Political trajectories compared

JACK A. GOLDSTONE

The rise of modern states in a globalizing world

If you travel internationally, you have a passport that identifies you as the citizen of a particular state.

Yet, the rise of such modern states is a relatively recent development. By 1800, the process of creating such states was still new and incomplete; Japan became a modern state only after 1868, China after 1911, Russia after 1917, Turkey after 1923 and India after 1947. Even in Western Europe, the process was uneven: Great Britain still has a very pre-modern House of Lords (mostly appointed, but still with nearly 100 hereditary members) as a com­ponent of its government; France invented many characteristics of the modern state in its First Republic (1792 to 1804), yet reverted to various kinds of monarchies and empire up to 1870; and although Prussia adopted many modernizing state reforms after 1815, it did not develop into the modern state of Germany until 1871. Nor is this process complete even in 2014: from the Sultanate of Brunei and the monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and the Persian Gulf to the European principality of Monaco, there remain states where hereditary rulers still actively rule, and in some of them sacred texts (the Qur'an) rather than modern rational legal codes still form the basis for civil or criminal laws.

From 1400 to 1800, global trends led to the rise of the modern state. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, several events had disrupted older states and empires all across Eurasia. First, tribes of Mongol nomadic warriors who usually spent their energies quarrelling with each other were united by Genghis Khan, who honed their tactics of rapidly advancing and highly maneuverable cavalry archers into an unstoppable force. Spreading both east and west from Central Asia, the Mongols overwhelmed states from Poland to China. Second was climate change; the Medieval Warm Period ended around 1300, followed by the first phase of the “Little Ice Age” which lasted for the next two centuries,¹ affecting crop yields all across the northern temperate zone. Third, bubonic plague (better known as the “Black Death”) became a global pandemic, inflicting a swift but painful death on from one-third to one- half of the populations of states from England to Egypt, and from Persia to China. The world thus entered the 1400s depleted and distressed; it took another century of war, disorder and political chaos before new, stable states would emerge.

In the fourteenth century, most people did not think of themselves as being ruled from the central capital city of large territorial states. Rather, people saw themselves as being ruled mainly by local authorities, who had only a loose allegiance to those who claimed to be kings or emperors. These local authorities were virtually unchallenged rulers within their local domains, whether as independent feudal-type lords or as appointed or hereditary governors or officials ruling in the name of a great imperial or royal overlord. Even for the great lords and officials, kinship and allegiance to dynastic families, often in the framework of household or personal service, took priority over any abstract idea of “the state.” With the exception of a few Italian city republics, people were never citizens of a state, but rather lords or subjects relative to those above or below them in the political, religious and social hierarchies.

Political domains were loosely organized entities with fuzzy boundaries, very far from exercising what the great German sociologist Max Weber identified as the key criteria of a modern state, namely a “monopoly of legitimate use of force” within a clearly marked territory.^{[367] [368]} In many areas, religious officials had as much authority as political leaders, or themselves held critical political positions or had resources and authority beyond the reach of state control. In some cases, religious groups (bishops, popes and religious orders in the West, more commonly monastic groups or Islamic sects in the East) raised their own armies and fought against state rulers or founded states themselves.

Moreover, in the fourteenth century, the world map showed a wide scattering of states large and small. Many of the most successful were city­states, such as Florence, Venice and Genoa in Italy, or federations of city­states, such as the Hanseatic League. At the same time, large areas of the Eurasian steppes, the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa, and America's Great Plains were dominated by nomadic warrior and trading groups, rather than states.

Over the centuries from 1400 to 1800, kings and emperors sought to recover and expand their authority, gradually gaining control over larger and better defined territories and over local officials and landlords. They also greatly increased the regularity and size of their tax collection and their military establishments (these two trends being closely interrelated); raised the size, professionalism and uniformity of their official administrations; adopted contemporary vernaculars as their languages of administration and education in place of classical or sacred tongues;^[369] and supported scientific, commercial, cultural and welfare endeavors designed to increase the wealth of their territories.

Some of the states that took root after 1400 were empires ruling diverse peoples of different ethnicities, religions and cultures: the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese Empire and the Mughal Empire.

While growth in the size, professionalization and power of these territor­ies and their administration laid the basis for the modern state, these trends coexisted with older, traditional structures of authority. The sociologist of empires Karen Barkey speaks of “the layering of old and new institutions” to describe this process.^[370] Hereditary military officers and officials, and nearly independent local authorities, continued to exist alongside officials appointed for merit. Religious authorities and canonical classic texts continued to influence state policy despite efforts to create more rational state policies and administration. And, notwithstanding increased efforts by state adminis­trations to provide security and welfare services, and rights to petition officials and use state-supported courts, the great mass of people usually experienced states passively as subjects. They were “subject” to military recruitment, taxation and other forms of service to local lords and to the state, but had no escape from their prescribed place in the social order.

It thus took many centuries for the fully realized modern state—based on uniform legal codes and free of hereditary rule or privileged local authorities—to emerge, often violently, from the shell of these multi-layered political regimes.

The culmination of this trend can be seen in the French Revolution of 1789 at the very end of this period.

While the French Revolutionary state was an extreme example, almost all states throughout the world were moving in roughly the same directions, trying to make rulers more powerful versus local and hereditary officials, make state administrations and laws more rational, raise the size and fire­power of their armies and navies, make tax collections more effective and efficient, and promote the wealth (and thus the tax base) of their territories.

Yet, we should not think that all states pursuing these goals had a similar character. They varied widely in the relationship between the state and religious authorities, their degree of centralization, the manner in which they recruited military and civil officials, the extent to which they had any institutionalized representative bodies, and their involvement in various welfare, scientific and educational efforts. They also varied considerably in the way in which they related to other states in their neighborhood, with great implications for the conduct of war and diplomacy and the pursuit of military technology.

We also must bear in mind that progress from the loose, highly localized and internally variegated administrations that characterized states c. 1400 to the larger, more centralized, more territorially focused, actively adminis­tered, militarily effective and economically progressive states that were increasingly typical by 1800 was not a smooth and continuous process. In almost every state there were cycles of progress and regress, unexpected periods of political crisis and collapse, and issues of problem-solving that states managed in different ways, some more successfully than others. Over these centuries, we almost invariably find that the very strongest states from the beginning of this period—the Aztecs in Mexico, the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe, the Delhi Sultanate and Vijayanagara Empire in India, the Ming Empire in China and the Mongol Empires in Central Asia—had disappeared by around 1800, replaced by more powerful states.

Finally, we must bear in mind that states in this globalizing era did not shape their trajectories independently. An overarching trend across these centuries is that Europe, which in 1500 was a relatively uninfluential and isolated area, divided into many hundreds of constantly warring city-states, bishoprics, dukedoms, monarchies, electorates and small empires, with very weak central governments, especially compared to the larger, more central­ized, and richer Ottoman and Chinese states, had by 1800 come to politically and militarily (although not yet economically) dominate the rest of the world. It had conquered and colonized all of the Americas and Australia, most of India and Indonesia, and penetrated deeply into Africa, from which it exported human cargo as slaves on an immense scale. How European states came to dominate the global political scene by 1800 is also a key part of the political trajectories of this era.

Yet, it would be a great mistake to simply see the political trajectories of 1400 to 1800 as a story of the “Rise of the West.” Although the Western states did emerge from this period relatively stronger than they had been at the beginning, the development of states was initially further advanced in the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East, and Western states borrowed a great deal of their technology and administrative innovations from Eastern states. As late as the eighteenth century, Voltaire was promoting the Chinese model of officials chosen by examinations as a basis for reform in France, and Britain—which only adopted civil service examinations to select officials in the mid-nineteenth century—still calls its higher civil servants “mandarins,” from the name given by China to its top officials.

Moreover, the development of the modern state in the West was in many ways shaped by interactions with Eastern states, through both direct military competition and economic exchange. Finally, while the West was the first region to realize the development of fully modern states, the modern state model quickly transcended the West, and after 1850 new forms of modern states, including military and party-states, were adapted and further developed in Asia, Latin America and Africa, as well as in Europe. The rise of the modern state, both from 1400 to 1800 and afterwards, was an inher­ently global process, and indeed would likely not have occurred without the globalization of the world in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.

Many patterns, many states

The fifteenth century was a period of violent disorder and incipient state building all across the world. Population remained at low levels, as new rounds of the Black Death periodically returned and warfare wracked the continents. This century saw the height of the Hundred Years War between England and France and the conclusion of the Christian re-conquest of Spain in Europe, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, including the final collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the fall of Constantinople. Further east, the 1400s began with Tamerlane's destruction of Damascus and Baghdad, and the sacking of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Iran (Persia) was ruled by a succession of Turko-Mongol dynasties, and India was divided into a number of warring states. In China, the new Ming dynasty was extending its authority and moving its capital from Nanjing in the south to its new northern capital, Beijing, while Japan was suffering through the Onin War. In the Americas, the Incas were just founding and conquering their empire on the northwest coast of South America, while the Mexica in the Valley of Mexico were asserting themselves over other Mesoamerican societies and building the Aztec Empire.

By the early 1500s, in the Old World much of this open warfare had devolved into border conflict among more established states. The adoption of firearms—both muskets and artillery—put a premium on the ability to raise vast funds to equip armies and navies. The heavily armed knights and marching archers of the Middle Ages gave way to armies organized around three main branches: the infantry, increasingly armed with muskets as well as swords; cavalry for scouting and flanking and charges armed with lances, swords and pistols; and artillery to break down fortifications and shatter enemy lines. Navies, especially in Western Europe, increasingly armed their ships with artillery as well. Supporting these armies and navies, and building the complex fortifications to resist them, required resources on an enormous scale. So rulers sought to make their domains more productive, and to increase their ability to raise resources from those domains.

