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China and the West to 1600

Empire, Philosophy, and the Paradox of Culture

 

Steven Wallech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank SuShuan Chen, Matthew Jaffe, and a third anonymous critic for the valuable suggestions and corrections they made to the draft manuscript of this book. Furthermore, the author would like to extend a special thank you to his editor, Andrew J. Davidson.

Preface

Teaching and studying world history at the college level is a uniquely challenging endeavor, the subject so immense that it can at times overwhelm the novice—first-time instructors and students alike—with its wealth of details.

Nearly all other college or university courses in history tend to focus on a single culture or region, distinguishing it from all other human communities. As a result, such courses tend to highlight differences. To teach world history, however, the instructor must reverse this emphasis. Theme or themes must be found to explain the common problems faced by humanity, and then explore how each culture did or did not find solutions. In this manner, the instructor deals with the commonality of our shared humanity, from which certain patterns over time, or themes, emerge.

This text uses one such theme to consider the comparative histories presented. This is the artificial relationship between humans and the plants they grow, and the animals they raise, to feed their population. This theme sets the material limits that confront a culture: how many people it can feed, how much geographic space it can command, and how effectively it can use it resources. In addition, this theme reveals how the nature of the relationship between humans and their food supply produces a continuous paradox, one that every civilization must face: an abundance of food generated by agriculture feeds a growing population that soon outstrips the food surpluses generated and threatens famine, epidemic disease, and exhaustion of the land that in the extreme can lead to ecocide, or the collapse of the ecosystem. Two subordinate themes are also useful in explaining how this paradox unfolds in world history: 1) the beliefs (religions and philosophies) that the production of surplus food supplies supports as civilization tries to address the central paradox cited above, and 2) the consequences of the close association between farmers and herders as they compete for use of the land.

Two civilizations are singled out in the pages that follow to facilitate this study: China and Western civilization. These two make good case studies because they were the richest and most powerful civilizations in world history during the ancient era. They produced material features that were remarkably similar. They faced the same internal problems at roughly the same time. They generated great philosophies in an attempt to find solutions to common problems. And they both faced the threat of invasion by a nomadic enemy as they spiraled into collapse at the end of the ancient era.

Post-Han Empire China and post-Roman Empire Western civilization diverged during the course of the Middle Ages. This divergence, the different paths China and “the West” took after the fall of their respective ancient empires, was in part a reflection of the varying degree of success they achieved in implementing the different philosophies they had developed to try to address the central paradox of culture. This divergence also reflects their levels of success and failure in dealing with nomads, ever present on their frontiers.

Furthermore, as the paradox of agriculture unfolds, subordinate paradoxes appear. The most important one to the study of world history is that the success China achieved in maintaining its ancient traditions ended up trapping Chinese culture in these traditions. In contrast, medieval Europe failed to recover the unity of Rome. Also, institutional contradictions emerged as a result of trying to mix surviving features of Greco-Roman culture with Christian practices and values and Germanic (and nomadic) customs. This created a dysfunctional feudalism that failed so spectacularly that Europe broke with tradition and modernized, making Western civilization the first to do so. Hence, the original paradox of culture, agriculture, spawned a series of subordinate ones considered by this study. The subordinate paradoxes reveal the great complexity of a great civilization in a simple, and, we hope, engaging way.

One still might ask: Why compare the ancient civilizations of China and Western civilization? The answer rests on the brilliance of both. Since these two civilizations achieved the pinnacle of material success in the ancient world, both examples can be used by the student of world history to study other human communities. An understanding of how both China and Western civilization struggled with the paradox of agriculture also provides a useful method of historical analysis.

Finally, this text can serve as supplemental reading for both halves of the world history survey. In ancient and medieval world history, it explains the complex consequences caused by humanity’s choice to abandon a natural way of making a living and adopt the artificial lifestyle that agriculture created. This book also provides a complete treatment of the tensions between nomads and sedentary farmers that persisted throughout most of ancient and medieval Eurasian history. Finally, this book explains why modernization began in Europe and not in China, which might relieve the instructor of a course on the history of the modern world from having to spend a great deal of time laying a foundation for the course.

