Cannibals and Kings (26 page)

Butzer admits that these operations would frequently require the “mass input of the total able-bodied rural population of a basin unit,” but supposedly of only one unit at a time. This conclusion is clearly false since each “basin unit” had at least two neighbors—one upstream and one downstream. At high water, failure to maintain the between-basin dikes and the return drainage channels in proper condition could result in the uncontrolled flooding of the downstream basin. When the Nile flood was higher than usual, a break in an upstream levee would threaten not only the adjacent basin, but the next basin as well, since the uncontrolled pressure could easily sweep away the between-basin dikes. The need for coordinating the response of several basins was equally great when the Nile flood failed and the amount of water diverted by the upstream basins affected the amount that reached those further downstream. Butzer himself paints a stark picture of the “famines … poverty … mass burials … rotting corpses … suicide … cannibalism … anarchy … mass dislocations … civil war … mass plundering … roving bands of marauders … as well as looting of cemeteries” that resulted from a failure of the annual flood. While there were occasions when the crests were either so high or so low
that no power on earth could render assistance, a government capable of putting 100,000 men to work building artificial mountains out of stone blocks in the desert surely did not refrain from attempting to moderate the effect of too much or too little water under emergency conditions.

As in so many other long-term natural and cultural processes, emergency or extreme rather than normal conditions shaped the political adaptation to the hydraulic mode of production. In China as in Egypt, when the major irrigation and flood control facilities were functioning properly, irrigation farming could flourish without any need for a highly centralized government. But when the great dams and levees on the major rivers were threatened by floods or earthquakes only a central administration could muster resources and labor power on a sufficiently grand scale. During the Han period, for example, population density was highest on the Great Plain of the Yellow River in the Shan-Si and Ho-Nan provinces. Periodically, the Yellow River overflowed its banks and flooded huge areas of the plain. In order to prevent these disasters, the central government supervised the construction of dikes and levees. This had the effect of increasing the amount of impounded water and of raising its level during flood seasons, thereby adding to the damage that the river could inflict when it broke through its containments. In 132
B.C
. the river breached the dikes, flooded sixteen districts, and sent a whole new branch across the plain. Tens of millions of peasants were affected. The break remained open for twenty-three years until Emperor Wu-ti himself visited the scene and personally supervised its repair. In
A.D
. II another breach occurred near the same point, but now the whole river changed its course and found a new path to the sea—a hundred miles away
from its former mouth. Repair work was again delayed, this time for several decades.

These facts warrant two conclusions. First, no effort on a village, county, or even provincial level was adequate to the enormity of the undertaking; otherwise, so many years would not have elapsed between the breaking and the repair. Second, whoever possessed the means to control the river literally possessed the means to control the life span and well-being of vast numbers of people.

In my opinion, the actual record of discoveries made by archaeologists has consistently favored the hydraulic theory. When the theory was first formulated, almost nothing was known about the conditions that had given rise to the agro-managerial states and empires of the New World. Wittfogel stimulated the first attempt by archaeologists in the late 1930’s to detect the presence of irrigation during the formative phases of native states in South America. Recent work by archaeologists at Columbia University and Harvard continue to support the view that the growth of cities, states, and monumental architectures in the pre-Columbian cultures of highland and coastal Peru grew step by step with an increase in the size and complexity of their irrigation systems. Excavations carried out in Mesoamerica by William Sanders and Richard MacNeish have also tended to confirm the importance of irrigation. As I showed in an earlier chapter, hydraulic agriculture was the basic source of subsistence for Teotihuacán and for the Aztecs’ cannibal kingdom.

