A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (9 page)

Such waste had to be paid for by maintaining pressure on the peasantry. There were repeated peasant rebellions. While uprisings of the lower classes against their rulers are rarely mentioned in the records of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India or Rome, they occur again and again in the case of China.

One such uprising had precipitated the collapse of the Ch’in Dynasty. The story goes that the rebellion was started by a former hired labourer, Chen Sh’eng, who was leading 900 convicts to a prison settlement. Fearing punishment for being late, he reasoned, ‘Flight means death and plotting also means death…Death for trying to establish a state is preferable.’ The rebellion ‘led to widespread killings’,
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a wave of panic at the imperial court, the execution of the emperor’s main former adviser and, eventually, the assassination of the emperor. After four years of turmoil one of the rebel leaders marched on the capital and seized the throne, establishing a new dynasty, the Han.

The masses had played a key role in the uprising. But they did not benefit from its outcome. The new empire was scarcely different to the old. It was not long before it, in turn, faced risings. In AD 17 peasants hit by floods in the lower valley of the Yellow River rose up behind leaders such as a woman skilled in witchcraft called ‘Mother Lu’. They were known as the ‘red eyebrows’, because they painted their faces, and they set up independent kingdoms under their leaders in two regions.

Such rebellions set a pattern which was to recur repeatedly. The extortions of the imperial tax system and the landowners would drive the peasants to rebel. Revolts would conquer whole provinces, complete with provincial capitals, and even threaten the imperial capital, until they were joined by generals from the imperial army, government officials who had fallen out with the court, and certain landowners. Yet successful revolts led to new emperors or new dynasties which treated the mass of peasants just as badly as those they had replaced.

This was not just a matter of the corruptibility of individual leaders. The peasants could not establish a permanent, centralised organisation capable of imposing their own goals on society. Their livelihood came from farming their individual plots and they could not afford to leave them for more than a short period of time. Those who did so became non-peasants, dependent upon pillage or bribes for their survival, open to influence from whoever would pay them. Those who stayed on their land might dream of a better world, without toil, hardship and famine. But they depended on the state administrators when it came to irrigation and flood control, the provision of iron tools, and access to goods which they could not grow themselves. They could conceive of a world in which the administrators behaved better and the landowners did not squeeze them. But they could not conceive of a completely different society run by themselves.

However, the rebellions did have the cumulative effect of weakening the Han Empire. It lasted as long as the whole of the modern era in western Europe. But it had increasing difficulty controlling the big landowners in each region. The imperial administration had no way of raising the resources to sustain itself and its empire other than by squeezing the peasants. It could not prevent periodic revolts. In AD 184 a messianic movement, the Yellow Turbans, headed by the leader of a Taoist sect, organised some 360,000 armed supporters. Generals sent to put down the rebellions were soon fighting each other, adding to the chaos and devastation.

Amid the burning down of the capital, the pillaging of whole areas of the country and the disruption of trade routes there was sharp decline in the urban centres, which further disrupted life in the countryside. Rival landowners were soon dominant in each locality, taking political and economic power into their own hands as they ran estates, took over the organisation of peasant labour to maintain canals, dams and irrigation works, and began to collect the taxes that had previously gone, at least in theory, to the state.
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The cultivators continued to produce crops under the new economic arrangements and many of the crafts and industries persisted—although, directed to satisfy purely local demands, they could hardly flourish. A long period of technological advance came to an end and so too, for the next three centuries, did the Chinese Empire, replaced by a proliferation of rival kingdoms.

In some ways the period has similarities to what happened in India in the 5th century AD and to the collapse of the western Roman Empire at about the same time. But there was an important difference. The essential continuity of Chinese civilisation was not broken and the ground was laid for a much more rapid revival of the economy and urban life than was to occur in India or Rome.

Nevertheless, the very political structures that had once done so much to promote technological advance and economic expansion could now no longer do so, resulting in a partial breakdown of the old society. The old bureaucratic ruling class could not keep society going in the old way. The landed aristocracy could only oversee its fragmentation. The merchants were unwilling to break with the other privileged classes and put forward a programme of social transformation capable of drawing behind it the rebellious peasants, adopting instead the quietist Buddhist religion from India. There was not mutual destruction of the contending classes, but there was certainly mutual paralysis.

The third great civilisation to flourish 2,500 years ago was that of ancient Greece. Alexander the Great carved out an empire which very briefly stretched from the Balkans and the Nile to the Indus in the late 4th century BC at the very time that Magadha’s rulers began to dominate the Indian subcontinent and Ch’in’s to build a new empire in China. Notions which arose in Athens and developed in Greek Alexandria were to exercise the same sort of influence over Mediterranean and European thinking for the next two millennia as ideas developed in Magadha in India and by Confucius and Mencius in China.