The sociologist Charles Tilly has argued that there were two main routes by which states in this period raised the resources for wars.^[371] One was to focus on capital-intensive activities—aggressively expanding manufacturing and trade—and to levy taxes on the movement and consumption of goods. This approach was particularly favorable for maritime countries with many ports and with valuable products to trade. Prosperous city-states as well as larger states could follow this route, using their profits to hire mercenary armies and build powerful navies. The other route was to conquer ever-larger territories and coerce ever-larger amounts of taxation out of the peasantry— sometimes by direct collection, and sometimes by selling the rights to squeeze the peasants to intermediaries (“tax-farming”). This approach was favoured by kings and emperors who commanded large and expanding territories, such as the rulers of France, Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Otto­man Empire, Persia, the Mughal Empire and China. But this description is too simple; aside from the fact that most rulers sought to follow both methods insofar as they could, there were yet more ways for rulers to acquire wealth. Moreover, this approach omits the fact that not all regions of the world fought wars to the same degree or in the same way, so that international relations were also critical.

By the early to mid-1500s, relatively stable states and empires had emerged in almost all the major areas of the world. In the Americas, in 1500, the Inca and Aztec Empires were near their height. In Europe, the Tudors in England, the Valois in France and the Habsburgs in Spain and Central Europe had created Renaissance monarchies with highly edu­cated officials and increasingly centralized control of their territories. In the Middle East and North Africa, the Ottomans had built the largest empire (in size) since ancient Rome, with a sophisticated bureaucracy and nearly unstoppable army. In Russia, the tsars from the time of Ivan the Terrible had thrown off their Mongol overlords and were building their own empire. In Persia, the Safavids had established control and expanded the Persian Empire to its greatest extent since the time of Mohammed; and in India the Mughals had begun to unify most of the subcontinent under their rule. China was united under the flourishing Ming dynasty, while Japan was becoming unified thanks to the victories of Oda Nabunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and developed a stable central state after 1603 under the Tokugawa shogunate. Even on the mainland of Southeast Asia, the rulers of Siam, Burma and Vietnam were similarly creating larger, more administratively effective and unified states. The main exceptions to this pattern were in Africa, where pre­literate states grew but were unable to adopt Eurasian-style military technologies on a large scale, and therefore were raided by slave-seeking traders from Europe and Asia; and in the islands of Southeast Asia, where fragmented island states in Indonesia and the Philippines became targets for colonial control by Europeans.

Yet, these varied states coexisted in very different patterns of relations in different parts of the world. In Europe, by 1600, the prevailing pattern was one of near-constant land and naval conflict among relatively compact kingdoms, with territorial states, including Denmark, Sweden and Russia in the north, and the Duchies of Milan and Tuscany, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in the south, gradually weakening the formerly independent city-states of the Hanseatic League and Italy. The commercial city-states of Genoa and Venice persisted, but became marginal. From 1500 to 1650, European wars mainly pitted kingdoms—usually of different religions (Protestant or Catholic), but not always—against each other for control of territory or naval domination. Yet, despite the constant struggles, no clear winner emerged; Europe settled into a permanent fragmentation among different states, each with their own dominant religion (Catholicism, Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism) and their own dynastic claims to territory. Unable to wholly defeat each other, and limited in their territorial gains by the persistence of other states, Europeans turned outward, and developed a different way to raise resources: the conquest and colonization of overseas states.

The Spanish and Portuguese initially dominated this approach. By the mid- 1500s, the Spaniards had used their advantages in steel and gunpowder to conquer the Aztec and Inca Empires, appropriating their accumulated wealth and setting up massive mining operations to continue the flow of treasure to their coffers. The Portuguese acquired Brazil, as well as establishing fortified trading centers on the coasts of East and West Africa, India and southern China. They were soon followed by the Dutch, who first dominated access to Indonesia and later conquered it, placed settlers in southern Africa and on Manhattan island (“New Amsterdam”) in North America, and established trading relations withJapan at the port of Nagasaki. But this was not the end. By the early 1600s, the British, who established a foothold in northeast India, had placed even more settlers in southern Africa, and colonized the east coast of North America. The French, too, pushed into both North America and Asia, and all of these countries now fought naval and territorial wars against each other over their colonies as well as over their European lands.

The development of Atlantic empires by Europeans led to continual combat at sea over access to treasure, and control of Atlantic trade routes. From roughly 1450 to 1700, naval warfare involving Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands and also substantial forces of pirates (some of the latter deployed by states as “privateers”) produced a rapid development of vessels, armaments and tactics designed for oceanic warfare. Naval gunnery developed lighter and faster-firing broadside cannon; naval architecture strengthened the naval platforms for gunnery and the resistance of ships to shelling; and sails and tactics developed for pursuit, attack and combat for taking enemy ships or destroying enemy fleets. While similar goals had motivated naval development of galleys in the Mediterranean, which grew heavier and better armed, naval combat in the Atlantic Ocean was something altogether different, requiring ships and crews that could remain at sea for weeks or months, and able to haul and defend huge loads of treasure between continents. By the seventeenth century, the Atlantic states of Europe had developed heavily armed ships unlike those anywhere else in the world.

A different pattern prevailed in East Asia. Not only did the Ming dynasty unite all of China, it also worked out a symbolic integration with its major neighbors. In previous centuries, Korea, Japan and Vietnam had all borrowed their writing systems, religions and systems of administration, with officials recruited by examination on the Confucian classics, from China. These states thus looked to China as the source of many of their key traditions. They did fight wars among themselves: China invaded Vietnam in 1409 and Japan invaded Korea in 1592 to 1598, but in contrast to Europe these conflicts were extremely rare and were separated by centuries of peace.

This is because China developed the “tribute system” during the Han dynasty (206 bc to 220 ad). Under this system, states wishing to trade with the Chinese Empire would pay tribute and acknowledge the central role of the Chinese emperor; the emperor would then give the tributary nation trading rights at designated ports. Even more important, this largely sym­bolic action bestowed recognition and legitimacy on the Confucian elites of the tribute states, who thus gained prestige and the freedom to manage their domestic affairs without any anxiety about Chinese aggression. Tributary states included Nepal and Burma, in addition to others. There were dynastic wars within Korea, and Vietnam often attacked its neighbors in Southeast Asia; but major wars between China and its main neighbors were largely avoided.^[372]

China did continue to fight wars, but these were almost entirely against the nomadic groups on its northern and western frontiers. For the most part, China's task was to prevent and repel the nomads' raids on Chinese territory. These wars did not involve set battles between comparable forces, and artillery and massed musket-bearing infantry were of limited use against mounted nomads who would strike and retreat to the steppes. Thus, unlike Europe, China did not have the incentives to continually develop and improve its military technology to keep pace with equal competitors. Rather, China developed the administrative tools (including merchant finance and paper money) to keep large forces of farmer-soldiers settled and supplied in frontier areas to repel raids. The Ming also rebuilt and extended the Great Wall as a barrier. This was asymmetric warfare, often expensive and demanding large numbers of troops, but of a different nature from what was routine in the European states system.

In the Middle East, Central Asia and India, the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires adopted firearms so enthusiastically that they are often referred to as “gunpowder empires.” As a group, they were so successful that they filled up the entire space of Eurasia below the steppes (see Map 13.1). Throughout the 1500s, these were arguably the most successful states in the world. The Ottomans spread across North Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, pushing Europeans back to the walls of Vienna; the Safavids expanded their empire into Armenia, Afghanistan and Central Asia; and the Mughals pushed their control from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal and from the Himalayan mountains to the deserts of the Deccan.

From the New World to the Old, the 1500s was thus a century of great empire-building. It was also a century of relative prosperity. A warm interval from roughly 1500 to 1590 interrupted the “Little Ice Age.” New crops from the Americas—potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize and peanuts—proved highly adaptable to the Old World, even in difficult soils, providing expanded nourishment. With the growth of centralized administrations to provide security, trade flourished more than at any time previously in world history, and new circuits of trade arose. Within China, the rebuilding of the Grand Canal to link northern and southern China, the expansion of cotton farming in the north and cotton spinning and weaving in the south, and of rice production up the Yangzi river basin and silk production in the delta, tied China together into a great continental trading system. Not only rice and textiles, but lacquer, ceramics, tropical woods, tea, paper, books, soy, fertil­izers and luxuries such as ivory flowed through the coastal ports and river arteries. China adopted silver as its main form of tax payments and copper for its currency, leading to vast imports of these metals from European traders and from Japan.

Europe used its New World colonies to obtain bullion, which was sent to China across the Pacific by way of Manila and to both China and India across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as well. Europe was the “underdeveloped nation” in global trade in the 1500s and 1600s, exporting raw materials, mainly bullion, to India in exchange for cotton cloth, which India produced in the greatest volume and quality for trade of any country in the world,^[373] and to China for silk, cotton and ceramics. Indian cotton was also used in huge volumes by Europeans to purchase slaves in Africa, who were sent to the New World to harvest sugar and work in the mines. European nations had a few fine manufactured specialties to export, such as heavy wool textiles, muskets and cannon, furs and glass (especially Venetian production). Yet, until the early 1800s, India and China led the world in manufactured exports, and European countries financed their trade deficits with Asia mainly by exports of bullion.

Although the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals rapidly deployed muskets and artillery in their armies, in contrast to Europeans, they did not do the same at sea. Whereas most European countries were modest in size, so their rulers were eager to gain and protect trade to augment their state's revenues, this was not the case to the East. European merchant ships hauled precious cargoes of bullion, gems and spices across the Atlantic or from Asia all the way around Africa. They needed to defend these precious cargoes against pirates, and to protect their ports and sources of wealth against other nations' privateers, hence their development of heavily armed vessels. Because of the costs and risks involved, Europeans' oceanic trade was usually carried out by state-sponsored expeditions (as with the Spanish and Portuguese), or by state- chartered corporations (such as the English and Dutch East India Com­panies), which could handle the required investments. The Ottomans, Safa- vids and Mughals, with their huge and rich land empires, instead relied mainly on tax revenues from their own territories to support their states' operations. Their rulers valued trade mainly as a way of bringing in locally scarce but necessary materials (especially silver), but let private merchants manage maritime trade, rather than invest in it themselves.

