granted. It is particularly relevant to this study because the male dominance of political systems arguably has much more profound effects on the way our societies treat their environments than does the sexual division of labor within families.23
If environmental historians are to study human societies as ecological systems, we must take seriously the fact that humans are mammals and primates. All social theories presuppose an idea of human nature, whether they acknowledge it or not, and such ideas tend to differ with respect to how they understand the relationships between humans and other animals. The version of human nature now current in the humanities sees humans as immensely adaptable and thus treats most aspects of our societies as cultural rather than biological. This is partly a reaction to the ways that scholars have historically projected their own vision of human societies onto our biology, legitimating their own ideas by arguing that they are hardwired into our species. This is generally the preferred tactic of those who believe that male dominance is the natural order of things. When we venture into the biology of human societies, we are bound to make mistakes, but it is better to err in the exploration of important topics than to avoid them altogether.
Biologists tend to assume that the sex drive, whose purpose is to increase the reproductive success of an individual’s genes, always plays some role in mammalian behavior. It is well documented across premodern human societies that powerful men often sexually exploit multiple women, producing large numbers of descendants while preventing many other men from reproducing at all. This is well documented in China, where richer men tended to have concubines, while poor men had trouble marrying, something that is still true. The implication is that the lust for power is inseparable from sexual lust. Not only do powerful men have more access to sex (not only with women, of course), but their reproductive success arguably corresponds with control over territory or resources just as in other species. Women rarely fought in ancient combat, but they were often the “causes, stakes and victims of war.”24
Apart from the fact that men are bigger than women on average, the main difference between the sexes in the world before modern birth control was that women in premodern societies spent much of their adult lives pregnant and rearing children. But this, as well as their other labor, was at least as important to society as men’s work, so it did not mean that they occupied a lower status. I suspect that male dominance increased as societies became more complex because group violence played a key role in the development of political institutions. As these institutions grew in strength, they raised the social value of organized violence and those who practiced it. The rise of competing armed polities created a dynamic in which organized violence became accepted as necessary to protect communities, and the men who excelled in it gained social prestige and military power, an ideal position from which to dominate their societies. Of course, women always had considerable power to make decisions about their own lives, but their social power diminished in relation to that of men and was increasingly related to their roles as wives and mothers of men.25
Violence is found in all human societies, but there is great variation in how we deal with it. Many smaller-scale societies had well-established methods of minimizing violence and reducing social hierarchies. Building political systems required breaking down these customs and replacing them with ones that valorized violence. Successful state builders like the Zhou and the Romans placed high value on military prowess and made warfare a regular part of their annual schedules. All empires in world history have arguably been formed by particularly aggressive cultural groups, such as the Romans, the Chinese empires, the early Islamic caliphates, Genghis Khan’s Mongols, and modern Europeans. Some might argue that all human groups are equally prone to violence and that those who dominate others are simply those with better skills in warfare and governance, but this ignores the central importance of culture in human societies and normalizes cultures of violence. Societies that succeed in reducing hierarchy cannot compete with those that valorize violence, and the latter’s values become accepted as normal. Given the connections between warfare, state-strengthening, and resource use, the triumph of aggressive cultures is an important trend in world environmental history.26
Not only was warfare an important factor in the initial formation of states, but it has remained a key factor in the growth of political organizations throughout history. War is expensive, and it forces administrators to improve existing methods of extraction and search for new sources of income. The enormous amount of wealth that is deployed for warfare also often results in administrative and technological innovation. Within a polity, poor military performance tends to weaken established power groups and facilitate reforms. Warfare also tends to destroy polities that are not as successful in mobilizing resources as their rivals, such as the decentralized kingdom of Poland that was gobbled up by its neighbors and the once-mighty pastoralists of Inner Asia who were conquered by Romanov Russia and Qing China. Most obviously, wars are usually fought by groups of armed men in a hierarchical command structure, which places them in an ideal position from which to impose their will on their own people and on any people unable to mobilize comparable armies. The importance of resource-gathering to military success is a central element in the formation of human civilization and thus in the ecological crisis in which we now find ourselves.27
Warfare is also the reason most of the world is now ruled by states. While the idea that all societies progress through defined stages of social development (social evolutionism) is still widely accepted outside of academia, there is actually no inexorable trend in societies to grow in scale or complexity. Even when societies do become more stratified and politically centralized over time, they can also move in the other direction. The reason that most people are now subjects of states is simply that states have conquered most of the world. Even in cases like that of North China, which is a classic example of a society that did in a sense evolve from small villages to huge empires, this trend is visible only from a macro perspective. If we look into any specific period of Chinese history in any depth we see not an inevitable trend toward increasing political power but rather constant fluctuation.28
Just as there is no simple path along which all societies develop, there is also no straightforward correlation between warfare and political organization. It depends on the broader geopolitical context. States with few rivals and steady revenues feel little pressure to find new sources of revenue. In contrast, those engaged in long-lasting wars with powerful rivals face strong pressure to seek new ways of extracting resources from their subject populations. The Roman state is an example of the former situation. For centuries Rome did not need a sophisticated tax-generating administration because it obtained enough revenue from pillaging and taxing conquered regions. Rome faced no major military threat and gained enormous wealth from exploiting areas outside of Italy, so the Roman aristocracy had the luxury of limiting the power and growth of the government to prevent it from threatening their own massive fortunes. It was only after persistent revenue shortfalls in the third century that Rome was forced to develop a bureaucracy and rationalize taxation. Similarly, the Han, Tang, and Qing empires in China all saw long periods without serious rivals.29
In contrast, when multiple states of similar strength compete, any way of increasing revenue can provide an advantage. Examples of states compelled by expensive wars to improve their extraction systems include the Hellenistic states that fought over Alexander the Great’s empire, early modern Europe, Warring States–era China, and the Han Empire during its expensive wars in Inner Asia. Many of these innovations proved unsustainable, but others laid the foundation for more powerful and intrusive states, a dynamic explained clearly by Charles Tilly:
The building of an effective military machine imposed a heavy burden on the population involved: taxes, conscription, requisitions, and more. The very act of building it—when it worked—produced arrangements which could deliver resources to the government for other purposes. (Thus almost all the major European taxes began as “extraordinary levies” earmarked for particular wars, and became routine sources of government revenue.) It produced the means of enforcing the government’s will over stiff resistance: the army. It tended, indeed, to promote territorial consolidation, centralization, differentiation of the instruments of government and monopolization of the means of coercion, all the fundamental state-making processes. War made the state and the state made war.