Yet there was little to distinguish the peoples living on the islands and in the coastal villages of Greece in the 9th century BC from the cultivators anywhere else in Eurasia or Africa. The Mycenaean past was all but forgotten, except perhaps for a few myths, and its fortress palaces had been allowed to fall apart. The villages were cut off from each other and from the civilisations of mainland Asia and Egypt. The people were illiterate, craft specialisation was rudimentary, figurative art was virtually non-existent, life was harsh and famines frequent.
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The forces at work fusing these people into a new civilisation were similar to those in north India and north China—the slow but steady spread of knowledge of iron working, the discovery of new techniques in agriculture, the growth of trade, the rediscovery of old craft skills and the learning of new ones, and the elaboration of alphabets. From the 7th century BC there was steady economic growth and ‘a marked rise in the standard of living of practically all sections of the population’.
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By the 6th century BC these changes had given rise to city states capable of creating magnificent edifices like the Acropolis in Athens and, by their joint efforts, of defeating invasion attempts by the huge army of Persia. But the circumstances in which the economic and social changes took place were different in two important respects from those in China and, to a lesser extent, India.

The Greek coastal settlements soon had more direct contact with other civilisations than was the case in China and India. Phoenician sailors had traded along the Mediterranean coasts for centuries, bringing with them knowledge of the technical advances achieved in the Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires. Then, from the 6th century BC, there was direct and continual intercourse between the Greek cities and the successive empires of the Middle East through trade, the employment of Greek mercenaries in imperial armies and the residence of Greek exiles in the imperial cities. Such contacts gave an important boost to the development of Greek civilisation. For instance, the Greek alphabet developed directly out of the Semitic script used by the Phoenicians.

The Chinese and Indian civilisations flourished in fertile river valleys and on broad plains, where agriculture could be highly productive once the forests were cleared. By contrast, the expansion of Greek agriculture was limited by the mountainous terrain. A surplus was obtained by the use of new techniques from the early 8th century BC. But beyond a certain point this would have begun to dry up if different responses had not been adopted from those in India and China.

The shortage of land encouraged the cultivators to take to the seas and colonise fertile coastal areas further along the Mediterranean—on Aegean and Ionian islands, around the Black Sea and Asia Minor, in southern Italy and Sicily, even along the coasts of Spain and southern France. The expansion of trade which accompanied this colonisation in turn encouraged the development of the crafts at home—so that Athenian pottery, for example, was soon to be found throughout the Mediterranean region. What had begun as isolated communities of cultivators and fishermen had turned by the 6th century BC into a network of city states, which fought each other but which were also bound together by trade and, with it, by a common alphabet, mutually intelligible dialects, similar religious practices and joint festivals, of which the Olympic Games is the best known.

The relative unproductiveness of the land had one other very important side effect. The surplus output that could be obtained after feeding a peasant family and its children was quite small. But it could be increased considerably by working the land—and later the mines and large craft establishments—with a labour force of childless adults. The enslavement of war captives provided precisely such a labour force.
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Here was a cheap way of getting hold of other humans to exploit—the cost of a slave in late 5th century BC Athens was less than half the wage paid to a free artisan for a year’s work.
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Slavery had existed for a very long time in the old civilisations. But it was marginal to surplus production, with the slaves concentrated on providing personal services to the rulers while agriculture and the crafts were left to semi-free citizens. Now, in Greece—and soon on a much greater scale in Rome—slavery became a major source of the surplus.

Significantly, the one major Greek city state which did rely upon the exploitation of a serf-like peasantry, Sparta, was centred on a relatively fertile inland area.
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Here a ruling class of full citizens who took no part in agriculture or artisan labour lived off the tribute delivered to them by the ‘Helot’ cultivators. But here, too, was a ruling class which boasted of its austere mode of life, indicating an awareness of the limitations on its way of obtaining the surplus.
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The exception seems to prove the rule for the other Greek states.

It is sometimes argued that slavery could not have been central to these states because slaves did not constitute anything like a majority of the population.
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But as G E M De Ste Croix has pointed out in his marvellous study,
Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World,
their proportion in the population and even the contribution of their labour to the overall social product is not the issue. What matters is how important they were to producing the surplus, for without this there could be no life of idleness for the ruling class, no freeing of writers and poets from relentless physical toil and no resources for marvels like the Acropolis. The ruling class owed its position to the control of land cultivated mainly by slaves, to such an extent that the classic Greek writers and philosophers saw the ownership of slaves as essential to a civilised life. So Aristotle could lump the master and slave as the essential elements of the household alongside the husband and wife, father and children, while Polybus speaks of slaves and cattle as the essential requirements of life.
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Slave revolts do not punctuate the history of Greece in the same way that peasant revolts occur in the history of China. This is because the character of Greek, and later Roman, slavery made it very difficult for the slaves to organise against their exploiters. They were overwhelmingly captives from wars waged across the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Asia Minor and even southern Russia.
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They were deliberately mixed together in the slave markets so that those living and working next to each other, coming from different cultures and speaking different languages, could only communicate with difficulty through the Greek dialect of their masters. And the master could usually rely on other Greeks to help punish rebellious slaves and hunt escapees. So while the Spartans’ Helot serfs in Messenia could organise together, eventually rising up and liberating themselves, the slaves proper could not. For most of the time, opposition to their exploitation could only take the form of passive resentment. This resentment was itself an important factor in Greek and, later, Roman history. It meant the direct producers had very little interest in improving their techniques or the quality of their output, and it discouraged improvements in labour productivity. Furthermore, the need to keep the slaves in their place formed the background to whatever other decisions politicians or rulers might make. But the slaves were rarely in a position to intervene in the historical process on their own behalf.