Asians were certainly capable of building large ocean-going vessels: Chinese ships had enjoyed features such as multiple water-tight compartments and stern-post rudders from the beginning of the first millennium that Europeans would not adopt until centuries later. In the 1600s, the Mughals built large ships to take tribute to the Holy City of Mecca, some armed with dozens of cannon and crews of several hundred. In the early fifteenth century, the Chinese built fleets of huge “treasure ships” much larger than anything produced by Europeans, which sailed all the way from China to the east coast of Africa. Yet, these voyages were commercial failures and hence discon­tinued; unlike Spanish expeditions to the New World that found rich stores of gold and silver to plunder and lands to colonize, the Chinese found mainly densely settled lands with few resources they did not already produce them­selves, or which Arab and Indian merchants had not already eagerly brought to China at their own expense. Facing no major threats from the sea, and focused on the challenge of controlling the steppe frontier, later Ming emperors dismantled the oceanic fleet and ceased to invest in long-distance voyages.

From the late fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, Asian empires developed their own counterpart to the Atlantic trading system, but along very different lines. Taking advantage of the prevailing monsoon winds, which produced steady but seasonal support for sailing, merchants developed a rough division of labor among themselves guided by nature.^[374] In the Far Eastern seas, Chinese merchant junks dominated trade with Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, mainly bringing Japanese silver and copper to China in exchange for cotton and silk; the junks would go as far as the Malacca Straits, where Malacca served as an entrepot for goods in transit from the Bay of Bengal to the South China Sea. In the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, Indian merchants would take over the coastal trade, moving goods between the Malay/Indonesia region and the east and west coasts of India. India's coasts would market goods produced inland, from pepper and dyes to its most famed products—finely woven and exquisitely dyed cottons. Other spices, medicinal herbs and manufactured goods would come from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Then between India's west coast and the Middle East and East Africa, Arab and Muslim merchants would take over, moving slaves, ivory and gold from Africa, and coffee and carpets from the Middle East, to India in exchange for South and East Asian products. Cambay and Surat, in Gujarat on the Indian coast, became the primary entrepots for this trade, their merchants amassing fortunes of millions of silver rupees. Further west, the port of Aden was a flourishing gateway for Asian goods to reach the Middle East, from which they would flow to the Ottoman lands and thence via the Mediterranean to Europe. This natural division meant that states did not engage in naval struggles to control particular routes. Rather, with a population several times larger than that of Europe, and a much more diverse range of ecologies, climates and products to trade, the merchants of the Indian Ocean/China Seas maritime routes prospered through volume and diversification.^[375]

By the early 1600s, the entire globe was girdled by trade flows, mostly oceanic and riverine, but also across the Mediterranean and the Sahara and Persian caravan routes, moving wool, silk and cotton textiles; ceramics (Ming porcelain was especially prized in Europe and the Middle East); sugar, spices, coffee, tea, glassware, metal goods, wood (ranging from tropical woods to whole trees for ships' masts), dried fish, ivory, gems, pearls, horses, camels, elephants, slaves, gold, silver, tobacco, saltpetre, guns, and a host of processed foods, dyes and other manufactured goods. For overseas and trans-continental trade, cargoes with a high value-to-weight ratio were essential, such as spices, sugar, ivory, gems and textiles, as well as precious metals. But for internal river and coastal trade, even bulk goods—grains, coal, fertilizers—would travel long distances.

Warmer weather, increased trade, new foodstuffs and relative peace naturally led to rapid overall population growth and urbanization. From 1500 to 1650, the population in most European and Asian societies at least doubled; and cities such as London, Beijing, Edo, Istanbul and Delhi, as well as thousands of smaller towns, grew even faster. The urban expansion and commercial growth fuelled the rise of commercial groups—bankers, mer­chants, ship-builders and manufacturers, and the lawyers, notaries and insurers who served them, but also commercial farmers producing crops for sale. State expansion also meant a growth in the ranks of officials, as well as the printers and booksellers, proprietors of shops and cafes, and artisans who served the burgeoning commercial and official classes. This was as true in China, India and Anatolia as in Europe and the New World.

Not every place flourished. Africa was increasingly torn by fighting—not only with Europeans and Arabs seeking slaves, but with Africans fighting each other to be the groups offering slaves for sale rather than being the enslaved. The natives of North and South America were nearly completely destroyed by the diseases and disregard of their lives brought by European conquerors and colonists. Still, across Eurasia, compared to 1400, by 1600 the world had become a much more populated, more urbanized, centrally ruled and administered place, with vastly expanded local, regional and inter­national trade fuelling the desire for goods and stimulating new ideas.

Yet, as so often in history, just when things seemed to be going well, it was all about to come crashing down.

The crisis of the seventeenth century: strain and recovery

The larger, more populous, more urban, more commercialized, more cen­tralized states that had been built up in the 1500s and 1600s were complex organizations, and diverse flows of people and resources had to be main­tained to keep them flourishing. Towns had to be supplied with food; taxes had to be collected to pay for much larger and better equipped armies and navies; peasants had to have sufficient land to feed their families and pay rents and taxes; and the economic, military and administrative elites had to be paid, kept loyal, and efficiently recruited and replaced. The rapidly expanding commercial and trading classes had to find their place in society alongside the privileged aristocratic and bureaucratic elites, and yet provided

with the money, credit and security to keep trade flourishing; and intellectual and religious elites had to continue to find reason to inspire the masses and lead the elites in support of the social order and the regime. In the course of the seventeenth century, many of these requirements ceased to be met; both material circuits of supply and social circuits of recruitment became over­loaded and states suffered increasingly severe financial and social strains. The result was a global crisis of political and religious authority that undermined states all across Eurasia.

The warmer interlude that had begun in 1500 faded by the 1590s, and the rigors of the Little Ice Age were felt again all across the world—freezing winters, torrential downpours and floods, disruptions of the monsoon rains, late springs and short summers.¹⁰ As prior generations of population growth pressed on harvests that no longer increased, prices for grains and basic foodstuffs rose everywhere; prices for fuel rose even faster. However, prices for other goods—including bullion, the wages of labor and manufactured goods—rose much more slowly. Population growth had reduced family landholdings and sent more workers to the cities; but as rents rose and real wages fell, both peasants and workers had less to spend on manufactured goods. Merchants and guild workers sought to increase output to compen­sate for declining relative prices, but found it hard to fight against lower demand, weaker prices for manufactured goods and rising costs of raw materials.

Whether in European kingdoms, the Ottoman Empire or China, landlords resisted the increasing demands of the state, seeking to keep as much revenue as possible in their own hands; yet, rulers faced rapidly expanding expenses from larger armies and administrations and the rising costs of basic foodstuffs. Some landlords were themselves in trouble, unable to keep their own incomes rising in pace with rising prices, but others were able to increase their wealth by buying up the lands of peasants or less fortunate elites, lending money to the state or profiting from the sale of commodities produced on their lands. Officials and aristocrats of older lineages also sought to fend off the social challenge from rising commercial and financial elites.

The difficulties of states in paying their militaries led to desertions, and deserters with guns usually became bandits. In China and the Ottoman Empire, banditry grew to such a scale that leaders emerged to head armies recruited from bandits and attack government forces. In China, one such

10 Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). bandit army reached Beijing, where defeat led the last Ming emperor to hang himself as his capital fell. In the Ottoman lands, the bandit leaders negotiated with the sultan to gain grants of land, titles and official positions, morphing into provincial governors and bureaucrats. The sultans also faced uprisings of their own infantry, angry over inflation and the declining value of their pay, sometimes leading to the deposition or even assassination of the sultan.

In Europe, fiscally weakened rulers were unable to keep the balance between the older aristocrats and newly created meritocratic officials, and between older landed and new commercial elites. They also faced urban or peasant uprisings and religious revolts. By the middle of the century, Britain was wracked by revolts in Scotland and Ireland and a civil war between different factions of the elite; France similarly was torn by elite factions and nobles who raised their own armies against the Crown; Spain faced uprisings in Portugal, Catalonia, southern Italy and Sicily; the German lands were devastated by the Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648); and in Russia the 1600s opened with one of the worst famines in its history and a decade of uprisings, invasions and civil wars that led to the replacement of the Rurik dynasty of tsars by the Romanovs.

Global trade continued, and a few areas that had staked their fortunes on trade, such as Holland, which was the leading center of international com­merce in the West, and the Mughal Empire, which was Asia's main exporter of cotton and pepper and importer of silver, continued to prosper. Both enjoyed “Golden Ages” of wealth and artistic achievement in the first three- quarters of the seventeenth century. India, situated more to the south than the rest of Eurasia, also seems to have been spared the worst effects of the Little Ice Age. But even in India, by the end of the century the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb found his resources exhausted by the Maratha wars and demands from his followers for state positions, and thus had to restructure his administration.

The theme of restructuring became common after the crises of the early and mid-seventeenth century. The major states were able to recover, and by making adjustments were able to resume the process of increasing their incomes and building their armies and administrations, emerging stronger than before. From 1650 to 1730, population growth stagnated almost every­where in Europe and Asia; but this was often a benefit to rulers. The breakneck pace of urbanization slowed; food supplies grew relative to population and prices stabilized or declined. Social mobility slowed as well, and rulers were able to restructure their tax systems and administrations without racing against constantly rising prices or rapidly expanding numbers of elites competing for positions.

In England, shortly after the civil war, the Stuart dynasty was restored to the throne, and under James II set about further centralizing royal control over the country and increasing its revenues. James became embroiled in a religious dispute with his own elites, who invited the Dutch leader William of Orange to enter England and challenge James; after James fled, Parliament offered William and his wife Mary the crown. Yet, despite this brief conflict, known as the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, over the next seventy-five years Britain's navy only grew stronger, its colonies more extensive, and its revenues and credit dramatically increased.