Introduction

The paradox of culture refers to the inescapable contradictions that marked civilizations throughout world history. The oldest and most significant paradox surfaced with the agricultural revolution. Once discovered and mastered sometime near the end of the last Ice Age, agriculture, a reliable method of producing food, gave rise to civilization, but at the same time trapped humans in a cycle of unwelcome consequences. When ancient farmers began to cultivate specific plants and raise specific animals to support sedentary communities, they deviated from nature, creating an artificial setting for human survival. By giving up a nomadic lifestyle and cultivating these organisms, the first agriculturalists not only produced their own food, but generated the first food surpluses in world history, launching a human population explosion. People began to settle down in ever-greater numbers, organizing and then reorganizing their methods and systems of food production. In so doing they changed the landscape.

The increasing numbers of people who had adopted agricultural and permanent living sites soon began to place pressures on the local environment. One consequence of adopting a sedentary lifestyle to cultivate food was the attraction of parasites, not only insects and rodents that wished to feed on humans or their food supplies, but pathogens that spread easily among concentrated populations of people and their domesticated plants and animals. Periodically these pathogens devastated local populations in the form of epidemic disease. In addition, this new, artificial relationship called “agriculture” set in motion periodic episodes of “ecocide.” In other words, the very methods the early farming communities employed to generate food eventually ended up undercutting their capacity to produce sufficient supplies of food by causing soil erosion, soil exhaustion, deforestation, or all three simultaneously. The end result was that the agricultural revolution created a fundamental paradox: the more successful the society is in producing plenty of food, the more potential there was for ecological disasters, whether biological or environmental.

In an attempt to defeat this fundamental paradox, each ancient civilization developed its own system of beliefs and practices, known collectively as its culture, designed to try to increase its control over the natural world. The various cultures attempted to integrate human actions, expectations, and agriculture, with the end goal of creating a steady flow of food to feed the ever-increasing needs of their ever-increasing populations. Nonetheless, none of these early cultivating communities could escape the consequences of its actions, as the artificial conditions under which they lived generated ever-greater distances between human civilizations and the natural environment.

Two such societies, China and the Western world, provide excellent examples of human culture’s struggle with the fundamental paradox agriculture created. Singling out China and the West for a comparative study is instructive, for both civilizations experienced striking similarities during the ancient era, and then dramatically diverged during the Middle Ages. Both societies matured roughly at the same time and at the same rate. Both grew to roughly the same size in terms of the number of people and amount of land under political control. And both suffered similar fates at the end of the ancient era for roughly the same reasons. Yet, with the beginning of the medieval era, China managed to hold the center, recover, and keep its ancient, classical institutions intact, while the post-Roman West collapsed and splintered into the eclectic European cultures of the Middle Ages. Furthermore, once the medieval era began, China entered a golden age of traditional practices that set it apart as the richest culture in Eurasia. In contrast, Western civilization lurched from one institutional design to another, from the Early to the High and then to the Late Middle Ages (500–1500 CE). Ultimately, and ironically, China’s great success in maintaining its traditional culture throughout the upheaval of the Middle Ages trapped its society in stasis, even as Europe’s stunning failure to maintain its traditional society set in motion great upheaval and change, a process that, ultimately and ironically, led to modernization, leaving China “behind” for centuries.

To accomplish the task of comparing and contrasting the paradoxes embedded in China and the West, we will consider three major themes: agriculture, philosophy, and the threat of and interaction with nomads. Agriculture is an obvious choice since the central paradox under study in this book springs from the singular event of humans selecting and planting specific domesticated plants. Chinese and Western philosophy is not as obvious a choice as agriculture, but one that nonetheless reflects the cultural paradoxes derived from changes in agricultural production. Finally, responses to, and interaction with, nomads serve as the third choice. The nomadic lifestyle required the breeding, raising, and herding of livestock and the ability to continually pick up and move in order to find fresh pastures. In contrast, cultivating domesticated plants required the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle: staying in one place, building fences, maintaining borders, and excluding intruders. These major differences in food production and lifestyles led to open conflicts between farmers and herders, struggles that played out over the entire course of ancient and medieval world history.

A timeline displaying the civilization of China by dynasty (top) and of the West (bottom).

Map 1 Shifting Historical Borders of China

Schematic of the map of China displaying its shifting borders over the course of history.

Map 2 Roman Empire

Schematic of the map of the Roman Empire.

Map 3 The Nomadic Steppe

Schematic of the map of China indicating its desserts, mountains, plains, plateaus, basins, and rivers.