This passage could be applied without much variation to the Eastern Zhou period in China, as described in subsequent chapters. And while we are on the topic of state-strengthening reforms, it is worth mentioning that the entire seventy-year history of the People’s Republic of China has been a state-strengthening project to counter the threat of hostile foreign powers, and there is nothing contradictory in the fact that it has been both a geopolitical success and an environmental disaster.30
The key to success in long-term warfare between equals is to improve the state’s administrative capability to mobilize resources and human labor for wars. In Zhou China, as in early modern Europe, governments took control of the subjects and lands of rival elite groups and of resources that had previously been shared by commoners. Beyond simply extracting resources from more of the existing economy, strong bureaucratic governments could extract more by reorganizing both society and the environment to make them easier to monitor and exploit. James Scott has described how early modern European states strove to make their domains more legible to administrators, remodeling society and landscapes into structures that matched administrative categories and methods. He argues that when one considers state-strengthening reforms in these terms, “processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification.” The Qin Empire actually established most of these (though its land tenure was anything but freehold) and probably went further in simplifying society for administrative rationalization than any state in the world had done up to that point. But Qin collapsed, and no subsequent Chinese dynasty maintained accurate records of population or land for very long. So Scott is right that states really achieved these aims only in modern times. But Chinese states tended to remain more bureaucratic than those elsewhere, and states came to occupy an unusually central place in East Asian cultures. Governments had such a profound influence on Chinese society that even the afterlife became understood as a bureaucracy, and religious documents written for underworld officials were modeled on those of living administrators.31
The administrative structures and techniques of the Qin Empire have been passed down since then despite two millennia of changing political practice. This happened not because China remained immobile but because each new ruler needed an administration and China’s unparalleled tradition of historical writing gave the educated classes a detailed historical record of the administrations of previous empires. While China’s literate elite claimed to draw their ideas from the wisdom of the Zhou rulers recorded in the Confucian classics, they actually knew much more about the Qin and Han system, which was laid out clearly in texts such as Sima Qian’s Historical Records (Shi ji), Ban Gu’s Han History (Han shu), and Fan Ye’s Later Han History (Hou Han shu). These histories, compiled by central government officials, contain detailed explanations of the Han dynasty’s administration as well as lively biographies of powerful men that are filled with useful lessons for aspiring administrators. These histories were extremely popular, and scholars all over East Asia learned practical administrative methods and acquired general political acumen from them. This created some continuity in the history of Chinese administration. Of course the fact that people in the region have been reading these texts since they were written is just one aspect of a more general historical continuity. Unlike in Europe, there has been no interruption of knowledge in East Asia from ancient times to the present. With brief wartime intermissions, bureaucratic administrations have existed somewhere in China since the time of the Qin Empire.
While the idea that China’s empires have modified their environments will not be controversial, it is worth outlining the ways in which they did so, a topic we will return to in chapter 6. Most obviously, the distribution of Chinese-speaking peoples, their widespread intensive agriculture, and China’s current borders are the products of many centuries of conquest and assimilation. The replacement of diverse ecosystems with farms was accompanied by the gradual replacement of diverse linguistic groups with speakers of Chinese languages. Once a given territory had been conquered, states built infrastructure and provided military backing for internal colonization. For the first millennium of their existence, the empires directly operated farms and woodlands. States modified hydrological systems by building canals and irrigation systems, as well as dikes, that turned wetlands into farmland. Government manipulation of the Yellow River dramatically affected the history of the North China Plain. States promoted new crops and farming methods and facilitated population growth by preventing famine. And of course Chinese empires became role models for neighboring states that also transformed their environments. This book will explain how that imperial system came to exist.