The French monarchy put down the mid-seventeenth century revolt known as the Fronde, and under Louis XVI created a massively powerful absolutist state that became the model for all European monarchs to emu­late. Louis XVI appointed new professional administrators to manage the provinces, and reduced the independence of aristocratic lords by forcing them to take up expensive positions in his court, much like the policy that Tokugawa shoguns used to similarly domesticate their regional lords. Spain lost control of Portugal, but reasserted its authority over its other territories and by exploiting new mines in Mexico continued to pump ever-larger volumes of bullion out of its American possessions. In Central and Eastern Europe, the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War, allowing Austria-Hungary, Poland and Russia to rebuild their finances and militaries so that they could focus on containing the Ottomans.

Although the Ottoman sultans in the early seventeenth century were certainly weakened by the crisis, with Sultan Ibrahim strangled in 1648 and women of the harem exercising influence over sultans who were often minors, in the second half of the seventeenth century the empire made a significant recovery. Under a series of strong Grand Veziers (chief ministers), the army and navy were strengthened and tax collections greatly increased by selling tax-farming rights to local notables. During this period, the Ottomans were self-sufficient in manufacturing a wide variety of firearms and cannon of quality equal to those of other European powers,^[376] and enjoyed a run of military victories, retaking Crete from Venice and expanding their territories in North Africa, Romania and southern Poland. Their fortunes were certainly mixed; although their armies pushed to the walls of Vienna in 1683, they were unable to take the city, as a relief force organized by Poland and the Habsburgs came upon them while much of their army was still engaged in siege operations, and the Ottomans' allies from the Crimean Khanate refused to fight. Nonetheless, the Ottomans remained formidable, fighting a see-saw war with the Habsburgs over the next thirty years in which the Ottomans retained most of their Balkan territories, and winning a major battle against Russia in 1710. While the period after 1650 was once described as a long Ottoman decline, this view is no longer tenable. From 1650 to 1870, during a period when Europeans were conquering the rest of the world, the Ottoman Empire kept control of almost all of its territories, continually refashioning itself to keep up its military and administrative effectiveness.

In China, as bandit armies were menacing Beijing, elite officials sought to prevent total disaster by inviting a neighboring ruler to come to their aid. To the north of China proper, in Manchuria, a series of ambitious Manchu rulers had been adopting some of the methods of Chinese statecraft to build a standing army and central administration in place of looser tribal structures. In 1618, the Manchus declared their own Qing dynasty and started to move south against the Ming. A few decades later, Ming generals asked the Qing to send their armies to help them repel the bandit forces. In 1644, after Qing forces had destroyed the bandit army threatening the capital, the Qing declared themselves the successor of the Ming as rulers of China.

The Qing rulers had to fight for decades to subdue all of China, and in the process had to restructure the state to strengthen their authority. Although they adopted the Confucian system of civil administration by officials recruited through competitive examinations, they developed a distinctive banner system to organize the military. They also passed legislation to force large landowners to pay their taxes, and to restore land to the peasantry, because in the late Ming landlords in the fertile Yangzi regions had often forced thousands of poor peasants into virtual bondage on their estates. After subduing the whole of China, the Qing also pushed deeply into Central Asia, defeating the remaining Mongol chiefdoms and firming up their authority over Tibet.

Not all states emerged stronger; the Safavids entered a terminal decline after 1666, and were destroyed by Afghan forces in 1722. The island states of Southeast Asia fell to the Dutch; and the remnants of Mongol Hordes were suppressed by Russia and China. Nonetheless, the world map of 1700, like that of 1600, was dominated by large empires: the Spanish, Portuguese, English and French in the Americas; the Ottomans in North Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East; the Safavids hanging on in Central Asia; the Mughals dominating India; and Russia and China controlling northern and eastern Asia (see Map 18.1). There were new ruling dynasties in Britain and in China, and all states had worked to reverse the growing threat from over­powerful local lords and to improve their revenues and militaries. But in the aftermath of the crisis of the seventeenth century, restructuring and recovery had prevailed.

Cultural retrenchment

So far, we have spoken of states mainly in terms of their material and organizational basis—raising taxes, recruiting and training administrative elites, deploying military forces, managing trade and administering territor­ies. Yet, no states were able to maintain elite loyalty and keep order over vast and diverse territories simply by force of arms. States also relied on carefully supported ideologies and religious beliefs to maintain support, and on intellectual and religious elites to promulgate them. Of course, every society also had its schisms, sects and heterodox beliefs that challenged the prevailing order; but rulers worked diligently to keep these within bounds and to maintain an ideological framework that supported their power.

As religious faith was a major source of legitimacy everywhere, reactions to the economic and political disorders of the seventeenth century frequently took the form of religious critiques.

In China in the early 1600s, scholars associated with private academies were sharply critical of the regime. Some claimed that the regime had lost the “mandate of heaven” by abandoning proper Confucian conduct of governance. Others, inspired by the early-sixteenth-century official and scholar Wang Yangming, argued for a more innovative and practical approach to current problems, rather than relying entirely on the Confucian classics. In the mid-century, as disorder increased, in parts of China the peasants who had been reduced to serf-like bondage on large estates rebelled and “sharpened their hoes into swords and took to themselves the title of ‘Levelling Kings,' declaring that they were levelling the distinction between masters and serfs, titled and mean, rich and poor. The tenants... would... say ‘We are all of us equally men. What right had you to call us serfs?'”¹²

¹² Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford University Press, 1973).

Downloaded from https:Zwww.cambridge.org/core. University of Sussex Library, on 10 Jan 2017 at 23:23:25, subject to the Cambridge C of use, available at https:Zwww.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CB09781139194594.019

18.i The world in 1700

In the Ottoman Empire, the bandit rebellions of the early seventeenth century were accompanied by the rise of the deeply conservative Kadizadeli religious movement, advocating a return to pure Sunni Islam, the destruction of heterodox groups and the submission of non-Muslims. Kadizadeli preachers gained a following in the main cities of the empire, and among officials as well.

This fundamentalism was not dissimilar from that of two movements in Europe, which began in the late sixteenth century and came to power in the seventeenth: the Puritans in England and the Jesuits in the Catholic Church. The Puritans attacked the Church of England for being too “popish” in its policies and practices, and wanted to “purify” it. Its opposite number in many ways was the Jesuit movement, “warriors for the Church” who sought to restore the influence of Rome and adherence to Catholic ritual and doctrine as defined by the Pope. Like China, Europe too had its “Levellers,” a group of religious dissenters in England who advocated equality and denied the authority of kings and noble lords. In the Islamic lands, Sufi orders also sometimes advocated a socially unsettling equality, saying the Qur'an promoted the equality of men and women in the eyes of God.

Throughout the seventeenth century, religious wars added to the general disorder: Confucian Ming Loyalists fought against the shamanist and Bud­dhist Manchus; Sunni rulers fought against followers of Shi'ism, and some­times against Sufis; Puritans fought against supporters of the Church of England; and all across Europe Protestants fought against Catholics in conflicts that were international, civil and sometimes both. Thus, one of the imperatives for rulers in the latter half of the seventeenth century was a cultural retrenchment to re-establish their legitimacy and the loyalty of their officials and subjects.

Having no deep understanding of climate change, demography or modern economics, seventeenth-century intellectuals usually blamed rulers' toler­ance of diversity, syncretism and deviations from orthodoxy as having been responsible for the disorders of the age. (In Western Europe, religious and political authorities sometimes even blamed witches for catastrophic weather events.) Thus, cultural retrenchment took the path of tightening up enforce­ment of orthodox beliefs, often accompanied by a strengthening of religious establishments and the suppression of dissent. As the best-established and most legitimate sources of ideology were the classic texts at the core of each civilization's belief system, the orthodoxies that were enforced were gener­ally based on the Bible, the Qur'an and the Confucian classics.

In Europe, the Thirty Years War ended with an agreement that rulers could determine religious practice in the boundaries of their states, and that other rulers should recognize and respect their sovereignty in this regard. The Austrian Habsburgs joined the Spanish in making Roman Catholicism the official religion in their realms; the Scandinavians opted for Lutheran church establishments, and even the Dutch Reformed Church sought to exclude other faiths. In France, Louis XIV decided to enforce Catholicism in his kingdom, forcing French Protestants to flee to Britain, the Netherlands and Prussia, where Protestant rulers took them in.

A few smaller kingdoms—Britain, Prussia, Denmark—which did not have such large populations that they could enjoy the luxury of expelling portions of their population for religious reasons, remained islands of relative plural­ism and limited toleration. But most of Europe settled into state-enforced orthodoxy within national borders. The most striking change was in Poland, where the Jesuits had their greatest success. The pluralism that had been maintained in the sixteenth century ended, and by the close of the seven­teenth century Poland's Christian population was converted almost entirely to Roman Catholicism, and its Jewish population—the largest and most culturally important in Europe—was the target of riots and violence.

In both the Ottoman and Mughal Empires, the relative tolerance of diverse groups that prevailed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave way to a more rigid enforcement of Sunni orthodoxy. Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648 to 1687) embraced the Kadizadeli fundamentalists, and “the renewed project of Islamization... was touted as a solution to enhance the somewhat battered legitimacy of the Ottoman state.”¹³ Christians, Jews and Sufis all came under harsh and unprecedented attacks. Although attacks on minorities faded after 1700, the Sunni preachers (‘ulema) grew in strength, and in the eighteenth century conservative readings of religious texts formed the basis for an increasingly orthodox Sunni identity of the empire.

In the Mughal Empire, a tightening of Sunni orthodoxy also occurred, similar to but not as severe as that in the Ottoman lands. Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1656 to 1707), facing rebellions from the Marathas and the Sikhs, restored discriminatory taxation on Hindus and ordered the destruction of Hindu and Sikh temples that were associated with rebellions. Aurangzeb gave greater authority to the ‘ulema to enforce Islamic law, and encouraged non-Muslims to convert. Aurangzeb was personally devout, but did not encourage or

¹³ Barkey, Empire of Difference, p. 188. undertake attacks against non-Sunni subjects, as occurred in the Ottoman lands. Nor did he exclude non-Muslims from his state administration, as did the Ottomans, and indeed most European monarchs who rarely appointed officials who were not adherents of the state religion. Nonetheless, Aurang- zeb’s policies encouraged a closer identification of the empire with adherence to orthodox Sunni beliefs.

