Ser wrote: ↑12 Sep 2020 06:26
Salmoneus wrote: ↑23 Aug 2020 13:21Similarly, I don't imagine the Romans - unless it's only a few hundred of them - abandoning their culture and adopting the more economically and politically primitive one of Han China... although of course over time influence would be inevitable.
I'm kind of curious why you consider Han China to be more primitive that way than the Roman Empire, if you could elaborate on that at any length. (And please note I don't know a lot, really like much at all, about the Han Dynasty in the first place... My interest in old China is rather more on the Spring and Autumn and early Warring States stuff.)
Well, it's difficult, if not impossible, to make a definitive comparison - which is part of the point, really. It's easy to study the Roman Empire, comparatively, because it had sophisticated institutions for collating and maintaining economic data; it's hard to compare it to China, because China... didn't. It didn't even try to record agricultural output, and even land area measurements weren't in standardised units until the 20th century. And because there was vastly less writing in general than in Rome, there isn't even the sort of incidental information from letters and diaries that we have from Rome (in Rome, it seems everyone was someone literate and wrote all the time - witness graffiti, letters from soldiers to their families, etc).
However, from what I've gathered, Han China was mostly an empire of small landholders surviving at the threshold of subsistance. A single bad year or a natural disaster meant devastation - and the central government struggled to provide adequate disaster relief. When order broke down, the result was catastrophe - over a few decades in the 1st century, China's population halved. The kind of demographic collapse that (Western) Rome eventually saw over the course of centuries of decline, China saw repeatedly, taking only years or decades - which speaks not only to political instability, but also to the precarious position of the Chinese population as a whole.
There's some debate over China's GDP per capita at the time (see above re lack of data); the 'classic' estimate appears to be $450, but this is just a calculation of what subsistance would have been, and more recent criticism of this figure from Chinese academics suggests it's much too high (it's essentially based on modern WHO/UN definitions of poverty, which are artificially high for political reasons). Something around $300 is more likely. By comparison, everyone seems to agree that Roman GDP was around $600.
Which is reflected in the few brute economic facts that can be estimated. An analysis of iron production per factory and recorded factory numbers suggest China produced around 5,000 tons of iron a year; others have complained that this is much too low, and maybe it was more like 10,000 tons (still others have suggested that efficiencies were likely lower than the 19th century production methods this is based on, and so the real figure should be less than this). However, even this high estimate pales in comparison to Rome's 85,000 tons a year. And in a really direct demonstration: Han China is believed to have had around 20,000 miles of roads, almost all of it unpaved and of a fairly primitive construction (just compressed gravel). Rome, by contrast, is believed to have had around 250,000 miles of roads, 50,000 of them paved, and even unpaved Roman roads were complicated structures of multiple layers to reduce wear and water damage. [roads along which were stationed inns at set distances, and over which a public postal service operated]
This is a big part of Rome's prosperity: Rome was a massively mercantile society. Along with those roads, there was extremely intensive trade by sea (particularly because Rome, unlike China, was able to eradicate piracy). There was also much more external trade than in China - Roman merchants usually went no further east than Burma (there were even Roman temples in India), but there was also a known merchant route as far as northern Vietnam.
Politically, Han China, although with a flourishing bureaucracy, was much more dominated by the Emperor, who could do virtually everything, and upon whom everyone else's position depended. Laws could be changed dramatically at the Emperor's whim - in the 1st century, one emperor even completely abolished private land ownership for a few years. In Rome - at least, in the early Empire - by contrast the civil service was a mixture of Imperial and non-Imperial institutions with checks and balances: although the Senate was no longer able to directly challenge the Emperor, the senatorial class remained an extremely powerful force. As a result, Emperors found their actions more restricted both by rival powers and by the rule of law itself, and indeed were themselves in a far more precarious situation (in the 1st century, of 11 emperors, somewhere between 7 and 9 of them were murdered, executed or forced to commit suicide - 3 of those were directly killed by Senatorial conspiracies, and 1 of them, Nero, was even officially declared an enemy of the public). That obviously in the long run wasn't great for political stability, but it does illustrate the much more collaborative nature of power in Rome. Emperors were forced to continually seek to maintain threefold legitimacy in the eyes of the Senate, the military (which also had great independent power) and the common people, and to play those power-bases against one another to maintain their own authority, and indeed survival.
But China also lagged behind Rome for geographical reasons. China was not as agriculturally productive as Rome (remember tha at this period, Chinese agriculture was based on wheat and millet grown in the north - the shift to rice happened much later, and the explosion in rice productivity didn't happen until the Ming; however, even for wheat and millet, it also seems that China didn't have the sort of sophisticated crop rotation systems that the Romans used). It was also highly vulnerable to its rivers - low water levels meant starvation, high water levels meant catastrophic floods (the Yellow River has moved around dramatically through Chinese history). It didn't have a large, calm internal sea to trade around. It also didn't have a productive nemesis to compete against, as Rome did with Persia.
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From what I can see, it seems as though a better economic and technological parallel to Augustan Rome is Song China, a millennium later (by which time China had overtaken Europe)