According to Wittfogel, the hydraulic theory has ominous implications for our own times. While he traces the origin of the agro-managerial form of despotism to specific ecological conditions, he emphasizes that once in existence it was spread by conquest far beyond its
semiarid riverine homelands. He insists, for example, that the Mongols transplanted the agro-managerial form of despotism from China to Russia in the aftermath of the Mongol conquest of Central Asia and the eastern part of Europe. In czarist Russia the same system of “Oriental despotism” lingered on into the twentieth century. The Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” were not, in Wittfogel’s view, transient steps along the way toward the restoration of liberties that human beings enjoyed before the evolution of the state; rather they led to the restoration of the centralizing powers of government and an increase in czarist tyranny through the development of industrial means of exploitation and control. Turning to China, Wittfogel sees the Communist revolution there as the restoration of the ancient imperial system, the founding of one more dynasty after one more collapse and brief interlude under foreign control. Because of the continuing agrarian and hydraulic structure of modern China, this analysis seems to me much more apt in the case of China than of Russia, where an industrial mode of production now prevails.

In either case, Wittfogel seems to have short-circuited the kind of analysis that is needed if we are to assess the true nature of the threat to liberty in our times. I do not believe that we are endangered by despotic traditions that have acquired a life of their own and that are transferred from one mode of production to another or from one ecosystem to another. What Wittfogel’s theory suggests to me is that when certain kinds of state-level systems of production undergo intensification, despotic forms of government may arise which can neutralize human will and intelligence for thousands of years. This implies further that the effective moment for conscious choice may exist only during the transition from one
mode of production to another. After a society has made its commitment to a particular technological and ecological strategy for solving the problem of declining efficiency, it may not be possible to do anything about the consequences of an unintelligent choice for a long time to come.

The hydraulic theory not only suggests an explanation for the remarkable convergences among the social institutions of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and Inca Peru; it also opens up promising avenues of inquiry relevant to the question of why capitalism and parliamentary democracy evolved in Europe before they appeared anywhere else in the world. North of the Alps, where there is no Nile or Indus or Yellow River and where winter snows and spring rains provide sufficient moisture for field crops and pastures, population remained more dispersed than in the hydraulic regions. Long after the great river valleys were packed from horizon to horizon with human settlements, northern Europe stood to the Mediterranean and the Orient as America was later to stand to Europe: a frontier still covered by virgin forests. (Yet population density was higher than in temperate-zone North America, where the absence of domesticated animals served to slow population growth even more.)

The appearance of the first states in northern Europe was not caused by the concentration of people in a circumscribed habitat. All were secondary states called into existence to cope with the military threat of the Mediterranean empires and to exploit the possibilities of trade and plunder provided by the great wealth of Greece and Rome.

Although most scholars refer to the political organization of the iron age Gauls, Franks, Teutons, and Britons as “chiefdoms,” these were societies that had obviously crossed the threshold into statehood. They should be compared with feudal states such as that of the Bunyoro rather than with redistributive chiefdoms such as those of the Trobianders and the Cherokee. By 500
B.C.
the social life of the peoples of Europe had become highly stratified. Like the Vedic invaders of the Indus Valley, the Franks, Gauls, Teutons, and Britons were divided into three hereditary castes: a warrior chief aristocracy; a priesthood, the Druids, in charge of rituals, record keeping, and time reckoning; and commoners living in farm villages or dispersed pastoral homesteads that were part of a local chief’s domain. At the apex of society was a hereditary or semihereditary warrior king who was a member of a ruling house or lineage.

While the king and his warrior chiefs sought to retain the image of open-handed generosity characteristic of egalitarian “big man” redistributors, they held a monopoly over the possession of the equipment essential for maintaining law and order and for waging military campaigns. The items over which they exercised their monopoly were war chariots, horses, body armor, and iron swords. Commoners were obliged to provide ritual gifts of grain and cattle and to render labor services when summoned by the chiefs or the king. If they knew what was good for them, they were prompt and courteous in their response to requests from their headhunting overlords. Society had passed beyond the point at which the redistributors had to rely on the spontaneous generosity of their followers, though there were still uninhabited forest lands into which commoners and
disaffected chiefs could flee if the “gift-giving” became too one-sided.