The Safavid Empire employed the most extreme religious policy of any of the gunpowder empires. Having determined to build a distinctive Iranian, Shi' a identity for their empire, the Safavids forced the conversion of all Muslims in their territory to Shi’ism. Much as Spain had given its non­Catholic population the choice of conversion, exile or death in 1492 to 1526, the Safavids forced all of its Muslim population to convert to Shi’ism or die. When the empire expanded to Iraq and Azerbaijan, these areas were enjoined to adopt Shi’ism as well.

In China, the conquering Manchus decided that the best way to legitimate themselves with the Chinese elite was to become even more Confucian than their predecessors. Scholars and officials were co-opted by prodigious sup­port for efforts to study, purify and reconstitute the original meaning of the classical sacred Confucian texts, using a new scientific philology based on historical studies. The Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736 to 1795) sponsored an enormous project to collect corrected editions of all the classic texts of China’s Confucian tradition, in the “Complete Imperial Library in the Four Branches of Literature.” This project employed hundreds of scholars for nearly a quarter century and the final product, published in almost 80,000 volumes, was reproduced for distribution in all the major centres of the empire. However, the process was combined with harsh censorship; any books critical of the Manchus or deemed as too heterodox were banned and destroyed.

Thus, by 1700, in addition to the world being dominated by major empires— European states with their Atlantic possessions, the Islamic gunpowder empires, Russia and China—intellectual life within those empires was increasingly dominated by a focus on restoring allegiance to orthodox beliefs founded on their core classical texts. Science and scholarship continued at high levels, as long as they did not come into conflict with those core texts; and military, agricultural and manufacturing technology continued to move forward. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, global trade rebounded, as the Atlantic exchange in slaves, sugar, tobacco, bullion and other items surged to new levels, and Asian output of cotton and silk, tea and coffee, and spices and ceramics boomed.

In 1500, the population of Asia was approximately three times that of Europe; by 1700, it was three and a half times as large. Real wages of urban workers in Beijing and Constantinople were virtually the same as those in Paris or Florence. There was nothing obvious to indicate that in a century and a half, Europeans would humiliate China and take over India; detach the Balkans from Ottoman control; and become considerably richer per head than Asians, while (with the exception of Russia) living in constitutionally limited national states. Certainly, Europeans had secured some small foot­holds on the coasts of East Asia and conquered a few Pacific islands; but as of 1700, after two centuries of activity in the Indian Ocean, they had not penetrated beyond the coasts of Africa or Asia, and had to follow the dictates of the Mughal, Chinese and Japanese rulers who regulated their activities.

In 1689, when representatives of the British East India Company refused to negotiate with the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, a Mughal fleet attacked the company's trading post at Bombay. After a year of resistance, the EIC surrendered, and in 1690 the company sent envoys to Aurangzeb's camp to plead for a pardon. The company's envoys had to prostrate themselves before the emperor, pay a large indemnity and promise better behavior in the future.

So what changed in the following 150 years?

The Western exception: falling out of love with ancient wisdom

Since the West first became aware of its sudden leap forward relative to the rest of world around 1850, scholars have sought to explain it. Naturally, they found the answer in some form of European superiority or early lead, such as a lead in weapons, or science, or productivity, or the virtues of Christianity, or Roman law, or the philosophy of the Ancient Greeks. The problem with this approach, however, is that if history proves anything, it is that an early lead in almost any kind of technology or skill means nothing in the long run.

Chinese and Indians had early leads in naval technology over Europeans, but it was the European fleets that eventually controlled the seas. Indian mathematicians and Arab scientists had a considerable lead over medieval European scholars with regard to advanced arithmetic, chemistry, optics and astronomy, so much so that almost all of modern and medieval European physics build directly on Arab commentaries and translations; yet, it was Europeans who first moved on to develop calculus, natural logarithms, laws of motion and the periodic table. India had a huge lead over Europe in cotton textile production, with regard to both productivity and quality of products. Yet, Britain came to dominate global cotton markets and industrialize pro­duction. China had roughly a 700-year lead over Britain in the production of cast iron and smelting with coke (coal) instead of charcoal; yet, it was Britain that developed coal and iron-based industry. Even within Europe, the seventeenth-century Dutch held the lead in shipping, energy production (from peat and windmills), fine textile production, agricultural productivity, finance, warehousing, artistic production and military drill; yet, by the eighteenth century, Holland's textile output collapsed, its military and naval strength deteriorated, and it was quickly overtaken by Britain as Europe's leading maritime and manufacturing power.

What we see time and time again is European nations, and especially Britain, vaulting from the back of the pack to take the lead in one field after another after 1700. Let me therefore suggest that what enabled Britain to take the global lead was not any early superiority or advantage, but rather benefits from relative backwardness. I would highlight three distinct forms of back­wardness that, quite accidentally, turned into remarkable resources for future gains.

First, compared to all major Asian civilizations, Europe was incredibly isolated after about 700 ad. China, India and the Middle East, even Persia and North Africa, were part of a vast Eurasian cosmopolis.1⁴ The spread of Islam created an Arabic-literate community that stretched from Spain across North­ern Africa into the Indian Ocean and as far as today's Malaysia; and through­out the Middle Ages that Islamic community was in constant trading contact with the other societies around the Indian Ocean and China Seas. By contrast, Europeans prior to 1500 were boxed in on every side, blocked by the Atlantic to the west, polar seas to the north, and the Mongols and Islamic empires to the east and south. Except for the rare merchant/traveller (such as Marco Polo, and even his stories were not widely believed), Europeans had little direct contact with any areas outside the Mediterranean or east of Jerusalem until the late 1400s.

Second, again compared to other civilizations, Europe had been exception­ally cut off from its own classical texts. After the final withdrawal of Byzantine power from Italy, much of the classical literature of Europe, in both Greek and Latin, was lost to Western Europe for centuries. It was only in the tenth century, when the Christian re-conquest of Spain got underway,

¹⁴ See Gommans, “Indian Ocean,” in this volume. that Europe gained access to large numbers of classical texts, albeit often in Arabic translations. Certainly, after 500 ad scholarship, science and math­ematics had continued within the Church, as scholars could draw on the surviving Latin translations by Boethius of Greek mathematical and philo­sophical texts, and manuscripts from monastic collections. Yet, many of the major works of Plato, Aristotle and others were not available until the eleventh century or later. The great atomist poem by Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, was only rediscovered in 1417. Nothing comparable, not even the Mongol invasions, created the same degree of loss and distance between medieval Chinese and their ancient classics, or Indians and their Sanskrit Vedas, or Muslims and Persian classical literature.

Third, the barbarian invasions had also left Western states administratively backwards compared to Asian empires. Ming China, the Ottomans and the Mughals had all inherited a centuries-old legacy of imperial statecraft and administration, in China from the Tang and Song dynasties, during which the examination system was initiated and developed, in the Islamic empires from Persia and the Baghdad caliphate, where the sultan/vezier model and admin­istrative slaves had developed. These practices were designed to enable rulers to control large empires, and provided an early achievement in absolutist and bureaucratic administration.

In Europe, medieval kings still ruled with institutions inherited from barbarian chiefs, rather than the advanced statecraft of Imperial Rome. The codices of Roman law, like other classical texts, were only recovered in the tenth century. Even once scholars began to study Roman administrative law, and develop it for European states, it did not entirely displace customary feudal practices. Significantly, European states retained councils of nobles as high appeals courts and advisors to the king. These took various forms, including the Parliament in Britain, parlements in France, cortes in Spain, and provincial and national estates in many kingdoms. All of these bodies had various rights to share in framing royal edicts, advising on fiscal and military matters, and preserved principles of representation and election in the political realm. They also upheld feudal principles that kings' rights over their vassals were limited by agreement and by law (the Magna Carta in England being an early and famous example of such agreements).

Of course, such interference from assemblies of hereditary notables would have been intolerable in the more sophisticated official bureaucratic adminis­trations of great empires—and European rulers, as soon as they became acquainted with Imperial Roman law, worked to replace these bodies with rule through appointed ministers and officials. Yet, Europeans had a late start, and as late as the seventeenth century, while some rulers had suc­ceeded in drastically weakening these troublesome bodies, many others had not.

The result of all these modes of relative backwardness was that Europe underwent an exceptional evolution over the centuries from 1400 to 1800, which led it where no other major civilization went: to a repudiation of its own classical heritage and a search for fundamentally new modes of knowledge-seeking and political administration.

In both China and the Islamic world, the Middle Ages were a glorious period of scholarship; but the result was to reinforce, rather than alter or repudiate, their classical texts. In China, these were the Confucian-era classics. In the twelfth century, Zhu Xi and other Song scholars assembled and codified the key texts of the Confucian tradition into the “Four Books and Five Classics” that became the basis for the imperial exam system, and served as the core legitimatizing texts of imperial rule throughout the Ming and Qing eras. It was a remarkable achievement, but represented a distilla­tion of ancient texts rather than a major departure or new synthesis.

In Islam, scholars had access to the libraries of Christian lands (in Greek and Latin) that they conquered from the Byzantines in the Middle East, Egypt and North Africa, together with the native speakers and scholars who lived there. The intersection of Islamic and Christian thought (which included Greek mathematical, medical, botanical and literary works, as well as philosophy) stimulated Arab mathematicians, astronomers, chemists and philosophers to do experiments, push the boundaries of Greek knowledge and develop their own advances.