However, a different class struggle did play a central role in the history of classical Greece. This was the struggle between the rich landowners, who farmed their land with relatively large numbers of slaves while keeping well clear of anything approaching manual labour themselves, and the mass of smaller farmers and artisans. These might sometimes own one or two slaves, but would work beside them on the land or in the workshops.

When the Greek city states first emerged they still displayed the imprint of their past. Kings came from lines of traditional chieftains, and the kinship lineages played an important role in determining people’s obligations and behaviour toward each other. Society was still held together by customary notions about rights and obligations rather than by formal codes of law. Those landowners who grew rich from the expansion of trade and the growth of slavery increasingly challenged such patterns of behaviour. They resented the privileges of the old ruling families on the one hand and their traditional obligations to the poor on the other. This was ‘a world of bitter conflicts among the elite…played out at every opportunity, disputing boundaries, disputing inheritance, putting up competitive displays at funerals’.
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The outcome in many states was the overthrow of the kings and the establishment of ‘oligarchies’—republics ruled by the wealthy. In these the new rich used their position not only to displace the old rulers, but also to squeeze as much surplus as possible out of those below them.

They taxed those with smaller landholdings to pay for state expenditures—for instance, on the navy—that were in their own interests. Relatively frequent harvest failures meant that many peasants could only pay these taxes and keep themselves alive by getting into debt to the rich, who would eventually use this as a justification for seizing their land and often even their very persons as ‘bond slaves’. Courts manned by the oligarchs were only too happy to give judgements against the poor.

The oligarchic republics were soon shaken by the resulting bitterness of wide sections of their citizens. In many of them ambitious men, usually themselves from the upper class, were able to exploit the bitterness to take political power into their own hands as ‘tyrants’. They would then upset the rich by dealing out various reforms to help the mass of people. But they would not and could not end the division into classes.

In some states, most notably Athens, the pressure from below resulted in even more radical changes—the replacement of both oligarchy and tyranny by ‘democracy’. The word, taken literally, means ‘rule of the people’. In reality it never referred to the whole people, since it excluded slaves, women and resident non-citizens—the
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, who often accounted for a large proportion of the traders and craftsmen. It did not challenge the concentration of property—and slaves—in the hands of the rich, either. This was hardly surprising, since the leadership of the ‘democratic’ forces usually lay in the hands of dissident wealthy landowners, who advanced their own political positions by taking up some of the demands of the masses. But it did give the poorer citizens the power to protect themselves from the extortions of the rich.

So in Athens debt-slavery was banned from the time of Solon (594 BC) onwards, law-making power was invested in an assembly open to all the citizens, and judges and lower officials were chosen by lot.

Such restraints on its power caused immense resentment among the upper class—a resentment which found reflection in some literary and philosophical circles. It was claimed that democracy was the rule of the mob, that those members of the leisured class who conceded rights to the lower classes were unscrupulous careerists (hence the word ‘demagogue’), and that the only hope for the future lay in breaking the shackles of popular control. Such is the tone of the plays of Aristophanes and the political writings of Plato, and it was probably the norm among Socrates and his followers.
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The upper classes did not simply express verbal resentment. When they could they staged an armed seizure of power, a full counter-revolution, if necessary murdering those who stood in their way. They were able to attempt such things because their wealth gave them military means not open to the ordinary citizens. The key military units were the ‘Hoplite’ section of the infantry, which included only those citizens with landholdings large enough to pay for the requisite armour and weapons. So the history of many Greek cities was one of continual struggles, often successful, by the richer landowners against democracy. The partial exception was Athens, where democracy survived for some 200 years. This was because the city’s dependence on trade gave a vital role to its navy, which was manned by the poorer citizens. Even the rich, who resented democracy, usually felt compelled to placate the poorer citizens. Two attempts to impose oligarchic rule, in the aftermath of defeat in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, were shortlived.

This 30 year war in the late 5th century BC had intertwined with the class battle over democracy within many of the city states. It arose out of a struggle between Sparta and Athens for influence over other city states. Sparta had built an alliance of states around the Peloponnese—the southern Greek mainland—to protect its borders and its subjection of the Helots. Athens was dependent on its sea routes for trade and had a sea-based alliance of coastal towns and islands, exacting regular payments of tribute from its allies which it used to help finance state spending, especially on its navy. But the war was about more than just which of the alliances would dominate. It also came to involve rival conceptions of how society should be organised. In Athens and its allied states there were many in the upper classes who at least half-welcomed Spartan successes in the war as an excuse to overthrow democracy. For some, Sparta became the focus of their counter-revolutionary aspirations, a model of how a privileged minority should deprive everyone else of any rights,
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much as fascist Italy and then Nazi Germany did for sections of the ruling class across Europe in the 1930s.