It certainly was not for want of suitable personalities that the northern European statelets failed to develop into monolithic despotisms. The Irish hero tales,
Beowulf
, the Nordic sagas, and Homer’s
Iliad
are filled with frustrated chieftains whom Marc Bloch has called “odd little potentates.” Hurtling themselves into battle, sacking cities amid screams and the sound of trumpets, slaughtering men and boys and carrying girls and women off in chariots hung with fresh heads, the Celtic kings and their chiefs are among the most ruthless figures in history. In Piggott’s words, they were a swaggering, belching, touchy, impossible crew—“hands twitching to the sword hilt at the imagined hint of an insult … wiping the greasy moustaches that were a mark of nobility.”

Yet the Celtic kingdoms remained small and disjointed. Commoners slipped from the protection of one chief to another. New coalitions of warriors signaled the rise of new ruling houses and the fall of old ones. Whole segments of kingdoms detached themselves from their homelands and migrated en masse from one region to another—the Belgae to Britain, the Helvetii to Switzerland, the Cimbri, Teutons, and Ambroni into Gaul, the Scythians into Transylvania. The Romans consolidated these loose, mobile feudal kingdoms into imperial provinces, constructed the first large masonry buildings and the first decent roads, and established systems of coinage, regular tax collection, and law courts. Much of this was a thin veneer laid over a countryside which was still barely prepared for statehood. Outside the provincial capitals the Romanized descendants of the Franks, Gauls, Celts, and Teutons practiced small-scale
subsistence agriculture in isolated villages. Trade in manufactured items and agricultural products remained rudimentary compared with the circum-Mediterranean portions of the empire. Virtually everyone remained illiterate. Hence with the collapse of Rome in the fifth century
A.D
. transalpine Europe did not lapse back into the “Dark Ages,” never having gotten out of them in the first place. What it lapsed back into was feudalism.

Through force of arms the ethnic chiefs and kings, ex-Roman governors, generals, war lords, peasant leaders, and bandits carved the former Roman provinces into a new set of feudal kingdoms. Of course, the restoration was not complete. Population had grown under Roman rule and many of the semimigratory pastoral peoples had been obliged to settle down and to practice a completely sedentary form of mixed farming. The new feudalism was more rigid and more formalized than its pre-Roman variety. Peasants were permanently assigned as serfs to the “manorial estates” controlled by the new aristocracy. They were promised protection against being routed or robbed in return for providing sufficient quantities of food, labor, and material to support the lord of the realm and his knights and artisans. Oaths of loyalty exchanged between knights and lords and between less powerful and more powerful princes and kings formalized the political hierarchy.

Despite the rigidities introduced by serfdom into the feudal system, the post-Roman political organization of Europe continued to contrast with that of the hydraulic empires. Central bureaus of internal and external plunder and of public works were conspicuously absent. There was no national system for collecting taxes, fighting wars, building roads and canals, or administering justice. The basic units of production were the independent, self-contained rainfall-farming manorial estates.
There was no economical way for the more powerful princes and kings to interrupt or facilitate the production activities that took place in each separate little manorial world.

Unlike the hydraulic despots, Europe’s medieval kings could not furnish or withhold water from the fields. The rains fell regardless of what the king in his castle decreed, and there was nothing in the productive process to necessitate the organization of vast armies of workers. In Wittfogel’s words, “the scattered operations of rainfall farming did not involve the establishment of national patterns of cooperation as did hydraulic agriculture.” And so the feudal aristocracy was able to resist all attempts to establish genuinely national systems of government. The king, instead of turning into an “Oriental” despot, remained merely “the first among equals.” Like John of England at Runnymede in 1215, Europe’s feudal kings generally had to refrain from interfering with the nobility’s right to tax commoners. The Magna Carta extracted from John by the English barons prevented the rise of a centralized despotism, not by guaranteeing parliamentary representation—there was no parliament as yet-but by guaranteeing that each baron would remain a “king” in his own castle.