The results were enormously impressive, but not revolutionary. Muslim scientists and astronomers improved on Ptolemy's astronomical models and made original advances in optics, mathematics, chemistry, medicine and calendrical accuracy. Yet, they never overturned the fundamental cosmology behind Ptolemy's and Aristotle's work: the belief that all things have a natural motion, and that for heavenly bodies that motion is circular. They also found the profusion of diverse Greek philosophical schools—Aristotel­ian, Platonic, atomist, Stoic, Sceptic—frustrating, and difficult to reconcile with the authority of the Qur'an. Eventually, one of Islam's most distin­guished scholars, al-Ghazali, wrote a damning critique of Greek philosophy, urging scholars to leave it aside and instead focus on the many strands of Islam's own shari‘a and Sufi traditions. Al-Ghazali was influential but not decisive, as other Arab scholars continued to study and comment on Aris­totle, most notably Averroes in Spain. Nonetheless, especially after the destruction of the Baghdad libraries by the Mongols, as in China, Islamic scholarship concentrated on empirical science, especially medicine, astron­omy and mathematics, and on studying works in the Persian and Islamic tradition rather than wrestling with the fundamental principles of Greek beliefs. Thus, Greek philosophy, despite its intense study, never became integral to Islamic cultural traditions or its legitimation of authority.

Both Islamic society and China thus emerged from their medieval period with a cosmopolitan world view and a strengthened set of classical texts that could be used to bolster state authority for centuries to come. Even when Europeans arrived in China, and even when they told of a new continent from which they brought silver to trade in Asia, nothing was particularly alarming about this news; the Chinese simply sought to add Europeans as one more foreign group subject to the tribute/trading relationships they had with other regions. Similarly, Islamic societies, having absorbed what they could from Western classical works, and having achieved substantial leads over medieval Europeans in calendrical calculations, navigation, chemistry and other areas, could be fairly complacent about the entry of Europeans into the global circuits of trade. Still expanding their own empires into Europe at the time, they saw no reason to doubt the superiority of their political and intellectual heritage.

By contrast, in Europe, medieval scholars were introduced to their own classical literature in a process of rapid discovery of the unknown. As Europeans pushed into Muslim Spain, and gained direct contact with the Byzantines through the Crusades, they brought back manuscripts of classical texts that had not been seen in the West for centuries. From Spain, many of these texts came with expert commentaries by Islamic scholars that further helped spur interest. The recovery and study of Roman law began in Bologna, whose law school developed into the West's first university. Soon, Oxford and Paris and a dozen other centers had communities of scholars poring over the newly recovered classical texts.

Yet, by now, Western Europe had been a thoroughly Christian society for almost a thousand years, and the clear imperative for scholars was to somehow reconcile the flood of new texts from classical authorities with Biblical revelation and Christian doctrine. This task was undertaken by generations of scholars, culminating in the masterwork of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologica, in the late thirteenth century.

Medieval scholars were by no means slavish with regard to the Greek classics, picking up where Arab scholars had left off in making marked improvements in such areas as the study of motion and optics, and using observational evidence as well as logic to arrive at an accurate understanding of nature. Still, the ideas gained from the classics had great prestige as ancient and globally recognized wisdom, while at the same time their novelty to medieval scholars was thrilling. Weaving together classical wisdom and Christian doctrine in ways that were complementary and mutually support­ive created a powerful new intellectual edifice.

The Renaissance led to further recoveries of classical knowledge, espe­cially regarding sculpture and architectural technique, philology (recovery of the grammar, syntax and style of classical languages), law and statecraft. By 1500, Europe's Renaissance monarchs, like their Mughal, Safavid, Ottoman and Chinese counterparts, had finally begun to gain access to a classical corpus that would provide elegantly schooled bureaucratic administrators, a supportive legal code, and sophisticated religious and philosophical grounds for their absolute authority.

However, just as this seemed to be coming together in Europe, a bewil­dering set of observations started to tear this new synthesis apart. University curricula which had come to depend on Greek masters such as Ptolemy for geography and astronomy, Aristotle for cosmology and Galen for medicine were soon shown to be inaccurate or incomplete.

This process began with the voyages of discovery. Seeking to break out of their isolated position and enter directly into the Indian Ocean trade circuits, Portuguese and then Spanish expeditions sailed into the Atlantic. First exploring the coast of Africa, then reaching the New World and finally circumnavigating the globe, Europeans came into direct contact with a bewildering variety of peoples, cultures, plants, animals and even continents.

The last was the most perplexing. Once it was clear, by around 1530, that the New World was neither the fabled East Indies (India, Indonesia, China), nor the fabulous lost island of Atlantis, but a previously unknown continent stretching almost from pole to pole, it was unavoidable to recognize that Ptolemy's authoritative geography had been wholly unaware of it. This was the first crack in the authority of ancient texts.

The discovery of new plants and animals unknown to ancient botany and zoology was a similar blow. In 1543, the anatomical research of Vesalius, supported by exquisitely detailed illustrations, showed that Galen had also made fundamental errors. The sixteenth century saw a mania develop in Europe for collections and observations of natural phenomena, as more and more novelties were reported. In 1572 and 1604, supernovae appeared in the skies above Europe. While Chinese and Arab astronomers had recorded the appearance of such “guest stars” for centuries, these too were something new for Europeans. Moreover, they were radically unexpected, as the cosmology of Aristotle had stated that the heavens were perfect and unchanging. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler published studies of these new stars, and Brahe also published an analysis of the trajectory of the comet of 1577; this showed that the comet's path was well above the orbit of the moon and would have smashed through the crystalline spheres that Aristotle claimed carried the heavenly bodies around the Earth.

Even the very centrality and immobility of the Earth—precepts fundamen­tal to Biblical cosmology as interpreted by the Church and supported by Aristotle—came under challenge. As early as 1543, Copernicus had offered a mathematical system to plot planetary orbits with the Earth and all other planets revolving around the sun. This could be accepted or viewed with scepticism as simply a powerful hypothesis. But spurred on by the new observations of Kepler and Brahe and the desire for more, a number of Europeans began to combine multiple lenses—which had been produced for eyeglasses since the thirteenth century—to build telescopes to better observe the heavens. In 1608 and 1609, Thomas Harriott in England and Galileo in Italy recorded their telescopic observations of the moon, which when mag­nified had features very much like the Earth—another assault on the radical classical distinction between “perfect” heavenly bodies and Earth. Observa­tions of sunspots amplified this point further. Also in 1609, Johannes Kepler showed that the orbital path of Mars, which had always troubled astron­omers, was troubling because it was a perfect ellipse, not a circle as Ptolemy and Aristotle had insisted.

The following year, Galileo went on to use the telescope to record moon­like phases of Venus, proving that it indeed revolved around the sun, and to identify additional bodies rotating around Jupiter, thus providing empirical proof that Earth was not the centre of all heavenly motions. Galileo began teaching that Copernicus's system of a moving Earth and sun-centered solar system was physically correct; but this was too much for the Catholic Church, which urged him to refrain from teaching this as doctrine, and proscribed heliocentric views.

The accumulation of so much powerful and novel evidence that contra­dicted the teachings of ancient scholars led philosophers such as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes to argue that a whole new approach to understanding nature was required. For Bacon, that approach had to be based on the further accumulation and collation of empirical observations; for Descartes it had to be based on a reformulation of philosophy that discarded all prior approaches and began fresh from mathematical and logical reasoning. By the late 1500s, many Europeans were increasingly looking at all of nature—from bodies to continents to the heavens—as a set of mechanisms that needed to be carefully examined, deconstructed and explained.

In fact, Bacon, Descartes and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers were in many ways taking up where medieval scholars had left off, restating and building on many of the latter's advances and critiques of ancient texts. But the new empirical findings forced them to go further, questioning the value and accuracy of classical understandings of nature in their entirety. In the context of the 1600s, these steps were revolutionary. European rulers had been working to reinforce the legitimacy of growing royal power with the authority of scripture and classical learning in one neat, well-integrated package. To claim that ancient texts were full of fundamental errors and could not be trusted was a threat to this package. Moreover, this threat arose at the same time that Protestantism, on wholly different grounds of critiquing the Church for selfishness, corruption and sinful behaviour, had also urged the denial of papal authority and raised the flag of rebellion against Catholic rulers. Other civilizations at this time also had to deal with rebellions and heterodoxy, but only in Europe were these combined with a continent-wide research program whose results were providing empirical proofs of the falsity of revered classical texts.

The disorders of the seventeenth century, including the plague, forced a young Isaac Newton to leave Cambridge, but from the 1600s onwards progress continued in many fields. In 1614, John Napier published the first extensive tables of logarithms, while in 1628, William Harvey demonstrated that blood circulated continuously in the body, not just through in-and-out pulses as specified by Galen. In 1638, Galileo published his work on relative motion, which—in another repudiation of Aristotle—showed that projectiles travel in parabolic trajectories. This not only was a profound finding; it also improved mathematical approaches to gunnery, with practical consequences for the more accurate aiming and firing of artillery.

Also in the early seventeenth century, Dutch and Swedish military innov­ators developed and perfected military drill, breaking down the movements of musket-loading and firing to a series of discrete and repeatable steps that musketeers could be trained to follow with precise coordination. Such drill greatly increased the effectiveness of armed infantry. Still, the matchlock firing mechanism of muskets remained clumsy and slow; but when the safer and faster flintlock firing mechanism was invented and widely adopted after 1700, and combined with the precision of European drill, infantry volleys became far more deadly and gave European arms a considerable advantage in the field over armies with less proficient drill and older muskets. This combination proved particularly effective for the British when fighting in India in the eighteenth century.

To return to advances in the pure sciences, in the 1640s, Blaise Pascal and Evangelista Torricelli had developed the barometer and used it to prove the existence of atmospheric pressure. Pascal also wrote on the vacuum, refuting Aristotle's belief that vacuums could not exist in nature, while also developing the first calculating machines and advancing prob­ability theory. Elsewhere in Europe, by the 1660s, Otto von Guericke and Robert Boyle were doing experiments with vacuums, while Anton Van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke were making new discoveries with microscopes. Leibniz and Newton were at work on the invention of the calculus, which enabled them to overcome the limits of classical approaches to the study of motion.

