Cannibals and Kings (25 page)

Century after century the standard of living in China, northern India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt hovered slightly above or below what might be called the threshold of pauperization. When population density in a particular region climbed too high, standards of living dipped below the threshold. This led to wars, famines,
and population decline. With lower densities, the standard of living would rise more to a point slightly above the long-term average.

Western observers have always been astonished by the static or “stationary” nature of these ancient dynastic systems. Pharaohs and emperors came and went decade after decade; dynasties rose and fell; the life of the coolies, ryots, and fellahin, however, went on as always, just a notch above barest subsistence. The ancient empires were warrens full of illiterate peasants toiling from morning to night only to earn protein-deficient vegetarian diets. They were little better off than their oxen and were no less subject to the commands of superior beings who knew how to keep records and who alone had the right to manufacture and use weapons of war and coercion. The fact that societies providing such meager rewards endured thousands of years—longer than any other system of statehood in the history of the world—stands as a grim reminder that there is nothing inherent in human affairs to ensure material and moral progress.

Each ancient empire developed its own integrated pattern of social life. From cookery to art styles, each was a universe unto itself. And yet for all their differences, ancient China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt possessed fundamentally similar systems of political economy. Each had a highly centralized class of bureaucrats and hereditary despotic overlords who claimed heavenly mandates or were said to be gods in themselves. Excellent networks of government-maintained roadways, rivers, and canals linked every hamlet and village to provincial and national administrative centers. Each village had at least one important person who served as a link between the village and the central administration. Political lines of force ran in one direction
only: from top to bottom. While peasants might sometimes own their land, as in China, the bureaucracy tended to regard private property as a gift of the state. Production priorities were set by state tax policies and by regular call-ups of village men and women for work on state-sponsored construction projects. The “state was stronger than society.” Its right to collect taxes, confiscate materials, and conscript labor was virtually unlimited. It carried out systematic censuses village by village to determine the available labor power and the tax revenue base. It deployed antlike armies of workers wheresoever the lords of the realm decreed and undertook the construction of tombs, pyramids, defense works, and palaces whose dimensions are stupendous even by modern industrial standards. In Egypt seasonal employment of as many as 100,000 able-bodied men was needed to carry out the monumental projects of the Old Kingdom, a labor force of 84,000 men employed eighty days a year worked for twenty years to construct the Great Pyramid of Cheops. In China construction on the Great Wall required a million workers at a time; another million toiled on the Grand Canal; over two million each month were put to work in the construction of the Sui Dynasty’s Eastern capital and imperial palace during the reign of Emperor Yang
(A.D
. 604—617).

Despite the development of philosophies and religions advocating justice and mercy, the rulers of these vast realms frequently had to rely on intimidation, force, and naked terror to maintain law and order. Total submissiveness was demanded of underlings, the supreme symbol of which was the obligation to prostrate oneself and grovel in the presence of the mighty. In China a commoner had to kowtow—fall forward, strike the ground with his head, and kiss the dust. In Hindu Indian commoners
embraced the sovereign’s feet. In Pharaonic Egypt underlings crawled on their bellies. In all of these ancient empires there were ruthless systems for routing out and punishing disobedient persons. Spies kept the rulers informed about potential troublemakers. Punishments ranged from beatings to death by torture. In Egypt the tax collectors beat recalcitrant peasants and threw them, bound hand and foot, into the irrigation ditches; the foremen on all state projects carried clubs and whips. In ancient India the magistrates condemned disobedient subjects to eighteen different kinds of torture, including beatings on the soles of the feet, suspension upside down, and burning of finger joints: for mild offenses, they ordered a fresh variety eighteen days in a row; for severe offenses, they sentenced the condemned to receive all eighteen on the same day. In China the emperor punished those who expressed incautious opinions by having them castrated in a darkened cell.

These ancient empires shared one other feature: each was what the great institutional historian Karl Wittfogel has called a “hydraulic society.” Each developed amid arid or semiarid plains and valleys fed by great rivers. Through dams, canals, flood control, and drainage projects, officials diverted water from these rivers and delivered it to the peasants’ fields. Water constituted the most important factor in production. When it was applied in regular and copious amounts, high yields per acre and per calorie of effort resulted.

Among modern scholars, Wittfogel has done the most to clarify the relationship between hydraulic production and the emergence of unchanging agro-managerial despotisms. My own view of that relationship borrows heavily from Wittfogel’s but does not correspond precisely with his formulation. I hold that preindustrial
hydraulic agriculture recurrently led to the evolution of extremely despotic agro-managerial bureaucracies because the expansion and intensification of hydraulic agriculture—itself a consequence of reproductive pressures—was uniquely dependent on massive construction projects which, in the absence of machines, could only be carried out by antlike armies of workers. The larger the river, the greater the food production potential of the region through which it flowed. But the larger the river, the greater the problems in making use of its potential. On the one hand, the state undertook the construction of extensive networks of diversionary and feeder canals, ditches, and sluice gates to ensure that there would be enough water at the right time; on the other hand, the state undertook the construction of dams, levees, and drainage ditches to avoid the damaging effects of too much water all at once. The scale of the activities in question literally demanded changing the face of the earth: moving mountains, reshaping riverbanks, digging out whole new riverbeds. Recruiting, coordinating, directing, feeding, and housing the brigades of workers needed for these monumental undertakings could only have been carried out by cadres obedient to a few powerful leaders pursuing a single master plan. Hence the larger the hydraulic networks and facilities, the greater the overall productivity of the system, the greater the tendency of the agro-managerial hierarchy to become subordinate to one immensely powerful person at its top.