These seventeenth-century advances were crowned by Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, published in 1687. In that volume, Newton presented a comprehensive theory of motion under the force of gravity, explaining phenomena as varied as the shape of the spinning Earth, the speed and shape of planetary orbits, the movements of falling bodies and projections, and the patterns of the tides. Although Newton had to assume a mysterious gravitational force that acted across space without direct contact between bodies, in Newton's mechanics the motions of all bodies in the universe seemed to be precisely explained without recourse to miracles or a privileged position for the Earth. To some, the absence of divine intervention and the mysterious nature of gravity were distressing. But to others, Newton's universe was a beautiful mechanism that operated regularly and indefinitely according to precise rules, like exquisite clockwork.

I mention all of these items (and I could cite many more) to illustrate how, in the century and a half following 1500, Europe experienced a veritable explosion of scientific discovery and practical invention, spurred on at first by the flood of new and unexpected information that flowed from the voyages of discovery, and then by investigations with new scientific instruments (telescopes, microscopes, barometers) which rapidly unmoored European thought from its classical foundations. Eventually, these advances would lead European technology to become the most productive in the world. But long before steam engines and railways would reshape Europe's economy, these profound changes in thinking would impact the shape of European states.

The Enlightenment and the model of the modern state

In the late seventeenth century, all major states were restructuring in the wake of the seventeenth-century crisis. The usual pattern, as we have seen, was to further strengthen state authority by resting even more heavily on orthodox readings of classical texts.

European states initially followed the same approach. Catholic and Prot­estant states alike sought to suppress some of the new scientific findings and philosophical approaches of the seventeenth century. Catholic states sought to suppress the Newtonian view of the solar system; the Jesuits instead promoted an alternative developed by Tycho Brahe that retained the central­ity and stationary nature of the Earth, with the sun moving around the Earth and carrying all the other planets with it. Even in Protestant Holland, Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht in 1643, and by the early eighteenth century Newtonian science was rarely taught there. James II of England sought to place Catholics in key posts in the major universities, which he thought were producing dangerous ideas, although his efforts were resisted by Newton and Protestant elites. Elsewhere in Europe, the mathematical sciences, including the study of projectile motion, hydraul­ics and probability, continued and were too useful to suppress. But physical theories that conflicted with the teachings of the Church were resisted wherever possible.

Yet, it was not possible to suppress all the consequences of this intellectual shift. At the same time that philosophers of nature were envisioning new sciences, philosophers of society were taking a similar approach. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke started reasoning from first principles, using logic to identify what they felt were natural laws to guide the formation and operation of state authority. In Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690), he first uses logic to demolish the idea that Biblical texts provide support for a divine right of kings; then goes on to argue that civil society exists only to protect the security and property of citizens, so that if a ruler acts arbitrarily to threaten such security and property, the citizens have an obligation to rise against that ruler's authority. Locke knew that these views were dangerous, and he published the Treatises anonymously. They were so extreme that they were hardly cited in the next half century, becoming widely acclaimed only after 1760. Yet, they are important for indicating where pure reason, applied to political thought, could lead.

The eighteenth century saw further efforts to treat the science of govern­ment in the same fashion as the science of nature: to reason critically, eschew models based on tradition or sacred texts, and try to develop models based on natural principles and mechanisms of balancing forces.

After the disorders of the seventeenth century, thinkers focused their efforts on developing a science of liberty, trying to discern how best to structure a government to protect the security of its people.

In this, Europeans started from a very different place from Asian societies. In Islamic societies and China, it was of course expected that for peasants to farm and merchants to trade they needed to be secure in their persons and property. It was thus up to the state to protect the weak from the strong and to enforce justice by passing and administering laws according to Qur'anic or Confucian principles which embodied justice. But the authority of the state was embodied in that of the sultan or emperor. It was their responsibility to provide justice for their subjects by creating appropriate laws and ensuring their fair enforcement. Advisors, officials and judges aided them, interpreting classical and sacred texts and developing laws, but the authority of sultans and emperors was in theory unassailable and unlimited.

Europe, however, had a variety of traditions that pointed to a different understanding of the relationship between authority and justice. The medi­eval institutions of vassalage, parliaments and estates were based on the idea that kings ruled in partnership with their chief and noblest subjects, had reciprocal obligations to them that must be honoured, and that passing laws and collecting taxes could only be undertaken with those subjects' consent. Medieval philosophers spoke of the virtues of “mixed” government which included kings and their parliaments, and William of Occam and Nicholas of Cusa wrote that people could not be expected to obey the commands of kings if those commands were contrary to justice.

There were also republican traditions, which originated in the Greek city­states and the Roman Republic, handed down in the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, Herodotus and other classical writers, and revived in the experience of medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states, which developed the ideas of citizenship, democracy and republican rule. According to these traditions, free adult males were citizens who had a right to choose their leaders, and those leaders' authority was temporary, bestowed and bound by the laws of the republic and checked by the actions of citizen assemblies. Classical Greek thought had distinguished between rulers who obeyed the laws and tyrants who did not. Whereas in Asian polities, the power of laws came from the power of the ruler, and were unchecked by anything except regard for the ideas of justice and morality as presented in classical texts, in the republican tradition the power of the ruler came from the laws, and popular assemblies acted to ensure that the ruler acted according to law.

By the seventeenth century, most European rulers had leaned on different traditions, drawing on the divine right of kings, ideas of the “Great Chain of Being” that handed authority directly from God to kings to watch over their people like shepherds over their flocks, and elements of later Roman law, all of which reinforced their absolute authority. They sought to get around parliaments and estates as much as possible, not calling them to meet or appointing officials that took over their responsibilities, and seeking revenue sources not dependent on parliamentary grants. They sought to gain control of judges, using special courts to enforce royal decrees. (In Russia, which drew more on Byzantine traditions, the idea of limits on the ruler's authority were much weaker or absent.) By this time, many of the Italian city-states that had once functioned as republics had been swallowed up by dukes and converted to monarchies; those that remained were regarded as minor exceptions with institutions not suitable for great territorial states.

Yet, when European states were weakened by the crisis of the seventeenth century, the focus of elite opposition was often through the remaining parliaments, and the elites' battle cry in resisting the demands of states for more resources was not just one of injustice, but claims that the liberties of the people were being infringed by tyrannical rulers. Indeed, through the entire period from 1500 to 1650, when states around the world were extending their bureaucracy, authority and resources, resistance in Europe had taken the form of a revival of republican thought.¹⁵ Europe's medieval parliamentary institutions, and its republican intellectual traditions, were reinforced by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discoveries and inven­tions, in which the power of reason was overcoming claims of both ancient and divine authority.

It was an odd mixture, to be sure—scepticism about divine rights based on scientific refutation of scripture and ancient texts, medieval institutions of mixed rule, and long-unused notions of democracy, republicanism and citizenship. Moreover, in the seventeenth century, European rulers for the most part succeeded in overcoming challenges, restoring their authority, and even further reducing the power of nobles, estates and parliaments and

1 ⁵ J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975). expanding the Crown's bureaucracy and resources. Yet, it proved a potent, even explosive, mixture in the following century.

Philosophical works on government written in the eighteenth century, a period commonly known as the Enlightenment, are quite diverse. They include the work of Montesquieu, whose Spirit of the Laws (1748) argued for the separation of political powers among an executive, legislature and judiciary. They also include the Scottish political economy school, including Adam Smith, who sought a science of trade and wealth. Other major authors include Voltaire, who attacked the authority of the Catholic Church and was a passionate advocate of Newtonian science, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who attacked all the traditional inequalities of the social order. What they all had in common, however, was an effort to develop an ideal of political organiza­tion based on reason, rather than religious belief or traditions, which would be effective in protecting the security and property of people from arbitrary and oppressive actions by the state.

There is an extensive debate on whether these works had any real impact on political change—certainly, most people were more moved by scurrilous tales of royal debauchery or direct threats to their livelihood than abstract philosophical arguments. Yet, there is no doubt that Montesquieu and Locke had a crucial impact on the framers of the American Constitution, whose design for a new kind of republic was one of the most important steps in developing the modern state.

Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws combined medieval ideas about mixed forms of government with republican goals of averting tyrannical rule. He argued that a government having separate executive, legislative and judicial bodies, each exercising their own power, was the best way to check unjust authority and ensure that people retained their liberty through the protection of the laws.

Montesquieu's theory drew on the practice of Britain, where, exception­ally in Europe, a strong and active Parliament had taken the lead in both 1640 and 1689 in resisting kings whose religious and fiscal policies were seen as oppressing British liberties. The survival of a strong Parliament in England was not inevitable. For much of the sixty years preceding 1689, British rulers had tried to get by without Parliaments, to subordinate them or to pack them with supporters to reduce their independence. It was only the fact that England's Catholic King James II had so deeply lost the trust of Protestant leaders that they conspired to replace him with a Protestant king, and that an Act of Parliament was the necessary vehicle to do this, which resulted in the preservation of Parliament's power in Britain, and elevated that body to a role unmatched by any other representative body in Europe. Britain's revolution of 1688 was thus a pivotal event in the European and global history of state-making, giving substance to traditions of limited royal authority and mixed government that were fading or absent elsewhere.¹⁶

Montesquieu is frequently cited in the Federalist Papers, the publication in which the chief drafters of the US Constitution describe and defend their work. Even more telling is that the Federalist on a dozen occasions refers to the “science” of government or politics. Federalist 31 compares the principles of the science of government to those of mathematics, noting that while the latter posits “THE INFINITE DIVISIBILITY of matter... even to the minutest atom,” a principle that is widely accepted even if difficult to grasp, the “principles of moral and political knowledge” should be given similar acceptance. At another point, Federalist 9 describes the problem of creating a republican form of government in a large territory as “ENLARGEMENT of the ORBIT within which such systems are to revolve.”¹⁷ Such language borrowed from Newtonian science is not merely coincidence: Thomas Jefferson once identified Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton as “the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception.”¹⁸

It was not inevitable that the British colonies would seek to detach themselves from the British state. But it was almost inevitable that when they decided to do so, they would justify their actions in terms of recent works on the science of politics and society that, echoing the works of the scientific revolution, analyzed the authority of kings and the rights of men in terms of natural principles and analytical reasoning, and would find it easy to dismiss claims of divine royal authority.

The Declaration of Independence opens with a statement that “the Laws of Nature” entitle the colonies to claim an equal status to other countries, and recounts the acts of tyranny that King George III had committed against them. The Declaration, the FederalistPapers and the Constitution all provide the basis for a large territory to govern itself as a republic, with elected and separate branches of government, a limited executive and laws according to reason.

Yet, these documents are also redolent of the particular history and position of the colonies and of Great Britain. It was only with the more

1 ⁶ Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

1 ⁷ Emphasis in the original in both instances.

1 ⁸ For a fuller exposition of the argument that advances in scientific thought were essential to American political development, see Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature (New York: Harper, 2011). radical statement of Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) that the hereditary claims of all kings and nobles to power and position are condemned as contrary to reason. Nonetheless, the world viewed the American Revolution as an exceptional event, perhaps a natural experiment, to see if such a thing— a large diverse territory without a king, without a national religion and dominated by an elected legislature—was possible.

What followed were greater changes than anyone could have imagined. The very same year that the United States passed its Constitution, in 1787, a council of French notables was meeting to consider changes to the French monarchy's system of taxation. Having run up large debts in its European wars (including, ironically, fighting against Britain to aid the American colonies to achieve their independence), the French monarchy found it necessary to increase state revenues. However, direct taxation of the peas­antry had reached its limits, as population growth, which had resumed in 1730, and rising rents had reduced the land and resources remaining in peasant hands. The richest sectors of late eighteenth-century French society were the commercial, urban, landowning and office-holding classes, who had historically enjoyed a variety of protections and privileges as regards taxation. Moreover, not all the regions of France were taxed equally, as customary rights and distinctions had impeded uniform taxation. The notables informed the Crown that they saw what needed to be done, but they could not change the regional and class-based provisions for tax relief, which were considered “property” attached to various kinds of ownership, without assaulting the liberty of those persons. Frustrated, the king called on the parlement of Paris to register tax reforms, but received the same reply. After a fruitless year of trying to pressure, bypass or restructure the parlement to gain their assent, and with the treasury empty and loans drying up, the king's ministers decided their only course was to call a meeting of the Estates-General. The Estates, which had not been called since 1614, had the virtue of representing the nobility, the Church and the common people of France, and thus would have the authority to guide the king on changing the laws of taxation and property without trampling on liberty. The date for their meeting was set for 1789.

Thus was put into motion a train of events that would eventually lead to debates over the role of nobility versus commoners in the Estates, and over the power of the Estates as a National Assembly to pass legislation without the consent of the king. Riots in Paris, civil and international war, the trial and execution of the king and queen and the creation of a republic all followed within five years. Although many predicted disaster, France not only moved ahead with the revolution, its armies—filled by mass conscrip­tion of citizens fighting for their rights and led by officers chosen for merit, not wealth or social rank—surged victorious across all of Europe. Led by General Napoleon Bonaparte, who in imitation of Roman models became first consul, then emperor, the Revolutionary regime established new legal codes, destroyed feudal and hereditary privileges, and spread the ideals of government by law and natural reason across Europe, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen sounding refutations of principles of political authority that had prevailed around the world for thousands of years:

i. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights...

6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation.

Certainly, such radical principles were not readily digested and did not immediately prevail. After French armies were decimated by a winter campaign in Russia and defeated by a grand coalition of British, Prussian and Russian forces, the Revolution was turned back and a monarch was restored to the French throne.

Yet, the French Revolution had unleashed forces that could not be contained. In order to provide the most competitive, efficient administrations and military officers, all Western powers had to reduce or eliminate heredi­tary rights to office and choose their officials on the basis of merit (although in this they were simply catching up to best practices that had been standard elsewhere in the world for centuries). The authority of the Catholic Church continued to be weakened by claims to individual freedom of conscience and the spread of Protestant congregations, as well as the proliferation of scien­tific advances. In 1830 and 1848, revolutions burst out across Europe demanding legislatures, citizenship rights and checks on state power. Although not successful in holding power, these revolutions further weakened the claims of absolutist rulers to legitimacy without popular consent, and by the end of the century, most European states had established legislatures and sought legitimacy by winning the support of their people.

In the Americas, the example of the United States was also powerful. When the French Revolutionary wars weakened Spain, the colonies of Mexico and South America rose in revolution to seek their independence, with most states achieving it by the 1820s.

By 1800, the combination of institutional backwardness (hold-over medi­eval parliaments and estates), the revival of republican ideals and stunning scientific discoveries that had undermined ancient authority had combined to spread in Europe and its American colonies an ideology of government based on natural laws and reason, designed to limit executive authority and protect individual liberty. Over the next two centuries, this ideal would transform state structures around the world.

Postscript: modern states, modern problems

The great empires of the Ottomans and China, and Japan, were at first only slightly affected by the momentous political changes in America and Europe. India did fall under British control in the late eighteenth century, but this was mainly because the Mughal Empire had already been profoundly weakened by the Maratha wars at the end of the seventeenth century. From that point on, the British were able to gain allies and financial support from states seeking to resist the Mughals, and pick at parts of the empire one at a time, starting in Bengal. With superior naval capacity, and local infantry trained to use European drill and flintlock muskets, the British were able to overcome the forces that any individual local Indian lord or ruler set against them, and the fragmenting Mughal territories quickly fell under their control.

The Ottomans, Chinese and Japanese, however, remained aloof. The latter two continued to restrict trade and contact with Europeans to a few specified trading ports. Even though Jesuit and Protestant missionaries brought information on Western astronomical, mathematical and scientific advances, these did not motivate the Asian elites to change their fundamental views on authority, statecraft or even the pursuit of knowledge. After all, Asian societies had their own sophisticated systems of medicine, engineering (for canals and roads), shipbuilding and manufacturing that were, up until the early nineteenth century, as good or better than anything offered by Europe.

The Ottomans were closer to Europe and were more deeply affected. In the early 1800s, ideals of liberty and national sovereignty began to penetrate into their Balkan possessions, setting off rebellions that eventually led to Greek independence in 1832. Also in the early 1800s, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, set about building a more modern army and industrial base, and was able to expand his territory at the expense of the Ottoman sultan (although officially still recognizing the sultan's overlordship, it was nominal only). Eventually, as the sultans sought to incorporate more modernizing reforms in banking, industry, transport and training from Europe, military officers realized that the future of Turkey lay in building a modern, secular, Turkish national state, an ambition that was only realized after World War I.

The story of this chapter, which ends at 1800, is a story of pre-industrial state-building. For most of the period 1400 to 1800, it is a story of strengthening national states and cultural orthodoxy; yet, it ends with the small and once-isolated peninsula of Western Europe developing novel forms of state organization that would eventually overturn and replace that of much larger empires which had been successful for many centuries.

Most of that story of overturn and replacement, however, occurs after 1800, and is a story of state-building and resistance in an industrializing world. Steam and coal, factories, railways and iron gunships transformed state power, while new ideas of communism and capitalism, emerging from the experience of industrialization, changed the terms of state competition and debate. Slavery, women's rights and the shape of constitutional regimes remained difficult issues. New innovations in government, such as the party-state, provided new options for modern state-building, and twists on older ideas, such as the modernizing military-led regime, provided still others. In the industrial era, wars grew astonishingly more destructive, and international competition more intense. Traditional regimes modernized, embracing and adapting Western modes of finance, military, industrial, scientific, educational and diplomatic organization, or perished. The process is not yet entirely complete. But as of 2014, the great multinational empires led by hereditary rulers and elites have vanished; almost all nations claim legitimacy from national sovereignty and some form of democracy (however near or far they are from that ideal in practice), and we live in a world of territorial nation-states.

FURTHER READING

Agoston, Gabor, Gunsfor the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Asher, Catherine B., India before Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Barkey, Karen, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

De Vries, Jan, European Urbanization 1500-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129(1) (2000), 1-30.

Elman, Benjamin, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Asia Institute, 2001).

On their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Elvin, Mark, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford University Press, 1973).

The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

Ferris, Timothy, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature (New York: Harper, 2011).

Goldstone, Jack A., “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West' and the British Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History 13(2002), 323-89.

“The Problem of the ‘Early Modern' World,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41(1998), 249-84.

Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, CA: University of Califor­nia Press, 1991).

Harkness, Deborah E., The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

Henry, John, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002).

Inalcik, Halil, Suraiya Faroqhi, Bruce McGowan, Donald Quataert and Sevket Pamuk, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Israel, Jonathan I., Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Kang, David, China before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

Lee, James Z. and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Reality 1700-2000 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Lieberman, Victor, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context c. 800-1830, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 2003/09).

Lindberg, David C., The Beginnings of Western Science, 2nd edn. (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Livi-Bacci, Massimo, The Population of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

McCloskey, Deidre, The Bourgeois Virtues (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Mokyr, Joel, The Enlightened Economy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

Parker, Geoffrey, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

Perdue, Peter, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Pincus, Steven, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975).

Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Rawski, Evelyn, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).

Richards, J. F., The Mughal Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Riello, Giorgio, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Robertson, John, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Saliba, George, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

Shapin, Steven, The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Subrahmanyan, Sanjay, Merchant Networks in the Modern World (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996).

Subrahmanyan, Sanjay and Muzaffar Alam (eds.), The Mughal State 1526-1750 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and European States AD 990-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

Wong, R. Bin, China Transformed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Zagorin, Perez, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton University Press, 2005).