The peculiar capacity of hydraulic societies to restore themselves despite frequent dynastic upheavals and recurrent conquests by barbarian invaders arises from the interplay between their political structures and their basic ecological adaptation. Though the concentration of total power in the supreme ruler and his family
meant that all lines of political force ran in one direction only, the sheer size and complexity of the state apparatus gave high officials and lesser bureaucrats the opportunity to satisfy their own ambitions at the expense of the people under them. Despite the value placed by the wise ruler on moderation and justice, the bureaucracy tended to fatten itself at the expense of peasant welfare. Corruption tended to increase geometrically with the number of years a dynasty remained in power. Soon public works were neglected, the dikes began to leak, the canals filled up with silt, and production declined. Sheer incompetence, human error, and natural disasters added to the subversive forces at work. Recurrently, therefore, a reigning dynasty would find that it was no longer capable of protecting and providing for the peasant masses. Torn by dissension, it would become vulnerable to the “barbarians” outside the walls, to the armies of neighboring empires, or to its own rebellious people. The dynasty would then collapse. This happened again and again in the history of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. But the new leaders—whether internal or external foes—had only one choice if they wanted to enjoy the wealth of empire: to repair the dikes, clean out the canals, rebuild the levees, and restore the hydraulic mode of production. A new cycle would then begin. Production would increase, the depauperized peasantry would lower its rate of infanticide and abortion, and population density would rise. But as density rose, productivity would decline, and corrupt officials would become more and more immoderate in their attempt to line their own pockets. Finally, as the peasants slipped back into pauperdom, the struggle for dynastic control would break out once again.

As Wittfogel has insisted, the kernel of the hydraulic
theory was anticipated by Karl Marx in a number of works that were either disguised or ignored by Lenin and Stalin. Marx attributed the peculiar political economies of India and China to what he called the “Asiatic Mode of Production.” He wrote:

One reason this part of Marx’s scheme of world evolution fell into disrepute under Lenin and Stalin is its implication that state communism or the “dictatorship of the proletariat” may actually be nothing more than a new and more highly developed form of managerial despotism reared on an industrial rather than an agricultural base. Another reason is that Marx referred to the Asiatic societies as “stagnant” or “stationary” and saw no prospect for their further evolution through purely internal processes. This was at odds with other aspects of Marx’s theories, for he held that the contradictions within society gave rise to class struggle and that class struggle was the key to the understanding of all history. Hydraulic societies had plenty of contradictions and class struggle, but they seem to have been remarkably resistant to fundamental change.

Some critics of the hydraulic theory contend that
the bureaucratic features of the ancient empires had already come into existence before the irrigation networks and flood control projects reached the stage of requiring huge numbers of laborers and centralized control. Robert McC. Adams of the University of Chicago, for example, argues that in early dynastic Mesopotamia “irrigation, on the whole, was conducted on a small-scale basis, which involved little alteration of the natural hydraulic regime and the construction of only small-scale feeder canals” and that therefore “there is nothing to suggest that the rise of dynastic authority in southern Mesopotamia was linked to the administrative requirements of a major canal system.” In rebuttal I would point out that Wittfogel’s theory is one not of the origin of the state but of the origin of the highly despotic and enduring nature of certain kinds of imperial state systems. Adams does not deny that during the maturity of the Mesopotamian empires construction and management of colossal hydraulic enterprises was a constant and salient preoccupation of highly centralized agro-managerial cadres. The dynastic history of Mesopotamia fully confirms Wittfogel’s basic contention that as the scope and complexity of the waterworks increased, so did the “interference of the centralizing power of government.”

Karl Butzer has recently rejected the applicability of Wittfogel’s theory to the hydraulic and managerial features of ancient Egypt. Like Adams, Butzer claims that the dynastic phase had already been reached before there was any large-scale investment in hydraulic construction. But he seems to go further in insisting that “competition for water was never an issue except at the local level”; that “there is no evidence for a centralized bureaucratic apparatus that might have served to administer
irrigation at the national, regional, or local level”; and finally that “ecological problems were handled at the local level.”

Butzer attributes the permanently decentralized nature of the dynastic Egyptian irrigation system to the fact that the Nile flood plain is broken into a series of natural basins which fill up sequentially when the river rises and overflows the levees along its main channel. Before the construction of the Aswan dam in the 1960’s across the whole width of the main, channel and flood plain, there was no way for districts to cut off the water of districts further downstream, as there was in Mesopotamia. Artificial constructions, according to Butzer, were small-scale and consisted primarily of attempts to strengthen and enlarge the preexisting natural levees and dikes separating each basin from the river and one basin from another.

Butzer’s critique of Wittfogel’s theory is contradicted by much of the data provided by Butzer himself. It appears that he has not understood what Wittfogel is saying. For example, the mace head of the Scorpion King pictures a 3100
B.C
. predynastic ruler either opening a levee or initiating construction of a canal. Butzer accepts this and other evidence as an indication that “artificial irrigation including deliberate flooding and draining by sluice gates, and water contained by longitudinal and transverse dikes, was established by the 1st Dynasty.” He also admits that the central government engaged in vast hydraulic projects beginning in the Middle Kingdom (2000
B.C.
) aimed at regulating the level of the Fayum lake and at draining large portions of the Delta region, though he regards these monumental undertakings as exceptions and therefore insignificant for an understanding of dynastic political organization. Further, despite his claim that local officials could regulate
and administer the distribution of water, he describes formidable technical requirements: